The freeze survival mechanism do be tanking my grades (for all of college) smh.
jflb96
Look, if I hand in work I might get told that Iโm not the smartest boy in the room, but no one can judge me on anything if I donโt hand in any of it at all
Same. My teachers are told in advance as part of my student disability access plan so we can work out tactics (usually having additional due dates and alternative exam arrangements).
Jon Rich
This is the way. Seriously, accommodations like that are the only way for some of us to succeed.
Funnily enough, even in Michael Crichton’s “The Lost World” he went out of his way to show that Jurassic Park was completely wrong about T. rex’s vision, by having the guy who wrote the paper GET EATEN for it. Turns out, the only reason it didn’t eat Grant and the kids in the first book was because it just wasn’t hungry.
How hungry is Walky’s mum? Should Amber have at least waited until after the pizza arrived?
I haven’t read the book in ages but isn’t there a moment in the first book where Grant begins to question the vision thing before he gets knocked out by the dinosaur hitting him or the car into him?
Doesnโt the dinosaur-shaped chimeric monstrosity then follow Grant and the kids forever, including running ahead of them so it can wait at the bottom of a waterfall with its mouth open? Was that meant to be some sort of pseudo-avian bloodsport?
morhek
I always assumed someone corrected Crichton, and he went “well shit” and threw it in the sequel to cover his ass, without really thinking about how it makes the T. rex’s motivation for chasing Grant completely nonsensical.
Crichton was…a mixed bag, as other responders have outlined.
jflb96
That sounds entirely plausible for a man who wrote a team of the nerdiest nerds to ever nerd that also had apparently never heard of Grey Goo despite working in nanotechnology
I’ve never read the books. Did he ever address the Velociraptor = Deinonychus thing? I mean, he was basically calling one dinosaur by the name of another.
eh, whatever
Although Crichton didn’t cite his sources, that must be taken from G. S. Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (1988), a scientific book for a wider audience. Paul is a bit of a lumper and sunk Velociraptor into the quite similar Deinonychus in that book. Nobody followed. Meanwhile they’ve turned out to be a bit more different and not each other’s closest relatives.
Alaric
I’m aware of Greg Paul’s having done that (though nowadays calling him a lumper is a bit funny, considering his recent attempt to split Tyrannosaurus rex into multiple species). My understanding, though, is that Crichton mostly went with the “Velociraptor” name because he liked the name. I was just wondering if it had been addressed anywhere in the actual books.
HueSatLight
Crichton always made science and scientists the villains, and in one book named a minor character after a journalist who had written an article about Crichton’s climate denialism. The character was a child rapist.
Crichton did Dan Brown levels of research, which is to say, he didn’t really do much but he liked people to think he did. He wrote pulp, some of it entertaining, some of it made good movies (because that was his goal after Andromeda Strain). Still pulp.
HueSatLight
correction, sometimes the villain wasn’t science, it could be feminism or the Japanese, that sort of thing.
clif
Science, feminism, Japanese. That sort of thing.
Sorry, I’m not seeing the common thread.
morhek
Michael Crichton would have hated Dina, and I assume the feeling would be mutual.
I think she just means that he was a better student than Sal. Probably due to environment rather than intelligence. I mean Sal’s school was basically a form of exile so she didn’t have the strongest incentive to do well.
To be fair, they got into the same school and were placed into the same math class. It’s very possible their grades were essentially the same but how they were perceived by teachers was not.
You’ve got the modifiers attached wrong. Walky got “good grades” and Sal “bad” ones*, therefore he was the “good student”. Whereas what we’ve seen suggests he was never actually good at studying, just smart enough to coast through school until now.
* also, I suspect that whatever grades Sal got were looked at in the worst possible light.
Y’know, I’d be willing to bet both Walkerton kids have ADHD(it oftentimes runs in families after all). Walky has the more overt hyperactive type while Sal has the inattentive type, which necessitates a different learning style.
Comic.phile
I would bet that too.
Miri
Given family trends, and given conditions like ADHD get underdiagnosed in girls… Yeah, that’d make a lot of sense…
It was established that Walky got good grades in school without having to make an effort. As he missed out on learning how to learn things that donโt come easy, he fell on his face with the first test.
Can relate, exactly my maths experience.
I think it’s more to do with her seeing Walky doing well academically as evidence that she did a good job as a parent. She can then treat Sal as an aberration.
If Walky is also having trouble, then maybe she’s the problem.
That seems likely. Although ironically, this one particular thing probably isn’t directly her fault.
zee
It can be, tangentially. I kinda had to write a thing about locus of control and how kids develop it; basically telling kids they’re smart from a a young age asks good bc “smart” (as our academically obsessed society sees it) is something youre born with. You more or less have natural acuity for grade school subjects. If you tell a kid who’s naturally good at school that they’re smart without ever putting emphasis on effort, there’s no need to learn how to put that effort in. So they coast through school on untrained inherent talent which can only take you so far, and hit a wall when they reach higher education. This is really bad for ND kids like walky (and me) bc by 18 it feels impossible to learn. At least if it was something practiced from a you age, they could’ve found a way to study that works with their specific needs and been okay.
TL; DR stop praising kids for being “”””smart”””” and start praising them for the amount of effort they put it. Ones an inherent trait you cant take ownership of and that will only take you so far, the others an extremely valuable skill
thejeff
There’s definitely something to that, but there’s something deeper as well. If it really does all come basically effortlessly, “putting in effort” is just busy-work. Praising kids for putting in time on repetitive work that they already get isn’t really better.
And it still doesn’t teach you actual studying. You still don’t learn how to learn. How do you really put in effort at something that’s trivially easy for you?
You need more challenge. Enough to make you need to put in effort. But that’s really hard to gauge and even harder to do for every kid in a large class.
Ari
I would also say that, like, not getting her kid tested for ADHD is maybe a little bit her fault
Do note that it is no coincidence that POC tend to get under-diagnosed for both ADHD and autism.
Proxiehunter
Probably too late for anyone to see this since the next strip is up but while you’re right about that there is also a very real phenomenon of parents, including and perhaps especially white ones like Linda, flat out refusing to get their kids tested despite them displaying obvious symptoms.
Like my sister in law who complains about my nephew doing things I’ve pointed out are symptomatic of ADHD. ADHD does run in her family too, my wife relatively recently got an adult diagnosis of ADHD.
And don’t get me started on how my niece was very upset one visit and my sister in law just said “Oh it’s fine. She just gets like that when her routine is violated.
Oh really, you mean a major indicator of autism. And not the only one she has. Autism which children born as prematurely as she was are more prone to than children who were carried to full term.
As someone who knows what it’s like to grow up as someone who’s ADHD and Autism didn’t get diagnosed until adulthood and how not being given the tools to do what people are demanding of you because no one will acknowledge you have a problem besides being lazy and maybe stupid will fuck your ass up her refusal to look at reality bothers me.
For mentally/maturity-wise better off parents, they’d get this was a case of a gifted kid, now past the K-12 stuff that they could breeze through, have to actually learn how to study like everyone else, often getting failing grades for the first time before they learn that.
Not for Linda Walkerton, because brother, this is ALL about HER…
Kimi
Why I always thought that smart students should be challenged earlier on in life so that they would learn how to cope with failure and how to study. Hard to do with mixed, large classes though.
Miri
I completely froze at that point for a bit… Also, if I didn’t try, then I was failing because I wasn’t trying, and not because everyone was wrong and I was really not actually smart after all…
Freemage
Heh. I was considered ‘gifted’ back in those days, too. Which meant I was ‘smart’ enough to look over the class syllabus (which invariably had the formula for calculating grades) at the beginning of the year, and calculate how much homework I actually had to turn in to be able to pass if I was acing my tests.
Savail
Yuuuup. Also meant that I could calculate the lowest and highest possible grades I could get in a class when it came down to the last few scores. If I couldn’t get any higher than an 89 in a class, but could potentially eke out a 90+ in another class, I’d cram-memorize way harder on the latter than the former to maximize GPA averaging.
Savail
(I almost always turned in the homework though because free grades. Testing was always rougher on me.)
I’m pretty sure before this conversation is over, Linda will have switched to Sal being the “good” one. I predict a non-zero chance that Sal will be so disgusted by more favoritism that she’ll admit she tried boning a TA for grades just to even things out.
But Linda is into that as part of her play book and will commend her for it, especially if the TA in question is still picking up shifts at Glasso’s so Linda can see him and thus instantly judge him as being good or bad for Sal.
This was all caused by Allan, the Head of the department, targeting her children as a way to punish her for actions when she was in college. He’s about to come in and gloat.
Luckily Walky’s speaking of a paleontology “fact” has signaled Dina, who is charging in the direction of Galasso’s as we speak, and her arrival will surely cause a distraction.
(She’s several miles away. T-Rex’s vision is not based on movement, but Dina’s hearing IS based on dinosaur mistruths)
543 thoughts on “Freeze”
Ana Chronistic
What if you flunked because you were frozen
Laura
That’s happened to me. Several times.
…actually, it’s what’s currently happening in my job… D-8
NGPZ
?? So sorry Laura, that must be awful!
Laura
Thanks, NG. ๐
TheCatCameBack
The freeze survival mechanism do be tanking my grades (for all of college) smh.
jflb96
Look, if I hand in work I might get told that Iโm not the smartest boy in the room, but no one can judge me on anything if I donโt hand in any of it at all
Bogeywoman
Same. My teachers are told in advance as part of my student disability access plan so we can work out tactics (usually having additional due dates and alternative exam arrangements).
Jon Rich
This is the way. Seriously, accommodations like that are the only way for some of us to succeed.
Bajj
Contact an employment lawyer. NOT kidding. Offer them like 80%+, who cares? It fixes the problem and gets you paid anything in emotional damages.
Laura
Thank you, Bajj.
Jo_cubstar
I went on disability leave from work cause that’s happening with me at my job, too. I feel you so hard :'(
Laura
Thank you, Jo_cubstar. I’m sending healing vibes your way. I hope your stress eases up and the obstacles dislodge for you. Take good care of YOU.
Cholma
Perhaps he should . . . Let It Go?
True Survivor
A+
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Or maybe he should run away…Into The Unknoooooooooooooown!
Emmanuel
Narcissistic rage freezing is pretty intense
Proxiehunter
A normal T-rex’s isn’t but that frog DNA they used as filler fucked shit up.
morhek
Funnily enough, even in Michael Crichton’s “The Lost World” he went out of his way to show that Jurassic Park was completely wrong about T. rex’s vision, by having the guy who wrote the paper GET EATEN for it. Turns out, the only reason it didn’t eat Grant and the kids in the first book was because it just wasn’t hungry.
How hungry is Walky’s mum? Should Amber have at least waited until after the pizza arrived?
Rectilinear Propagation
I haven’t read the book in ages but isn’t there a moment in the first book where Grant begins to question the vision thing before he gets knocked out by the dinosaur hitting him or the car into him?
jflb96
Doesnโt the dinosaur-shaped chimeric monstrosity then follow Grant and the kids forever, including running ahead of them so it can wait at the bottom of a waterfall with its mouth open? Was that meant to be some sort of pseudo-avian bloodsport?
morhek
I always assumed someone corrected Crichton, and he went “well shit” and threw it in the sequel to cover his ass, without really thinking about how it makes the T. rex’s motivation for chasing Grant completely nonsensical.
Crichton was…a mixed bag, as other responders have outlined.
jflb96
That sounds entirely plausible for a man who wrote a team of the nerdiest nerds to ever nerd that also had apparently never heard of Grey Goo despite working in nanotechnology
Alaric
I’ve never read the books. Did he ever address the Velociraptor = Deinonychus thing? I mean, he was basically calling one dinosaur by the name of another.
eh, whatever
Although Crichton didn’t cite his sources, that must be taken from G. S. Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (1988), a scientific book for a wider audience. Paul is a bit of a lumper and sunk Velociraptor into the quite similar Deinonychus in that book. Nobody followed. Meanwhile they’ve turned out to be a bit more different and not each other’s closest relatives.
Alaric
I’m aware of Greg Paul’s having done that (though nowadays calling him a lumper is a bit funny, considering his recent attempt to split Tyrannosaurus rex into multiple species). My understanding, though, is that Crichton mostly went with the “Velociraptor” name because he liked the name. I was just wondering if it had been addressed anywhere in the actual books.
HueSatLight
Crichton always made science and scientists the villains, and in one book named a minor character after a journalist who had written an article about Crichton’s climate denialism. The character was a child rapist.
Crichton did Dan Brown levels of research, which is to say, he didn’t really do much but he liked people to think he did. He wrote pulp, some of it entertaining, some of it made good movies (because that was his goal after Andromeda Strain). Still pulp.
HueSatLight
correction, sometimes the villain wasn’t science, it could be feminism or the Japanese, that sort of thing.
clif
Science, feminism, Japanese. That sort of thing.
Sorry, I’m not seeing the common thread.
morhek
Michael Crichton would have hated Dina, and I assume the feeling would be mutual.
NGPZ
ooooooooh here we gooooooo 0_0
*plays “Shout!” by The Isley Brothers on Galasso’s Jukebox*
StClair
FX: *JP T. rex roar*
Nono
…her good “student”?
Was Linda teaching Walky at some point? Is she a teacher?
Mr. Random
Nah, more like he got good grades and she expected him to keep getting good grades.
True Survivor
I think she just means that he was a better student than Sal. Probably due to environment rather than intelligence. I mean Sal’s school was basically a form of exile so she didn’t have the strongest incentive to do well.
Bryy
Phrasing it as “good student” is super loaded.
Needfuldoer
“My good student”!
That adds some possessiveness and guilt to the mix.
Ari
To be fair, they got into the same school and were placed into the same math class. It’s very possible their grades were essentially the same but how they were perceived by teachers was not.
StClair
You’ve got the modifiers attached wrong. Walky got “good grades” and Sal “bad” ones*, therefore he was the “good student”. Whereas what we’ve seen suggests he was never actually good at studying, just smart enough to coast through school until now.
* also, I suspect that whatever grades Sal got were looked at in the worst possible light.
MM
And like Danny said, Sal needs teachers who are able to work with her style of learning, which she probably hasn’t had a lot of.
Segnosaur
I wonder if she even needs help anymore.
She needed Danny to “explain the rules” to her (at least in math) but she might have a good enough grounding now that she could succeed on her own
Fay
Y’know, I’d be willing to bet both Walkerton kids have ADHD(it oftentimes runs in families after all). Walky has the more overt hyperactive type while Sal has the inattentive type, which necessitates a different learning style.
Comic.phile
I would bet that too.
Miri
Given family trends, and given conditions like ADHD get underdiagnosed in girls… Yeah, that’d make a lot of sense…
StClair
Agreed.
Jo_cubstar
This seems highly likely, yeah
CJ
It was established that Walky got good grades in school without having to make an effort. As he missed out on learning how to learn things that donโt come easy, he fell on his face with the first test.
Can relate, exactly my maths experience.
James
I think it’s more to do with her seeing Walky doing well academically as evidence that she did a good job as a parent. She can then treat Sal as an aberration.
If Walky is also having trouble, then maybe she’s the problem.
Masumi
That seems likely. Although ironically, this one particular thing probably isn’t directly her fault.
zee
It can be, tangentially. I kinda had to write a thing about locus of control and how kids develop it; basically telling kids they’re smart from a a young age asks good bc “smart” (as our academically obsessed society sees it) is something youre born with. You more or less have natural acuity for grade school subjects. If you tell a kid who’s naturally good at school that they’re smart without ever putting emphasis on effort, there’s no need to learn how to put that effort in. So they coast through school on untrained inherent talent which can only take you so far, and hit a wall when they reach higher education. This is really bad for ND kids like walky (and me) bc by 18 it feels impossible to learn. At least if it was something practiced from a you age, they could’ve found a way to study that works with their specific needs and been okay.
TL; DR stop praising kids for being “”””smart”””” and start praising them for the amount of effort they put it. Ones an inherent trait you cant take ownership of and that will only take you so far, the others an extremely valuable skill
thejeff
There’s definitely something to that, but there’s something deeper as well. If it really does all come basically effortlessly, “putting in effort” is just busy-work. Praising kids for putting in time on repetitive work that they already get isn’t really better.
And it still doesn’t teach you actual studying. You still don’t learn how to learn. How do you really put in effort at something that’s trivially easy for you?
You need more challenge. Enough to make you need to put in effort. But that’s really hard to gauge and even harder to do for every kid in a large class.
Ari
I would also say that, like, not getting her kid tested for ADHD is maybe a little bit her fault
NGPZ
Do note that it is no coincidence that POC tend to get under-diagnosed for both ADHD and autism.
Proxiehunter
Probably too late for anyone to see this since the next strip is up but while you’re right about that there is also a very real phenomenon of parents, including and perhaps especially white ones like Linda, flat out refusing to get their kids tested despite them displaying obvious symptoms.
Like my sister in law who complains about my nephew doing things I’ve pointed out are symptomatic of ADHD. ADHD does run in her family too, my wife relatively recently got an adult diagnosis of ADHD.
And don’t get me started on how my niece was very upset one visit and my sister in law just said “Oh it’s fine. She just gets like that when her routine is violated.
Oh really, you mean a major indicator of autism. And not the only one she has. Autism which children born as prematurely as she was are more prone to than children who were carried to full term.
As someone who knows what it’s like to grow up as someone who’s ADHD and Autism didn’t get diagnosed until adulthood and how not being given the tools to do what people are demanding of you because no one will acknowledge you have a problem besides being lazy and maybe stupid will fuck your ass up her refusal to look at reality bothers me.
Peter
Note her reveling use of the possessive.
“MY good student”, not “A good student”.
Peter
*revealing, even.
DudeMyDadOwnsADealership
It hasn’t exactly been subtle for a while, now….
For mentally/maturity-wise better off parents, they’d get this was a case of a gifted kid, now past the K-12 stuff that they could breeze through, have to actually learn how to study like everyone else, often getting failing grades for the first time before they learn that.
Not for Linda Walkerton, because brother, this is ALL about HER…
Kimi
Why I always thought that smart students should be challenged earlier on in life so that they would learn how to cope with failure and how to study. Hard to do with mixed, large classes though.
Miri
I completely froze at that point for a bit… Also, if I didn’t try, then I was failing because I wasn’t trying, and not because everyone was wrong and I was really not actually smart after all…
Freemage
Heh. I was considered ‘gifted’ back in those days, too. Which meant I was ‘smart’ enough to look over the class syllabus (which invariably had the formula for calculating grades) at the beginning of the year, and calculate how much homework I actually had to turn in to be able to pass if I was acing my tests.
Savail
Yuuuup. Also meant that I could calculate the lowest and highest possible grades I could get in a class when it came down to the last few scores. If I couldn’t get any higher than an 89 in a class, but could potentially eke out a 90+ in another class, I’d cram-memorize way harder on the latter than the former to maximize GPA averaging.
Savail
(I almost always turned in the homework though because free grades. Testing was always rougher on me.)
Masumi
Aaah true even more yikes
Dday
I’m pretty sure before this conversation is over, Linda will have switched to Sal being the “good” one. I predict a non-zero chance that Sal will be so disgusted by more favoritism that she’ll admit she tried boning a TA for grades just to even things out.
RowenMorland
But Linda is into that as part of her play book and will commend her for it, especially if the TA in question is still picking up shifts at Glasso’s so Linda can see him and thus instantly judge him as being good or bad for Sal.
Dday
A mother just knows.
Proto_Eevee
Idk whats worse, this or martian invasion
Nono
Well Walkyverse Linda knew all about being martian invaded, heyooo
Bruceski
This was all caused by Allan, the Head of the department, targeting her children as a way to punish her for actions when she was in college. He’s about to come in and gloat.
Doctor_Who
Luckily Walky’s speaking of a paleontology “fact” has signaled Dina, who is charging in the direction of Galasso’s as we speak, and her arrival will surely cause a distraction.
(She’s several miles away. T-Rex’s vision is not based on movement, but Dina’s hearing IS based on dinosaur mistruths)
NGPZ
Ooooooh yeaaaaaaaaaah!!!! ?? ?
*plays “M-1412 Chase” from Dragon Ball Z OST*
Just an Armadillo