Cassie Soliday: One of the Smart Kids

As a first-grader, Cassie Soliday finds her coveted spot in the gifted class is at risk.

Cassie Soliday is a writer, comic artist, and the love child of a poet and a parrot head.  She's an advocate for women in the arts and produces two podcasts, 'Ink and Paint Girls' and 'Jammiest Bits of Jam'. Afflicted with wanderlust and the desire to run away with the cat circus, she has three great and terrible ideas that could get her fired so she could do so.  She lives and works in California making cartoons. Previously she was a Story Collider producer in LA.

This story originally aired on June 2, 2017.

Story Transcript

So I have a lot of fears in life, one being public speaking; two, the weeping angels from Doctor Who; and probably the silliest of all of them is that I’m afraid of being called stupid.  It doesn’t matter if I know the person or not, I’m just so afraid after anything I say that six-letter word is going to leave their mouth and come and slap me in the face. 

There's way cooler fears to have in life.  So I thought back.  I was like, why did this even start?  And for me, emotion is like a time machine, that if I can remember how I felt in a certain moment, I can remember incredible details. 

So I thought back and narrowed it down to a series of events that happened to me in first grade when I was six years old.  To give you some insight into my six-year-old world, here are some of the most important things to me. 

Seeing long mathematical equations fill a college-ruled notebook.  I would get these huge math books from the library and copy all these math problems and then I would flip to the back of the book and copy all the answers.  I had no idea what I was doing, what it meant.  I just knew it looks so good on paper.  And I would show it off to my teachers and friends just waiting for that beautiful compliment: “Oh, you are so smart.” 

I also loved carrying around my dad’s encyclopedias.  When my parents would take me to our tiny, tiny library in southern Illinois -- it’s smaller than this room, I kid you not -- I’d get their biggest book.  And I don’t mean big as in like the pages, but it literally looked like this book was walking down the street when I carried it. 

I wished that every day was star lab and that my name was Cassiopeia.  I had a big imagination and a big love for how smart things looked. 

So you can imagine when I got into the gifted program in first grade I was ecstatic.  I was so excited and happy.  Some of the prerequisites for getting in this gifted class was you don’t pee or poop your pants anymore, you only speak when you're spoken to, and you had to be smart the top of your class, a.k.a. me.  I didn’t know how to tie my shoes yet, but that was totally me. 

There were five of us in this class, and every day at 1:45 p.m. the gifted teacher, Ms. Beth, would come and escort us from our normal first grade class and into a small room with no windows.  I loved this because we were leaving those other first-graders behind in that normal class and we were going to the special gifted class.  I felt like the other four students in this class are my best friends and that we were bonding over our growing brains.  Those other students were just learning how to write a sentence and what that meant. 

But one day in gifted class Ms. Beth announces that we’re going to have an exam, a qualifying exam.  Let me be more specific.  A timed qualifying exam.  And if you didn’t make over eighty percent you’d be removed from the class. 

But I was not worried.  I was a little concerned for Trevor.  If anyone wasn’t going to make it into the next level of first-grade academia, it was going to be Trevor and his camouflage hunting pants. 

So the day comes and we take this test and I whizzed through it… because I didn’t know most of the answers.  So I go back through it and I read all the questions very slowly, looking for context clues.  I wasn’t sure why I didn’t know these because I was so smart.  Everyone said so. 

And there is this one question I remember.  It was, “If you have six pirate ships in a lake and you remove two, how many do you have left?”  It occurred to me that this was a trick question because it had said that it was in a lake, but pirate ships belong in the ocean. 

So I take my number-two pencil and I cross out “lake” and write “ocean” above it, and then I write a little note to my teacher to the side.  Then the answer comes to me, Oh, four. 

So I go through all the questions thinking that they were trick questions and I still get done before all the other students.  I felt guilty because my friends would never think to question the questions.  I had come into this treasure chest of information that I cannot speak of or share. 

So time’s up.  Pencil’s down.  We hand in our tests.  And because there's only five of us, Ms. Beth is able to grade them really quickly and hand them back. 

I’m holding my test and there's a flood of red ink all over it.  There's huge Xs through my little notes to her with the word “No” and an exclamation point beside it.  I had got a sixty percent, the lowest grade out of all five of us.  Even Trevor got an eighty-two. 

So the next day, around 1:45, when Ms. Beth comes to get our smarty pants clan, I tried to leave with them hoping that everyone forgot that I failed the test.  And my normal teacher tells me to sit back down and that I will not be joining them anymore. In front of my friends in the gifted class, and in front of those dummies in the first grade class. 

I was embarrassed.  I had to see my best friends leave everyday at 1:45 after that.  I was embarrassed, I was ashamed, and I felt really stupid.  I even tried to make excuses that I couldn’t see the blackboard, that I couldn’t see the test.  And my parents, being good parents, take me to the eye doctor and he tells them that I’m lying, that I have twenty/twenty vision.  But at least in glasses I would have looked smart. 

Even worse than this, the school realized that I had a speech impediment.  So they threw me into an even smaller room with no windows with a speech therapist and another kid that could barely form words.  We spent hours on end rolling our Rs, learning the difference between wiver and river, and clenching out teeth together to make T sounds. “T-T-T-T.”  I definitely felt stupid. 

So what do I do now? asked my six-year-old self.  That’s around the time when everyone is asking, “What are you going to do?”  Like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I didn’t know because I wanted to be smart and do something smart.  I didn’t really know what that would be, but I knew that it was no longer for me, I guess. 

To cheer me up, my parents took my little brother and I to opening day of Toy Story, Thanksgiving 1995.  I remember sitting in between my parents with a bag of popcorn on my lap.  And the first time that I saw Woody blink and come alive, I was floored.  I was just amazed.  This very normal toy… like I have toys at home so it really threw me that something so normal could have a life, and here, all these toys are running around.  Were my toys running around right now at home? 

I basically knew two things after I saw Toy Story.  One, that I wanted to be an animator, and, two, we needed to get home as soon as possible so I could catch my Care Bears jumping on my bed. 

I had always loved cartoons and to doodle and draw, but I'd never really given it any merit.  I always thought that, Oh, we’re reinforced to be smart so that must be what you need to do.  But after this, seeing all those credits of the people who worked on that movie, I knew that that was an option. 

So I really took that on as my identity.  I grew up being known as the artsy girl, the girl who wanted to be an animator and work for Disney.  What being an animator entails is really looking at life and then recreating it in this 2-D space and this 2-D world, and I really loved that. 

So I’m never going to be able to make my own math problems in a college-ruled notebook or get through a long, thick book without falling asleep on page two, but someone has to draw silly cats in top hats and monocles.  It took seeing a cowboy doll push a space ranger action figure out the window and go through this incredible journey to learn that there was room in the world for both. Thank you.