Kate Lumsden with Nate Pieplow: What "Smart" Looks Like (Learning Challenges)
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Traditional children’s books agree on what a smart kid looks like.
Smart kids read. Their reports cards are full of As. Usually, they wear glasses. Often, they’re socially awkward. Sometimes they are the main character, sometimes a sidekick, but across the history of children’s literature, smart kids have tended to match the same basic description.
As with all stereotypes, these representations damage readers by giving them a narrow definition of what “smart” is supposed to look like. And when I was young, “smart” didn’t look like me.
I was an anxious kid. I tried to follow rules, but I interrupted a lot, fidgeted in class, was a bit of a “troublemaker” in that way. A lot of people called me slow, but I remember this constant sense of my mind racing. I couldn’t write well -- I had poor grammar, terrible spelling, and awful handwriting—but I told fantastic stories. Your ideas are good was a frequent assessment. If teachers only graded on ideas, I got As. If they graded on the other stuff, I got Cs or worse.
My daughter and son had similar experiences in school. Out loud, they were wonderful students. In written work, they struggled. When an expert delivered the professional assessment that my son was gifted and talented, my son refused to believe it. Both explicitly and implicitly, school had told him he wasn’t smart.
That was the moment I decided to write the story that became Confessions of a Mango.
Mango’s main character, Ruby, is like me and my kids. She has diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. School is a major challenge. And it doesn’t help that her twin brother, Bryce, tends to fit the “smart” stereotype—just like my real-world twin brother. When Bryce gets accepted to a competitive magnet middle school, Ruby has to go too. Bryce fits in immediately, but Ruby feels like an imposter. A mango among lovebirds.
I live in a place where a lot of parents vie for the most prestigious schools for their kids, where “more homework” is equated with “better learning,” and where academic pressure is normalized. I dropped Ruby into a similar environment so that the story could explore the toxicity of overachievement culture. The school in the book, Benton Academy, is a place where achievement is fetishized and failure isn’t discussed. I populated Benton and its community with the kinds of teachers and parents that I’ve known, people who are trying to do right by the kids but end up fueling stress and anxiety.
When Ruby fails a math test, even though no one teases or bullies her about it, she feels ashamed, just like I did at her age. Slowly, she comes to realize that she hasn’t been taught how to fail—that is, how to recover from failure. Failure is considered something to keep private. What would happen if a student started a conversation about it? This book explores that question.
With my amazing co-author Nathan Pieplow, I wrote this book for the kids who work super hard in class and only pull off a C. For the ones who took years longer than their peers to pick up a book. For the ones who still struggle to read and write and do math well into middle school. The ones with 504 plans and IEPs, whose talents are going unrecognized. The ones who still think of dyslexia as a disability rather than a slightly inconvenient superpower. The ones who think of failure as a failing.
And I wrote it for adults, too, who could use a new perspective on school, homework, pressure… and on what “smart” looks like. I could have used a book like this. I had completed my doctorate before I was willing to apply the word “smart” to myself. I hope Confessions of a Mango speeds up that timeline for the next generation.
Kate Lumsden lives in Boulder with two awesome kids, a great husband, and two elderly cats. Growing up with dyslexia, falling in love with books changed her life. She’s humbled that she now gets to write them. When she isn’t writing she enjoys walking, running, and exploring the nearby mountains.
Nate Pieplow has eaten a reuben
sandwich in 63 of the 64 counties in Colorado. He is the author of the two-volume Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds. When he isn’t traveling to see birds, he teaches writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
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