Individuals

With a mother as a teacher, it isn't hard to see how sometimes our peers would think we were teacher's pet. While most of the time we loved our teachers, there were times they got on our nerves too. One particular occasion was when we were in middle school, and it was a Parent/Teacher night.

At this time in our lives, we weren't as close as we had been when we were younger. We each had our own group of friends, and I remember that Aspenn wanted to have the conferences with just my mother and our teacher. That's right, we both had the same teachers at this time too. 

They had given us testing without our mother's consent and put us both in the gifted program when we transferred middle schools. The only thing they did for us was put us with the same teachers, but at different class times. This worked because it was the first year that we had to get used to having different teachers for different subjects.

For this conference night, I was sitting in the back of the classroom in someone's desk. I just had to be far enough back so that I couldn't hear what the teacher was saying about Aspenn. All of the teachers had respected the fact that we wanted to be treated as separate individuals, and so we wanted our grades to be private from one another. That was until we got to our History teacher.

Once Aspenn had her conference it was my turn, our mother stayed in her seat while Aspenn and I switched. To this day I remember a specific sentence this teacher said as if it were yesterday. "You are .02% behind your sister, you better get that up!"

I know for him it must have been funny, and he had said it loud enough that Aspenn heard it. I didn't know what to do about it and was instantly depressed. It wasn't long before Aspenn would tease me about it, and it really felt that I never heard the end of it. My favorite teacher at the time instantly became a teacher I didn't really want to see anymore. For the rest of the year I kept my head down, did my school work, and quickly got out of the class when the bell would ring.

Twins are like any siblings, they have their own thoughts and ideas. While they look remarkably similar, they each have their own soul. Most twins I have met are just like us. They want to be seen as individuals, not just as people that look the same. We don't always share the same ideas, we are just like everyone else.