Here’s one step father who was not impressed with his wife’s kids from another marriage. Rossano Rubicondi was married to Donald Trump’s first wife and mother of his three elder children, Ivana, from 2008 to 2009 — then the couple started dating after the divorce. Apparently there was no love lost with Ivana’s kids, because Rubicondi says they didn’t like him and he most emphatically has nothing good to say about them, and that’s putting it mildly. Page Six:
It sounds as if there was some quibbling with the kids over cash because — without elaborating on any specific incident involving money — he defensively told us: “No one touched a dollar or dime from their family . . . I don’t know [if that’s why they didn’t like me], but these people are all about money. They don’t have a heart. They are garbage.”
He added, “Don Jr. is an idiot. He’s a jerk,” and instructed us, “Put it down: ‘You are a jerk.’ Put it in capital letters!”
He added: “They are nobody . . . They are disgusting. We are talking about kids who are so stupid, except Ivanka.”
Rubicondi raged on, “They are a piece of scum. Before they say anything about me, I will wash their mouth out with soap! They are disgrace for human being.”
Intelligence is relative, like all things. Ivanka probably has come to regard herself as an intellectual light, able to hold her own with the luminaries of the world stage, because she grew up with her moron brothers. Granted, her bulb may have a bit more wattage, but overall, she’s pretty dim as well.
I thought I was pretty average intelligence, until I started working with people who really were average. Then I realized I’d grown up with kids who were smart to genius level. (FWIW, in that school district, a *third* of the junior high students got tracked into “New Math”, in the early 60s.)
It is relative. I went to a really bad school in the second grade, and then, thank God, we moved again, and i got into a decent school for grades 3-6. The bad school was really really bad. Zero education and the kids were dolts. I was miserable, needless to say. The school I considered normal had dolts as well, but there were some very sharp kids, so there was contrast.
BTW, the “new math” tanked me in the 7th grade. I never recovered from that and my math SAT score was 227 points below my verbal.
I think we had good teachers: they got it to work for most of us. (I barely made it through geometry in 10th grade; didn’t go back to math for several years.) But learning how to do different number bases helped when I got into computers.