How and when were you invited?

Post 5--#MTBoS30--reflections after the twitter chat with Kaneka Turner
If you haven't seen her Shadow Con talk: http://annual.nctm.org/2016-annual-meeting/extending-the-invitation-to-be-good-at-math/

I remember at one point during the summer between 6th and 7th grades riding our bikes past the local junior high school on our way to the park.  We stopped and peered through the glass front door of the junior high hallway wondering how it was going to be.  I just knew I wasn't good enough to be there.
I didn't feel invited...
Nurtured by some of the best teachers of my life, I blossomed and grew.  I loved math and science, english and history.  I even loved PE, HomeEc and Art.  No one told me "you're good at math." They just made me work hard and made me feel special. Nobody said it, but I knew I had been invited.
Then we moved.
The new intermediate school didn't offer Algebra 1 for 8th graders. My mother insisted. So I walked across the street every day and took Algebra 1 at the high school. I was weird. I didn't fit in. But I did feel special. And I felt like I was good at math.  My mother hadn't exactly invited me--more like she had driven me to the party, pushed me out the open car door, and driven off before I could chicken out!
But I wanted to chicken out because I wasn't good enough! Every year, people would make dire statements. "Just wait 'til you get to high school!  That's really hard!"
"Calculus is really hard!"
It never occurred to me that every time I went and did something that was really hard, it wasn't all that hard for me.  Plus I have a brother who was one year ahead of me in school.  He was unquestionably and without doubt the smartest person ever!  I know that because my teacher's used to tell me that every single year.
"You're Bruce's sister!" they would say. "Bruce was so smart he used to fall asleep in my class and he would still get 100% on all his tests!"
I knew what they were really saying: "There's no way you are as smart as he is."
So I uninvited myself.  I took pre-calculus as a 10th grader.  Then I quit taking math.  I just flat chickened out because I knew I wasn't good enough (and because calculus was REALLY hard!)
Fast forward several years... I found myself married, in a different state and going to Junior College.  I was taking basic courses with vague notions of becoming a journalist or maybe a psychologist.  It turned out that I was pretty good at math. So I kept taking math courses. And I kept being really good. I had reinvited myself to the party and my vague notions began to take the shape of a math degree. But what would I do with that, I wondered?
Then I was in Chemistry class one day and the teacher asked me what I was planning to do.
I said "I'm kind of thinking of majoring in math."
He said "Oh wow! That's really cool!"
Then he proceeded to tell me (with flamboyant arm gestures) how all the scientists were down here at one level, but all the physicists were up here on a level above them, but all the math majors were all up here... WAY above all of them!
What he never once said was that I couldn't do it or that it was going to be really hard. He had invited me!
There were other invitations along the way: The math professor who allowed me to take a couple of advanced classes even though I hadn't taken the prerequisite; the professors who supported me through taking classes for honors, donating extra time to create "honors" level work for me in math.  There were also "uninvites." One professor stated that I wasn't capable of honors level work.  Finally, I was able to get mad instead of chickening out.  I got an A in his class.  Then there were the cliques of ethnic male students that I ran into a few times.  No one spoke a word to me or even acknowledged my existence for an entire semester in prob/stat.  It made me mad enough to get the highest grade in the class.  I finally had the confidence to know I had the all access pass.
But being good at math doesn't necessarily translate into being a good teacher.  I still feel like I'm "not good enough" in that arena on many days.  It didn't help that during the golden days of NCLB I was flat out told I wasn't good enough because my students' test scores weren't good enough.
Thank goodness that era is over.  It is CCSSM, twitter and MTBoS that have invited me back in this time.  I am working twice as hard as I was before and having twice as much fun now.  I don't know if I have the all access pass--yet--but I do know I got an invitation.
I guess the party really has started!