You’re gifted enough to cruise through the first few stages of your education without trying, so you forge an identity as “the smart kid” but never build up skills in learning or studying, so when you finally get to a level where your natural intelligence can’t carry you anymore you can’t keep up with the people who did learn those skills and you start to fail and lose your identity as the smart kid which causes you to break down because that’d how you defined yourself for so long… or so I’ve heard.
That’s the cost of designing education for the worst students.
This is actually the reason. Because there is no such thing as “natural intelligence”. Not more than there is “natural strength”. There are natural predispositions, yes, but what you get is function of what training effort you put in. Whether you realise, and/or like, putting effort into training your intelligence, is is another thing. So people who are “above average” were in a favorable environment that fostered their development without it feeling forced, or unnatural. And then, when the environment was replaced by the school’s, it sadly didn’t foster personal development anymore. I would argue we would need to redesign education, now that we have internet. We don’t have to design courses around physical limits.
I feel like you watched me grow up. For a long time I was smart enough to pick things up naturally, I was even offered to skip grades.
Then the math got complicated and I didn’t know how to learn it. I went from being the smart kid to being the stupid one in remedial math. Being smart was all I had at that point, so when I “lost” that, I lost everything in my eyes. I was stupid and I was never going to be anything because of it.
I ended up getting my GED as an adult and I now have a promising career in insurance- so I didn’t really lose everything, but when I was 15 it sure felt like I had.
I am good with knowing my deficiencies. What sucks is being told that they are my fault because I should be “smart enough to overcome them”.
Agreed 100%, being a specialist in something always has led to someone taking a pot shot at your deficiencies.
Or being a jack of all trades and getting potshots for not being an expert in everything just because you pick up the basics quickly.
It’s actually insane how many teachers and other education professionals waved me off with ‘you’re smart enough, just try harder’ while I was obviously suicidally depressed and extremely dysfunctional. Having undiagnosed autism because I was a teenage girl in the '00s was fun.
The guilt that “you could have done more with your life”, despite being a successful engineer with a happy family.
Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of “exceptional children” pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of “Special Needs” but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means “kids that teachers need to make exceptions for”
“Gifted” programs royally screwed my education. I had huge gaps in my knowledge because they decided that being top percentile in reading/writing (and being the weird kid) meant I could just skip out on classes for special little weird classes or sit with higher grade classes. I just had ADHD btw and really liked to read. Anyway, I would LOVE to know wtf they thought they were doing moving a kid around that much in 3rd-5th. I suffered the hardest with math. I was missing bits and pieces, which is pretty gd important in math, and I’d still somehow get the answers right but talked to about my overly complicated or ✨creative✨ solutions lol. Even now I hide my work if I need to solve something because I’m probably doing it weird… Then later it was really fun finding out that I couldn’t really live up to being “gifted”. 0/10 being special made me less educated.
There’s that joke about wearing regular clothes on Halloween to go as the “gifted kid”, and when people ask what you’re supposed to be you sigh and say you were supposed to be a lot of things.
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
I still suffer from this. Promising early start, intense self-confidence issues and depression by the end.
I don’t mind being aware of everything, but I do mind that nobody else is
As you get older, you sort of get used to the fact that the majority of your fellow passengers are oblivious to the fact we’re on a bus speeding towards a cliff, driven by depravity and delusions of grandeur. And you realize short of a miracle, nothing is going to change it. It’s either that or you go mad. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Did you know that 80% of people think they’re above average intelligence?
I wish my iq was 20 higher or lower, idk just gimme out of the blue zone
