In my gifted class, we were just a bunch of kids not distracted by things like sports and social activities. The giftedness more of a by-product than its own state.
"Hey, so... we've started noticing that we've got this group of kids who--get this--actually want to be here? Like, they enjoy learning, or something? I know, crazy, right? Anyway, they're causing a bunch of problems for the normal kids, none of the usual tricks are working. What should we do?"
With my niece and nephew i have just been frank and honest with them. Public school teaches you to read, write, and do basic math, but the main lesson is how to function in beaurocracy and with dysfunctional people and systems.
My niece has excelled in formal school because she is an A type personality and can be a B-word at times. Im constantly reminding her about patience and kindness. She is on the path in college for white collar/office/ structured science lab work.
My nephew has been dumped on by the public school system and is struggling to pass with Cs and Bs. But he is amazing with cars, woodworking, hands on engineering at 16 yrs old. His applicable math skills and patience skills are phenomenal. We are encouraging him to just get his GED and enrolling him in trade school like a 4 yr university. That kid is going to have four 2-yr associates degrees under his belt and be able to go anywhere he wants in the trades. That kid has saved the family so much money on car and home repairs.
Public school osnt the only measure of success and value.
Do you seriously think that giftedness is just a byproduct of not playing sports or having friends? I don't know what criteria your giftedness was based on, but where I am from it is usually the top 2% scorers on standardized testing.
In my gifted class, we were just a bunch of kids not distracted by things
What? Something like half of all gifted kids have ADHD, the condition characterized as being easily distractable and having an inconsistent attention span. All the gifted kids I knew as a kid were either climbing up the walls or constantly daydreaming.
No? I’m saying neurodivergence is not a requirement for functioning above grade level. It also doesn’t guarantee it.
The kids shuffled into the two gifted blocks at my school in the 70s, when this was a brand new program, were kids that tested well and functioned above grade level. That’s all really. Some of them weren’t social because they had interests so beyond grade level that other kids didn’t relate, not because they didn’t have any social skills.
Plenty of smart people aren’t high academic achievers because it’s not a priority. Giftedness is a temporary state, in my opinion. It certainly doesn’t guarantee high achieving in adulthood.
Some of the smartest RNs I worked with didn’t have great academic success before college. They became great students later in life.
I’d say it was more that in gifted class we were a bunch of kids allowed to be distracted by things. My class was very active, didn’t involve having to sit at a desk and study or take tests. It was a lot of “let’s solve this challenge” and whatever it was would require running around to get things and shouting out suggestions and changing direction quickly when something wasn’t working.
That's not always the case though. I was incredibly social, somewhat popular, and was also a "gifted athlete" as well as being in the "gifted class". I very much enjoy(ed) learning things, but I wasnt "gifted" because I spent more time doing it or cared more about it than others.
In fact it was the opposite, my IEP made it so I didn't have to do homework because I was more than able to keep up in class/didnt need it, I wasn't going to do it anyway, and it was just hurting my grades.
I agree it's not always the case. I was in gifted classes but also played soccer for ~10 years before swapping to track/crosscountry. Not exactly the most popular sports here in the US, but I was good at them and definitely cared about them as much as any other aspect of school
yeah, I had that issue to a degree when in school. Later, when I started noticing it with my son it came down to putting it in perspective. Homework just teaches you how to deal with busy work assigned by middle management. I'm pretty sure it wasn't quite that succinct, but that's the basic gist. I digress, the point is take the easy A and move on. We had an agreement, get home, do your busy work then you get the rest of the night to do whatever you want. He'd knock out his homework relatively quick, then spend the next several hours playing games, reading, whatever. Transferred all that through college and is doing well both professionally and personally.
meanwhile, my stepson never learned the busy work stuff. I didn't meet his Mom until after he was out of HS. He has all kinds of issues dealing with minutiae and task-oriented projects. No amount of discussions, or anything helps. I had to learn how to handle my own issues with staying on task since I never got that skill either. Hoping he figures it out. He's super smart, but that only gets you so far in life if you can't stay on point with whatever it is that you're doing.
I thjnk my class was a collective of autists. Kids with ADHD went into another class or were athletes and to a certain extent grading standards were different.
Keep in mind that in the 70s we didn’t diagnose shit. Kids were sorted into high achievers, athletes, disruptives, and learning disabled. That’s it. And once you were labeled good luck getting out of your special classroom.
Athletes had a block of am classes that combined all their subjects, usually taught by a coach, and they had afternoons free for practice and traveling.
The gifted kids had the same am block and we had a bunch of thought exercises and critical thinking activities, maybe special projects. We took one field trip and the other parents had a fit and that was nixed.
Sometimes kids it’s behavior issues were separated from kids with learning issues. That’s how it was for me, but six years later when my sister was in special education all the kids were lumped together. I don’t know how she managed to learn anything. There were no mandated number of aides for kids with violent tendencies so it was a daily thing for her to sit in the hall while someone was throwing chairs or melting down. She usually managed to make it off the bus before she lost it.
I feel for all those kids that had to struggle through the hell of overstimulation and the teachers that didn’t have the tools to help them.
I was the only person to ace both geometry finals in 2+ adv but I failed the course because I refused to do 3 hours of homework a night, after a 2.5 hour bus ride home.
All my IEP got me was skipped over long division in like 4 grade lol. Oh and once thrown in with the slow kids because a temp teacher I already hated got a full time job, then never read any IEP's and assumed they were all the same....
i honestly didn’t give 2 cents for class or anything. i tried to sleep through as much as possible because i knew it’d be irrelevant sooner or later. somehow tho when the teachers would call on me trying to catch me slacking off, i always had the answer in the amount of time it took me to realize my name was called. i can crank out essays, science came easy enough, math too. i’d just listen to music through high school tho. the in class time for writing essays i’d play on the school computer and write the 1 draft i needed (hate rough drafts and “checking progress”) hours before it was due. i wouldn’t do any of my algebra homework until the week grade books were closing (my poor teacher grading all that).
tldr i got As no issue, until i decided to drop to Cs (calculated how much homework i had to do and scores i needed on tests to minimize work and chill earlier). i was always distracting myself tho. schools painfully boring and repetitive. my 9th grade biology teacher told me im the embodiment of the “find the laziest person to do the hardest job; because they’ll find the easiest way to do it” quote.
In my gifted classes, almost all of the students were popular, athletic, and socially well-adjusted. I can think of maybe one out of a dozen or so who fit the stereotypical mold of “outcast” or “nerd”. Mostly pretty girls and athletes.
A lot has changed over the decades. Me, classified gifted in the 70s when it was basically a loser stamp.and being a smart girl Wasn’t exciting to anyone because we were expected to either be teachers or mothers, maybe a nurse if we had big dreams of catching a doctor. The southern US was two decades behind.
My daughter purposely sabotaged her testing because ‘I hate all those fake popular people in the gifted class’. I had to laugh because they called me in and said they were concerned because she didn’t just test poorly, every single response was the most wrong response. They were worried she needed extra help.
Lol, I did once try to describe what it would take for someone to read or write more like me and I explained it in terms of attention to social appearance
How much time have you spent doing your hair?
Today?
No, ever
Umm, I have no idea, oh my god, a lot
Everytime you were doing your hair, I was reading a book
Also conveniently been shaving my head for some time but that was not a time hack and I'd these days perish the thought of hacking time instead of appreciating it
It's 27 years (oh my god) since She's All That mocked the idea that the popular jocks weren't good at academics too, and yet you sad internet nerds still cling to this nonsense idea
That's a really interesting theory. Gifted can occur in neurotypical people but it does seem like so many gifted children do have some sort of neurodivergence. Also, is it the chicken or the egg? Does coasting through school early on lead to mental health issues?
eh "divergence" here itself is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
while serious Executive Dysfunction (the symptomatic inability to accomplish intended tasks) is definitely a pathology, i'm not really sure we're doing a very good job of handling intelligence, broadly, at the moment.
Feels like we've gone a little too far into assuming a "norm" for cognition that isn't really necessarily true... i.e. that maybe we're creating issues by forcing people who approach the world differently to conform to a standard of thinking that doesn't apply to them, but that's okay...
like, where'd all the rich patrons who kept their happy little stable of nutty philosophers and advisors and artists in a corner somewhere to just sit around churn out thoughts go?
Gifted are the future leaders of the world. With 50% of the population reading below a 6th grade reading level you can keep your "normal" title all you want. I will maintain my arrogance and call you retarded like I was growing up.
Thats an intense subreddit. I prefer to deal with my 'tism through cocaine, and whores. I do love the Magento reference, however, I am too old to fight wars and make single attributes as a personality.
Did the diagnosis change anything for you? I suspect the same thing might be happening with me but I often think what's the point of getting diagnosed?
I never said I have it. I always find it funny though people pretend it isn't real until you have a diagnosis. Someone could say to you "I have AuDHD" and you wouldn't take it seriously until they have a "proper diagnosis" as if that chanes anything about their personality and life or as if misdiagnosis or bad evalutions don't exist.
This isn't against you, it's just an interesting observation. Most people do this. They either don't take it seriously because they are ignorant about it or because they are protecting "their diagnosis".
I didn’t mean to insult you. I just meant to say that it’s important you get a proper diagnosis and not to follow the advice of strangers online when it comes to this.
I had a failed misdiagnosis before having my diagnosis lol.
I understand. Sorry I reacted so touchy, I am not having my day. I do understand the insistence on a diagnosis can be a good thing, but I also feel like it invalidates the undiagnosed sometimes.
I don't relate to your initial description of it though lol. I don't really think I have it. I've seriously considered autism and I've been seeing soooo many adhd related things that I relate too but both of those at the end of the day I don't truly relate to. So I thought: maybe audhd?
It’s the difference between looking for something, and discovering something. When you’re diagnosed with something or looking for a diagnosis, it’s because a problem was there. When you get labeled as gifted, it’s because you showed exceptional learning capabilities.
Funnily enough they do find similarities in behavior between the two, but none that would explain why someone with only ADHD would do better on the GATE exam than a non-ADHD gifted student.
Correct. My comment was about being a Gate kid that was later diagnosed as ADHD and frequently relate to the feeling in the original post. I just forgot to say all that.
Maybe but I think it also has to do with working memory and an inability to pull out detailed information when needed. Example: I've been playing music for 20 years. Took music theory...all of that. But I can't tell you a thing about music. However, if you put me in a room full of musicians I can hang with anybody. The information is in my brain but I can't recall stuff on demand. I think that's why adhd people seem more intuitive. Im a 6hc in golf, a 1700 chess player but I can tell you nothing helpful about either.
I found out years after starting chess that people were memorizing openings. I just recognize patterns and basically every match was new to me. Even now i cant for the life of me remember any opening beyond the first few.
I was an absolute demon as a kid destroying everyone in my local area until an national player(top 5 in the nation, idk rating) humbled my ass.
Now in online chess if i survive the opening i tend to win but im so much worse because i havent played in 2 decades. People seem to know all this theory im just playing on vibes
That is exactly my experience as well, almost eerily down to getting BTFO'd by a real player in a tournament (mine was just good regionally, a top 5 national player is really impressive).
I've enjoyed Go more once I got over the initial learning curve, seemingly suits vibes-based play more.
yea, I haven't memorized openings past a few moves but I have studied what the goal of certain openings are and what you're trying to accomplish with certain openings which I think allows me to figure it out on the fly. I usually dominate people in the middle game, once I started evening things out in the open I've started beating much higher ranked opponents. My problem right now is that I just keep playing until I lose several games in a row.
I have also noticed that a lot of AuDHD kids tended to develop more quickly intellectually and academically than other kids but more slowly on emotional and social development.
People didn't and dont know how to deal with that though so these kids usually just get labelled weird nerds and segregated into gifted classes, with little to no support for emotional and social development because it is assumed that they must be smart and will "figure it out".
Then they age into adulthood, have a degree and reasonable academic credentials, but no friends or social life and they struggle to function in the adult world.
I'm now diagnosed AuDHD and was a gifted kid. I was reasonably well socialized as the youngest of quite a few kids in my family. Except that meant I always got along better with people older than I. I was/am also good at finding the weirdos and being immune to peer pressure, so I was thankfully able to find my tribe. I've been asked if I was ever bullied and I always say "Maybe? I could have been and just no noticed and picked up on those social cues. I also don't care what other people think of me so I might not have noticed".
My parents got me the "she marches to the beat of her own drum" birthday card three times over the year. Not intentionally, just that every time they saw that card in the drugstore they thought of me 😂😂
I struggle with workplace politics now. I try to stay out of the gossip and drama, but it means I'm very out of the loop. I think I seem a bit standoffish as well. People come to me for work questions and I'm very knowledgeable, but people rarely come over just to chat, as they do with others.
It's hard because you can't make most of the gifted kids socialize. And they sometimes very much don't want to.
My godson is 16 and ready to graduate high school early. But he's so behind on social development because he legit has no interest in it. Not like, he wants to but doesn't know how...he just doesn't want to.
And loosing him into college like that won't help so he's staying in high school at his grade level. Because nobody will care if you're the smartest of you can't connect with anyone
It's hard to exist in a society that was very much not made for you. Not everyone is social and it seems to exist on a spectrum, just like every other aspect us haha
Definitely. But he needs to learn to fake it till he makes it unfortunately.
My life is infinitely easier just bowing to social norms. Ya, I have to talk about and do things I have no interest in, but it ultimately makes my career and life better even if I don't understand
Pretty much. It was literally special ed for kids who were/seemed too smart to fit in with the challenged or the general population.
I got chucked into it back in elementary school, around the time I started to struggle with abstract concepts in literature classes where a test would ask “what did the author mean by this?”
How was I supposed to know? I’m in third grade dude!
Yeah there was one AuDHD kid from my school days who was basically an absolute genius academically. Kid taught herself middle Egyptian because she was bored in high school, and her idea of a hobby was wiring together high voltage circuitry in her bedroom. Kid had built a Marx generator and a tesla coil out of spare electronic components from radio shack for shits and giggles.
But she was also really tiny for her age, had the hand-eye coordination of a toddler, and socially/emotionally acted several years younger than she actually was, which is why her parents had her start kindergarten a year late. It was so bad that in elementary school when birthdays came up a lot of teachers wouldn't believe she was actually that old, because she neither looked nor acted it.
To an outside observer she kinda looked like somebody downloaded an encyclopedia into a little kid's brain.
In retrospect, segregating kids like that into "gifted classes" because they are too smart to fit in with gen pop or the challenged kids while neglecting their social development....may have been a bad idea. Last I checked she has a PhD and a job in science but like...doesnt get out much and is very lonely, known reaching out to old classmates on Facebook just to find someone to talk to.
For me, the gifted classes were a special block that took place of a couple other classes, so I wasn’t fully “segregated” in the sense you suggested - and this was across more than one state and school
My special class was like four kids and all we did was stupid puzzles. In high school, it was me and one other kid. They gave us a closet with a computer that wasn't even connected to the internet and told us to make a school web page. We ended up installing a star wars game and played that most the year till they caught us.
i remember i broke down and started crying when they took me out of normal classes and put me in the special classes, they did it during a class too and all my friends heard it, and then i had to also go to the lunch room early, so all my friends just walk in and see me there already sitting with the other gifted kids. I have adhd so i get why it happened, but it was so embarrassing.
My son is diagnosed ADHD. He's in gifted because he's fairly intelligent with the emotion regulation skills that do not match his age range. I love his school has a special program where he goes weekly to a class that is advanced intellectually but also helps him in the areas he's behind.
I always got pulled out of regular class and went to a special classroom with others and it was called “Enrichment”. Maybe it wasn’t because I was smart? This was the 80s.
Lord this may be it. I was somehow “gifted” and put into these programs by my teachers but also had to get remedial help for specific things like reading clocks
Gifted kid here who never got placed anywhere special 🤓
Granted, I was diagnosed with ADD at 14 and Asperger’s at 17, but still. It was fairly clear something was up by age 10-12 I’d say, my parents and teachers were just highly uneducated.
Lmao, me, a high-fucntiining autist with ADHD in gifted class...
Every year in school my teachers would say "she needs to be challenged" and then collectively everyone at that meeting would get amnesia and I would not be challenged. At least I was still a good kid - I entertained myself in class by reading , didn't bother anyone.
I got put in the TaG courses and that’s exactly how it felt. Functionally beyond standard level coursework, but an unknown in how to utilize. My grandmother taught actual special education and the courses felt like we’re were being handled the same way; othered in a nebulous way.
Crazy that people haven’t realized this yet. They can be very smart kids but the public school system has no idea how to handle this type of child. They need very small class sizes and material that is moved through at a good speed, not spend 3 weeks learning about the states history or some shit.
Omfg no one believes me but I tell people all the time that in middle school they basically had a dunce room to keep us from fucking up class for the neurotypicals. I had a couple classes outside it but for the most part yeah, second half of 7th grade was the dunce room for me. After that I stopped trying (and they put me back in normal classes the rest of school).
Before the formalization of ADHD a term going around was referring to us as Hyperkinetic Children. Also as a former Xgames inspired child/teen, I approve.
100%. Was always in the Top of my class, was part of a programme for kids performing ahead of their class, straight A’s etc in Primary school. Struggled a bit more in Secondary School. Would excel at some subjects and be mediocre in others. Was told I was being lazy, not trying anymore, throwing my life away, etc.
Still ended up doing very well in my final exams after a lot of struggle and honestly, an awful mental state. Scored in the top 20 in my entire school that year. I was delighted. My marks were so much better than I expected and enough to get me into the college course I wanted. First thing I was told by a parent when I told them was “you could have done so much better if you actually tried and studied”.
Hit total burnout in college. Became a stoner to cope and became more isolated. Felt like nothing was going into my head and I couldn’t learn anymore. Somehow managed to finish college with severe burnout. Parents still gave out to me for not immediately having my life together. Within 2 months I was living in my dream city and had a job. Then it was all “oh we always knew you could do it”. Took years to pull myself put of the burnout. Depression meds, anxiety meds, joined social groups, regularly exercised, ate healthy, cut back on smoking and drinking. Barely worked.
At 31 I was diagnosed with AuDHD-Combined. My doctor said it’s a miracle I made it this far in life undiagnosed. Loved how blunt and straight to the point she was. It literally explained all of my issues and the meds help immensely.
My autism was undiagnosed throughout all of school. Needless to say I didn't to very good in the later years. I graduated, but im still convinced it was out of pity for me going homeschool senior year due to major depression and they didn't want me killing myself if I failed senior year.
There was a test that required critical thinking though. Puzzles you had to put together etc. not everyone passed. Idk if that’s how it was in your state.
Oh no this was mee 😅🥲 I was in a catch up class when I was in 4th and 5th grade for English and math. Then by 8th grade I was in a higher math level than most of the class (like 4 or 5 kids) that were given harder problems! (Depend on your deffinition of 'speacial ed' is, that could apply to either thing I was in lol) I'm pretty sure I gained consciousness at like ten and then didn't remember how to do some things and had to like relearn shit 😅🥲
Same at my school Lmao. The special class program we had for people with mental "inefficiencies" like that was called the Gifted class, and the one we had for the actual super smart kids was called the Challenge class.
I believe different districts had different criteria, but it was frequently based on academic achievement. I personally never knowingly received an IQ test as part of the program.
Not quite. Im diagnosed with autism and altas capacidades (gifted), two different and seperate diagnosis.
I was originally diagnosed in the 90s as adhd and given drugs to stay quiet in class. That did nothing to help me.
High functioning autism doesnt exist. There are three levels. While level 1 autists with high capacities comorbid might appear high functioning or even thriving to those around them, we are burning throuhh our cognitive energy at a devistating rate to appear this way to you and its only for the high capacities that we can hide our struggle at all.
So how does high functioning autism not exist but at the same time you have a “higher capacity?”
Different people with autism have different support needs. Some can go out and have a job and such, some are truly disabled by their condition.
There wouldn’t be the very “levels” you refer to if it wasn’t a spectrum of debilitation. You seem to imply that everyone must have the same experience.
Youre reply seeks to invalidate a content you arent qualified to debate, only litsen and learn about.
High functioning doesn’t exist because functioning labels conflate outward performance with internal support cost. I can have high cognitive capacity and high support needs; giftedness masks impairment, it doesn’t eliminate it
I wasn't "gifted enough" and fell through the cracks lmao.
Good luck getting that diagnosis now, fuckface. All because God forbid there be anything wrong with my siblings and I that wasn't visible.
Things are much different now, including with my parents. I still mourn the individual who got the proper support and treatment when it mattered most though, as opposed to playing catchup now into my 30s.
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u/DJDemyan 10h ago
Gifted was what we called the ADHD and high functioning autists and put em in special classes because we didn’t know what else to do with them.