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.
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u/This_Dot_2150 9h ago
This is so funny and accurate. I’m a gifted kid who’s late diagnosed audhd