Society is set up in favor of people with brains that more closely approximate the “average” brain, at the expense of those of us with brains that are fucking weird; that’s basically the idea of neurodiversity. A thing I think is potentially important is that “brain that’s fucking weird” doesn’t just include people whose brains are broken or different-but-still-good; it also includes “brains that work better in some important way.”
For instance, think about kids who have, for whatever reason, more academic aptitude than other kids.* The “gifted kids” (ugh, I hate that word) and particularly the kids who always wound up at the top of gifted class.**
There’s a stereotype of the smart kid not having a lot of friends, and in my case and the case of a lot of people I know, that’s true. If you’re good at academics, it’s probably at least in part because you love academics (or at least part of it). You also, once you get at a certain level, have absolutely no one to share your love of academics with. When I was in third grade, I was reading Plato’s the Republic; my peers were playing Pokemon. I’m not saying that I was better (both occupations are entirely useless except for entertainment purposes), but it makes it terribly difficult to make friends if you want to talk philosopher-kings and they want to talk Pikachu. At the same time, while all my peers were out socializing I was… alone. Reading Plato. Because Plato was more interesting than whatever the people in my class were getting up to.
This means I was alone a lot, obviously. Because I was alone I never really learned a lot of really basic social skills you’re supposed to learn when you’re young. (I theorize that this is behind not just former gifted kids with poor social skills but also the geek social fallacies, most of which are about Not Excluding People Like We Were Excluded.) I felt like I was the only person in the world who loved the things I loved, which is a terribly lonely thing to feel. And, well, when kids see someone who’s weird, who doesn’t have a lot of friends, and who has rather poor social skills, they tend to bully them.
Adults don’t help either. There’s a natural tendency when someone is good at academics to praise them for being good at academics, which means that a lot of gifted kids (including me) wound up defining ourselves as The Smart One. This interacts really badly with social exclusion, because it’s really easy to conclude that the reason everyone keeps excluding you is because you’re better than them. That way lies arrogance and a rather unpleasant personality.
At the same time, if you define yourself as Smart, there is going to come a time when you’re Not Smart. When you meet people who are smarter than you, or you have to suddenly start working at a class. This can induce low self-esteem, depression, and general emotional crisis, because if you’re The Smart One what happens if you aren’t smart anymore? (Bad things. Especially if you’d already decided that you’re better than people because you’re smarter than them and suddenly they’re smarter than you.)
Classes, up to a certain point, are really easy for people with a lot of academic aptitude. You learned it the first time the teacher went through it, but she has to spend the whole hour reviewing it because no one else is as quick as you– for that matter, you might have learned it last year when you taught it to yourself. This means that a lot of people get bored and disengage from classes, which can (oddly) lead to very poor grades and the classic “but you test so well!” syndrome.
If classes are easy, it’s really easy to coast through on native ability, which means you don’t learn how to study or work hard. When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards? And, of course, you suddenly feel stupid because Smart People don’t need to study.
Anyone else have thoughts/experiences about being one of the quote-unquote gifted kids?
Possibly related: The problems with being smart, which offers a different perspective on some of the stuff I’m talking about here.
*Obvious Disclaimer: it is way better to have a ton of academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with a lot of academic aptitude than it is to have no academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with not very much academic aptitude. In the latter, you get a sucky situation and society makes it worse; in the former, you get something awesome, and there might be shit related to it, but at least you still get academic aptitude. However, we can talk about problems that are not The Worst Problem (TM). It is allowed.
**Other Obvious Disclaimer: this is a generalization that won’t apply to everyone– in fact, most of it doesn’t apply to me. And it’s based on my observation of myself and other former gifted kids, so it is not scientific in any way.
I’ve always had a challenge with it. The biggest problem isn’t just identifying as the “Smart Kid,” but for me it’s more feeling like a fake. I’m in medical school, and with essentially no studying other than going to class and reading the material once outside of class, I do better than at least 80% of the class. I worry the bottom’s going to drop out of this, that I’m going to flunk, that because I’m not studying I’ll be a worse doctor. I worry that because I never learned study skills that eventually I’ll kill someone because of it.
In terms of being praised for academic success and “being smart,” I actually find it aversive – because I DIDN’T have to work for it, what the hell does that say about me? I feel like this doesn’t deserve praise – “doesn’t everyone work like this? Isn’t this easy stuff, if you just think of it like a system?” It’s been a lifelong struggle to understand how to accept compliments.
I’m not sure if there’s anything “to be done” about this, other than work on my own inner self. I’m not defined by success, and anything I need to know will be repeated again. I just feel like I’m doing something wrong that I have so much free time to pursue my other interests in med school. Masochistic I know, and yet a surprisingly powerful source of guilt.
I think I have already said that it’s really nice to have found you — as one person who finds themselves alone a lot, to another. I stumbled down a very different path: I was in my 20′s before anyone told me I was even “good” at anything. As I started to discover who I really was, I began to think I might be smart, and understood that people can be smart in vastly different ways, i.e. not only math and science. I continue to feel as though I was horribly deprived and have spent the past 15+ years reading voraciously to try to make up for it, but as information expands now at warp speed, I often find myself discouraged, thinking I will never be able to know “enough.”
Wow… this is basically my entire childhood (and a bit of my adulthood) in a nutshell. I spent so much time reassuring myself that “it’s fine having no friends, because I’m The Smart One”, that when I got to university and found people who were not only smarter than me, but also better socialised, I kinda just started falling into a massive slump.
(Plus, why should being smart make it “okay” to have no friends? Childhood me, what the fuck?)
Thing is, I think the adults in my life really did their best to help me out of my self-defined box. My mother always encouraged my sense of humour, and tried her best, bless her, to get me involved in physical activities. But I just had no aptitude for making friends.
I can relate. This is why I dropped out of my Master’s program. I never learnt how to study or work hard.
I never learnt how to form close relationships with people either. I just can’t do it. I have made friends but it takes a tremendous effort on the other person’s part, I just don’t know how to reach out.
“When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards?”
This so much. It happened to me when I studied abroad and took all of my classes alongside native speakers…in my third language. I was getting Cs in subjects I would have gotten As in if taken in English. I had no clue how to study properly or focus, and was constantly abnormally depressed and anxious.
Another thing that I’ve experienced, as one once labeled ‘the smart one’, is the problem of leaving school and entering the workforce. I have a liberal arts B.A., so my first post-college job was retail, followed by teaching English overseas. No one gives a shit how ‘smart’ I am or what my GPA was as long as I have the people skills to make a sale, or keep a rich toddler from throwing a shit fit after being told “no” for the first time. Identity/emotional crisis indeed. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to go make grad school financially feasible as soon as possible.
I started out a lot like the person you describe in your post. I was well ahead of most of my classes, was bored a lot of the time, and was being actively bullied or passively blanked by my entire peer group. Then three things happened: at 14 I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and didn’t go to school for four years (and when I did, it was on my own terms – no more PE lessons), I discovered the internet, and I discovered distance learning. The internet let me find my people, and distance learning let me get the qualifications I wanted on my own timetable – learning study skills along the way. Because it wasn’t just a a matter of showing up to classes, I had work out how to work.
Once I got to university, the mix of some classes, some self-study and some freedom suited me perfectly (and you get more freedom as you go up, which is why I should now be working on my PhD but am writing this comment instead). I wouldn’t want to advocate getting CFS, which is horrible, but I am in favour of distance learning and the internet – and letting teenagers have much more control over what they learn, when, and how.
STORY OF MY GODDAMN LIFE RIGHT HERE. I didn’t start learning how to study until I started playing Street Fighter, of all things, halfway through university. My repeated academic failure and a lack of social skills made me constantly suicidal throughout my childhood and adolescence. The only advice I ever got was “you just don’t work hard enough”, which is a really dumb thing to tell a kid who’s already crippled by low self-esteem.
On top of that I’m not even that smart, I just really liked maths and reading as a kid
Yeah, this certainly is a thing.
A few additional caveats:
- If you are Smart, you will find yourself hanging with Nerds. However, not all Nerds are as academically intellectual as you and even among the ones who *are*, there is a chance that they may not be interested in doing original work (I’m mostly talking pre-college here, with some degree of science focus, and also wonder about people who for whatever reason don’t end up going to college.) This can be kind of isolating. I would bring gadgets to school and people would be in awe of the stuff I found the least interesting, which is an odd and uncomfortable form of compliment. I think that more needs to be done to get people who can and want to do original stuff talking to each other sooner.
Krause: The obvious solution appears to be to get all the gifted kids to hang out with each other and make them take classes that are hard enough that they actually have to work, but I worry that that might worsen the “we’re better than everyone else” problem and keep the gifted kids from learning to communicate with and relate to the non-gifted. .
Based on my experiences, I strongly favor gifted classes, preferably in big schools.
When I was a little nerdling, I was at a small, private school, and while the quality of the education was good, the small size and tendency to only socialize with you age cohort led to me being the *only* nerd just due to sample size issues. This was a tremendously isolating experience, obviously, and I never really formed any deep social bonds at the time.
Then, in the 7th grade, we moved and I went to a gifted program in a large, public school. Finally, there were other nerds! I could socialize with people who were like me, where such interactions weren’t painfully awkward.
IMHO, it’s best to go in steps for kids who are, by nature or social pressure, socially isolated – start with other nerds, build the skills and confidence, then move out to pretty smart but not “gifted” people, then finally “normal” people. Trying to jump ahead will just result in painfully awkward situations at undermine the gradually built confidence.
IME, it gets better once you live alone. As a kid, you’re insulated from the hassles of life, free to spend all day every day on your passion, which means you have little common ground with others. Once you live by yourself, you can join others bitching about the shared experiences of paying bills, waiting at the DMV, commuting, the bus being late, forgetting your umbrella when it rains, and sleeping in a narrow strip of your bed because the dog takes up the rest and refuses to move.
“If classes are easy, it’s really easy to coast through on native ability, which means you don’t learn how to study or work hard. When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards? And, of course, you suddenly feel stupid because Smart People don’t need to study.”
Oh my god, that happened to me in my junior year of college and it was SUCH a mindfuck.
I remember reading somewhere that this is a very gendered problem, in that people tend to emphasize the role that effort plays in success with masculine-presenting kids and the role that innate smartness plays in success with feminine-presenting kids. (I also can’t remember where I read that, so take it with a grain of salt).
I went to an entire school for gifted kids, and it was very formative, not always in a positive way. We definitely centered our collective identity around massive elitism, and also since I was pretty much the class outcast for eight out of eleven years, I didn’t even get much of the “hanging out with other gifties” social benefit. But the small class sizes and frequently eccentric teachers were good for my brain.
So much of this. I was one of those ‘gifted kids’ and I had a hell of a time in public school because I was socially ostracized. I got placed in a program in grade four, but when we moved before grade seven, my parents gave me the option to continue in the program or to start moving back into mainstream education. They encouraged the latter because they were concerned about my ability to mix with others when I got to high school and into the job force.. when I WOULDN’T always be around people like myself.
I can relate to the feelings of inadequacy upon reaching higher-level learning and discovering that I had to actually work and study at stuff and didn’t just *get* it as I was used to doing.
I can relate to this. Something that happened to me related to this was that I found myself envying the students who had bad grades, because when they worked hard they got better grades and would get praised for it, whereas my grades were pretty much constantly high so me getting a high mark was nothing special :/
“At the same time, if you define yourself as Smart, there is going to come a time when you’re Not Smart. When you meet people who are smarter than you, or you have to suddenly start working at a class. This can induce low self-esteem, depression, and general emotional crisis, because if you’re The Smart One what happens if you aren’t smart anymore?”
Yes. This happened to me. In grade school, almost everyone hated my guts and made it very clear every school day. But it was okay for me to exist because I was an academic superstar in every subject except P.E. Then I took the challenging path in high school (because not taking a challenge is as good as failing it?) and not every subject was super easy anymore (I actually got a couple C’s). So where do I get off daring to exist? I still have no idea, especially considering that, I think Mori mentioned this above, being good at school is not being good at getting a cool or well-paying job. You can’t put your IQ or SAT score on a resume. And no one talked to me during college about what I wanted to do after graduation.
And in my day we didn’t have Pokemon and tumblr and we had to walk through the [strike]snow[/strike] hurricane uphill both ways.
After reading the “problems with being smart” link I feel it’s relevant that I have gotten well into adulthood without any significant experience of turning failure into success through hard work. I’ve succeeded (and failed) at things that required hard work, but never succeeded at the kind where you fail and fail and fail and then succeed (as opposed to the kind of thing where you put in a lot of hard work first and then you either succeed or fail). So maybe I just have no tolerance for frustration, but I can’t fail and fail and fail and keep on trying, i.e. practice something I am not already good at.
Yes and then there are “gifted” kids like I was, just… not in any way that anyone knew how to deal with. I couldn’t spell, I could barely do basic math (even with countless hours of tutoring). but I started taking art commissions in 3rd grade? I was making books of poetry or short stories and illustrating them? I was able to digest and understand abstract expressionism? I was enjoying the hell out of playing the first generation of Pokemon, but I didn’t have time to talk to other people about pikachu because I was busy scripting and developing my own Pokemon game.
So I had parents and teachers that were routinely surprised and simultaneously disappointed, urging me to just study harder (right, because 10 hours a week for a single subject isn’t enough) and getting frustrated that I wasn’t gifted in the “right” places. I didn’t want a social life– I wanted to be able to pursue my projects and be respected for it, but it’s always been a struggle and, even coming up on 2 years out of art school, it’s still a struggle. My father encouraged me to pursue that education, offered to pay for it, and yet when I got my degree with honors (I should have gotten two, as I did enough work for a double major) there was still that sound of disappointment in his voice, as though he was expecting me to magically come home with a bachelors in finance.
It’s not just about being “gifted”, it’s about being gifted in the way they want you to be. Which basically always comes down to math.
*puts on social psychology hat*
It’s also a problem because the way we define smart is “understands without trying”, which doesn’t include such practically valuable skills like persistence, and asking people who are particularly skilled to help you out and admitting what you can’t do so that you can learn it. There’s a body of research showing that kids who are praised for the ways they solve problems/persistence, not for being smart, actually achieve better in the long run, and are more satisfied with their all-around abilities. (When long run is defined as either test achievement or tasks outside of school)
I was that smart kid. I had many teachers who HATED me because they didn’t know how to deal with me. I wasn’t arrogant (then), but I was attention seeking – I wanted to be impressive so I could be told I was a good kid and I was smart, counteracting what I was getting at home. On the other hand, I had a few teachers who recognized me for what I was, and they really loved me, and they engaged me on a much different level from the other students. I had teachers who weren’t even my teachers who wanted me in their classes.
In third grade, my neighboring fourth grade teacher would often take me into her classroom when the third grade teacher kicked me out of class because he didn’t know how to deal with me. She didn’t just have me sit, either, she pulled me up to do spelling bees, participate in class, and other wonderful things.
Of course, in the end, I was that smart kid who became the dumb kid. I couldn’t do a lick of homework, but I was still passing because of tests alone, and so I didn’t even have that much motivation to try to improve. College came along, and I promptly left for the corporate world, which I got into as soon as I could doing computer work, something that just came naturally to me.
It was funny, my fifth grade math teacher HATED me. She started out the year with me just putting up questions on the projector as a sheet. I looked at them, immediately solved them in my head, raised my hand, and began to rattle off answers.
She started just revealing the questions one at a time to try to limit me. I just raised my hand faster because now I only had one problem to solve at a time. (From time to time, though, I could see the shadow of the problems behind the paper, and I would just work to solve those to keep myself busy.)
Eventually, she just wouldn’t call on me, and told me to keep my hand down.
But I saw that as discouraging, not “You’re so smart I have to wait for the rest of the kids to get their chance first.” She never bothered to explain it to me.
So, I figured out the pattern she was using to call on other kids, and most of them were the ones memorizing the patterns of the cracks on the ceilings. I just glanced at the questions, memorized them and answered them in my head, and then started looking around the room like I wasn’t paying attention, so finally she called me.
I spat out the answer without even looking back. I think it probably pissed her off more than usual, lol
Gifted classes are a godsend. The sooner you manage to find your level and be challenged in classes, the better the “never learned how to work hard” problem is to deal with, and the sooner you stop the socialization problems. Nothing like a gifted class actually at your level to finally let you practice having a friend, and then to learn that just “being Smart together” isn’t enough for a friendship, and then to finally learn that those friendship-building-blocks work with people who aren’t Smart too.
That said, gifted classes in school still don’t help the phenomenon of totally falling off a cliff after graduation. What in the world are you supposed to do when being Smart is no longer particularly relevant, as it isn’t in the vast majority of occupations outside college?
Ozy: re: Krause: I spent most of my elementary school in a full-time (not pull out) program for highly gifted students that was co-located with and did “non-accedmic” subjects (art, pe, music, recess) with a normal school. That program didn’t provide full time coverage for high school and middle school, so we were placed in increasingly more “normal” honors classes as we got older. However, we were placed into classes based on or skill in the subject rather than by age. I think this worked well in terms of academic challenge, and was as good as could reasonably be expected in terms of socialization.
DJ: Find a job where being smart *is* still relevant? Of course, that’s easier said than done, even in the “useful” areas like engineering and science.
Or maybe focus on a hobby, and just get some job you can tolerate to pay the bills?
From a society-wide perspective, it’s quite a waste that there are smart people who aren’t able to do useful things with their brains, not for lack of willingness but from lack of opportunity. Of course, giving that the existing smart people in science are all scrabbling over an ever-shrinking pool of grant money, the chances that society with re-prioritize properly is pretty slim. Society clearly just wants to enjoy the fruits of smart people’s labor and intellect without having to pay or respect that labor and intellect.
I had ~no friends until college, and then “Wow! I can sit within a few feet of people and listen to their conversations and occasionally make comments, and they do not immediately get up and walk away! I must socialize ALL THE TIME now!” I think this was part of the reason I suddenly stopped being any good academically, though “Now I see I’ll never be smart enough” contributed too. Maybe if I hadn’t gone to an all-nerd college I would have stayed in my room studying all the time and actually learned something instead of exploring roofs and tunnels all night while high on sleep deprivation.
Also in one intro Physics lecture the prof described college as a mining operation searching for a few diamonds in vast quantities of worthless rock. I see the point, producing one Feynman is worth more to a college than producing a few thousand competent engineers, but it’s pretty fucking discouraging to be basically told you’re not worth educating.
I’m a bit of a weird case.
I was not in the gifted classes because due to my academic shittyness and inborn existential disregard for grades I was barred from taking them. you can’t be in the high up college-prep classes in any subject if you’re also in the remedial classroom,and I never managed to pass basic algebra while in highschool. so, I was always in the remedial room.
I was constantly the smartest kid in the normal-kid and stupid-kid classrooms.
this put me under a very different burden because it became my job to assist whoever was around me, my team in my geology class was the rejects but we all passed with good grades because, although I made them do the digging (and quite a bit of the actual filling out of worksheets, my handwriting has always been unintelligible) I did all the mental heavy lifting.
Having to explain things to people around me all day helped me put my thoughts in order, helped me get along with people, (which I really needed, it is hard in the world for awkward extroverts who scare off the people they wish to befriend) and helped me to become a much better writer, and helped me in college. in fact most of the academic skills and aptitudes I have were much better suited to college than public school.
when I got to community college I had this moment where I swore that I would never ever do anything that I personally did not want to do ever again. I would never study math ever again (this was after getting my gen-ed requirements out of the way), it did not interest me to do so, and therefore I wasn’t going to bother, and that was OK because I was no longer accountable for my successes on anybody else’s scale. I was suddenly free.
I took an art class, I did not feel like I was wasting time because, heck, I was good at it. I liked doing it. I was going to do some more of that. same with every other subject that I liked.
I revel in the feeling that every decision in my adult life is one I have made because I wanted to make it. I’m not a failure for not acting out somebody else’s idea of success, because I’m not playing their game, they are. I feel responsible for everything in my life not attributable to circumstances of birth and luck. and it’s fucking great. (even as I work my entry level job, more metaphorical mountains await me)
so yeah, that was the second major epiphany of my life.
MCA: Nobody wants to pay for any sort of talent in this job market. Not unless you’re a stock broker.
We lost a lot when manufacturing in the US disappeared. I wager that most people are good with their hands, good at making things, and can glean some kind of personal satisfaction from having build something tangible. Where are all those kinds of minds now? Pencil-pushing in endless seas of cubicles and being paid to twiddle their thumbs. Whose mind isn’t going to rot in a system that’s designed to prepare them for that?
“If classes are easy, it’s really easy to coast through on native ability, which means you don’t learn how to study or work hard. When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards?”
I can definitely identify with this- throughout grade school and for the first couple of years of college, I was an honors student who barely studied at all (I recall studying for a few hours the night before AP tests in high school, but that’s about it). The only school I attended with a Gifted program was my elementary school. I remember enjoying the program (it gave me a break from regular classes, which tended to be unbearably easy/dull) but I don’t think it was particularly challenging.
When I finally hit college classes that actually required studying, I had no idea how to go about it, and I was unable to study for more than an hour or so at a time (I actually think I may have undiagnosed ADD; I have problems focusing in most areas of life). As a result, I didn’t do well in those classes, received C’s for the first time in my life, and graduated with a mediocre (to me, at least) GPA of 3.2. I rationalized this by telling myself that employers don’t really care about your GPA anyway (I have no idea if this is true, but I am now employed in a field where being smart is valued, so I guess it worked for me?).
Basically, I spent all my schools years coasting along doing a minimum amount of work, and as a result, I’m a pretty lazy person, and I have a tendency to give up on things if I don’t experience immediate success; on the other hand, since I am good at most of the things I do, have extremely high expectations for myself, and if I don’t succeed at something that I think I should be “good at,” it’s crushing for me. I think if I had had a more challenging academic environment at a younger age I would have learned to deal with those things better.
As for the social component, I suppose I was lucky that I come from a large family (I have 5 siblings and a huge extended family) who are mostly “smart people,” so even though I didn’t have many friends in elementary/middle school, I had enough smart people around me that I didn’t feel alone or get a superiority complex, and was able to develop adequate social skills and make friends in high school.
MIT has an interesting take on a lot of this. Classes in your first semester are all given a P, if you earn a passing grade, or don’t show up at all if you don’t (‘no record’). There’s a definite aspect of, ‘Ok, time to learn study skills, time to become okay with average, time to find out who you are now that you’re not “That smart kid in high school”‘…I’m still good at some things more than other people. But those people are good at other things too. Now I get to have an actual personality, I’m not just the human calculator.
…sometimes that means working on your personality too, to be fair…
L: Very true. I guess I just yearn for the day when life is like Star Trek (particularly TNG), where pursuits of the mind are given the highest priority, nobody wants for the necessities (or even comforts), and pocket-sized laser pointers can vaporize tanks.
Darryl: the med school here uses a similar Pass-fail system, because without it, they’ll all just go insane trying to get A’s.
I also recall a friend from my first college having a lot of trouble making the transition from being the smartest kid by leaps and bounds in his small school to suddenly being surrounded by people close to or surpassing his intellect. He went way, way overboard trying to impress everyone, including reaching way beyond his skill set, and didn’t settle down until at least his junior year.
I was a gifted kid. I was also bullied and moved up two grades, which made me younger than everyone in my class. I was socially awkward (even though I had some friends, I just couldn’t manage being ‘charming’ – I was too intense and didn’t find connection with my peers because we just didn’t get each other’s stories) and my teachers were always on the lookout for me to fail. None of the braininess ever let me think I was ‘better’ than anyone else, nor, unfortunately, that I was even half as good as anyone else. This was exacerbated by an emotionally abusive home where I was constantly told I was arrogant and lazy and should never have the audacity to enjoy or be proud of anything I could do. Anything I was able to do was by definition worthless, and only the things that were impossible or very hard for me were worth striving for. Fucked up.
Luckily, I did all right for myself academically. While I coasted through high school, I cared so much about getting good grades that I taught myself excellent (if exaggeratedly effective) study skills in university. Black-and-white thinking for the win! I was so afraid that I’d get a 4 (out of 10) that I always aimed and got a 9 (out of 10).
I would have liked to have gifted classes. My family were members of an organization for gifted kids, and the one week per year we had summer camp was the one week where I felt normal. I’d meet other gifted kids, exchange a few sentences, and then go off doing all the ‘kid’ stuff like running and playing and climbing trees that I was never allowed to do with my classmates.
There is also the tendency for individuals who do not fit the “conventional” profile for giftedness to be left to their own devices. The face of giftedness is usually white, exhibits teacher-pleasing behavior, sits quietly/works well enough with others, and often times male. This is how most teachers “expect” the gifted student to be or behave. Gifted people can have these traits, but there is also a large number of gifted people who are rebel rousers or who act out–they are bored in class and, due to their high intelligence, do NOT get along well with other/exhibit teacher pleasing behavior. Black girls, Asian boys, and Hispanic students can be gifted. Intelligence doesn’t really discriminate.
This is on top of the fact that intelligence is operationally defined, much like depression or anxiety (though these are easier to define and operationalize than intelligence). We can see it in others or ourselves (or so we think), but there is less agreement on what exactly “it” is. Some people define intelligence strictly as “g” (or general intel), others follow the multiple intelligences paradigm. Even within those two main perspectives, differences exist. In our society, intelligence is seen as something you just “are” even though it has been proven to fluctuate over the life time and can correlate to one’s activities. And, as you pointed out, we base a great deal of our self esteem in our ability to achieve. However, many do not distinguish between ability (what you could do, for example can you think critically and creatively to solve problems?) and achievement (what you have done; what you have been taught). There is a difference between someone teaching themselves physics and solving problems at work and someone who went to Harvard and obtained a PhD in physics solving problems at work. These two measures intermingle and overlap (did you achieve because of ability, or did your ability come from the fact that you were taught slowly, over time, by others?)
Society also places a great deal of stress on intelligence and achievement, but less stress on the steps it takes to get there. Yes, we know it takes hard work. But how many children’s stories really take the time to focus on that hard work? Most (at least in my Disney filled days) tend to focus on the reward or accomplishment, the finale at the end of it all. So, if you are “smart”, it seem effortless, permanent, and worthwhile. If you aren’t, you are stuck that way and can’t contribute. Even though we aren’t entirely sure what “smart” is. What a fallacy.
And I have to agree with you emphatically: society is make for those of us who fall under the top middle portion of the normal curve. Outliers (or even those past the second standard deviation) have trouble “functioning” the further out they are.
As a side note there’s decent sized (though not as large as I’d expect) gifted education community online. http://giftedexchange.blogspot.com/ is good start if anyone is interested.
Yeaaah I can definitely relate with this.
I’ve always had easy times in school. Well actually no – I’ve had easy times with school work. School itself, not so much. Most of elementary school all of the school work was easy stuff for me, I never studied for exams and got straight A’s for pretty much everything. It wasn’t challenging so I got sloppy and bored very fast. Of course, I was also bullied in school because of this (or maybe because I was so socially inept – I can make friends on a person-to-person basis but I never do well in groups, I’ve always rejected cliques).
So later on in school when I got to puberty I didn’t want to be bullied anymore so I basically started fighting back when I was, which meant I was considered a troublemaker (it’s easier for the teachers to remove the one student who gets bullied and refuses to just take it, than it is to remove a whole bunch of kids) and put in a special class, where the teacher pretty much didn’t care and I didn’t have to do anything at all. No incentive to study or anything, it was basically just like a clubhouse where we watched TV and stuff instead of studying.
My grades went to shit so I didn’t get to any good secondary education, I just took whatever I could get just to get away from all the bullshit of my home town, and dropped out in a year because the school sucked. Then I spent the next 12 years or so drifting along, doing alcohol and drugs in excessive amounts and being a total outcast.
Now I’m trying to get back to school, which is not easy because the system is set to favour those who’ve just graduated from grade school (sucks, hey? Apparently, if you don’t make it the first time, the system considers you not-worth-the-effort) but I have to try because what else is there to do.
It’s simultaneously refreshing and horrifying to read through these comments and remember how many other people are in exactly the same boat as me.
I think a healthy percentage of all my anxiety stuff, and the need to drop out of college, can be traced back to stuff I picked up in my school’s gifted program. But then again, that program also kept me from completely losing my shit in high school. I had a lot of fun in there, even if it was unhelpful in the long run.
If I could warn my younger self not to enter the program, I don’t think I would, because who knows what hilarious alternate set of personality disorders I’d get instead. But it does make me wonder how many kids get saddled with exactly these problems. I’d be super appreciative if you felt like writing more on the subject!
Speaking as one decidedly not-gifted… Kate, that was a great comment.
On the job, nothing is quite as aggravating as the smart, genius kid, who can’t mop the fucking floor: “Dude, its worse than when you started.” Its hard to fathom how someone so smart can’t see the dirt: “SEE THE DIRT? SEE IT?” (I don’t know if they really don’t see it, or don’t understand the importance of getting rid of it because they are preoccupied with their heavy thinky-thoughts.) But I know lots of genius kids who were (example) fired from kitchen jobs for profoundly dumb things, such as using salt instead of sugar in the recipe. I think believing one is very smart, especially if you really are, leads to deadly errors like not locking doors or turning off ovens or using salt instead of sugar (tasting what you cook before serving it, is always a good idea!) .. i.e. double-checking oneself, persistence, perseverance, learning to appraise one’s work objectively, etc. If you are smart, you are perfect, so of course the floor is clean and the pie is good. Or if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter, since you are the smartest.
That’s how smart kids lose simple jobs and the dumb kids get hired in their place.
And that doesn’t help the rest of us, since I really enjoy talking to the smart kids more.
Oh wow. This is all so familiar. The only thing you didn’t mention was how acceleration throws an additional wrench into the works. Imagine being the only girl in your 9th-grade P.E. class who doesn’t yet wear a bra. At a school where everybody has to change uniforms for P.E. Also bear in mind that athletic ability depends a lot more on your age than on your intelligence, and you’ve got a recipe for “I hate all sports.”
Imagine not knowing who you even can befriend. Everyone your age is in a lower grade and doesn’t understand what you’re talking about, and everyone in your grade thinks you’re immature.
Imagine constantly getting reprimanded for doodling, fidgeting, and being otherwise disruptive. I spent most of 2nd grade in detention for changing questions on my copy of the test. (They weren’t hard enough, you see.)
I took AP classes in high school and did decently. Then in college, I actually had to study for the first time since elementary school (when I had to memorize multiplication tables and history facts), and I had no idea what to do. I failed a lot of classes before I got the knack.*
Probably the worst part was my father. When you teach yourself to read at age 2, it often seems like there’s nothing you can’t do. My father basically expected me to get, not just all A’s, but all 100′s. In everything. If I didn’t succeed, I got yelled at and told I wasn’t really trying. If I did succeed, it was just “well, she’s a genius, so we kind of expected it.”
Complicating things further, my brother was academically average and extremely charismatic. So not only did he have more friends, but he got praised for the same B’s and low A’s that got me a “this is garbage and you’re not even trying” lecture.**
So yeah, depression, anxiety disorder, and I finally learned how to socialize by using the Internet a lot during college. By junior year I was able to talk to folks in meatspace and not look appallingly weird.
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* I think Kate Donovan’s comment is relevant here. I am still learning how to admit when I need help with things, and have finally, just a month ago, accepted that taking medication for my mental illness doesn’t make me weak-willed.
** Is it really a lecture if you’re being yelled at instead of talked to? I’m not sure.
d: So, what else do you have to do with your time? I know how it feels to be “behind.” (Or is this just what everyone thinks who decides they want to learn everything there is to know in the Universe? Well, except math. I don’t do math, which is what I thought “everyone” who was smart should be able to do…) Not sure why, but hearing your story and hearing that you are back at it, those kind of stories really resonate with me, bcs that‘s what I feel we’re all supposed to be doing—growing in our own ways. You learned some important shit on your path and others like you, who are young and struggling, could benefit from it. The problem is…how to reach them. Writing children’s or YA is one way.
One day, somewhere out there in the wide world of the internets, somebody will comment on a thread about gifted children and say “I wasn’t gifted”.
But until then, based on current sample size, it’s very important to manage gifted kids correctly, because 100% of kids are gifted.
Really, Hugh? See also: self-selected sample who finds this subject relevant to their experiences. I rarely had to study before I got to college and found most homework boring (I actually calculated the minimum number of homework points I needed for an A in one case). I would have no reason to jump in on a conversation about oh, I don’t know, how hard it is to be the younger sibling who follows a gifted kid through the same schools because that conversation is not about me. And that is hard and can be a painful experience. It’s just probably not a conversation for me.
@Quartz: Well, obviously. I just wonder if Ozy doesn’t have any non-gifted readers, or zir non-gifted readers feel like they aren’t able to comment on this. I kind of doubt it’s the former, and if it’s the latter, I want to encourage them to speak out.
Feel like I’m a little late to the party here, but I’m curious about people’s pre-school social environments. As a former “gifted” kid who never felt isolated or friendless (at least not due to my “smartness,” mostly due to my shyness/general introversion), I’m wondering how I managed to escape that… Was anyone else in daycare (just daycare/basic preschool, not an intensive “learn a foreign language and complex math” Pre-Kindergarten type of school) from a young age? I don’t have a lot of concrete memories from that, but I suppose it’s possible in that environment there would be more emphasis put on being able to socialize nicely with other kids over developing “intellectual” abilities.
Or maybe I just need more social approval/interaction than some other commenters. With increasing time post-grad school I’m beginning to see that my problems with that experience probably stemmed more from not having my social/emotional needs properly filled than from wanting to quit because the work was too intellectually challenging. (My issue wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work, just that I didn’t really want to do it, which was frustrating since I knew I had the capability to do it. My frustration made me want to do the work even less… and repeat. I’d always been able to force myself through subjects I didn’t care much about before, why couldn’t I do it now?)
I think I realized pretty early (or I could just be imagining in hindsight that I knew this) that I’m not necessarily “smart” as much as a “quick learner.” My brain just seems really good at remembering stuff. It’s a lot easier to do well in school when you only have to be told once that 3×5=15, so you can move on to learning other things, instead of needing to be told 10 times before your brain makes the connection that lets you actually remember that fact. By contrast, I sometimes think I’m a little short on the “logic”/common sense circuits that some people have that let them realize that, yeah, putting that hot pot right on the counter, even though you’re worried about getting it off the stove before it catches on fire, is a Bad Idea if you want to get your security deposit back.
This happened not only to me, but also to my father. Having coasted through school, he duly went on to study maths at university, and then proceeded to fail his second year exams, so switched to philosophy. I, having been warned half my life of this possibility, had to suddenly learn to study effectively in upper VIth (that’s the last year of secondary school before you go to university, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the British school system).
Both of us are ‘gifted’ in the sense that we have retentive memories, read fast, and learn things relatively quickly, rather than having an abundance of any skills which come in useful once you get to actual life. I never felt that I was ‘actually’ smart, and always felt that it was a little unfair being praised for things like my maths grades, which I had done absolutely no work for, while others worked much harder than me but still came out with Bs. (I did no work at all for any of my GCSEs, and virtually none for my maths A-level, and still got the best GCSE and second-best A-Level grade in the school).
Perhaps I’m older than most of the commenters (a feeling I got from reading Ozy’s previous blog), or perhaps I grew up in a smaller, more rural/isolated setting. Or perhaps my school was just badly run or poorly funded, two facts that have been reinforced in the local newspaper I read when I go home to visit family. Regardless of the reason, I found gifted and talented classes to be a painful waste of time. All they did for me was to mark me as “different” from others, and not in a good way. The problem was, our original GATE teacher died when we were in junior high, and the teacher who took over the program very much treated giftedness like it was some combination of a profound mental disability and something to be embarrassed about.
I have ADHD as well, so yes, I do need certain accommodations – and of course, I did not get them because when I was growing up, ADHD was barely on anyone’s radar, and certainly no one thought girls could have it, or that “smart kids” could have it. Anyway, the painful part of GATE was that were treated like toddlers and talked down to – and I’m talking about when we were in the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades – just condescended to, pulled out of class to attend lectures about how rough it is to be gifted and have no friends (and by extension, be on the receiving end of taunts and bullying), and pulled out of class to attended so-called “enriching” activities that served us no greater purpose other than to leave us with a pile of make-up work to do when we got back. So, I quit “GATE” without fanfare halfway through my junior year and never looked back.
Today, I don’t feel particularly gifted. I would say I’m decent in the STEM subjects and that’s about it. My ADHD has caused me a lot of problems in social situations and on the job. I used Cliffs Notes throughout high school and college because my reading comprehension abilities are almost nil. I have serious motivation problems, and when I’m depressed (a side effect of PTSD, though the PTSD has nothing to do with being gifted; it’s related to a violent childhood), I get almost nothing done. Because my insurance coverage has been spotty/nonexistent throughout young and now middle adulthood, and I am plateauing at best (probably getting worse), I am about to start the process of filing for SSDI as a backup because I work in a sub-set of a STEM field where 40 is considered “old” aka “ready for the refuse heap,” and I am staring down the barrel of my own obsolescence. But yes, I will readily admit that I do not feel gifted or even particularly intelligent these days. I am not sure what can be done to improve the lives of children and adolescents who are both gifted and mentally ill or cognitively different. I hope things get better for the next generation.