here is the very sad story of my life
Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Students: An Underserved Population
So y'all may not know this, but I was pretty smart as a little kid. I learned to read when I was one and a half, I could read pretty much any book by the time I was six, and in kindergarten I was placed in the gifted program at the school where my mom taught. I never had my IQ tested, but I would be willing to bet that at the time it was pretty above average.
Then I went to first grade in a different district, enrolled in a program that was supposed to encourage kids like me. That...didn't happen. I was mocked and bullied for OMG LIKING SCHOOL. I was bored in class, even when I was one of four second graders in a second/third grade split level class. All I wanted to do was read my books, not keep myself busy by doing work that I had mastered long before. I had wonderful teachers, but they simply weren't used to having a student like me. I realize how incredibly narcissistic that sounds, but it's true.
(This is not to say that everything about that program was bad; after all, it led me to continue in the CK district, meet my bestest friends, and eventually graduate from Oly, the best school ever. However, yeah there was a lot about it that just kind of sucked and was miserable.)
Eventually, I just stopped caring about school. I became an entirely mediocre student, because what reason did I have to care about my grades? They were a completely arbitrary reward. Receiving an A didn't mean that I actually learned anything from the class. Good grades didn't make people like me better. In fact, in my experience, it had led to the opposite. I still loved learning about the subjects I was interested in, but I couldn't bring myself to care about anything else. I wasn't challenged. I couldn't challenge myself; I was a kid who barely knew how to deal with my own problems. My parents didn't know what to do with me, having trusted in my elementary school to give me work at my own level.
My mom told me to "play the game". She must have told me that thousands of times from when I was about eleven to when I graduated. Just play the game. Do what they ask you to, even if it's laughably easy and you don't care about it. But that's simply not how I roll. If I don't care about something - if I don't find something interesting or enlightening about it - I won't do it. I was never a particularly rebellious kid, but this was my one quiet rebellion.
Long story short, my brain pretty much atrophied due to lack of challenge. You guys know me, I make stupid posts squealing over aliens falling in love/hatelove in webcomics. I'm borderline retarded at times. I don't know how to interact with other people, because no one wanted to interact with me during my formative years. I can't do math, because I hate math and don't care about it. Once upon a time, my intellectual star burned bright, but that time was many years ago now.
When I read the article I linked at the beginning of this post, it hit me like nothing has in quite a while. Alex, although his case is exaggerated and my IQ has certainly never been near 169, is very similar to a younger version of myself. I have always gotten along better with adults than with people my own age (as anyone who has ever seen me at a Rainbow meeting will know), as Alex does with the university professor and his students. I have become an expert in those things and only those things which interest me; namely, literature, languages, and foreign cultures.
There are many, many good things about the American education system. But its inability to provide adequate services and programs for highly gifted students is not one of them. At the same time, however, homeschooling is not always a valid option. What if both parents work? Or if the child's intelligence and capacity to learn simply exceed the ability of the parent to teach them? This is a difficult problem, and one that I doubt we will be able to solve any time soon. In order to encourage gifted students to excel to the very best of their ability, we must change the way that we view intelligence, and difference in general, as a society.
Oh man how did this get over 700 words.
If you want to read a book about the hardships of being gifted that is also made of awesome and funny, I highly recommend An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. It's pretty much excellent anyway. John Green is an amazing writer. Although how Colin managed to get nineteen girlfriends is beyond me.
And I don't mean for this post to come across as bragging or "OMG LOOK AT ME I AM SO SMRT". It's just...this has been my experience in almost twenty years of life.
I'll probably come back to this post in an hour and realize how rambling and disjointed it is. D;
So y'all may not know this, but I was pretty smart as a little kid. I learned to read when I was one and a half, I could read pretty much any book by the time I was six, and in kindergarten I was placed in the gifted program at the school where my mom taught. I never had my IQ tested, but I would be willing to bet that at the time it was pretty above average.
Then I went to first grade in a different district, enrolled in a program that was supposed to encourage kids like me. That...didn't happen. I was mocked and bullied for OMG LIKING SCHOOL. I was bored in class, even when I was one of four second graders in a second/third grade split level class. All I wanted to do was read my books, not keep myself busy by doing work that I had mastered long before. I had wonderful teachers, but they simply weren't used to having a student like me. I realize how incredibly narcissistic that sounds, but it's true.
(This is not to say that everything about that program was bad; after all, it led me to continue in the CK district, meet my bestest friends, and eventually graduate from Oly, the best school ever. However, yeah there was a lot about it that just kind of sucked and was miserable.)
Eventually, I just stopped caring about school. I became an entirely mediocre student, because what reason did I have to care about my grades? They were a completely arbitrary reward. Receiving an A didn't mean that I actually learned anything from the class. Good grades didn't make people like me better. In fact, in my experience, it had led to the opposite. I still loved learning about the subjects I was interested in, but I couldn't bring myself to care about anything else. I wasn't challenged. I couldn't challenge myself; I was a kid who barely knew how to deal with my own problems. My parents didn't know what to do with me, having trusted in my elementary school to give me work at my own level.
My mom told me to "play the game". She must have told me that thousands of times from when I was about eleven to when I graduated. Just play the game. Do what they ask you to, even if it's laughably easy and you don't care about it. But that's simply not how I roll. If I don't care about something - if I don't find something interesting or enlightening about it - I won't do it. I was never a particularly rebellious kid, but this was my one quiet rebellion.
Long story short, my brain pretty much atrophied due to lack of challenge. You guys know me, I make stupid posts squealing over aliens falling in love/hatelove in webcomics. I'm borderline retarded at times. I don't know how to interact with other people, because no one wanted to interact with me during my formative years. I can't do math, because I hate math and don't care about it. Once upon a time, my intellectual star burned bright, but that time was many years ago now.
When I read the article I linked at the beginning of this post, it hit me like nothing has in quite a while. Alex, although his case is exaggerated and my IQ has certainly never been near 169, is very similar to a younger version of myself. I have always gotten along better with adults than with people my own age (as anyone who has ever seen me at a Rainbow meeting will know), as Alex does with the university professor and his students. I have become an expert in those things and only those things which interest me; namely, literature, languages, and foreign cultures.
There are many, many good things about the American education system. But its inability to provide adequate services and programs for highly gifted students is not one of them. At the same time, however, homeschooling is not always a valid option. What if both parents work? Or if the child's intelligence and capacity to learn simply exceed the ability of the parent to teach them? This is a difficult problem, and one that I doubt we will be able to solve any time soon. In order to encourage gifted students to excel to the very best of their ability, we must change the way that we view intelligence, and difference in general, as a society.
Oh man how did this get over 700 words.
If you want to read a book about the hardships of being gifted that is also made of awesome and funny, I highly recommend An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. It's pretty much excellent anyway. John Green is an amazing writer. Although how Colin managed to get nineteen girlfriends is beyond me.
And I don't mean for this post to come across as bragging or "OMG LOOK AT ME I AM SO SMRT". It's just...this has been my experience in almost twenty years of life.
I'll probably come back to this post in an hour and realize how rambling and disjointed it is. D;