For me, when I was in third grade, we’d have a half-hour or so of “quiet time” at our desks at some point in the afternoon. I think we were encouraged to read but some kids took a nap, some drew, etc. There were always a line of classroom books along the chalk tray of the unused side-wall chalkboard and, one day, I noted a book about hellen keller that I never noticed before. Most of the books along the line were pretty bland, low-level animal-character kids books, ramona, etc., but this one was actually a chapter book, no illustrations, and I thought I’d hit the book jackpot. “A ‘real’ book!” I remember thinking, all excited. Every day when “quiet time” was announced, I’d bolt over to the chalkboard from worry that someone else would want to read it before I was done. I formulated how I could prove to the teacher that I was actually in the middle of reading it, so I wouldn’t have to hand it over. It took me, probably, two weeks (i.e. FOREVER) to finish and it was one of the highlights of my year. When I finally finished, immensely satisfied, I put it back on the communal chalkboard and waited. For the rest of the year, to my shock, not ONE other classmate even touched the book.
I think that was probably the first time I separated myself, mentally, from my classmates. I still remember how astonished I was that no one else had any interest in that hellen keller book. Later that year, incidentally, I had testing done and declared “gifted”, and put into special classes during mathtime, but this ended after a couple months when the gifted program’s funding got cut.
How about others? When did you gain a conception of yourself as smart, or smarter than the masses of children around you?
Third Grade. You had to do your 9x multiplication times tables. My buddy and I went up to 16x16. Because it was fun.
Sixth grade. When we were doing math, and the teacher asked for the answer, I always had my hand up. He, the teacher, got tired of calling on me when no one else had their hand up. Later, two friends cussed me out for being a brown-noser. But, I was just doing it because it was fun and easy–for me.
Side note–math concepts which came easy to me in the early grades did NOT translate into anything useful, and I still hate calculus. But it made me feel smart.
At 12. I was in a special maths class, but got booted back to standard classes for a couple of weeks and it was so easy! Up until then I’d thought I was in the ‘slow’ class.
The next year I started HS and got put in the top stream and my parents were told that I was in the top 50 students in the country. I barely passed my (Grade 10??) exams though and was a HS dropout shortly afterwards.
Life still proves my ability to behave like a bumbling fool on a daily basis.
My kid (a slight hijack) got called a retard last week, because she’s in the special needs program - the *gifted *section of the program. She’d never heard the word before and laughed like a loon when I told her what it meant.
First grade (French immersion). We would have little French spelling tests of ten words. I would always score 10/10, and was a little puzzled why most kids wouldn’t. The exercises in the math books were also wicked easy (well, to me). My teacher was really impressed when I was the first kid in the class to speak French in complete sentences, and I didn’t see what the big deal was. It was around that time that I realized that other kids my age just weren’t as smart as me. To this day, many of my friends say I’m the smartest person they know. I’m horribly outclassed here on the Dope, though.
I couldn’t say when exactly I realised that I was smarter than the majority of kids in my grade school and high school classes. It must have been really early on… maybe grade 2 or 3? I just coasted along and made my way to graduation without ever breaking a mental sweat. That’s what happens when you read at a university level by grade 6 and have an eidetic memory.
I can tell you exactly when I realised that I wasn’t as smart as I thought, though… when I failed a second-year university course just because I was too lazy to attend half the lectures since I figured I’d still manage to fake it through the tests using last-minute cramming. University was a serious lesson in humility and a much-needed reality check.
Then I went to work in the corporate world and realised that apparently most of the other smarty-pants kids who showed me up in university stayed behind in academia. So now I can revel in my intellectual superiority for a few more years, at least until I catch up to that other bunch of smarty-pants kids who went and got MBAs while I was writing about the ethical ramifications of in vitro fertilization and Kantian imperatives. Then I’ll probably get my ass handed to me again.
Unlike most of the Dopers here, I was just an average kid. I made As and Bs–sometimes mostly As, sometimes mostly Bs–but I worked hard for them. I wasn’t included in any gifted programs and I was sad about it (if only because the gifted kids got to do stuff that I wanted to do, like go to museums and write books), but I didn’t feel like a grave injustice had been made either. I didn’t think I was stupid, but I didn’t think I was particularly smart. Everyone around me seemed smart.
But in the third grade, I started feeling special because I had some artistic abilities. Another teacher sought me out to do drawings for the school paper (which was a big deal, since the paper was the domain of the fifth-graders), and the gifted kids contracted with me to do the illustrations for the books they were writing. I think it was the first time that I was able to feel like I could do things other kids couldn’t do and I started feeling smart.
In third grade I started using a shoe as a phone and built an elevator in the back of the classroom to a labratory underground. But when they tested me for the gifted program I missed it by that much.
Logically, I realise that if there are people with lowered mental ability (mental retardation), and animals who have a brain but will obviously never have the same capabilities, that there must be physical limitations to intelligence. But from a practical standpoint, it often seems like most of what makes people stupid is an unwillingness to try things, deliberately sabotaging oneself by making no effort to listen to things he is not interested in, avoiding information that goes against what they want to believe. Watching the general level of intelligence, among people I knew, drop as they entered high school rather confirmed this for me. (Theoretically, if there’s going to be a period for diminished capability, it should start with puberty, not high school.)
I don’t think that, genetically, I’m all that much smarter than a good quantity of people, but simply because I’m willing to take however much longer to catch up, and less willing to bow to societal norms, I was able to pass others.
So I can’t say that there was ever any one time. It’s just always been more an internal conflict between wondering whether the person is really stupid, or if they just need to get a kick in the pants.
I think it was probably second grade, when I realized that not only was I in the faster reading group, but I was reading faster than any of the kids in the fast group. The times when we did the “each kid read a sentence out loud” were hard on me because I would be reading ahead, and lose track of where the class was in the story. So my time to read a sentence would come, and I’d be in temporary panic, not knowing if I was in the right spot. Then, of course, as soon as my turn was done, I’d zoom along and usually finish the book or story.I soon learned to count how many people and sentences were ahead of me, find the sentence I was scheduled to read, and mark it with my finger. As long as the kids ahead of me didn’t screw up, I’d read the right sentence, even though I’d be pages ahead. I noticed that even the other smart kids didn’t seem to be reading ahead,and that made me feel smart.
Now, of course, even the kids in the slower group have successful careers and make decent money, so fat lot of good it all did me.
Second grade, when they caved in to my parents and put me in the talented and gifted program a year early, and let me join the school orchestra two years early (I already had been taking private lessons for a few years, and my older sister was in the orchestra). I remained academically bored. Being pulled out of regular classes for those put me well on my way to being the coolest kid around. (Oh, no, that was the speech therapy, I think. Not that I’m bitter…)
Eleven and a half years later, after a very rocky freshman year, I flunked out of college, partly because actually needing to work, academically, was an unfamiliar concept. Being told to take a hike was, quite frankly, worth every penny that I paid for the privilege, because I needed that kick in the ass to get my life together.
I have to say 1st or 2nd grade. That’s about the time my mother first explained that the reason the other kids were beating me up was that they were jealous because I was so smart.
I got put into the “gifted students program” later on in grade school, but that didn’t last long. Not because I wasn’t really gifted, though — the IQ test they gave me at the time gave me a score of 124 — but rather because the people running the program screwed up, IMO. Instead of providing us with activities to stimulate our intellects and creativity, they started taping electrodes to our foreheads and conducting experiments to see if we were telekinetic or telepathic. Apparently without getting parental consent. My Christian fundie mom wasn’t going for that, and yanked me out of the program.
Around 1st grade I was put in gifted classes. I always tested smart and had high levels of reading comprehension. But pretty much as long as I can remember I pretty much “got” stuff other kids didn’t.
My auditory comprehension is only about average though. I tend to get bored or distracted listening to people at length or sitting in long lectures. Mostly I’d rather read it on my own or figure it out for myself. That’s also probably why I’m not great at languages.
I did go to some really good colleges filled with smart people though.
The problem with being smarter than 90% of the people (and the reason many smart people aren’t successful) is that most stuff seems like bullshit to us.
First of all the grade school I went to had all of these little “satisfactory/unsatisfactory” ratings for various behaviors and such-I, bored out of my skull (in retrospect), with little respect for my teachers (who were, from 2nd grade on, by turns morons, bitches, and overall imcompetents), I would routinely get a lot of “U’s”. With my confidence shattered (after an excellent 1st grade with a wonderful teacher), I endured a string of B’s and C’s, and some D’s. There wasn’t anything called a “gifted class”-idea was foreign to the school administrators, as was any more general and informal method of ferreting out the gifted kids. Peer relationships certainly didn’t go well-thought there was something seriously wrong with me getting teased all the time. Had one good friend, whom I lost in a move to a new state far far away.
Come 7th grade I got accepted to a prep school with a middle school annex. So my dad was rich, figured that was the reason why I got in (school had a policy of never releasing the entrance test scores to the students). In my spare time I did what any very bright kid would do-create my own worlds, make up my own games, scour every book I could find in my thirst for knowledge. I just figured every other kid basically did what I did, but being quite the loner what they hey did I know? Kept slacking off in school, had a big chip towards any teacher I had (certain that they would let me down in one way or another sooner or later, just as all the past ones had).
So here comes 11th grade, and I take my SATs, and get a 1290, back when the scale was such that a 1290 wasn’t just 90th percentile, but 98th. Amazed the living hell out of me, esp. given my off-and-on approach to learning, and made more than a few acquaitances deeply envious. I just never had a common yardstick to compare myself to before then, and had no reason to think I was all that different from other kids.
At the end of grade 6 I won an academic scholarship to a private high school. I never saw it coming, I had no clue that I was smart at all, let alone smarter than other kids.
I found out later that my parents and teachers had seen it in me, and put me forward to sit the scholarship exams, but I had no idea. In fact, I thought of myself as stupid, because I didn’t know my times tables (still don’t), couldn’t spell to save my life (still can’t) and had changed schools a couple of years earlier from a school that ultimately was closed for failing to meet academic standards, and had therefore been over a year behind my peers in my new school.
I wouldn’t say I am/was SMARTER, per se, than other kids/people, but it’s amazing how simply NOT being a window-licking moron can separate you from the other “kids”, both in school and now as an adult.
