I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s also and skipping a grade was viewed as punishment. “You’re not being challenged enough, skip a grade and leave all your friends behind. Also, you’ll now be the youngest and probably smallest in your classes during your formative years when peer acceptance is so important!”
There was no gifted and talented options available back then. Finished your work early? Here’s “extra credit” work that will mean nothing because you’re already getting an A. Or, spend your time doing “quiet time” things like puzzles or drawing. But no sleeping. No, you can’t go home even if it’s the end of day and you’re doing nothing for the next 1/2 hour.
Also, no reading the next chapter or next assignment because that will put you even further ahead of everyone else.
After the 6th grade, I stopped going to school more and more until high school when I went to school for one day. The real mess is that kept getting advanced to the next grade “Because we know you can do the work!”
Oh wow… I had forgotten about the whole “smart kid”/sports thing. I got a lot of… stink-eye and/or snooty attitudes from a surprising number of teachers and even parents because I was a good academic performer, in the gifted & talented classes, and (GASP!) played football. And not just football, I was an offensive lineman- specifically a center. So not even the traditional “smart” position of quarterback, but one of the commonly “dumber” positions.
Which was funny, because in reality, QB and offensive line are the only positions on the field that actually require intelligence, with offensive line possibly requiring more to excel than even quarterback. You have to know how to recognize an opponent’s defensive set and understand your own play so that you can adjust the blocking at the line of scrimmage to still be successful- things like where to double-team, where they’re liable to stunt, etc… It takes a lot more brainpower to do all that than it does to play most other positions- they’re far more dependent on physical prowess and reaction than actual brainpower.
And this isn’t just my rose-colored recollection of high school football either; there are many articles about how offensive linemen routinely have the highest Wonderlic scores in the NFL Combine, and are the smartest guys on the field. (just google “offensive linemen most intelligent” for a slew of them)
I had a buddy in HS who was a very good HS baseball player. Not all-star, but a good fielder and big power hitter. He was a smart kid (eventually went on to grad school in International Relations), very strong and built like your prototypical linebacker. So one of the football coaches went out of there way to recruit him to play on the line.
He just plain couldn’t get it and eventually ended up quitting (they would have kept him just for his size and strength on defense). He said it was too fast and chaotic for him amidst the narrowed vision and colliding bodies to be able to read a play and react in time. I’ve never looked at linesmen as dimbulbs since then.
In New York in the '60s one of the options students in SP (special progress) programs had in junior high was doing three years in 2. About half the SP students took this option. Those who took the 3 year program got Earth Science in 9th grade and I assume some enrichment.
My mother absolutely refused to let me take the 2 year program, which is one of the many wise decisions she made.
I think pretty much everyone in this thread would agree that gifted, whatever that means, does not always correlate with more mature.
Argh, I thought I’d posted this reply to you several days ago, but I hadn’t. On the other hand, it still looks relevant, so here goes.
“Giftedness” and neuroatypicality don’t always go hand-in-hand, of course! My second child (the K child) isn’t 100% typical in his speech but besides that he has zero issues with affective/behavioral traits, but I guess he tested out as “gifted”?? And of course at my children’s school, since they are good about dealing with that kind of thing (and, equally importantly, don’t tend to attract parents who are looking for a skill-based school), they naturally select for kids who have some kinds of at least mild twice-exceptionality.
But… I do think it’s plausible that there is a higher incidence of neuroatypicality in highly intelligent kids, just based on my experience in (a highly-rated, very technical) graduate school, where I feel like, looking back on it, rather more of us than one might expect from the general population were… not entirely neurotypical.
That being said, I really think that there is too much coddling of the Special Gifted Snowflake at my kids’ school, and assuming kids need coddling when they really don’t. I hadn’t realized this was a general Gifted Thing, I’d thought it was just this school, so I’m really glad you’re posting about it, this has been a really interesting thread for me.
I hear you, but there’s a lot of non-neurotypicality working at Big Lots, too, in my experience (and maybe some of those were GT kids who were underserved, but I don’t know that all of them were). I think GT/non-neurotypical has a pretty good chance of ending up functional, and so are visible. People of average or below average intelligence who also have processing differences end up super marginalized and largely unnoticed. The generally moderately under-grade level kid with a specific processing disorder is almost never formally diagnosed. I think it often goes unnoticed and the kid is shuffled off as “weird” or “awkward” and will bump around until they end up in some marginal, sustainable position: a lucky break leading to a job just good enough to survive on, an inherited decrepit house, or friend with an inherited house, that allows them to live on a job not actually good enough to survive on.
I’m honestly not going to speculate on relative frequency.
I tend to look at it this way - the average child averages out to be average but isn’t average on any one thing. Some have more … variation about the mean … than others. Advanced visuospatial offset perhaps by lower language and/or socioemotional channels. Or the other way. But average on average. Above average overall also has that spread.
That’s very fair! I’ll be the first to admit that my experience of people is, in general, not at all representative of the overall population. (Though @DSeid’s point is a good one too… my older kid varies around the mean a lot, my younger kid not so much.)
But yeah, I think one of the (many) interesting things I’ve taken from this discussion is the observation that my kids’ school (and maybe GT programs in general, given your observation that they are Like This) actually selects for neuroatypicality – definitely not consciously; our school has in fact said before that they would really like to have more of “the kind of student that would excel everywhere” – but the kind of “let’s look for, and commit to helping, these kinds of affective/behavioral traits” mindset really primes them to attract those kinds of kids.