There could be a whole separate thread for the “gifted innumerate”. Your head gets filled with all these ideas when you’re young. You frequent science museums and read all sorts of fun books about aviation and spaceflight. Then you get to HS find yourself repeating first year algebra–in sophomore year, and it doesn’t help much when, a decade later, you finally get algebra.
What?
No. A close friend of mine; someone I knew long ago. 
While I agree watering down the definition of “gifted” is bad, these parents should be commended, not vilified, for wanting the best for their kids. If their “little snowflake” isn’t in the program, suck it up and deal with it. Competition, especially academic competitiveness, is healthy.
“Gifted” is a very vague concept. I went to school not with the top 1%, but probably the top 0.01% in the country (USSR). Grisha Perelman was two grades below me in my school. At the time I was in that school, around 10% of the kids in school were there because of parents’ connections, the rest were merit-based (and often from fairly low-class backgrounds). Even the “connected” ones couldn’t have stayed there or graduated without keeping up academically, the dropout rate was high at the start of school.
The alumni of the school keep in touch - lots of people among the graduates are at the top of their professions (usually computers/physics/mathematics, although a couple of people in my class decided to become physicians). There is a strong contingent of my school’s graduates working in Google, Microsoft etc. Quite a few founded and run successful tech companies.
But then, this group is self-selected. To get into the school, you had to find out about it somehow - it was not advertised (I was told about it in a math group I joined in 7th grade), study for the entrance exams, pass them (the year I got in 5% of those who applied got in), then work your butt off to stay in and graduate.
To a point. I grew up in a school system which was very collaborative from K-college; having college students who couldn’t understand how to work in self-directed groups (they’d never done any group-work which wasn’t adult-directed) was one of the biggest surprises I got in the US. They were hell-bent on getting the highest possible individual grade, not on doing the best possible work.
When I was in school - I graduated in 1984 - I was the student representative for G&T - and Gifted was already watered down. It included not only people who were academically gifted (which generally wasn’t necessarily the kids who got the best grades - but the kids who grasped abstractions easily), but those that were musically, artistically, even athletically gifted. Gifted simply meant - it comes easy to you.
With athletically gifted kids, they didn’t do much other than after school sports - but one of my classmates did go to the Olympics - and the school offered support. With musically or artistically gifted kids, they tried to have special offerings - like for academically gifted kids. They wanted to set us up - regardless of the nature of our gifts, with actual challenges - which, when things come easy to you, is hard to find.
If you get good grades, but have to work for them - you probably weren’t gifted. The gifted kids were the ones getting good grades but never studying - or the ones who got lousy grades because they never turned in homework - boring and useless - but understood the concepts - they were reading or doing math far above grade level - usually without additional instruction - when they were found.
(I know it is a zombie but the thread is really good so I am going to reply anyway)
I found reading this thread to be extremely interesting and I am not at all surprised at the replies.
I don’t recall when I started reading, writing, counting, etc. (I would presume at the normal times in life) and I have never had an IQ test (that I know of), but they did suddenly put me in the gifted classes in third grade. We moved less than half a year later to a far more rural place that didn’t have gifted classes so I never saw another.
I always found school fairly boring and never had trouble with anything other than doing my homework (they made me sit through that boring crap all day and then they want me to willingly do it at home too? Not happening.) and algebra (until I got glasses). In high school I was allowed to take some physics courses for college credit that I found to be really fun, but I think that was mostly because they were about 90% hands on lab. I don’t recall what my graduating GPA was, but it was decent enough, likely in the vicinity of 3.0 - 3.5 and I received an “Advanced Diploma” for taking extra courses. Outside of school I didn’t have any sort of extracurricular activities but I did have a job that started right after classes ended and didn’t get me home until 9:00, which allowed me to avoid homework all the better.
I didn’t want to go to college and had decided to join the Marine Corps, but that didn’t really materialize for a variety of reasons that I am sometimes still bitter about so I ended up doing about 1.5 years of community college while still working at the job I had in high school, just full time. I don’t recall my GPA there either but I found the classes tedious; I did enjoy driving into the city and spending the day there, even though it was a pain to get back for work since the drive was nearly an hour.
After I gave up on community college I finally gave in and ended up at a four year school that was as far from my parents as I could get without paying out of state tuition. Of course none of my community college credits transferred. I found the four year school to be as boring as every other school I had been to and I avoided doing homework, studying (never learned how to anyway) or going to class for the especially boring ones. I hated it so much and wanted to get into the workforce so badly that I took extra courses and got my bachelors in 3 years* despite the fact that I worked 36 hours a week washing dishes in the cafeteria. I graduated with a 2.13 GPA and immediately set out looking for a job.
I accepted an offer for a job about a month after I graduated (in 2008 right before the economy collapsed). I think I mostly got it by luck as they never asked for my GPA and I never offered it but I know now that it would have immediately disqualified me. I have been with this same company ever since and have, in my opinion, excelled. The guy who hired me has been reporting to me for the past two years and I have been steadily receiving more advanced tasks. In the near future the company will be relocating me to a different office where I will be taking over the project that I have been working on for the past few years as well.
All told, I hated school and didn’t do particularly well despite the fact that someone at some point recognized me as gifted. I have, however, been steadily employed since I was 12 so I do have a great work ethic and it has proven to be far and away more valuable to me than being “gifted” ever was.
Stuck at home, college dropout (have enough for an AA, so that’s how I usually refer to myself.) While a lot of it probably had to do with my mental illness, my inability to buckle down was probably also because school was so easy.
That said, if it weren’t for scholarship money requiring all As (and not the two Bs I got), and if I’d not been totally asinine about student loans (avoiding them), I’d probably still be in school. When I say I was unable to buckle down, I more refer to my music classes–which, knowing what I really wanted to learn, I shouldn’t have taken. But the idea that a class might actually be hard and based on performance rather than just effort was something I never learned.
I don’t really think I was “gifted” in any sense, but I was reading on my own before first grade and was told by a 7th grade English teacher that I was reading on a college level(“so WTF was my problem?”). I didn’t talk before age 6, I was and am undoubtedly autistic but the child psychologists my parents took me too diagnosed me as too ADHD to form words(too hyper to talk?!). I was just memorizing everything, if you can call that gifted.
Combine this with 0 people or social skills and I crashed HARD and was lucky to survive my teen years.
Based on ya’lls experiences, I’m starting to feel like the “gifted” label is more trouble than its worth.
The label is. Actually being gifted certainly isn’t.