''Gifted Children'' - Where Are You Now?

In My Humble Opinion
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Couple thoughts:

  1. I don’t think Gifted programs are for identifying prodigies like Mozart. In my experience, parents figured it out and did the appropriate measures, e.g. getting music tutors for the children. The students in my G&T classes seemed to only be the best of a given group, not sublime.

  2. Of my friends who were in G&T, honors, AP, etc., only one of them went on to get their Ph.D. The rest chased the dollar and got barely enough education to get them into their chosen fields. Interestingly, the one who did get his Ph.D. retired this year at 39.

  3. In my personal experience, I felt my environment held me down. The largest company I have ever worked for was Pizza hut. Mainly, I worked for small, proprietor-owned companies with limited resources and small market shares. Also, rents are astronomic in my area, so opening my own business is much harder than in other places (yes, I’m familiar with the risk-taking behavior that defines entrepreneurs.) I like to think that if I had had the opportunity to leave this area, I would have had many more opportunities.

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I was tagged as ‘gifted’ early on, started kindergarden a year early, got placed in the accelerated groups and classes as I went, read voraciously, took AP courses, got into a top tier university, straight-tracked through that in 3 and a half years, went to a world-class med school, a higly-regarded and competetive residency, got boarded in my specialty, got to be a Fellow in my specialty, taught medical students and residents, and eventually joined the state government to run the health-care delivery system for a statewide prison system as Associate Medical Director (which frankly has been a bigger challenge and learning experience than anything I did in medicine before).

I still read a lot.

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Perhaps it doesn’t really need to be said given the range of responses already in this thread, but being “gifted and talented” – precocious at picking up and retaining skills in reading and writing, mastering advanced topics quicker than others, building a large vocabulary, being widely read and knowing lots of “random stuff about stuff” – doesn’t necessarily translate into material success or personal happiness. Having a leg up on academic or intellectual matters does NOT mean having a head start in The Real World.

Why bother with G&T type programs then?

1 - On a personal level, because stifling the exercise of such talents may be an easy path into personal unhappiness for such people.

2 - Because in certain areas of endeavor, having that academic leg up IS a head start. For example, in academia: many a “brilliant” scientist or mathematician has completed a PhD thesis and done some kind of impressive post-doctoral paper by the age of 26, and this does not happen without being accelerated as hard as one’s talent can handle.

3 - It is also in the area of math and science specifically that the US Government is trying to bolster our home-grown talent, as falling behind other countries scientifically will sooner or later mean falling behind technologically, economically and militarily. Historically we’ve grown by attracting top foreign talent from Asia, Europe and elsewhere, but that picture is changing.

To answer the question in the OP (which I haven’t until now), I have done very well professionally as a technology professional, as a computer programmer in large scale systems in the financial services sector. I now get paid more than I thought I would when finishing my degree. I can’t say for sure whether or not I’d have ended up where I am had I not gone to my specialized high school; I probably would have majored in Comp Sci in college regardless, and could well have ended up in an Ivy League college anyway based on my SAT scores (which I think would have been pretty much the same) and grades (which would certainly have been much higher on average – I was an A-/B+ student at my HS). My desire to stay in the NYC area would have been the same as well (which is how I ended up in financial services rather than something more engineering-oriented given the timing of my graduation).

But as I said earlier, I wouldn’t trade my HS experience for anything, and would sooner trade my college experience for one at a “lesser” college in a heartbeat.

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Hey! You ever read The Lord Of The Rings? You might like it! :wink:

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I was more advanced than most of my peers, particularly when we were young - I read every Friday to my kindergarten class (Sweet Pickles books!), was an “A” student, etc., etc. We did not have a G&T program, but I was always in the top reading and math classes, and went into the AP-style classes in junior high.

Then, once puberty hit, I was not content with being a nerd. That, coupled with a divorce and a somewhat absent mother and father, I hit the skids. I started smoking, lost my virginity when I was 14, and eventually dropped out of high school.

That is why I think G&T classes are very important. Smart kids, just like slow kids, have problems with the larger crowd, are subject to bullying, etc. Separating those kids out gives them some protection from those problems, and in a case like mine, I think that the pressure of my smart peers might have kept me from skewing so far into “bad kid” land, in that I would have someone recognizing and encouraging me.

I subsequently had a baby at 19, got my shit together, met a fantastic man, and have a great marriage, a son, and a good life. I worked as a paralegal for 12+ years, and recently (last Friday!) ended that job to start and run my own company. Because of the issues I had, this is, by far, the best time of my life.

When my daughter qualified for the Merit Classes at her elementary school, I signed her up immediately. They started in 3rd grade, and I know that having a place to be herself, along with a stable family, has given her confidence and social intelligence that I never did.

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Also, as long as I’m tooting my own horn, I got a 34 (out of a possible 36) on the ACT, I was in the 99th percentile on the SAT, and got either a perfect score or in the 99th percentile on all three chunks of the GRE.

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I was pretty gifted as a child. Was in the Gifted and Talented programs, blew away all their little tests, never really studied or did homework but tested higher than most of my peers… and this despite being over a year younger than my classmates.

I never fell into the trap of expecting to be the best at all times. I never cared much about someone else’s definition of success. I still don’t.

Now, I do what I want to do. I go to work at a job I like and I spend the rest of my time working on whichever personal project I’m currently passionate about. My former G&T classmates are, to a man, chained to a cubicle, a pager, or a cellphone; in more debt than they’ll be able to pay off before retirement age; and obsessed with obtaining whatever gadget is the latest craze.

I never have very much extra money, but I don’t owe anybody a cent. I don’t have a Wii or an iPhone or a Land Cruiser, but I’m still pretty happy–not because I’m overconfident and disproportionately superior, but because I know that my knowledge and skills are marketable across a broad spectrum of industries. Failing that, I don’t mind doing manual labor even though I’m over 40; getting dirty or working out in the blistering heat / sub-freezing cold doesn’t bother me.

The closest I’ve come to the scenario you described was during nuclear-propulsion training in the Navy. I was horrified to learn that I actually had to study!

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That. Was. Awesome!

Never lose that spark or the forces of Darkness will have won!

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I know exactly what you mean. When I was a youngster, I was in love with words. They had their own textures and feelings when they rolled off the tongue or were stacked neatly across the page. FTR, no, I’m not synaesthetic.

School killed that. This word means this. It’s spelled like this. It goes here in the sentence. It fits this meter. It rhymes with this.
Ah, but it didn’t die. I saw the word architect a couple of years ago, and I remembered how it used to seem such a magical word, like a waterfall–graceful flowings ending in a sharp, glittering plunge. Since then, the love affair has begun anew. And I know a whole lot more words now than when I was young.

If there is hope, it is this: the wonder doesn’t die, we just hold it captive and mute.

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First, hi robby, always nice to see fellow alumni on the SDMB. I think I had a more positive experience with the Core, though. I’d certainly read a lot of the books on the LitHum and CC lists before college, too. It was lovely to have read the Odyssey by myself in high school, but in college, I got to read it with Wallace Gray. I might as well never have read it at all by myself.

I was in all of the gifted programs and AP courses, scored in the xxth percentile on standardized tests, was tested by some mental professional or other when I was a kid, blah blah blah. Nothing all that special, and the details are unimportant.

I do remember the gifted program quite well where I went to elementary school. The program itself was nothing really remarkable. But what it did do was keep me engaged and gave me something to look forward to twice a week. Something, anything to get me out of the doldrums of third through eighth grades for two or three hours a week. I probably would have consented to three hours of root canals per week back then if I had thought it would have helped.

I had a harder time then because I was so disorganized. I frustrated my teachers because they knew I was a reasonably bright kid who could just not get it together. The gifted programs helped because they partially offset some of the chronic anxiety I faced all the time due to my own inability to manage the complicated details in the life of a seventh-grader. What I could do reasonably well was take tests and read books. I read a lot of books.

I made it to an Ivy League school and really opened up. Suddenly I started to do my homework. I ended up doing a lot of homework: I double majored in history and classics and often took as many as 7 classes per semester. I learned four or five more languages and studied like it was going out of style. I’m glad I did, because the next few years were a bit of an intellectual wasteland.

Unfortunately for my long-term development, I didn’t really learn that I don’t have that much horsepower in college. Right after college is when I learned the harder lessons. One of my advisors in college told me, quite rightly, that he simply could not write me the recommendation I needed to get into the PhD programs I wanted to apply to. He was right. I was not ready nor was I good enough. Unfortunately this was in the spring of my senior year, and I had done zero college recruitment in the fall. I graduated into the dot-bomb and worked miserable jobs with long hours for a few years. I finally learned some intestinal fortitude and how to approach tasks with organization and discipline.

I managed to turn my classics degree into something quantitative. I’m a part-time econometrician for a Fortune 50 company and am a full-time doctoral student. Crazy people pay me to do game theory and read dead languages all day. I’ve never been happier nor busier. Nor have I ever known less about something I am expected to know a lot about, but I guess that is par for the course.

I’m never going to be intelligent enough to do great things with my brain. Even somewhat sub-great things. If I am lucky I will get a job offer at a mediocre university and will make middling scholarly contributions in technical journals that few will ever read. I will probably never write the magisterial synthetic treatment that will revolutionize my areas of interest.

My intellect (though certainly my personality moreso) was enough to alienate me when I was young without exactly offering Mozartian compensatory benefits. What I did learn, though I can’t exactly remember when, is that what my intellect lacks in finesse and skill, it must make up for by marching millions of badly-armed Russian peasants to their deaths. I don’t think most people get that from elementary school gifted programs.

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Olives, that poem may not be flawless, but I pretty regularly troll the net looking for holiday-themed poems for my students, and that was a helluva lot better than most poems written by adults. I’m impressed.

So I’m the slow one in the bunch, I guess. Didn’t learn to read until I was 4. I’ll spare the rest of the “look how smart I was!” details, but I’ll say that somehow I managed to keep the high GPA through college.

To take Sleeps with Butterflies’s impolitic observation one step further: my academic proficiencies had some direct links to my social awkwardness. I remember in the fourth grade being reduced to tears by our wonderful GT teacher when she pulled me aside and reamed me out for being an arrogant little brat to the other kids. I don’t remember what I’d done, but I’m sure I deserved it. In junior high, when I was dumped back into the regular population of kids, I suddenly realized that being academic wasn’t a social plus, and it totally flummoxed me: I retreated into myself, becoming bitter and severely shy and depressed. It took me a really long time to pull out of that.

It seems clear that there’s a tendency for academic proficiency to go hand-in-hand with social awkwardness; I wonder what the root is of that, and is it common in other cultures? I seem to recall hearing that in India, the idea of “nerd” as a pejorative is completely bizarre, that there’s no stereotype whatsoever of bookish people being socially awkward.

As for success, I’m pretty much as successful as I want to be. I have a vocation that’s tremendously rewarding, I have a wife I love, and I have a daughter that I adore. If my salary is below the national average, if my house is falling apart, if we’re struggling to figure out how to afford having a second kid–well, I’d not trade my problems for anyone else’s.

My academic proficiency connects to my success, as well: my wife is a big old nerd like me, and I wouldn’t have fallen for her (or she me) without the academic side. And I went into teaching because I love learning so much; I was motivated both by my good teachers and by my bad teachers. My good teachers made school a time of wonder, mystery, and sublime joy; my bad teachers made it absolutely miserable. I know what a difference a teacher can be, and every time I tell a kid about the myth of Achilles or about the shapeshifting properties of slime mold or about North Carolina’s pivotal role in the American Revolution or about how to bake bread or about the Fibonacci sequence, I’m doing my best to make that difference.

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I’ve done a few things in my life which some people think are kind of remarkable, but I basically feel like a huge slacker, I’m worried about my employment situation, and I’m frustrated at myself over not getting anywhere with my various interests.

I have huge problems with finishing projects or with practising or seeing through anything I’m not immediately good at. I trace it back to the time when I was told that I was Smart and therefore if I wasn’t good at something, something must be Very Wrong and it was probably my fault.

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As a college professor I have met many gifted kids, particularly mathematically gifted kids. The scary thing is how poorly educated many of these kids are. A common example is a gifted inner city kid who comes to CUNY to take precalculus in 11th grade. This kid is considered astounding at his high school because he completed all three NYS high school math exams early. But the overwhelming majority of high schools in NYC offer precalculus and calculus. So he is amazingly talented for his high school but at a lousy high school and luckily taking advantage of a college now program. But here’s the really bad part: he has top scores in his high school on the state exams but they are only 75% and his teachers have not bothered to introduce sine or cosine since most of the class cannot understand it (or so they believe). This is a story I’ve seen over and over again. The kids are saved by being introduced to the idea of reading a textbook and teaching themselves all the material their teachers skip. Since they are so smart at such inner city schools (and usually minorities) they go to strong universities, but often flunk out. Keep in mind that these kids may only be mathematically gifted and have overwhelming trouble with Freshman English at a strong university.

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As for myself, I was not considered gifted as a child although I clearly was exceedingly talented mathematically and fairly good at music. I was a poor student in other subjects until 4th grade. When I was admitted to a gifted school, my teachers expressed surprise announcing me to the class. Turns out I have a 145 IQ but with an extreme balance towards geometric ability and am now a research mathematician. I credit my gifted and talented extremely challenging high school for preparing me to ace my way through a challenging college and then progress through a PhD (where only 2 of 18 doctoral students in my year has US Bachelors degrees). I do not consider myself as successful as I would like to be and feel I have not lived up to my potential. Most mathematicians I know feel they have not done as well as they hoped they would.

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Success in life may very well depend on the particular talents you have. Most math techie talented people I know are doing fine with good jobs people respect. Those who are also talented in other ways are more likely to be earning big money and impressing more people. Those who are talented poets and writers without technical talent seem to have a hard time earning a living, even harder if they decide they do want to write the great American novel. When you have talent in math or science, you are paid to go for a doctorate and you put 100% effort into your field for 5-7 years. Not so in the liberal arts. Few people are given the opportunity to really immerse themselves in their writing and achieve their full potential. Its a sad situation.

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I was tested as gifted at an early age. I’m doing ok but nothing crazy.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about gifted people in his book Outliers. Basically, it’s more important to be socialized with other intelligent, achievement-oriented people at an earlier age than it is to simply have a lot of intellectual horsepower. A gifted kid might be “King of the Idiots” in his high school, but he will probably have a really tough time once he gets to college and finds that everyone is just as smart and even more motivated than he is.

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I actually omitted this from my original OP, but I had a long paragraph in there about where I think this comes from. I was, as an elementary student, insufferable to be around. I believed I was soooooo much more mature and sooooo much more intelligent than everyone else, because that’s what the authority figures in my life were telling me. And as a result, I treated me peers like ignorant peons not worth my time. Shit, I sometimes treated adults that way too.

Unsurprisingly, there were many people that did not like me. Not because of my ability, but because of my attitude.

Quoth my mother: ‘‘Nobody likes a show-off.’’

And because I learned that lesson early enough in life, I’ll add, I actually did pretty well socially in high school. I mingled with a lot of different crowds and met some awesome people along the way. I’ll be honest–it started out like, ‘‘okay, I’m going to pretend to be humble so people like me.’’ But once I really opened up to people, I was humbled for real. Some people are capable of amazing things. While I have dealt with social anxiety, I like people quite a bit and don’t feel that it’s all that hard to get along with them. In fact, I think I’m pretty good at things like mediation and conflict resolution–I care how other people feel and want everyone to get along.

Uh, the moral of the story, I guess, is that social skills can be learned.

I was discussing this thread with Sr. Olives today, and he seriously gave me an assignment for tomorrow to write a silly poem related to my grocery shopping experience. I haven’t looked at the world that way in so long. I’m actually looking forward to grocery shopping.

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I was asked to skip the second grade, but I didn’t. I did later skip the 11th grade, so I graduated just a handful of days after turning 17. I was 17 my entire Freshman year of college, which was amusing since I went to a college that used to be mostly people in their mid-20’s and up. I got tired of my major after a couple of years and wasted my 3rd and 4th years of college. I had managed to keep both of my full paid scholarships, but since I changed majors after my 4th year, I had to get a loan and go for 2 more years. I graduated around the same age as most people, but I could have easily had a 4 year degree at the age of 20, which would have given me a nice head start on a career.

I ended up becoming a chemist, even though I have a business degree. I’m starting my MBA program in the fall and hopefully getting out of science soon.

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Heh. Could be a fun game thread: 24 hours to write a ridiculous poem about a subject.

My special power is sonnet.

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First - I don’t think I mentioned Columbia as my Alma Mater, but bingo. :slight_smile:

Second - I thought gifted programs were always a “track”, i.e., a special set of classes, not a recurring enrichment session like throwing a new chew toy at the tiger cage at the zoo. That’s come up a few times now in this thread. I confess I don’t quite see the usefulness of that at the elementary school level - at more advanced levels, maybe, where high school kids can spend a few hours a week learning university level math or physics or literature or what have you, but what are you going to do with an 8 year old?

Third - You’ve got the analogy for marshaling your intellectual forces just a little bit wrong. You don’t march badly-armed Russian peasants to their deaths, you march French soldiers with overextended supply lines to their deaths in wintertime Russia!