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

In My Humble Opinion
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We have a high school in our district like this. It feeds from a region of very expensive homes (even for California) and has a lot of parents with high level jobs. It has very high test scores, and is one of the top high schools in California.
There was a scandal when a girl who was one of the dozen or so valedictorians admitted that she cheated in high school. There is an incredible amount of pressure from parents. The school is overcrowded, and when the district wanted to change attendance boundaries so that a few wlementary schools would feed into another high school, some of these parents nearly became violent. (I was at a meeting, it was scary.)

But I think this pushing comes from parents with kids who are very smart but not necessarily gifted. I learned that pushing yourself in areas you care about is a sign of giftedness. I suspect we both did a lot more pushing of ourselves than our parents ever did of us. But that is not true of a lot of kids, as your example shows. These are the same kind of parents who go ballistic when their kid doesn’t get into Harvard.

I had it good in high school - I sucked so bad at Spanish that I had no shot at being valedictorian. It took a lot of the pressure off.

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[stereotype]

So, in other words, Koreans?

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No practical benefit to me, that I can see. I got a college degree, which has enabled me to (theoretically) qualify and keep a professional job, but that’s not just the domain of “gifted” kids.

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Are there any math related jobs other than teaching?

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I was considered gifted probably by any standard - always with the advanced classes, constant straight A’s, 99th percentile on pretty much all standardized tests, spelling bee rep multiple times, piano since age 2, perfect pitch, was both reading and composing at adult level around age 10, got free piano, singing and later musical theatre lessons (couldn’t afford them otherwise) because a sweet patroness saw I excelled more than her paying students, took G&T summer classes (financial aid), got constant callouts of ‘the brain’ and ‘most artistic,’ was always the first in class to finish tests, which then went on to get As, got merit scholarships, etc, etc. AND I loved it (still do) - loved learning, studying, working, excelling, being creative. And to be honest, I was also a good kid. We were still poor minorities, so I never really had a superiority complex, and didn’t really have social problems in school (I was kind of the nerd who was accepted by everyone). Did great all through college too (though I did stumble a bit in higher math). Graduated a well-known university with a fine art degree.

Now where am I? Still poor (though I was doing well until I quit my last 9 to 5 to go into business for myself at the beginning of the economy tailspin), and also (not directly related, though the poorness doesn’t help) so depressed from day to day that I’m constantly considering suicide. And you know what they say, if you don’t have your [mental] health…

I will say that being well-off and/or connected, and aptitude in selling oneself, gives one much more of an advantage than giftedness or work ethic does, these days.

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Officially gifted, reading by age 3 and put up a few grades for reading classes in elementary school blah blah blah.

I currently have a decent office job, wonderful family and so forth. I haven’t remotely realized my potential but that’s entirely due to other issues (mostly depression and similar). I’m doing okay, all in all.

I occasionally have moments of extreme cleverness but have not yet figured out how to make them pay.

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Please don’t give up Viridiana. I was just relating in this post how I pulled myself back from the brink of serious depression. It is totally possible to recover from even the darkest darkness. The best treatment for depression is CBT. If you can’t afford therapy, here’s a book that really helped me. Good luck.

More with the depression, huh? I’m beginning to wonder if intellectuals are more prone to depression and anxiety than the general population. I know I often diagnose my problem as ‘‘thinking too much.’’ Or at least, thinking too much about the wrong thing. The only time my grades ever suffered were due to depression. I just stopped caring. It’s pretty hard to ace your classes when you honestly don’t give a shit about them or anything else.

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This was, to some extent, my experience as well. It forms a vicious cycle with the common problem of “didn’t have to study in high school to excel, then went to college”–you get depressed because you don’t know how to study and you’re failing calculus quizzes, so you study less because depression saps your motivation, so more of your grades fall, etc etc.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more imaginative people in particular are more prone to depression, rather than more intellectual but focused people.

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In my case depression runs in the family; both sisters are on antidepressants (I’m not) and my grandfather suffered terribly from it.

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I was always in the gifted programs. I have no idea when I learned to read, what milestones I accomplished when, or what my IQ is. I tend not to care much about that. And yes, I am now a rocket scientist at NASA. Just finished the doctoral dissertation.

Not always true. I am living proof that you can get by on raw intelligence with no motivation and a lousy work ethic.

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Cool idea for a thread, Olives. We have a young son, just turned 2, and already I’m seeing parents of his nursery friends talking about their kids doing this that and the other. At nursery ffs. If our lad turns out academically-inclined it seems natural to want to maximise his learning opportunities at school. But I do wonder what gifted programs really accomplish, long term.

We didn’t have such programs in the UK for my schooling - I just started out academically strong and pretty much stayed there. Currently an academic, a reader at a UK university. I was never that bright that I didn’t need to work, though, so I developed a work ethic along the way. A couple of times when I hit a wibbly patch (classic first year of uni was one) I managed to work my way back into things.

It does seem that people who are successful in their professions have the drive / competitiveness / ambition aspects of their work ethic in the ascendancy - how gifted programs in school influence this I have no idea. You meet quite a few hard-working folk who are essentially passive in their approach. They enjoy the rewards and recognition that you usually get from putting a shift in, often to the extent of working exceptionally hard, but they really aren’t bothered about becoming CEO, partner, Billy Big Bollocks professor etc. Those that are bothered tend to stand out a mile, for better or worse. I see it in the grad students that pass through my group and my School at large. By that stage it’s usually very clear who has the potential and ambition to go into either industry or academia and become a leader.

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And you just had to come in and screw up my poll, didn’t you?!!! :wink: (I have a rocket scientist friend, and she is awesome. Though we couldn’t be more different, engineers hold a special place in my heart.)

Nice username, btw. And congrats on ending the torment of grad school!

I can see this. I’ve always worked hard, but I think it’s sort of insulting to other people in less fortunate circumstances to imply that I’m where I am today because I worked harder than them. I know people who work ten times harder than me, and never got half as far. But I also know people who have done far less with more resources.

To use a metaphor based in my real life, I married a guy with a wealthy family, which means we are occasionally showered with random large sums of money. There is nothing fair about this – I am well aware that there are people who do not have random people giving them money from time to time. However, when we get that money, we don’t blow it all on comic books and bubble gum, we invest it. The first thing we did was pay off our credit card debt, then we started a Roth IRA. Even though we will likely get more in the future, we plan our lives as if it is the last gift we shall ever receive.

He has cousins who receive far more entitlement gifts than we could ever dream of – cousins who have had entire houses purchased for them and fully furnished. Cousins who have basically nothing saved toward a future, who walked away from the homes because they weren’t good enough, who have no real mission in life other than to get as much hedonistic pleasure as they can day-to-day. Though those cousins of ours may never have to suffer the hardship of true poverty due to constant suckling off the family teat, we consider ourselves far and away more successful and in control of our lives than they are.

When it comes to intellectual fortune, I am similar. I have used it to invest in long-term security and satisfaction. I do not take it for granted that it will always serve me. There are other people that do. Even though they might have greater ‘‘gifts,’’ I consider myself more successful than they are, if only because I have learned to make my skills work for me rather than be a slave to the skills. So even though I am a social worker, and likely never to make much money, I consider myself very successful. I was one of the few people on this planet who had the luxury of becoming practically anything I wanted to be, and I chose this. I am doing what I really want to do, living the life I really want to live, and I don’t know how else you could define success.

Imagination could be key. At some point I think I went from, ‘‘What would happen if this chair came to life?’’ to ‘‘What would happen if everyone I loved most in the world was killed in a horrible accident?’’ or ‘‘How would I defend myself if I were framed for murder?’’ I actually get so engrossed in these ‘‘daymares’’ that I will start tearing up because it feels so real. Vivid imagination + anxiety disorder = not the most winning combination.

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I did research on this a long time ago, but the consensus is you can’t really hold down smart kids. Smart kids in a bad school perform just as well as smart kids in a good school. The top 10% of public school kids perform just as well as the top 10% of private school kids.

Another theory is that putting the top kids in gifted courses are a waste of resources. The gifted/honors programs have the best teachers, best equipment, and most funding. If the smart kids would succeed no matter what we do, why not put the 2nd or even 3rd tier kids in there?

The research says that low performing students do better in high expectation environments (although they don’t beat their high performing peers.) Therefore, low performing students reach maximum achievement in the toughest programs (even though it is lower than what the top students will achieve.)

On the other hand, if I were a parent, why should I pay to have YOUR dumb kid in honors classes? And there’s the rub: when parents complain about their student’s performance, it’s a purely selfish exercise in “me too.” They want THEIR kid to get a good job, they want THEIR kid to get into good colleges, and they don’t want their kid to have to compete in the job market against far more qualified applicants.

So, in general, any sort of G&T or Honors class is just another form of the long-standing tradition of gatekeeping where some students (sometimes based on race, income, etc.) get more chances than other students, and students who might do better (if not the best) in those classes are kept out.

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What is the definition of perform? Good SAT scores? Good colleges? Good jobs? Not that I doubt this result, since at the top level for the most part I don’t think private schools do any better public schools. I’d think it would be harder to tell a paying customer that their kid is not gifted, in fact.

But plenty of gifted kids don’t succeed. The dropout rate for GATE identified students is reasonably high. Plenty of people responding to this thread seem not to have succeeded by their own definition - perhaps they would have been happier with a program like the one I was in, where I couldn’t slack off and where I was always challenged.

We won’t find any personal testimonials about this around here, but I wonder how this would apply to sports. I’m not gifted in basketball (cough cough) but I bet putting me in with the basketball team, and having the good players coach me would have lifted my abilities. They might have lost even more games than they did, but I’d have done better. Isn’t it possible to differentiate and challenge every student? We can set the bars a bit higher, but not at the 80 IQ point level.

There is some of parents pushing kids, but in most schools there is also parent advocacy. Parents more familiar and comfortable with the system are going to advocate better for their kids than parents not so comfortable. It is also an attitude problem. Plenty of teachers have told me that for the most part the parents showing up for back to school night and teacher interviews are the ones who don’t really have to.

In our school either a parent or a teacher can nominate a kid for GATE, and they get automatically nominated based on test scores. They still get evaluated, though. I don’t know how to get parents with no tradition or respect for education to support their kids. That is going to naturally select kids from better backgrounds, where the parents cared about learning and pass that love on to their kids. That’s a problem I don’t know how to solve, but not giving gifted kids the best the school has to offer doesn’t do a thing for anyone else.

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I don’t buy this at all. For example, what is meant here by"performing"? Grade point average is not meaningful as that is often on a relative basis. Nor is performance on standardized tests like the SAT, which is not a measure of coursework learned, simply “how well you can take a test”.

As a concrete example, my wife is a math professor and often some of the brightest students in her class are coming from “bad inner-city schools”. So yes, there is no lack of bright minds in bad schools. And of course, they were the top students from their “bad schools” also, and think of themselves as “good students”. Unfortunately they are usually NOT prepared for doing college level work, because the TRACK they were on was so far below their level, and never even knew it!

Some were proud that they had been good enough “to take calculus in 11th grade”. But as it turns out, the calculus class offered at their high school didn’t cover enough material to take even the AB (versus the more advanced BC) Calculus AP exam. Or they got As in math classes while scoring 75% on the NY State Regents, which is also terrible, but were so far and away the highest scores in their class (where most outright failed the Regents exams) that they got As and thought a 75 must be a pretty good score.

Furthermore, they spent years coasting on basic smarts to do the homework assigned without effort, never knowing that work was not representative of what would be expected of them at a higher level. That’s a double whammy: not only have they gotten the “coaster mentality”, they’ve coasted to a level far below where they should or could be!

Why does this matter? Because my wife is a college math professor. These kids who are so bright, but were not placed properly into a track that would have fed and watered their interest and ability, will likely never catch up. They have to be willing to admit they’re two or three years behind where they thought they were and invest the time to bone up, as well as learn the studying skills necessary to do so along the way. Most people in this position simply give up on taking any more “advanced” college level math courses.

And why does THAT matter? Because not being able to pass Calc I & II, Linear Algebra, Discrete Mathematics I, and other “advanced” courses which are really only sophomore level college material, bars them from becoming doctors, engineers and scientists. Which this country desperately needs more of, and is stuck importing a lot of them from Asia and Europe.

I’ll agree with this much: “equipment”, “funding” and “small class sizes” mean far, far less than simply having a teaching or mentoring structure in place that recognizes and encourages people who are good at something and interested in it to go FASTER and FARTHER than their peers who are not. Ten year old textbooks and an energetic, communicative teacher who’s truly mastered the subject far outweighs having 10 kids assigned to a teacher who barely knows the syllabus but has all the latest software and computer equipment.

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I wonder how things could have been done differently in my case.

I don’t know that I am ‘gifted’. I have my suspicions, though. I did the usual read-before-kindergarten thing. I was moved from grade 1 to grade 2 in mid year, thus creating a situation where I was always smaller, weaker, and less physically-developed than the other kids in the class. This reinforced my sense of inferiority.

Through high school, I never often worked very hard. There was that one year where I got straight A’s, but that was unusual, and I always tried to avoid standing out, even for ‘good’ reasons. Standing out meant you got hurt. There were three tracks of courses: ‘vocational’, for people going on to the trades; ‘general’, for the average student, and ‘advanced’, for the student going on to university. There was also the optional fifth year of high school, grade 13, which was intended for university-goers.

I took the advanced courses and grade 13, because I was going to go to university and become an architect and design solar houses! That lasted all of three terms, and then I flamed out. I eventually switched to college and took electronics engineering technology. At least I graduated from that.

But that didn’t matter that much. Social skills are far more important that academic skills as a predictor of success and happiness, and during childhood and high school I had few social skills. I was ugly, unpopular, an outcast, without even an outcast community around me. I had a few friends and that was it. I couldn’t schmooze or make a deal to save my life–still can’t–so I never had a job during high school. Without money, I never had a car either. My family wasn’t rich enough to send me on the school trips to places like Cuba or England. Thus, I never got to go to the popular places with the popular kids.

So, understandably, I never had a girlfriend in high school. I never even had a kiss until after I d was in electronics. And I was blindly oblivious to the social arrangements forming around me. Like having no idea that my best friend at university was involved with another friend. (They married, had kids, are successful, etc.)

Socially, I started out late, and only now at age 46 have caught up to where most people are in their early twenties. I’ve never had a long-term relationship of equals lasting more than four months with a woman, while most of my friends are married. Many are parents. Some are grandparents.

Much later, I found out about things like Asperger’s Syndrome and face blindness. Again, I don’t know, by diagnosis, that I have these. But I have my suspicions.

If they’d diagnosed me/put me in a better system/provided specific social training when I was young, maybe I could have made something of myself. But right now, I have to say that I am a failure, socially and professionally. I’m using maybe 10% of my potential. I look at the things I can do, and the only thing that could possibly be ‘gifted’ is my ability to visualize things in 3D. That’s it. I have to learn languages and math and everything else by long, painful slogging.

I have often bitterly wished to be ‘normal’. Maybe then I could be happy. If this is giftedness, it’s a pile of shit.

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I realize you’re joking here, but I’ve been following this thread for several days and my feeling has been that you really do just want to hear from people who aren’t very successful and who will complain about how the gifted programs at their schools screwed them up for life. Well, I consider myself successful, despite (?) being a “gifted child”, and I loved the gifted program in my school district. The few friends I had as a kid were all in the gifted program too. My once-a-week gifted classes also gave me the only break I had from otherwise daily bullying. I don’t believe I was bullied simply for being gifted, much of it was explicitly about my appearance, but somehow it didn’t happen when I was only around other gifted kids. The gifted program was really the only consistent bright spot in an otherwise pretty miserable elementary and middle school experience. As far as academic work goes I can barely remember anything I did in my regular classes prior to the 8th grade, but I could describe the content of many of the gifted classes I had going back to early elementary school.

As an adult I’m definitely not some sort of world-famous intellectual, but I never expected that I would be. Maybe I was lucky in that when I was a kid my mother was pursuing a graduate degree in Educational Psychology, and thus had a better understanding of what it actually meant for a kid to be gifted than a lot of other parents did. Although my mother sure wasn’t perfect and did essentially nothing to help me develop my strengths or improve my weaknesses (unlike the way she treated my siblings, but that’s another story), at least she didn’t lead me to believe that I’d be a total failure unless I managed to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem or win a Nobel Prize.

I completed my undergraduate and graduate degrees without ever needing a student loan, thanks largely to merit scholarships. I am still (barely) under 30 and a professional in a field that requires the graduate degree that I have. I’m pulling in a middle class salary, slightly above the national household median. I have health insurance.* I recently had a nice vacation in Europe that I planned myself. I have good friends, including one who was in the gifted program with me back in elementary school and turned out to truly be my “BFF”, and several hobbies as a creative outlet. I’m learning new things all the time. None of this is especially astonishing, but we can’t all be an Aristotle or a Goethe. As far as IQ or SAT scores I’m above the 99th percentile, but that means there are still millions of people alive today who are as smart as or smarter than I am. Some of these people have accomplished things that are truly amazing, but others are total losers or successful in some ways but worse off than I am in others. I can imagine being happier or better off, but all things considered I think I’ve done pretty well for myself.

*Since my teens I’ve suffered from chronic and potentially life-threatening medical problems. If I had grown up in a country with nationalized health care I might have pursued a more creative and less secure line of work as an adult, but for me to do this in the US would have bordered on suicidal.

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I wouldn’t say that a gifted program screwed me up for life, but I do believe it was essentially useless and meaningless for me to be labeled as “gifted,” and instead of constantly being told how smart I was I should have had habits of hard work whipped into me.

I was labeled as “gifted” when I started elementary school. While I wasn’t up to par with some of the people who have posted in this thread–reading at a college level in kindergarten!–I’ve been told I was tested to read at a 3rd grade level in kindergarten. I believe it was in first grade that our “gifted” program started–they called it “Challenge” in my school district–and the school wanted to place me in it. My parents actually wouldn’t allow it at first; my dad in particular objected that they took us out of regular class to spend time in the Challenge program. Looking back, I think he was right. I suppose I was a smart kid, but I never learned some of the basic skills. For example, at some point in elementary school we used to have timed arithmetic tests, and the winner would get a ticket for a free ice cream in the cafeteria. I never came close to winning, because I never memorized the tables like we were supposed to. I thought through each problem every time. Whereas the winner was seeing “8x7” and immediately writing down 56 and moving on, I was sitting there thinking “OK, let’s see… 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48… 56! got it!”

Also, partly perhaps because of my high intelligence, I didn’t have to work hard early on in school, and never developed good study habits. Got away with a lot of procrastination, and my parents were pretty hands-off; it’s not like they ever sat me down at the kitchen table and said “you’re not getting up until your homework is done.” So overall, I wound up having a pretty mediocre academic career. I certainly don’t feel successful or well-accomplished; though some would say I’m in a very good place right now–medical school–I’m not doing very well at it, and I feel depressed most of the time. I grew used to being able to hit one out of the park every now and then, and not having to make a sustained effort, so, for example, when I was applying to medical school I scored in the 99th percentile on the MCAT, but 3 years later failed Step 1 of the USMLE on my first try basically because I just didn’t study.

I don’t think kids should be praised for being smart; instead they should be praised for working hard.

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Sorry, no. My only motivation was to point out that ridiculous academic success as a child doesn’t generally correlate with ridiculous professional success as an adult. Just because I was the smartest person in my school when I was 10 doesn’t mean I’m the smartest person in my school now. People are fond of reporting all their awesome test scores or their childrens’ awesome test scores as if it means something important to their long-term success. I don’t think it does. I think that there is virtually no difference, as predictive factors of adult intelligence and success, between your average gifted child and your average A-B student. I don’t have a cite, so I started a poll.

I used myself and my husband as an example. He was not a gifted child, I was. I probably could have smeared the floor with him, intellectually, when we were seven. If we’d competed in high school, the gap between us would have been smaller, but I might have still come out ahead. As undergraduates we attended some of the same classes, and he did better in some and I did better in others. We are both, today, as graduate students, about equally intelligent and successful.

My observation about my own relative misery was really just the sharing of a personal experience. In fact, the more information that comes into this thread, the more it seems I might have been better off in a gifted and talented program because I would have learned earlier in life that I wasn’t the smartest person on the planet, and would therefore have been over myself by the time college came around. As it so happened, college coincided with a major personal crisis for me, and finding out that not only was my life falling apart in a thousand other ways, but I could also no longer outshine everyone academically, well, it was personally devastating. My academic achievement was, quite literally, all I had left at that point, and it was enough to push an already extremely demoralized 18-year-old girl into full-blown life-threatening mental illness.

My life was decidedly not ruined by being gifted. By my own admission I consider myself highly successful and happy. And I am genuinely glad that you are happy as well. I would never delight in the suffering of others just because it supported some silly thesis.

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That’s one of the hardest things for parents of gifted kids who were not gifted themselves to get through their heads. Gifted does not mean “likely to win a Nobel Prize or Pulitzer.” Gifted means, as I said upthread, “thinks differently.” Sometimes this can be channelled to success, sometimes it isn’t. But gifted kids who don’t have access to gifted programs are - according to studies I have seen - more likely to drop out of school - they get bored. They are also more likely to have social problems if there aren’t other gifted kids in their peer group - or as a friend of mine reported when his son was pulled from regular classroom into a gifted one - “Dad, they GET my jokes.”

Also, while most kids defined as gifted in school are smart (since schools don’t necessarily have programs for gifted artists who don’t have intellectual gifts), not all smart kids are gifted. The “smartest” kids in my high school class weren’t gifted - they thought in ordinary patterns at a higher level. Me, I was gifted, I thought in intuitive leaps and part of what gifted education taught me was to slow down and apply rigor to my thought process - create something other people could follow that wasn’t - If A, then B so see - J! Which is one of the things that many gifted kids do - and J seems perfectly obvious. But other people - even other smart people, have to go through C,D,E,F,G,H, and I before they see J. And gifted kids often can’t explain how they got to J - and that is what gifted education can help with. Because when people can’t do that, they can’t sell their ideas, and most jobs involve being able to explain things.

Also, gifted kids sometimes move along at a faster pace in some areas, but will be slow in others. A lot of gifted kids can’t spell well. It isn’t important to them.