I took Cranky’s comment to be a sort of “Who cares anymore?” thing. Yeah, as a kid I was considered to be gifted, whatever that means. I was put in a special program, sent out to competitions, etc., etc., the whole nine yards. And it wasn’t just one area - I was pretty much good at everything in elementary school. For awhile it went to my head, and I was probably the most annoying, pretentious child on earth. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t half as clever as I thought I was - oddly enough the more I learned the stupider I felt. (Grad school definitely helped take me down a peg or ten.)
I kinda disagree with overlyverbose (again, heh). I WAS smarter than most kids my age. I was also quite arrogant about it, but that didn’t make it any less true. (Maybe I wasn’t socially smarter, but that’s not what’s being discussed here.) But in the long run it hasn’t meant much. The fact that I was in Honor Chorus and advanced math class has had no bearing on my life since.
I think this is why roleplaying games lump different kinds of smarts under different game statistics. For example, in Dungeons & Dragons your Intelligence stat describes how “book smart” you are and your ability to learn, while your Wisdom stat covers things like common sense (which would include things like knowing better than to brag about how Intelligent you are) as well as the desire to learn.
[brief hijack]This is probably going to sound stupid, but I really appreciate how well you express your opinion and disagreement. It’s nice to be able to actually respectfully disagree with someone and not have it turn into a big flame fest. [/brief hijack]
Thanks! For what it’s worth, I do see where you’re coming from - my answers are based purely on my own experience so should be taken with a grain of salt. Like everything else around here, heh.
Here’s how I see it. If you aren’t a neurosurgeon or building robots for NASA or developing sophisticated trading models for Goldman Sachs or something, you probably aren’t as smart as you think you are. You might be bright. You might even have been brighter than 90% of your high school class. But if you aren’t doing something as an adult that actually requires extraordinary levels of intellectual achievement, then what does it matter?
It’s kind of like the jocks who think their the king of the school, but once they get to college it’s a whole new level of athletics which most of them probably won’t even qualify for. And even if you are actually smarter anyone, how is that something to be proud of? You didn’t DO anything, you were just born smart. It’s like one of those guys who thinks he’s awesome because he’s tall.
Being smart is nice, but if you don’t learn how to get along with the rest of the world, you’re either going to turn into an pompous intellectual prick or some quant nerd locked in a room crunching numbers.
This whole concept of “smarter than” is kinda nebulous to me; certainly never got any practical benefit from it. Actually, since forever, I was always regarded as more freakish than anything else. Led to some amusing incidents, but since I really don’t have anything to show for it, I don’t feel “better” than the rest of the animals. And I’ve learned that there are some gawdawful smart people out there.
In first grade, Ms. Brooks was very gently introducing the class to the notion of Where Did I Come From? She was saying something about tadpoles and asked if anyone knew anything about the subject. I raised my hand.
See, I had gotten ahold of some literature- Our Bodies, Ourselves was one of the books I remember- so I went into all this detail… She never looked at me the same after that. :dubious:
I was tested “gifted” and all that fun stuff, so I got the short-bus-for-smart-kids treatment from 10 or so.
I noticed most people can learn as much and as quickly as they want about the things that interest them… and the things that interested me were science, math, literature, et al. and not sports or television. I didn’t view it as being smarter so much as smart in a way that was applied differently from most other kids my age… and a way that responded well to academic testing.
Some kids effortlessly memorized the words to all their favorite songs, decades of statistics from football or baseball, how metal and wood respond to pressure/heat/cutting, intricate social rituals, etc. and I remembered math/science.
In the first few years I was in the Navy I had an opportunity to meet a lot of other kids who were smart in a similar way. I know for a fact I am not always the smartest person in the room when making a valid comparison. Or the second or third, even.
I was classified as a retard by my second-grade teacher, for being left-handed. To her way of thinking, left-handedness just wasn’t proper, and anyone who could not learn to write properly (right-handed) was “develpomentally challenged.”
Thank God the school secretary (call her Betty) also went to our church, and when Mrs. Oh-So-Proper started the process to have me moved over to the classes that take the short-bus, Betty short-stopped the whole shebang and went pretty far in getting Mrs. Oh-So-Proper some much-needed remedial counselling.
I’ve always been slightly smarter than average, in a general, non-specific kinda way. If anything, I’ve had slightly better aptitude at reading, writing, and math than the average.
Unfortunately, I’ve always been generally apathetic towards school, so my “only slightly-higher-than-average” intelligence never amounted to a hill o’ beans. All-in-all, when you take me as “the whole person,” I’m probably a littlle below average, in spite of a slight aptitudes for some subjects.
There’s lots of average and slightly-below-average people who’ve gone further and higher than I due to their persistence and drive.
I should explain. “Kudos” not for all your family being above average, but for slipping in an obscure (or maybe not) reference that I got! (I don’t get most of the obscure references on the board. )
Now, at 35 and especially after hanging out on the Dope for awhile, I mostly feel like an idiot but a few things stand out to me as a kid.
When I was in first grade, one other student and I wrote a play for a puppet show they showed the whole 1-3rd grades. I don’t remember how that happened but everyone seemed to be impressed.
In third grade, my R2-D2 moved from one side of the wall to the complete other side, fully a wall and a ceiling faster than all but one other girl when we out-read and reported the whole class book report project. Also in third grade I was pulled out of class for advanced math.
My fourth grade teacher told my mother that he was constantly trying to catch me reading in class by asking me questions about what he was teaching. Problem was I had already read the textbooks and according to him, always had the answer.
In fifth grade I got to spend English/Grammar time on the computer because I had idly started my Grammar workbook one weekend out of boredom and finished it by the next day- turned it all in in the first week of the year.
Then my parents pulled me out of public school to private Christian school where I mostly learned that evolution was evil :rolleyes: . When I re-entered public school as a freshman, I was behind in math and science and never got back my knack for it (not that I tried as hard as I probably could have).
Smart people go to college and usually graduate. Smart people play chess and win. Smart people know algebra. Smart people invent things.
Me? I graduated high school, suck at chess, can do multiplication in my head, and even if I did invent something I can’t patent it due to conflict of interest. I’m not smart, I just have an above average IQ, and I don’t even know exactly what it is. The world’s smartest human is not the one with the world’s highest IQ.
The OP didn’t mention how smart we think we are now, nor does it ask our opinion of ourselves after having confronted the realization, or whether we think it made us or makes us better people. It asked about the first time, and I thought putting the “smart” in quotes carried the message about relativity and stereotyping pretty clearly. So I don’t see the need to take this thread in that negative direction (yeah, I know I’m late).
For most people, it doesn’t seem to be so much smartness in the end as fast/early development, and only in the relative sense perceived by our childish eyes, but I thought that was already implied. Without saying anything about how I feel now, I was relatively “smart,” looking back on how things played out, and not even arrogant about it, as I’m reading here from others, more just careful because I wasn’t sure whether anyone else thought so and would ostracize me for “thinking I was better than everyone”. Anyway, we were still poor; I imagine it’s easier to be humble when your friends all have more and better “stuff” and afterschool activities than you do and you’re attending expensive music lessons for free because the teacher has a good heart, sees you as bright and hungry to learn, and uses you as a positive example.
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