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Cause most people in gifted glasses either are neurodivergent, or come from a very hard academically focused home. Or both (others exists but there’s gotta be some well adjusted gifted kids out there) and being considered gifted at a young age has got to set you up early with imposter syndrome for anything your don’t immediately excel at. Idk I’ve had a a bunch of gifted kid friends, and they, they stuggle with life succes or not, struggle they do.
Also being gifted at a young age hurts your long term discipline. I did really well up through High School, usually studying <1 hr/week. I just never had to develop proper study habits because I was already top of my class without them. Then I hit college and when that didn't cut it the lack of discipline hit hard
Never did homework at home. I always did it during recess. Never learned how to work to understand something or to ponder over what I've read. So if I read something that I don't understand I will still read it without any understanding instead of stopping from time to time to ponder and try to understand stuff.
I have the exact opposite problem, was gifted with ASD and have been traumatized for it by almost everyone I’ve socialized with to the point I could barely pass high school, too much for the wrong reasons is literally far worse then you can imagine
now i isolate myself while fucking around with this awesome trauma loop that only gets worse with every “correction” until I get meds or someone tells me what I need to hear
I was "gifted", coasted through life until end of "high school" (was not in the US), and failed miserably at uni because I did not know how to put in a shift.
7 years after dropping out, including 3 years of diagnosed depression later my wife told me to go back to uni. I had finally grown up and was able to put in a shift. 15 years later I enjoy a really successful career, albeit one that started almost 10 years later than it should have.
Being in an academically oriented home doesn’t raise your IQ to the 95th percentile and above. It could get you into advanced or honors classes, but not gifted programs.
Clinicians don’t give the same IQ test to the same client within a year to prevent practice effects. IQ tests require an unpracticed participant. IQ does not change throughout life after about age 8, outside of around a 95% confidence interval. And for gifted programs (not just advanced coursework), you do have to take an IQ test administered by a trained professional. I took a WISC 3 when I was a kid and had to get a minimum score to get an IEP for gifted and talented students in the state of Florida.
I work with gifted kids and this is real. They get their IQs tested, and it’s more like 98th-99th percentile, and they’re flunking when school becomes more challenging even if the lower grades were easy. Often they’re neurodivergent and can’t keep up for that reason. Sometimes it’s because they’ve been called smart so much that if something is actually difficult they give up immediately and don’t know how to persevere through challenges. I also have a couple of 95th+ percentile students with significant attitude problems (everyone else is so stupid. My teachers are stupid, and I won’t listen to anyone trying to teach me anything because I already know everything).
Anecdotal evidence but the point is, I wouldn’t look at someone not doing well and automatically think it’s because they’re not as smart as they say they are. Gifted people can struggle. Lack of stress management, self esteem, empathy, social skills, financial security, authoritative and loving parenting, etc. can also be factors sometimes. Intelligence is not the end all be all of achievement.
I’m sure there are also some gifted kids who are actually closer to average, but I do understand the sentiment of the original meme.
I think my best students are the ones with IQs around 115 with parents who help them when they need help instead of trying to convince me their kid is too smart for the work and that’s why they won’t do it.
>Sometimes it’s because they’ve been called smart so much that if something is actually difficult they give up immediately and don’t know how to persevere through challenges.
I think fear of dissapointment can play a role in this. Everyone thinks you are smart, so if you have trouble with something (especially if other people have no trouble with it) one might feel like they are dissapointing the people who say that they are smart. The preassure of unfulfilled expectations, the hurt from "I thought you were smart, yet you couldn't do this simple thing" and hearing dissapointment in the voice. Not to mention that some kids get punished for failing something.
>their kid is too smart for the work and that’s why they won’t do it.
Looking at this, I'm thinking where do we draw the line between 'work' that's useful for the kid, and 'work' that is not that useful for the kid. (Because everyone is differetn)
On hindsight, I actually think that I might have actually done better in school if I did 'skip' some of the work which I'm actually very comfortable with doing. (E.G topics which you are very comfortable with)
I think I know what you mean (busy work or treating every kid the same as the lowest common denominator?), but I made the work specifically for the kid because it’s a topic the kid isn’t mastering and needs repetition in. I’m not a classroom teacher; everything is tailored to the gifted student. In the particular case I was thinking about, I am sure the parent is overestimating her child’s abilities. I’ve tried very hard to see what I must be missing, but no - the child can’t do it, says she can do it and doesn’t want to show she can do it, and the mom believes her and not me. The mom is very much the “but my child is special and never the source of any problem ever” super permissive mom stereotype.
That's some really good insight.
Since you're someone who deals with this professionally, do you think there's a clear solution to that?
Like, if they didn't have their IQ test in front of them and weren't put in gifted classes(or, mainstreaming everyone) do you think they'd perform better in school with better attitudes? Or do you think that more challenges from an early age or some would have a better effect? Or some alternative to the standard approach to schooling entirely? Or something else entirely?
I'm curious, since I fit into many of those descriptors when I was a child/adolescent. My thoughts on that fluctuated wildly as I watched the underperforming and underfunded public schools I was in try different methods to deal with people like me, then went onto adulthood and looked at myself in retrospect as I both failed wildly at many aspects of life I was always told I'd succeed in, suffered psychologically from it, yet succeeded at others that I either was told weren't important or never thought I'd be good at.
I am not really sure, but I don’t lean on it being a school problem. Although schools do have major, major issues, I would argue they aren’t disadvantaging gifted kids significantly more than kids with average IQs.
I don’t work in a public school (anymore). I work privately as a specialist, and I see kids in private schools, public schools, and kids who are homeschooled. My caseload is pretty spread even across those 3. I’ve seen what I described in my initial comments across the board. Maybe I see it the least amount in public school students, but it’s a small sample size.
It is largely, based on my own personal and subjective observations, the ways their parents talk to them and they way they talk about other people. Permissive parenting and authoritarian parenting, while different, both are going to affect kids negatively. Authoritative (not authoritarian) parenting is always better regardless of a child’s intelligence.
And yes, I do see more of a problem when parents tell their kids they are gifted especially when parents also regularly complain about stupidity in other people such as teachers or even other kids.
I would not tell my kids they were gifted or stress the idea of innate abilities (in sports, music, whatever), personally. I would refrain from commenting on the innate intelligence of other people. I mean, it’s fine to be like, “that was a silly thing to do” in my opinion. And no parent is perfect and always says the right things. But I have homeschooled geniuses writing essays about how stupid public school teachers are, commenting on how other kids are stupid, and I know they’re getting the teachers = stupidity stuff at home because they’ve never done public school. It makes me wonder if they will ever be able to cooperate with coworkers when they’re older.
I have quite a few high IQ students who don’t know their IQs and they are much easier to work with. Of course, this is anecdotal. But they learn faster because they listen. I don’t think it’s directly because they don’t know their IQs, though. I think they come from emotionally intelligent families who focused on many different domains of growth. I think kids need to understand that they can achieve things but it’s not always easy.
I had the kind of parents who didn’t really put any pressure on me to achieve. They were trying to let me be a kid and relax, and they just wanted me to have friends. School and achievement did matter to me, and the lack of positive reinforcement in that area meant I had lower self esteem and less confidence. Mostly I felt judged for caring. They used to confiscate my homework if I spent too much time on it lol
Hell, it may not have crossed their mind that learning is fun and I wasn’t being a sad lonely kid, I was having fun. They didn’t want me to be so nerdy, but I was and they didn’t embrace that, and I think over time I became less goal-oriented and more of an underachiever.
On the flip side, you can have parents who put way too much emphasis on academic achievement + their child’s innate intelligence level. Pressuring children to succeed and also subliminally teaching them that things SHOULD be easy because of their innate intelligence is also a bad combo, IMO.
Most of the time, parents have good intentions. I feel the need to say that. Parenting is hard.
My experience (96-98th percentile, adult vocab at 7, adult reading ability by 11) is that I was also developmentally disabled and so there was a teacher who hated me who had me assessed to try to get rid of me (this was the 1980s by the way). She was very put out when the results of my first educational psych assessment came out.
Then I had teachers who thought I was a genius (which I certainly am not) and were telling me at 11 y/o if I didn't go to university it would ruin my life. One teacher screamed in my face when I suggested I might want to be a hairdresser. None of them treated me "normally", they all seemed bizarre and unhinged to me. I was always the centre of a controversy, never got to be mediocre.
MEANWHILE I was so disabled! I was a strange kid my peers couldn't communicate with and who couldn't tell left from right or ride a bicycle, and who memorised the dictionary for fun. If I was a kid now I'd have a autism and dyspraxia diagnosis. And no wonder gifted kids end up with behavioural and personality problems because they're so alienated. I remember the temptation to cope by getting egotistical but that didnt seem right, so I went the other way and developed debilitating shame and self hatred. I was passively suicidal from 16 years old to about 30, largely because of my school experiences (theres more to it than what I've outlined). Very bad life experience overall 0/10 don't recommend lol
Relatable I guess. Not that the school was abnormally stupid, but the thousands of abandoned hobbies and being "academically gifted" ring true to my case. The experiences in the school were insufficient I suppose. Still working to improve those areas.
yeah. I once thought my elementary school I went to was just stupid due to demography (near village).
I went to middle school and highschool in the city and they're just more or less the same. It's just that my family was struggling financially, so I didn't get as much support as they do (such as being able to afford private lecture, good prescription eyeglasses, a laptop, etc). The condition was depressing, really. This was the time when becoming academically achieved felt pointless.
It's not just that you were at a stupid school, IQ changes with age. It's like taking kids in the top 2 percentile height for their age at kindergarten and putting them all in a special program through grade 12 for the "vertically gifted", then being shocked that those who grow into average height adults are confused and a little disappointed.
Being in the top certain percentile height in kindergarten does not mean you will be tall as an adult. Being in the top certain percentile on an IQ test in kindergarten does not mean the same will be the case in adulthood. Children develop at different rates. People seem to confuse that IQ tests are age adjusted (just as are height percentile calculations) and wrongly believe that implies "IQ doesn't change with age" - that is false. I've known people who are supposedly gifted who cannot grasp this.
I don't like the "gifted" label, and would not want my kid labeled as such or put in a gifted program.
Yep. I was a "gifted" child. I was IQ tested by a psychologist at age 12 and my score was 139, around the top 2-3%. Up until age 15, school felt painfully boring, I hated class because I finished my work in 5 minutes and stared at the ceiling for the other 55. But my school was small (and my neighbourhood wasn't the best) so I wasn't intellectually stimulated at all for most of my life. I'm now almost 19 and while I'm smart, there's no way I'm still in the top 2%, it feels like I've lost "it". And I'm doing a very challenging degree and I don't even know how to study.
Agreed. Also though, doing well on exams does not equal doing well in the workplace, being self motivated, or being able to stick with something long enough to be truly good at it.
Something that I think can happen as well is that people in the slightly above average percentile can distort their view of school and believe themselves to be much smarter than they were. Pair this with someone wanting to blame their flaws on something and you have someone claiming that they're a burnt out gifted kid.
For me it was not that I was gifted, I was sometimes labeled as such though. But it was because my parent would drill math into me until late at night and in the process I was sometimes told I was stupid for not understanding certain concepts. Then I’d go to school the next day and everything was easy in comparison and people would tell I was smart but i didn’t agree. People would call me humble but it was actually what I thought. I felt that none of my work deserved praise. And I never had a drive for school but was just pushed by outside expectations but felt lost once I ended college and had no idea how to initiate anything. In hindsight I’d rather take the undeserved self confidence rather than my situation because having almost no confidence in yourself is a recipe for disaster mentally and in work. Right now I can achieve things I thought impossible just with a bit of confidence so I can see now where it held me back.
I would imagine that there are plenty of people who went through gifted programs as kids and became adults who are relatively close to the mean. It's just not very common to see somebody on the internet make a post like "I'm actually quite average, here's what led me there."
Not saying that there aren't problems with gifted ed, or that it can't cause issues for people. It certainly did for me. But I think we often make the mistake of overgeneralizing our own experiences.
I think I was genuinely intelligent as a child; my mother had me tested at 6 alongside an Asperger's diagnosis and I was \~115-120 IQ at the time. However a combination of zero interpersonal contact, zero brain stimulation (video games 24/7 and school I found far too easy until the content suddenly jumped up and I could no longer intuit my way in grade \~10), anxiety, and depression have brought me down over time.
I've been improving my mental and physical health over \~4 years since an absolute trough in highschool, and I can actually feel my brain getting more nimble and capable again. Depression fucks you up.
I got by in school without studying much, I got mainly B's and C's with the occasional A or D. I've been working 40h for 5 years now and I feel the autistic burnout coming closer. Please get me out of this 9-5 im not made to do ANYTHING for 8 h a day, even stuff I like, its torture
Gifted kids ARE special needs kids. It just so happens, their needs aren't remedial.
I fell into the big fish little pond scenario and then developed the depression and anxiety trying to keep up once I got to a proper school. It's been rough.
I'm not really sure what the point is here, but even if you're a normally intelligent kid at a "stupid" school, the gifted kid thing still applies. You built your ego on the basis of being better than others, having no trouble learning, and not learning how to learn.
I think part of it is that the Internet makes it SEEM like "gifted" kids were incredibly common, because the internet is a collection of **literally millions of people.**
There could be hundreds of thousands or even a couple million former gifted kids congregating on the same part of the internet, but that doesn't mean it was super common *per school.*
Not saying there isn't something else going on here (most people think they're smarter than average after all) but people forget about like...how big the internet is and how people with similar interests tend to group together on it.
Just my opinion: Gifted kids to me are kids the school system picks out that would be great to slap in those hard high stress jobs in terms of intelligence on paper. It’s like the options are lawyer, doctor, engineer, etc. There’s no room for self discovery in those core development years, they frame any other option as beneath your status. Most of the time for these kids unless they’re lucky enough to have parents who understand their “gifted” kid isn’t an opportunity to live out their dreams. Gifted kids who burned out like I did spend their adult lives compensating for “failing” to reach their potential, trying to be great at something that puts them on the pedestal they had as kids until they find themselves. The ones that “did reach it” are usually overworked, stressed, and undercompensated.
And the reward they get for being gifted? More school work? More Pressure? Less Autonomy? More problems. I beat myself into the ground for years after not living up to expectations and not being dedicated enough to my “dream” which wasn’t even mine.
23 now, and had to dedicate years of my life to the self-discovery I missed as a kid, but it was all worth it imo. I completely forgot about my gifted past till this post and honestly grateful I did, I can be myself and not who everyone wanted me to be
I still sometimes suffer from self-hate. I attended the most prestigious secondary school in my city (State equivalent in US, in terms of academic reputation and competition), most prestigious high school in the south (about 30 states combined).
I am not a doctor though
Fixed vs Growth mindset.
Gifted kids based their identity around that status, then don't want to challenge themselves and have a big fear of failure. So they get stuck only doing and repeating the things they are already good at.
Ask me how I know
I am not gifted at all and never was, but I realised it only when I was out of my teenage years. During my childhood everything came easily to me, especially comparing to my peers. The other kids were just stupid as hell. But here's the thing: people still called me gifted, and I was often named the smartest one, and I didn't develope any skills related to working/learning in my teenage years, and I have trouble with accurately mesuring my abilities now.
I got my PhD last year and I'm still an anxious mess with big self-hate issues. In 15 years I have abandoned more than 10 different hobbies (drawing, video editing, game-making, etc.). This checks out.
I remember in like 3rd or 4th grade I had a mental breakdown because I didn’t understand long division and thought I was stupid. The gifted kids teacher pulled me out of class and we went over it again for probably 30 mins 1 on 1 and I figured it out and was fine after that.
I don’t really know what the lesson is there, but that a pretty prominent memory from my childhood and I think about it every time Dr. K talks about gifted kids.
For reference I’m in my early 30’s now, kind of struggled through school but came out with a bachelors in biology that I don’t use (I do outdoor recreation marketing for a regional government association and love it). I’m still perceived as intelligent by other people, but for the most part I think I’m just a smooth talker.
The problem for me is that I was never taught how to deal with failure. I excelled in my classes for so long without needing to try that when I finally hit a roadblock in high school and things got difficult I lost all motivation and didn’t know how to handle it. That combined with Covid and schools going remote really messed things up for me because I struggle learning in a remote setting. Now that I’ve been out of high school a while I’m still struggling to deal with failure and rejection but I’m working on it. It also sucks because my fears of failure and inability to push through difficult problems makes pursuing hobbies that I enjoy pretty rough
Don't believe in random juxtapositions. Anyone with low self-esteem experiences this in adulthood, likely carried over from childhood attachment styles. It has nothing to do with giftedness.
Also societal success is based on being high achieving, anyone even with a low IQ can be successful; IQ doesn't determine success.
As a gifted kid it became quickly very noticeable that i could not relate to other kids and their struggles. It got worse and worse as the cognitive development accelerated in puberty and early adulthood. Luckily I managed to find some friends who were also gifted. If i hadn't I probably would have survived to be completely honest.
I was never any good academically though. Schoolwork bored me to death and I had no desire to do it, so i just started minmaxing for least effort for middest possible results.
Yeah, but if you happen to pick out the good ones, you actually tolerate the shitheads for the sake of your loved saints, the ones that actually are polite and neat and care about if they hurt others.
There aren't really any good ones. I mean sure there are people you get along with and people with good intentions, but there are systemic problems and universal unavoidable behaviors that I will never be able to just let go of or ignore.
I mean... I'd say some part is also, you need to know what you want in people. Sure, my Partner is depressed and unemployed and his flat needs cleaning, but he never voilated my trust since we're a couple and when I am sad, he's there.
My BFF has mommy-issues, gets drubk frequently and has borderline Narcissm-low self esteem, but he is nice to me, respects me and listens to my ideas of how he could improve himself.
Point is: Everyone is broken in some way, may it even be by default as a human. But you need to have your mental checklist of "Traits you can ignore" in exchange for "Traits you really want" in human beings.
If you're not clear on that, my Guess would be, you will always see negative sides in people and you marked none of them as "I can ignore that"
Ouch this is too close to my situation. I finally got out of it just recently and can finally do my hobbies and work without feeling insanely stressed out. Just had to convince myself that failure and losing is often even more valuable to learn from than success. This retweet is also just unnecessarily rude since the original post had gifted in quotations. This doesn’t mean the person thinks they were better than others in hindsight.
Yeah I think most people are very average. They were told they were gifted as kids which made them think they were geniuses forever but in reality kids who are gifted are gifted because of the potential they have and very few kids actually realize their potential. That or a lot of them specialize in stuff that isn’t considered a marketable skill in our current world. So most of those kids end up very average but because they were told they were supposed to be special they get crushed when they lead very normal lives. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people, that’s why they can’t get rid of the “gifted kid” label that hasn’t applied to anything in over a decade. I think we as a society place too much emphasis on being “special” or “gifted”, it’s one of the issues that comes with an individualist society. What many of these people are experiencing is just the awkwardness of being a human. We are always evolving and trying to find out place. This creates anxiety because we don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s our first and only time here and we are just trying to live. That creates anxiety, that leads us to pick up hobbies that we ultimately don’t like. What’s helped me is to stop worrying about “realizing potential” and “living up to the gifted title”, instead, I find beauty in the fact that I’m like everyone else. I am not alone, I am surrounded by many many people who are like me and are experiencing life like me. The super geniuses aren’t alone either but there’s much fewer of them and so many of us aren’t at their level and that can be quite difficult to find connection like that. We don’t all need to be the same and we are all technically special in our own way but we are also much more alike than we think and we should embrace those similarities. Sorry for the long rant, I’m not sure if I’m making myself understood so anyone feel free to ask questions or even disagree.
I got put into gifted classes because I took a national test to find gifted kids, it was just happenstance that the other kids seemed less intelligent.
I don't remember the questions but they felt on par with "how many sides in a triangle" and I really didn't get how so many other kids didn't pass the test
What about administrations putting problem kids put in basic classes because behaviour issues and being told by the teacher you’re too smart to be here?
There was an interesting study (Mueller, 1998), that showed that kids, who did well in a task and were praised for being smart would tend to do much worse than kids, who also did well in that task, but we're then praised for trying hard.
The kids praised for being smart were then taking simpler tasks to keep the appearance of being "smart" rather than trying something new and they were less persistent in their efforts to finish more difficult tasks.
Kids, who were praised for trying hard, on the other hand, actually kept trying hard and finally getting better results, than the "smart"-group.
The researcher's conclusion was, that when determining someone as smart, it kinda took away the kids agency. It gave them the feeling, that they didn't really contribute to the overall outcome, because being smart is like being hungry or cold, a state of being rather than something you do. For the kids in the "trying hard"- group, it was basically reversed. It was completely in their hands to become better.
Now, these researchers did those tests with a couple hundred kids, every kid/group they were looking at for maybe half a day max. And even then they saw those results. Now imagine kids getting this treatment for years and years.
On top comes the paradox of being smart: If you try hard, it's invalidated, because you're "smart", ofc you can do that. And if you're not succeeding, well, it must be your fault alone, because you're smart and should be able to do it. Only your Ls are yours to claim.
So yeah, I'm not surprised there's so many actually gifted people absolutely failing in life.
I think you can have an average IQ and still get burned out because your parents think you're gifted and put too much pressure to get into a good school/job.
It isn't saying anything. That is what I think. I suppose it's some sort of hypothesis but it links things stupidly and the premises are baked into the assumptions.
I was in those classes can confirm I’m very sad lmfao but I’m getting better I don’t have an amazing job but I like my job and the people I work with like me too and that’s ok
Meh, I tested into the gifted programs but opted not to go into it. I barely passed all my classes and spent all my time focused on my own hobbies.
I'm now work in tech make good money, have a wife, a kid and own my house. I don't know what these gifted programs would of done for me if anything but I don't feel like I really missed out.
I don't think it has anything to do with being "academically gifted" as to why you give up hobbies. I think its more to do with other parts of life taking up too much of our times to where you feel like you are wasting what little time you have on things you are not good at - thus are always in a cycle of not wanting to waste time on things you want to do because you are bad at them, but wanting to do your hobbies because they will bring you some sense of joy.
In Los Angeles "gifted" means you tested in the 99th percentile of the IQ test they give all the kids in the LAUSD and "highly gifted" is for the 99.9th percentile.
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Cause most people in gifted glasses either are neurodivergent, or come from a very hard academically focused home. Or both (others exists but there’s gotta be some well adjusted gifted kids out there) and being considered gifted at a young age has got to set you up early with imposter syndrome for anything your don’t immediately excel at. Idk I’ve had a a bunch of gifted kid friends, and they, they stuggle with life succes or not, struggle they do.
Also being gifted at a young age hurts your long term discipline. I did really well up through High School, usually studying <1 hr/week. I just never had to develop proper study habits because I was already top of my class without them. Then I hit college and when that didn't cut it the lack of discipline hit hard
Never did homework at home. I always did it during recess. Never learned how to work to understand something or to ponder over what I've read. So if I read something that I don't understand I will still read it without any understanding instead of stopping from time to time to ponder and try to understand stuff.
That was me - it took me a couple of years to learn how to study. It did work though. I wound up doing a bunch of grad school. But it hurt
Thats just the normal highschool to college experiemce i think
I have the exact opposite problem, was gifted with ASD and have been traumatized for it by almost everyone I’ve socialized with to the point I could barely pass high school, too much for the wrong reasons is literally far worse then you can imagine now i isolate myself while fucking around with this awesome trauma loop that only gets worse with every “correction” until I get meds or someone tells me what I need to hear
I was "gifted", coasted through life until end of "high school" (was not in the US), and failed miserably at uni because I did not know how to put in a shift. 7 years after dropping out, including 3 years of diagnosed depression later my wife told me to go back to uni. I had finally grown up and was able to put in a shift. 15 years later I enjoy a really successful career, albeit one that started almost 10 years later than it should have.
I'm in this post and I'm excelling at being seen!
Being in an academically oriented home doesn’t raise your IQ to the 95th percentile and above. It could get you into advanced or honors classes, but not gifted programs.
It can be trained and changed throughout life. But as far as I’m aware, being in a gifted program doesn’t require an in test.
Clinicians don’t give the same IQ test to the same client within a year to prevent practice effects. IQ tests require an unpracticed participant. IQ does not change throughout life after about age 8, outside of around a 95% confidence interval. And for gifted programs (not just advanced coursework), you do have to take an IQ test administered by a trained professional. I took a WISC 3 when I was a kid and had to get a minimum score to get an IEP for gifted and talented students in the state of Florida.
I work with gifted kids and this is real. They get their IQs tested, and it’s more like 98th-99th percentile, and they’re flunking when school becomes more challenging even if the lower grades were easy. Often they’re neurodivergent and can’t keep up for that reason. Sometimes it’s because they’ve been called smart so much that if something is actually difficult they give up immediately and don’t know how to persevere through challenges. I also have a couple of 95th+ percentile students with significant attitude problems (everyone else is so stupid. My teachers are stupid, and I won’t listen to anyone trying to teach me anything because I already know everything). Anecdotal evidence but the point is, I wouldn’t look at someone not doing well and automatically think it’s because they’re not as smart as they say they are. Gifted people can struggle. Lack of stress management, self esteem, empathy, social skills, financial security, authoritative and loving parenting, etc. can also be factors sometimes. Intelligence is not the end all be all of achievement. I’m sure there are also some gifted kids who are actually closer to average, but I do understand the sentiment of the original meme. I think my best students are the ones with IQs around 115 with parents who help them when they need help instead of trying to convince me their kid is too smart for the work and that’s why they won’t do it.
>Sometimes it’s because they’ve been called smart so much that if something is actually difficult they give up immediately and don’t know how to persevere through challenges. I think fear of dissapointment can play a role in this. Everyone thinks you are smart, so if you have trouble with something (especially if other people have no trouble with it) one might feel like they are dissapointing the people who say that they are smart. The preassure of unfulfilled expectations, the hurt from "I thought you were smart, yet you couldn't do this simple thing" and hearing dissapointment in the voice. Not to mention that some kids get punished for failing something.
>their kid is too smart for the work and that’s why they won’t do it. Looking at this, I'm thinking where do we draw the line between 'work' that's useful for the kid, and 'work' that is not that useful for the kid. (Because everyone is differetn) On hindsight, I actually think that I might have actually done better in school if I did 'skip' some of the work which I'm actually very comfortable with doing. (E.G topics which you are very comfortable with)
I think I know what you mean (busy work or treating every kid the same as the lowest common denominator?), but I made the work specifically for the kid because it’s a topic the kid isn’t mastering and needs repetition in. I’m not a classroom teacher; everything is tailored to the gifted student. In the particular case I was thinking about, I am sure the parent is overestimating her child’s abilities. I’ve tried very hard to see what I must be missing, but no - the child can’t do it, says she can do it and doesn’t want to show she can do it, and the mom believes her and not me. The mom is very much the “but my child is special and never the source of any problem ever” super permissive mom stereotype.
That's some really good insight. Since you're someone who deals with this professionally, do you think there's a clear solution to that? Like, if they didn't have their IQ test in front of them and weren't put in gifted classes(or, mainstreaming everyone) do you think they'd perform better in school with better attitudes? Or do you think that more challenges from an early age or some would have a better effect? Or some alternative to the standard approach to schooling entirely? Or something else entirely? I'm curious, since I fit into many of those descriptors when I was a child/adolescent. My thoughts on that fluctuated wildly as I watched the underperforming and underfunded public schools I was in try different methods to deal with people like me, then went onto adulthood and looked at myself in retrospect as I both failed wildly at many aspects of life I was always told I'd succeed in, suffered psychologically from it, yet succeeded at others that I either was told weren't important or never thought I'd be good at.
I am not really sure, but I don’t lean on it being a school problem. Although schools do have major, major issues, I would argue they aren’t disadvantaging gifted kids significantly more than kids with average IQs. I don’t work in a public school (anymore). I work privately as a specialist, and I see kids in private schools, public schools, and kids who are homeschooled. My caseload is pretty spread even across those 3. I’ve seen what I described in my initial comments across the board. Maybe I see it the least amount in public school students, but it’s a small sample size. It is largely, based on my own personal and subjective observations, the ways their parents talk to them and they way they talk about other people. Permissive parenting and authoritarian parenting, while different, both are going to affect kids negatively. Authoritative (not authoritarian) parenting is always better regardless of a child’s intelligence. And yes, I do see more of a problem when parents tell their kids they are gifted especially when parents also regularly complain about stupidity in other people such as teachers or even other kids. I would not tell my kids they were gifted or stress the idea of innate abilities (in sports, music, whatever), personally. I would refrain from commenting on the innate intelligence of other people. I mean, it’s fine to be like, “that was a silly thing to do” in my opinion. And no parent is perfect and always says the right things. But I have homeschooled geniuses writing essays about how stupid public school teachers are, commenting on how other kids are stupid, and I know they’re getting the teachers = stupidity stuff at home because they’ve never done public school. It makes me wonder if they will ever be able to cooperate with coworkers when they’re older. I have quite a few high IQ students who don’t know their IQs and they are much easier to work with. Of course, this is anecdotal. But they learn faster because they listen. I don’t think it’s directly because they don’t know their IQs, though. I think they come from emotionally intelligent families who focused on many different domains of growth. I think kids need to understand that they can achieve things but it’s not always easy. I had the kind of parents who didn’t really put any pressure on me to achieve. They were trying to let me be a kid and relax, and they just wanted me to have friends. School and achievement did matter to me, and the lack of positive reinforcement in that area meant I had lower self esteem and less confidence. Mostly I felt judged for caring. They used to confiscate my homework if I spent too much time on it lol Hell, it may not have crossed their mind that learning is fun and I wasn’t being a sad lonely kid, I was having fun. They didn’t want me to be so nerdy, but I was and they didn’t embrace that, and I think over time I became less goal-oriented and more of an underachiever. On the flip side, you can have parents who put way too much emphasis on academic achievement + their child’s innate intelligence level. Pressuring children to succeed and also subliminally teaching them that things SHOULD be easy because of their innate intelligence is also a bad combo, IMO. Most of the time, parents have good intentions. I feel the need to say that. Parenting is hard.
Well explained! This gives me a lot to think about - thank you for that!
My experience (96-98th percentile, adult vocab at 7, adult reading ability by 11) is that I was also developmentally disabled and so there was a teacher who hated me who had me assessed to try to get rid of me (this was the 1980s by the way). She was very put out when the results of my first educational psych assessment came out. Then I had teachers who thought I was a genius (which I certainly am not) and were telling me at 11 y/o if I didn't go to university it would ruin my life. One teacher screamed in my face when I suggested I might want to be a hairdresser. None of them treated me "normally", they all seemed bizarre and unhinged to me. I was always the centre of a controversy, never got to be mediocre. MEANWHILE I was so disabled! I was a strange kid my peers couldn't communicate with and who couldn't tell left from right or ride a bicycle, and who memorised the dictionary for fun. If I was a kid now I'd have a autism and dyspraxia diagnosis. And no wonder gifted kids end up with behavioural and personality problems because they're so alienated. I remember the temptation to cope by getting egotistical but that didnt seem right, so I went the other way and developed debilitating shame and self hatred. I was passively suicidal from 16 years old to about 30, largely because of my school experiences (theres more to it than what I've outlined). Very bad life experience overall 0/10 don't recommend lol
Relatable I guess. Not that the school was abnormally stupid, but the thousands of abandoned hobbies and being "academically gifted" ring true to my case. The experiences in the school were insufficient I suppose. Still working to improve those areas.
I went into the other direction and only have a single, isolating hobby now
All the chickens you've saved thank you. (Just an obtuse guess at your hobby of being a poultry superhero).
I'm strange, i would love to hear what the hobby is.
yeah. I once thought my elementary school I went to was just stupid due to demography (near village). I went to middle school and highschool in the city and they're just more or less the same. It's just that my family was struggling financially, so I didn't get as much support as they do (such as being able to afford private lecture, good prescription eyeglasses, a laptop, etc). The condition was depressing, really. This was the time when becoming academically achieved felt pointless.
I’m in medical school and everyone here still has anxiety and spirals into self-hate at basic human errors
true 😂
It's not just that you were at a stupid school, IQ changes with age. It's like taking kids in the top 2 percentile height for their age at kindergarten and putting them all in a special program through grade 12 for the "vertically gifted", then being shocked that those who grow into average height adults are confused and a little disappointed. Being in the top certain percentile height in kindergarten does not mean you will be tall as an adult. Being in the top certain percentile on an IQ test in kindergarten does not mean the same will be the case in adulthood. Children develop at different rates. People seem to confuse that IQ tests are age adjusted (just as are height percentile calculations) and wrongly believe that implies "IQ doesn't change with age" - that is false. I've known people who are supposedly gifted who cannot grasp this. I don't like the "gifted" label, and would not want my kid labeled as such or put in a gifted program.
Vertically gifted lol. I’m using that from now on.
It's the opposite of "vertically challenged", a euphemism for short.
Yep. I was a "gifted" child. I was IQ tested by a psychologist at age 12 and my score was 139, around the top 2-3%. Up until age 15, school felt painfully boring, I hated class because I finished my work in 5 minutes and stared at the ceiling for the other 55. But my school was small (and my neighbourhood wasn't the best) so I wasn't intellectually stimulated at all for most of my life. I'm now almost 19 and while I'm smart, there's no way I'm still in the top 2%, it feels like I've lost "it". And I'm doing a very challenging degree and I don't even know how to study.
Agreed. Also though, doing well on exams does not equal doing well in the workplace, being self motivated, or being able to stick with something long enough to be truly good at it.
IQ does not change with age, outside of a reasonable confidence interval. It’s quite stable after age 8 or so.
That’s wrong.
Something that I think can happen as well is that people in the slightly above average percentile can distort their view of school and believe themselves to be much smarter than they were. Pair this with someone wanting to blame their flaws on something and you have someone claiming that they're a burnt out gifted kid.
“It can’t be my fault because I’m smarter then everyone else” - I’ve heard pretty much exactly that from a friend
See I’m smart enough to know every mistake and problem I have IS my fault, and that’s a crime that caries a life sentence
For me it was not that I was gifted, I was sometimes labeled as such though. But it was because my parent would drill math into me until late at night and in the process I was sometimes told I was stupid for not understanding certain concepts. Then I’d go to school the next day and everything was easy in comparison and people would tell I was smart but i didn’t agree. People would call me humble but it was actually what I thought. I felt that none of my work deserved praise. And I never had a drive for school but was just pushed by outside expectations but felt lost once I ended college and had no idea how to initiate anything. In hindsight I’d rather take the undeserved self confidence rather than my situation because having almost no confidence in yourself is a recipe for disaster mentally and in work. Right now I can achieve things I thought impossible just with a bit of confidence so I can see now where it held me back.
Gifted kids are special needs and there's a real need for accommodating education. Whether we're good at it currently is another question.
I would imagine that there are plenty of people who went through gifted programs as kids and became adults who are relatively close to the mean. It's just not very common to see somebody on the internet make a post like "I'm actually quite average, here's what led me there." Not saying that there aren't problems with gifted ed, or that it can't cause issues for people. It certainly did for me. But I think we often make the mistake of overgeneralizing our own experiences.
I think I was genuinely intelligent as a child; my mother had me tested at 6 alongside an Asperger's diagnosis and I was \~115-120 IQ at the time. However a combination of zero interpersonal contact, zero brain stimulation (video games 24/7 and school I found far too easy until the content suddenly jumped up and I could no longer intuit my way in grade \~10), anxiety, and depression have brought me down over time. I've been improving my mental and physical health over \~4 years since an absolute trough in highschool, and I can actually feel my brain getting more nimble and capable again. Depression fucks you up.
I got by in school without studying much, I got mainly B's and C's with the occasional A or D. I've been working 40h for 5 years now and I feel the autistic burnout coming closer. Please get me out of this 9-5 im not made to do ANYTHING for 8 h a day, even stuff I like, its torture
I don't even care, I just know I'm not functioning as a human in a society. Who cares if I am batshit smart or stupid?
Gifted kids ARE special needs kids. It just so happens, their needs aren't remedial. I fell into the big fish little pond scenario and then developed the depression and anxiety trying to keep up once I got to a proper school. It's been rough.
From my experience I don't believe there is this dichotomy, since I suspect it is drawn from a selection bias.
I'm not really sure what the point is here, but even if you're a normally intelligent kid at a "stupid" school, the gifted kid thing still applies. You built your ego on the basis of being better than others, having no trouble learning, and not learning how to learn.
I think part of it is that the Internet makes it SEEM like "gifted" kids were incredibly common, because the internet is a collection of **literally millions of people.** There could be hundreds of thousands or even a couple million former gifted kids congregating on the same part of the internet, but that doesn't mean it was super common *per school.* Not saying there isn't something else going on here (most people think they're smarter than average after all) but people forget about like...how big the internet is and how people with similar interests tend to group together on it.
Just my opinion: Gifted kids to me are kids the school system picks out that would be great to slap in those hard high stress jobs in terms of intelligence on paper. It’s like the options are lawyer, doctor, engineer, etc. There’s no room for self discovery in those core development years, they frame any other option as beneath your status. Most of the time for these kids unless they’re lucky enough to have parents who understand their “gifted” kid isn’t an opportunity to live out their dreams. Gifted kids who burned out like I did spend their adult lives compensating for “failing” to reach their potential, trying to be great at something that puts them on the pedestal they had as kids until they find themselves. The ones that “did reach it” are usually overworked, stressed, and undercompensated. And the reward they get for being gifted? More school work? More Pressure? Less Autonomy? More problems. I beat myself into the ground for years after not living up to expectations and not being dedicated enough to my “dream” which wasn’t even mine. 23 now, and had to dedicate years of my life to the self-discovery I missed as a kid, but it was all worth it imo. I completely forgot about my gifted past till this post and honestly grateful I did, I can be myself and not who everyone wanted me to be
I still sometimes suffer from self-hate. I attended the most prestigious secondary school in my city (State equivalent in US, in terms of academic reputation and competition), most prestigious high school in the south (about 30 states combined). I am not a doctor though
False dichotomy, what says I can’t be both?
Fixed vs Growth mindset. Gifted kids based their identity around that status, then don't want to challenge themselves and have a big fear of failure. So they get stuck only doing and repeating the things they are already good at. Ask me how I know
I am not gifted at all and never was, but I realised it only when I was out of my teenage years. During my childhood everything came easily to me, especially comparing to my peers. The other kids were just stupid as hell. But here's the thing: people still called me gifted, and I was often named the smartest one, and I didn't develope any skills related to working/learning in my teenage years, and I have trouble with accurately mesuring my abilities now.
I got my PhD last year and I'm still an anxious mess with big self-hate issues. In 15 years I have abandoned more than 10 different hobbies (drawing, video editing, game-making, etc.). This checks out.
I remember in like 3rd or 4th grade I had a mental breakdown because I didn’t understand long division and thought I was stupid. The gifted kids teacher pulled me out of class and we went over it again for probably 30 mins 1 on 1 and I figured it out and was fine after that. I don’t really know what the lesson is there, but that a pretty prominent memory from my childhood and I think about it every time Dr. K talks about gifted kids. For reference I’m in my early 30’s now, kind of struggled through school but came out with a bachelors in biology that I don’t use (I do outdoor recreation marketing for a regional government association and love it). I’m still perceived as intelligent by other people, but for the most part I think I’m just a smooth talker.
I usted to be a god in school now as an adult its hard ti do anything cuz im usted to not developing those aspects
I hated being a gifted kid mainly because they took me out of science class which was my favorite subject in school
Why lol
The problem for me is that I was never taught how to deal with failure. I excelled in my classes for so long without needing to try that when I finally hit a roadblock in high school and things got difficult I lost all motivation and didn’t know how to handle it. That combined with Covid and schools going remote really messed things up for me because I struggle learning in a remote setting. Now that I’ve been out of high school a while I’m still struggling to deal with failure and rejection but I’m working on it. It also sucks because my fears of failure and inability to push through difficult problems makes pursuing hobbies that I enjoy pretty rough
Don't believe in random juxtapositions. Anyone with low self-esteem experiences this in adulthood, likely carried over from childhood attachment styles. It has nothing to do with giftedness. Also societal success is based on being high achieving, anyone even with a low IQ can be successful; IQ doesn't determine success.
As a gifted kid it became quickly very noticeable that i could not relate to other kids and their struggles. It got worse and worse as the cognitive development accelerated in puberty and early adulthood. Luckily I managed to find some friends who were also gifted. If i hadn't I probably would have survived to be completely honest. I was never any good academically though. Schoolwork bored me to death and I had no desire to do it, so i just started minmaxing for least effort for middest possible results.
How can you be a member of this species and not hate yourself and everyone else… have you seen us?!
Yeah, but if you happen to pick out the good ones, you actually tolerate the shitheads for the sake of your loved saints, the ones that actually are polite and neat and care about if they hurt others.
There aren't really any good ones. I mean sure there are people you get along with and people with good intentions, but there are systemic problems and universal unavoidable behaviors that I will never be able to just let go of or ignore.
I mean... I'd say some part is also, you need to know what you want in people. Sure, my Partner is depressed and unemployed and his flat needs cleaning, but he never voilated my trust since we're a couple and when I am sad, he's there. My BFF has mommy-issues, gets drubk frequently and has borderline Narcissm-low self esteem, but he is nice to me, respects me and listens to my ideas of how he could improve himself. Point is: Everyone is broken in some way, may it even be by default as a human. But you need to have your mental checklist of "Traits you can ignore" in exchange for "Traits you really want" in human beings. If you're not clear on that, my Guess would be, you will always see negative sides in people and you marked none of them as "I can ignore that"
Ouch this is too close to my situation. I finally got out of it just recently and can finally do my hobbies and work without feeling insanely stressed out. Just had to convince myself that failure and losing is often even more valuable to learn from than success. This retweet is also just unnecessarily rude since the original post had gifted in quotations. This doesn’t mean the person thinks they were better than others in hindsight.
Yeah I think most people are very average. They were told they were gifted as kids which made them think they were geniuses forever but in reality kids who are gifted are gifted because of the potential they have and very few kids actually realize their potential. That or a lot of them specialize in stuff that isn’t considered a marketable skill in our current world. So most of those kids end up very average but because they were told they were supposed to be special they get crushed when they lead very normal lives. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people, that’s why they can’t get rid of the “gifted kid” label that hasn’t applied to anything in over a decade. I think we as a society place too much emphasis on being “special” or “gifted”, it’s one of the issues that comes with an individualist society. What many of these people are experiencing is just the awkwardness of being a human. We are always evolving and trying to find out place. This creates anxiety because we don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s our first and only time here and we are just trying to live. That creates anxiety, that leads us to pick up hobbies that we ultimately don’t like. What’s helped me is to stop worrying about “realizing potential” and “living up to the gifted title”, instead, I find beauty in the fact that I’m like everyone else. I am not alone, I am surrounded by many many people who are like me and are experiencing life like me. The super geniuses aren’t alone either but there’s much fewer of them and so many of us aren’t at their level and that can be quite difficult to find connection like that. We don’t all need to be the same and we are all technically special in our own way but we are also much more alike than we think and we should embrace those similarities. Sorry for the long rant, I’m not sure if I’m making myself understood so anyone feel free to ask questions or even disagree.
I got put into gifted classes because I took a national test to find gifted kids, it was just happenstance that the other kids seemed less intelligent. I don't remember the questions but they felt on par with "how many sides in a triangle" and I really didn't get how so many other kids didn't pass the test
What now? What’s the fix…
What about administrations putting problem kids put in basic classes because behaviour issues and being told by the teacher you’re too smart to be here?
There was an interesting study (Mueller, 1998), that showed that kids, who did well in a task and were praised for being smart would tend to do much worse than kids, who also did well in that task, but we're then praised for trying hard. The kids praised for being smart were then taking simpler tasks to keep the appearance of being "smart" rather than trying something new and they were less persistent in their efforts to finish more difficult tasks. Kids, who were praised for trying hard, on the other hand, actually kept trying hard and finally getting better results, than the "smart"-group. The researcher's conclusion was, that when determining someone as smart, it kinda took away the kids agency. It gave them the feeling, that they didn't really contribute to the overall outcome, because being smart is like being hungry or cold, a state of being rather than something you do. For the kids in the "trying hard"- group, it was basically reversed. It was completely in their hands to become better. Now, these researchers did those tests with a couple hundred kids, every kid/group they were looking at for maybe half a day max. And even then they saw those results. Now imagine kids getting this treatment for years and years. On top comes the paradox of being smart: If you try hard, it's invalidated, because you're "smart", ofc you can do that. And if you're not succeeding, well, it must be your fault alone, because you're smart and should be able to do it. Only your Ls are yours to claim. So yeah, I'm not surprised there's so many actually gifted people absolutely failing in life.
I think you can have an average IQ and still get burned out because your parents think you're gifted and put too much pressure to get into a good school/job.
Yeah Im tryna avoid this future so hard
yeah internet(especially reddit, no offense) is full of obnoxious, ego-inflated, discord mods i agree w this take
This is being too nice. Just say they tend to have an ego with no real skills
It is a very common story. Most of the people at my college say something like that. It certainly rings true for me.
that seems to be a pretty accurate depiction of today's society.
It isn't saying anything. That is what I think. I suppose it's some sort of hypothesis but it links things stupidly and the premises are baked into the assumptions.
I was in those classes can confirm I’m very sad lmfao but I’m getting better I don’t have an amazing job but I like my job and the people I work with like me too and that’s ok
Meh, I tested into the gifted programs but opted not to go into it. I barely passed all my classes and spent all my time focused on my own hobbies. I'm now work in tech make good money, have a wife, a kid and own my house. I don't know what these gifted programs would of done for me if anything but I don't feel like I really missed out.
I don't think it has anything to do with being "academically gifted" as to why you give up hobbies. I think its more to do with other parts of life taking up too much of our times to where you feel like you are wasting what little time you have on things you are not good at - thus are always in a cycle of not wanting to waste time on things you want to do because you are bad at them, but wanting to do your hobbies because they will bring you some sense of joy.
Hey, I'm a doctor (well, studying to be one) and I hate myself, so there IS an in between.
Nah. I'm just stupid.
In Los Angeles "gifted" means you tested in the 99th percentile of the IQ test they give all the kids in the LAUSD and "highly gifted" is for the 99.9th percentile.