My gifted program (late 90s) literally consisted of:
- playing Oregon Trail
- playing Carmen Sandiego
- making a puzzle
- making and presenting an invention +
- drawing pretty designs with a compass without knowing the actual math behind it +
- making a didgeridoo and a rain stick
- these classes were literally in a closet which was a part time “gifted” room.
What I wished they’d taught:
- how to study
- how to manage your time
- how and why to set goals for yourself
- how to start new habits
- how to be persistent
I went to 15+ schools before I graduated highschool, and depending on where I was I was either put into “gifted and talented”, the “extended learning program”, “fast path”, or “Accelerated Track”. Every place had a different philosophy of how to deal with kids who already knew how to read and do math.
Sometimes I would end up in a class with a bunch of quiet bookworms who wore church clothes every day and other times I would be surrounded by rambunctious and highly enthusiastic nerds.
Usually we would play computer games or play games designed to make us engage socially, but sometimes we would actually study interesting stuff in a deep way.
Every one of these programs seems to be a totally improvised and locally unique program. Nothing from the words they used for things to the books, brands, or activities seemed to have any consistency. Since I usually moved in the middle of the school year I would often see multiple versions of each grade’s program.
It made me really glad I didn’t grow up in a small town. Those people are getting screwed.
This is exactly it. So much of it was improvised. And that’s largely by design when you account for how most American schools are funded: unevenly through local levies.
Dang, THAT was the entirety of your school’s genius program? I assume your school was not in an affluent area.
mine was the same.
my school was in the bottom quartile of systems in my state. a quarter of the students were in poverty.
we also only had like 2 computers so we all had to play on them together and work in teams.
Oh I made it, I make more than a lot of my peers in highschool, not all of them, but I make a good wage. But I fucking hate the dev industry man. I was unemployed for 3 months and I got so much done. Agile methodology sucks the soul out of me, I don’t have anything left for my personal projects. It’s micromanagement incarnate. Oh you had two bad dev cycles in a row? Guess it’s time for a PIP. Oh you had to step away for an errand a few times this dev cycle? Let’s not make it a habit, even though all your work is done. Oh you have mutiple 2 hour meetings to attend and we still label you had full capacity meaning you have to figure out how to do 8 days of dev work in almost half that time. I’m so fucking tired of it.
It’s also full of boot lickers. Had people on my team that were like “oh I’ll just work this weekend to make the deadline” and I’m like why. They made the deadline even though we told them it was too aggressive. You don’t get paid more for hitting it or for putting more hours in. Stop enabling them and devaluing labor.
they have no value in their lives other than work. tons of people out this in many industries.
they have no hobbies, no passions, and their friendships are typically shallow competitions of materialism and titles.
One of the guys I used to work with that was like that seems to have other hobbies. He likes riding his bike and learning guitar, playing video games, traveling Europe. But he’ll also just work though a weekend or on his vacation. I don’t get it.
Ugh god don’t get me started on that, it’s literally ingrained in the work cutlure that getting the work done is more important than following the labor laws. I have gotten in trouble for not attending “”“optional”" meetings out of work hours.
Everyone bends and breaks the law in the employer’s favor but the minute you don’t it’s considered a personal insult to your boss.
Bro… As someone who felt this and is happier making less… Consider state govt tech roles.
You’ll have more relevant experience than your peers, there’s no ‘cycle’ to speak of…
Not even my team, got quoted like 200K on a Drupal upgrade.
I was like “guys I have upgraded about 400 Drupal sites exactly like this it takes 3 hours max.”
Hero.
That team keeps asking me questions and my boss is protective of it. “Email him and schedule time, stop wasting my teams time.” Essentially letting me fuck off.
Yeah I make less. But I have enough time to literally take on anything. Started self hosting, exercising, building a small business…
Dev industry blows so hard.
Yeah I actually have friends who work for my city, I told them to let me know if positions open up, but the other issue is that city jobs are so good that no one leaves lol. I’m looking to switch to sys admin work because I have a background in that, I’m hoping to get my base level cert in that this year.
Imho the gifted program is where you send smart kids to lose their social skills.
It’s not even smart kids, it’s usually just average kids who have overly involved parents doing most of the work for them.
The majority of “gifted” programs just double the workload and run half a grade ahead.
I’d never put my kid on one even if they were actually smart because separating them out and endlessly bullshitting them about the future just creates raging narcissists with self-esteem issues.
Not every gift program separates them out.
Not every gifted program integrates, it’s obvious I’m talking about the ones that do separate.
Not everyone knows that there are integrated programs. Integrated programs are new. Most people’s experience would be with a segregated group. Nothing in your comment suggests that you knew there were integrated programs.
It was not obvious that you knew this. If you said, “I’d only put them in an integrated program” and not “I’d never put them in one” that would have made it obvious.
You’d think it would be obvious that I’m talking about the programs that separate kids out by saying “they separate kids out.”
There are programs that don’t do that, cool, I’m obviously not talking about that.
Obviously, I did not think that. You can read that as all programs and not some programs. Obviously.
Bro your reading comprehension is cooked
I don’t think it’s the gifted classes doing that, it’s more helicopter parents forcing there kids to spend all there time after school studying or with tutors etc. Instead of hanging out or engaging in more social after school activities like sports.
You can be just as social in a gifted class as a regular class, you can’t be as social at mathnasium as playing soccer.
IDK about that, the gifted kids at my school seemed to have their shit together the most out of all of us and always seemed like the adults in the room. I don’t know what they were getting that the rest of us didn’t but I sure could have used some of it… I always felt like I was missing things that came so easily to them.
“Gifted” programs are so fucked up.
They separate kids out for being “smart”, put them on a pedestal, endlessly gas them up with wildly unrealistic expectations and then only teach them how to be good students at the expense of all social development.
All these kids go into the world thinking that being good at math or memorization is 95% of what it takes to be successful when in reality it’s like 10% intellect and 90% social ability.
The worst part is that these kids usually aren’t even extra smart, they just have more involved parents.
It always ends up that the kid with infinite potential lives up to none of it and has a massive ego complex because they got gaslit into believing their parents pipedreams were realistic and that it’s their fault for not living up to them.
Hey now. Some of us were smart but predated ADHD diagnosis. So we got put in there, did some fun higher maths, but still didn’t finish our homework and then barely graduated.
Yeah that’s definitely the good ending. My school did so poorly they changed the grading curriculum to be 50% homework based so I was cooked on that.
I did well on the tests but they made tests 15% and quizzes 12%. I don’t remember the rest of the breakdown but it was absolute bullshit.
They did it because the year above me had a 50% non graduation rate and my year had a 53% non grad rate.
The only reason the school didn’t get shut down is because it managed 47% the year after me and apparently the deal was 3 consecutive years of over 50% failure = shutdown.
You’re experience must be an anomaly based on other comments and my anecdotes. When I went through school, the gifted courses were just advanced level classes that you had to meet a minimum threshold to be able to join. By highschool for us, you were picking which classes and electives you wanted to take plus the required classes each semester, so everyone one of my classes had different people in it. Everyone had to take biology, gifted or not, but the gifted could take algebra earlier than the rest of us.
I was not in the gifted classes, but one of my best mates was. He graduated with honors, graduated from university early with a double major in Biology and physics and never paid a penny in tuition. He got accepted to a very reputable medical school where he graduated with honors, and didn’t pay for tuition because he joined the military which paid for his med school, granted him guaranteed residency, and paid him an extra 40k a year during his residency. He’s now the chief of cardiology at his location.
I also graduated with another kid that graduated highschool as a junior in college with all of the college courses he took. He did not participate in the gifted kids classes but he was extremely smart. He never graduated college and last I heard he was a manager at a local theater.
Point being, your comment is a major generalization that I don’t believe is supported by fact. I don’t doubt that some places did handle gifted kids poorly, but I’d argue that wasn’t the norm.
I don’t think that it’s just the gifted kid programs that are causing these issues, I think it’s more foundational than that.
So much of school is focused on rote memorization, test scores, and grades that kids who do well end up having their entire sense of self-worth tied to their grades. Then they get out into the real world and no longer have those academic scores to tell them that they have any value.
It’s how we get stuff like this:
There’s so much more in this discussion like how kids who never are challenged by schoolwork don’t actually learn how to learn and therefore give up on something at the first hint of difficulty or challenge because their brain is conditioned to believe that either you’re instantly good at a thing or you’re a failure forever, or how there’s a real lack of teaching collaborative work in school despite that being like 90% of work in life, but that’s all too much for my tired brain to try to piece together into a comprehensible message. So instead I’ll just end with my usual meme on the subject: Beware, the “gifted kid to burnout trans girl with a praise kink” pipeline is real.
Being gifted somehow made adults think I couldn’t be neurodivergent. So many wasted years of no treatment and misery.
Oh yeah the expectations put on those kids is so fucked.
I really disagree with whole concept of “gifted” in the first place because it implies that academic intelligence is the only “real” intelligence and that people all learn the same way or they’re just stupid.
It’s a super narrow worldview that actively harms kids in and out of the program.
This is such a horrible take. Gifted programs offer accelerated offerings for children who are so goddamn bored in normal level classes. They allow people who to get ahead, give additional opportunity for faster advancement, and really don’t even separate kids that much.
Nah I know way too many losers who are still talking about how much potential they had 15 years ago.
Having kids pulled into entirely separate classrooms is pretty dang separated so IDK what you’re on about.
Those programs just blow smoke up kids asses and set them up to fail.
So? There’s also a ton of kids who did actually leverage that to get through college faster and do well. Bitchy people gonna bitch. Gifted program didn’t accelerate my progress in life, but it certainly did help me not sit there bored in a low level math class all day with people who couldn’t or didn’t care to do basic equations.
Sounds like you just want to feel superior to people.
Having a massive ego without anything to show for it is a common symptom of “former gifted” kids.
Believe it or not, some people are more interested in academics than others, and catering to allow that is a net positive to society…
Being bored in lower level math classes is reality. It’s not a hypothetical
There’s a difference between catering to academic interests and making a narcissist boot camp for the children of overly ambitious parents.
It’s not hypothetical that these “gifted” programs don’t really have better outcomes in terms of making kids engaged with academics.
Imo it’s obvious that these programs aren’t for the kids, they’re for the overactive and insecure parents.
Now the “former gifted” bullshit is so ingrained in people’s identity that any criticism of the program is perceived as a direct attack.
Now the “former gifted” bullshit is so ingrained in people’s identity that any criticism of the program is perceived as a direct attack
The criticism in question is not “any” criticism, it’s an implication that such programs should be fully removed. There’s plenty of valid criticism to be had, like letting parents force their kids into these programs without proper testing, or the socioeconomic disparities that are present in such programs.
Your source is not available through my college, and it’s locked behind a paywall. Without being able to read beyond the abstract, it seems to be focused on early year including kindergarten gifted programs, rather than a more generalized take that includes middle school and highschool.
If it’s just elementary school, I will agree that gifted programs loss of socialization can be much more important even for those small time periods. However, your source does not seem to be making a general statement of all gifted programs.
Everyone is goddamn bored in school. It’s school.
To put it longer “bored and taking a year of schooling in an already fully understood subject where the teacher spends 3x as long as necessary on each topic”.
There’s a difference between bored by the monotonous structure we’ve built up for schooling, and bored that you already understood the material a week ago, but are stuck listening to the teacher try to get the class delinquent to pay attention so the Republicans won’t pull funding from the school for bad test scores
‘That much’ is a sliding scale. A kid can be removed from class for a few hours a week, or per day, or altogether and put in programs at special schools.
Outside of grade skipping, the majority of gifted programs are stem(not that there isn’t lit gifted, but they tend to start later), I don’t think being fully accelerated out of your classes is a common “gifted” experience.
The variation is extensive across the incredibly uneven landscape of school districts for sure.
Literally everyone is bored in normal level classes. Most of us just express it by getting bad grades so we’re excluded from the gifted stuff.
Im not sure you are correct as no one was telling us we would be successful because of these classes when I was in them.
What we DID miss out on was seeing kids learn how to do things we already knew. This would have been very helpful when I got to the point where I didnt immediately understand the lesson and found myself having to learn how to do things years after most kids learn how to be taught to.
The real problem IMO is watching others learn is useful to the process of learning and taking the kids who know the lesson out of the room deprives them of this experience which in the long run creates other problems.
That’s only fair until you consider you may be depriving the accelerated kid of opportunities just for the point of keeping them in the class to inspire others.
In my case being in the accelerated class meant I never learned how to learn and when at 13 I suddenly didn’t immediately understand literally everything in class from the get-go I didn’t know what to do. I never experienced that before. I could read and write in paragraphs at 3 I didn’t watch my peers learn and it was a rough go for a while.
It was cool to have my critical thinking skills developed earlier, as that’s what we did with accelerated students in my town, but IMO I personally might have benefitted by remaining in the class to see how kids learned.
I gotcha. The program I was in had us go to a different class once or twice a week (varied since I changed schools a few times) instead of separating us entirely from the rest of the students, which we still did our regular classes with. I can definitely see how isolating a select few into “ivory towers” could cause some issues.
They kept threatening us with the whole “if you don’t learn how to properly study, you’re going to find yourself having a lot of trouble in college”
That… Never came to pass.
in reality it’s like 10% intellectual and 90% social ability
That may be true for some lines of work like sales, but something like software engineering is closer to 10% social ability and 90% technical ability.
If you want to ever move up in your career that’ll have to change because engineering advancement inherently means becoming management.
The unfortunate reality is that we live in a collaborative world and if you can’t collaborate then you will not go far.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the world if you’re also the most easily ignored.
One person can only do so much especially when they’re competing with people who aren’t alone.
Engineering advancement inherently means becoming management
Not necessarily, at the company I work for, they have two advancement tracks for engineers: management and individual contributor. The individual contributor track goes something like associate engineer -> engineer -> senior engineer -> principal engineer with a bunch of different sub-tiers in those with raises associated with them. Yeah, you cap out at principal engineer, but at that point, you have a good salary and equity and would be considered a success by most metrics.
Yes any work is going to require collaboration, but that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of social skills. Even the most socially awkward person can explain technical requirements to a colleague and ask them to implement them. There’s a difference between communication skills and social skills, and success in academics requires good communication skills.
I’m not saying social skills aren’t valuable, I’m just saying they aren’t required to succeed in this current capitalist economy.
Ehhh, to each their own. I was in those classes, fully separated streams. No idea why you’d assume having a more interesting class would nix social development. (You can’t learn to socialize if the teacher doesn’t have to slow down?)
Fully wide range of outcomes but a lot of the kids with the potential went and realized it. Sure, not all of us did but from my small circle one’s on the second highest court in Canada, one’s set up a reasonably famous company, one’s a cardiac surgeon etc.
(You can’t learn to socialize if the teacher doesn’t have to slow down?)
When do you talk to to other kids if not during class? Lunch was for study group, where we didn’t talk, and we didn’t get free periods or anything because it was just more class.
Wild, maybe Canada does ours differently? I was in 2 different programs over the years but we still had lunch, free blocks and still shot the shit a bunch in class. And then sports and other extra curriculars too.
But the gifted class also has kids in it who talk to you.
Not when the teacher thinks we need to be better behaved than the normal kids because we were smarter than them. Not when everybody in the class has parents that beat them for coming home with a B. Not when…
I just had a relatively normal class with extra projects and more advanced math lessons. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on me, except for awakening an interest in the Aztecs that might have contributed to wanting to learn Spanish. It looks like that’s pretty standard from the study linked in this comment chain.
everybody in the class has parents that beat them for coming home with a B.
Oh, dear. As a child you just assumed that was true, didn’t you?
I’m talking about school in the US, I’m not sure how Canadian schools are structured.
In my school, they pulled all the “smart” kids(most just had parents who did 90% of the work) out of normal classes, gave them 2-3x the workload and moved the coursework up by half a grade.
I’m sure there are better programs but widely that’s how things were for American gifted students.
Many of the people I knew in those programs either turned out average or did extremely poorly because they had a massive ego with no social skills.
It’s to the point where I feel like the people who became successful were successful in spite of the gifted program and the people who turned out to be failures did so because of the gifted program.
It will be different in different places but this has been my experience in the US.
In the same way American schools aren’t representative of Canadian schools - your experience at one American school isn’t representative of all American schools. Maybe cut back on the blanket statements about American schools.
Yes thank you for reiterating for me that I’m talking about American schools. Because as I stated I am talking about American schools.
In case anyone didn’t know I’m talking about American schools, as in not non-american schools.
Well, going by your literacy, I’m gonna guess you weren’t in the gifted classes. Completely misread what I said.
No I read it, it’s a pointless uhm ackshully
It’s pointless to point out that your singular experience at one school isn’t indicative of American schools at large? Knowing their are other people who have their own experiences in the world is a critical development stage you should have reached by now.
You know, everyone else in this thread has come with levelheaded replies sharing their experiences with gifted programs, and it’s a mix of some schools who did it right and others who did it wrong. All you’ve replied with is obstinate vitriol. Starting to think you’re just jealous you didn’t make it into the gifted programs…
Yeah, that sounds wild. Ours were opt in programs with some testing etc. Coursework was hard but I still hardly had any for homework etc.
Got to skip a few university classes as ours counted for them though which was useful. And yeah, the more I think about that grad class (decades ago now) the more impressed I am with what some of those folks went on to do.
Nice, it sounds like you went to a good school or a normal one outside the US.
I’m specifically talking about gifted programs in the US. Like most of our education system, they’re generally shitty unless you’re in a high privilege area in which case you’re probably going to a private school anyway.
In my American school, the bulk of the gifted and talented program was better-behaved, wealthier children, with homemaker mothers. They were the talented seat fillers. The handful of gifted children were taken out of class for one-on-one instruction.
1000x this.
I’m not going to mess up my kid the same way I got messed up.
I’m going to find a new and novel approach that will despite my best intentions mess him up in new and novel ways
Hey, that level of self awareness is way more than what the people who forced these shit programs had.
Nobody gets out of childhood unscathed or unscarred but having parents who actually listen goes a long way to reducing the pain.
Instead of all these random gifted programs that are all or nothing, we need to start treating earlier grades like high school where some students take advanced classes and others do the bare minimum.
Our whole education system needs a rework. Between the dogshit structure and the universally low pay for teaching we are going to end up far far more ignorant than we are now.
I stand by that every class-year should begin with an explanation of why you’re expected to learn the topic and what skills you’re expected to develop in the class, along with a paragraph or two sent to the parents on it. It won’t fix everything, but it will encourage students to quit thinking of their literature classes as a waste of time because they’re going into STEM or that their science classes are a waste because they aren’t.
I hated civics class and thought it was boring, but my mom made clear I was inheriting this country and I needed to know how it worked so I paid attention and by the end I was the sort of person who doesn’t avoid jury duty and who doesn’t resent paying taxes, just what’s done with thst money. Similar for learning to write and speak from my father who made clear that a stem job involves a lot of writing and public speaking.
I agree 100%
I absolutely hated school until I got to college and took a C++ class. Suddenly I was having a blast because I could see purpose in what I was doing.
The reality of it is some people are good little drones who can work on pointless tasks because they were told to and people who aren’t and need to see why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Imo the gifted programs didn’t reward people because they were smart but because they were obedient.
Personally, I can’t say I experienced any of that. Especially the “extra involved parents” part.
I was in gifted programs from K-12. Turns out hyperlexia is now a well known indicator of autism.
From what I remember it was like 30% autistic kids, 60% helicopter parents and like 10% kids from international schools who were just light years ahead of everyone else.
I think it can be done right but not in an education system that’s so fundamentally shit to begin with.
There’s a lot of comments in here addressing the social skill reduction, as if those kids in gifted programs (hello, fellow former gifted kids) didn’t still socialize with their peers in just about every other aspect.
Even the kids in ‘charter school programs’ here were just separated from a group of 400 to a group of 50 or so kids for half or so of the day and then the rest of the stuff they attended classes with the other 350 kids. Even if they were completely separated off, they still have peers (admittedly, also ‘gifted’ peers).
Ignoring that portion, and you’ve still got the fact that you MUST challenge a child while developing. If I didn’t get put in the ‘gifted’ track, I’d have goofed off even more and paid even less attention. NONE of my peers had their parents doing their homework (like some commentera have put), we just finally had homework we couldn’t do on our own on the bus ride home. If you don’t challenge a child’s mind, they can’t grow. And people who think every kid learns at the same pace, and that learning slower than the pace your brain can handle has no negative side effects, have no idea what they’re talking about and should look into child development as a focus of psychology and come back to this comment thread.
most of the comments here are just self-victimization in the form of ‘could have been’.
which is precisely the premise of the OG post. People are just pouring their delusions into this being like ‘no but that doesn’t apply to me!! i truly was gifted and special!!’
I don’t know… hard for me to understand any of this. I was not a gifted kid. I was smart and hard working. Most ‘gifted’ people I have met are just… lazy jerks who refuse to grow up and take responsibility for their choices… but LOVE to go on and on about how everything is their parents/teachers fault and how their perfectly decent life would have been so much ‘better’ and they’d be the next Bill Gates/Zuckerberg/Musk if some math teacher had been less mean to them as a pre teen.
Obviously yeah, my injury is addiction. Any further questions
Be burned out is more like trying to run a life long marathon at 125%, it works find in the start but at some point the body needs to recover.
It’s more describing how I’m decaying while still alive
In my case the “gift” was undiagnosed neurodivergence and that seems to be the case for a lot of people.
Yep! Only I was in the “could be good if she applied herself” group
Those teacher notes still occasionally visit me in my nightmares.
Ah, fellow late diagnosed ADHDer
“wow this kid is really smart, though curiously only when it comes to science stuff they find interesting… And how strange, they don’t seem to have any friends and they barely talk to other kids, in fact they seem much more comfortable talking to adults… Oh well, i’m sure that’s normal”
“Oh my god where did all these autism diagnoses come from all of a sudden? It must be something in the water!”
White/Asian Kid’s Elders: “I don’t understand brain plasticity, so I’m going to assume the speed with which my child learns things proves they’re a genius”
Other POC Kids Elders: “I don’t understand brain plasticity, so I’m just going to hold my kids close and hope what they’re rapidly learning doesn’t get them killed.”
I was that asian kid and I can assure you this knowledge (or even the word neuroplasticity) is not as pervasive as many believe it to be
I more mean to say that the idea of “intelligence” is treated very differently in first class and second class citizenry.
It’s an asset to be celebrated when your background qualifies you to join elite circles. It’s a liability to be managed when you’re confined to drudge work.
Yep, just go to Appalachia, you’ll see the same mindset.
I was gifted enough to eventually figure out I was a dumb ass.
Socrates, is that you?
No, but he sure is dumb enough to think he is
Most of these kinds of people as adults just didn’t realize that as they got older they actually had to try, that intelligence and skill aren’t inherent and is something you actually have to put effort into.
Truth is, most kids who are gifted in school grow up to be perfectly average.
because as you grow up your cohort pool gets bigger an bigger and more elite.
being a big fish in a tiny pond doesn’t mean you’re a big fish in the ocean. in the Ocean there are Tuna 100x as big as you and even bigger predators.
Perfectly average is a pretty hard target to hit. Where do you start taking the measurement from, and do you include the curvature, or just a straight line measurement? And do you have to hit maximum before measuring, or do we take an average of your measurements?
just pull it from the economic stats of your country/state/city.
however most people live in bubbles are are largely concerned about how they are doing to their neighbors, friends, and work colleagues. so if you make 400K a year but steve two desks over makes 550K a year, you feel like you’re below average and failing at life.
Yeah, but like, how do you measure steve? Do you ask him nicely first, or are you doing it all incognito like? And you need to standardize the measurements somehow. Do you ask the same person to do the measuring? How is that going to work when you need to poll across a large section to be sure you’re perfectly average?
because Steve is probably constantly bragging about how much money they have.
rich people love nothing more at social events than to brag about how much money they are spending/making.
look dude, the stats are out there. google them. it takes a few seconds to look up labor data, homeprices, wage data, etc.
the key is to stop agonizing about what could have been or should be. accept what you are.
Yeah, but steve, and most of the others, are self-reporting. Can you really trust those numbers? Unless you get your hands dirty and put the ruler up there yourself, how can you be certain? You’ve got to be certain here. Maybe it’s not six, maybe it’s only five and three quarters.
most kids level off at 10
Hey some of us are just lazy
Yeah, my “gift” was undiagnosed ADHD which has made life absolutely miserable to navigate once I left the extremely structured environment of school.
