The Kintsugi School for the Gifted and Talented

Don't worry about it! I haven't gone to them but I've been told by my psychiatrist that they need a diagnosis to actually give you accommodations, and I don't really know what I would even ask for? Like my problem is not that I need extra time on tests or something like that, my problem is I can't focus for shit and can't start long projects without the stress of an imminent deadline.

 

Okay, you've convinced me. I need to see my psych anyway so I'll ask her what I need to do to talk to them. Thank you :)

 

i dunno if i count as 'gifted' or not because pre-k was all learning to read instead of naps because naps were boring and i had a nice pre-k teacher and k-8 was people throwing textbooks and other educational books at me (not literally) and telling me to go at them. no actual teaching, no help after 6th grade, just me reading, filling out quizzes and tests, and through 7th and up grading everything all alone. like, in elementary i was still going to an actual school but it was like... they handed you a bunch of booklets on different subjects and walked back to their desk, and you figured it out from there.

i'm fucking terrible at geography and history (like, embarrassingly terrible. i'm working on it.) and was (i say was because i haven't had the need to use things like calc in every day life often, so there's def been degradation of skill) really good at math because when an adult asked if i understood i just said yes so i could move on. no accountability, no checking up, nothing. high school had actual teachers but it was a home school co-op and we only met twice a week. again, grading was left up to parents so i graded all my own stuff again forever.

in the end i dunno if all that was good or bad but i do know listening to someone talk about something has always been a billion times harder than just reading them saying the same thing, so i learned more on my own than i ever would have in a classroom. maybe. anyways that's most of my school life in a nutshell, just wanted to share cause i'm realizing maybe it was a bit unusual. i just remember being told i was smart a lot and thinking "how would you know? you're not even involved in the process."

 

I only learned that I had to study, not how, in the IB program because if I didn't at least try I would have fucking bombed History. That's how I learned paper notetaking is not for me because I took extensive in-class notes that I couldn't fucking read because my fast handwriting is fucking illegible. I might have been a helluva lot better student if I'd had a computer. Thank fuck for colleges recognizing the power of technology.

Seconding/thirding others here that even "just" depression can get you accommodations. I went in without any diagnosis at all and said I had depression and maybe ADD and was failing a class I kept getting As on the tests of because of it and they basically went "Yep, sounds like a common depression problem! We'd give you accommodations if you actually had medical proof that's what's going on but you don't so we can't, sorry." I ended up handing in the accommodations I got in high school that enabled me to pass my IB exams and got by on that as proof because it was there was no way to get a diagnosis before the end of the semester and got by on that, but I digress. I have a friend who's gotten all sorts of shit from the school because he's doing the depression meds dance, so I do know it's a thin you can get accommodations solely on the basis of.

This more or less sounds pretty similar to my skill set.

I asked my mom to teach me the alphabet before Kindergarten so I could read going into it an they didn't eve teach me to read! Still awful at spelling to this day despite having a really big vocabulary that occasionally gets me called a thesaurus fucker online.

Also really great at conceptual math to the point that I took a year beyond AP (college-level) Calculus in high school but terrible enough at basic arithmetic to have been held back from recess for almost an entire year because it took me about three times as long to learn my three times tables as every other student took to learn them up to 12 in elementary school. I still often mess up when I calculate the tip. (Thankfully I often end up overtipping, but still.) on the other hand, I still find derivation a fun exercise 6 years after taking Calculus for the first time. Something about those neat patterns man.

History and geography are sucky as heck. Fuck menorization. Basically, anything that's conceptual I can do in my sleep, anything that's memorization-heavy might as well be brain surgery, because rocket science is too conceptual for me to be bad at it. I've never actually found a flavor of brainweird that describes this, except maybe, maybe the 'tisms.

 

the stars must have had aligned or some shit because all three of the three students in the gifted and talented program during one of my years in elementary school turned out to be trans in high school. and to this day i have no idea how the stars aligned for that to have happened. (one of them might be on kintsugi too but i don't know if they ever made an account)

i'm pretty sure the other is currently away from school for serious medical complications, but the two of us still in school are currently a pair of complete messes who are involuntarily in a mixture of ap and ib courses and are in no way ready to move on with our lives and progress into college at the end of this school year

 

Oh, wow, @Ipuntya, I didn't know you were that young. I'm here if you ever need IB support, that's tough shit.

 

@Ipuntya i think im the same age as you and all i can say is thank god my school doesnt offer ib

that said im totally overloaded with ap courses so............i get u man, im the same boat re: moving on with life

 

I've been really good at english/grammar/spelling as long as I can remember! Math I wasn't so good at because it was boring to me, but thankfully I could always ask my engineer dad for help, so I ended up above grade level in every subject and expected to take the Hard Classes.

My high school did AP (rather than IB) and I'm gonna be honest, I have no idea about school rankings or desirability, all I know is that I got so little sleep during middle/high school and was so stressed out that I legitimately have almost no memory of stuff before about 4 years ago.

I also have the thing where I just Cannot Do something if I'm not interested in it, which makes it lucky that I'm so in love with learning (I will do geology or fiction analysis for hours) or I probably would have had huge problems a lot earlier. Now that I've figured that out and am in "just get it done" mode, I just pick my classes carefully so I don't sit there and be an anxious, guilty brick at boring classes. As it is, I'm just glad I'm on my last semester of college and get to enter the job world soon--at least work ends! At least there's a time you can feel okay about not working!

This thread has made me super sad because hyperempathy and why can't I just magically help all of you, but solidarity hugs/fistbumps nonetheless.

 

I go to a school that has a 3.5 year average stay for students and until recently had the same average stay for teachers.

But honestly I prefer demanding schedule because at least here I know what the expectations are.

I was in 4th grade and was doing super well in math and so you know what the teacher did? She kicked me out of the class and didn't even move me up to the next class.
This was a montessori school where 4th 5th and 6th were all in the same grade and math classes actually happened during a long open study period in the morning.

 

That's an ADD symptom, jsyk!

Wtf

 

...really? I always put that sort of thing down to just me not being disciplined enough. Huh.

 

Yep, a lot of people think that, but no, it's squirrel brain.

 

...oh. I assumed my brother was ADD because he can never sit down OR stop talking, but I guess it manifests differently in everyone, especially through gender. Family history makes it more likely too, yeah? Something new to ask my therapist about, haha

 

Yes, family history makes it more likely and gender effects its manifestation. The gender thing is why they eliminated the distinction between ADD and ADHD, actually. It seems that the hyperactivity part is just how it manifests in people who are expected to be boys, whereas people who are expected to be girls are taught that hyperactivity is unacceptable. So, like, I definitely have squirrel brain, but when I complained constantly to my mom that I was bored she told me to entertain myself because no one else would. So I carry around my sketchbook, headphones and phone with an internet connection everywhere I go now just so I can entertain myself.

 

I read through a bit of this thread since my emotions are a little disabled right now (long story, neither here nor there) and it's been a little helpful to me, so thanks for everyone for sharing stories, painful as they are.

I have such a violent, unpleasant internal reaction to being called 'smart' or 'better' or 'more talented' or 'in any way ahead of my peers' that I don't know how I woudl even begin to unpack it. I get sent into loops about whether or not it's true, and whether it is or not, i hate the implication. I'm not better, I'm not special, I'm not different. I don't need more attention than anyone else, I don't need help, and I especially, more than anything, don't need more hopes tacked on me from anyone else, because I can't imagine what sort of hope I wouldn't fail.

That was just a straight log of my feelings. I can't even parse them, honestly. I think a lot of it is the same 'if I'm so smart, why do I make failures' brain rot that so many of you are suffering. When I was graduating college and didn't know who would ever want to employ me, I kept expressing these fears to others and they told me the same thing, in different voices: "there's no way you'll fail. you're smart and talented and employable and good, so you can't fail."

I just wanted someone to say "it's ok if you do fail." No one said that.


Again, I don't even know how to unpack that.

 

I think one aspect of one common form of Gifted Angst boils down to, "everyone says that since you're so smart and talented you can easily succeed, but you feel like you're failing, so you must not actually be as smart and talented as everyone insists you are." And your Smartness and Talentedness is always what people praise about you and frame your value in terms of, so if that rings hollow it can feel like you're totally worthless and useless.

 

I think... it was a lot like that, but the flipside. If I did fail, how much could I credit these positive statements about me?

On one level I realize there are a lot of reasons I could potentially fail to do the Functioning Person Things, the Creditable, Affluent Person Things, but... well, does anyone really have an easy time believing that the lack of visible success in your life is NOT evidence of a lack of goodness in your person?