The Kintsugi School for the Gifted and Talented

I have found the transition to university hard academics-wise for a lot of reasons (of which suddenly lots of mental and physical shit and no parental support are but two :D), but the fact that this exact scenario has happened multiple times for assignments that are a significant portion of all our grades is really not helping. (like, oh, this thing that counts for fifty percent of your grade for this module? we will just mark everyone down really hard. and we don't grade on a curve, so you just all have bad marks now! also we won't institute double-blind marking! have fun!)

notes are hard and only possible since I discovered that no one really cares if I use a laptop. even then, notes put on blackboard are better, since they are more comprehensive than I can write, and have less swearing from when I disagree with literally everything being said >_>

 

@Re Allyssa fwiw i just did a course on child language acquisition, and we talked about the idea of a language-learning curve as you get older. it does get harder, admittedly, but everything gets harder to learn as you get older; it's a matter of neural plasticity. (studies in second-language fluency show a fairly steady downwards trend as the age at which the second language was learned increases, but not steeply)

what makes the big difference for kids in bilingual environments is that they get so much more exposure to languages a and b (and the ability to distinguish actually starts in utero and is super neat), and since you're an adult you can search out stuff in the language(s) you want to learn and to immerse yourself, which frankly is more fun than what i did in school.

(i hope this helps somewhat offset the feeling of missed opportunities)

 

@Re Allyssa some anecdata - I'm an immigrant to the country I live in, who went from English to Finnish, a language that is, with the exception of the alphabet, almost nothing like English, and I've seen lots and lots and lots of adults learn and become fluent in it (I haven't, yet, but that's due to factors other than my brain problems or age). So... don't paint devils on the walls about your ability to become fluent in a second language just yet, especially since you're still pretty young. Immersion and practice are, IME, a lot more important than age.

 

oh man how did i miss this thread
i was a gifted & talented kid & i fucking hate it (i could probably still be considered a kid but no longer talented & boy this is so much better)!

Spoiler: ranty abt experiences

my mum used to make me do kumon because a) i was good at math but i could be better & b) free time for your kid what? (i'm mostly kidding about the second one, it only took like 10 minutes but i resented it so much in later years it took up to an hour & a half due to procrastination). she also yelled at me in a restaurant for getting a 70% on an exam for a class that i'd made clear that i absolutely despised, didn't study for, & also the teacher hadn't taught half the topics. this was years ago & now we don't talk grades so much as how i'm doing, like whether i understand the material & how i feel about it. it's much better.
high school (actually grades 7-12 but let's just call it high school it doesn' feel as long that way) was awful, it was very much a g&t high school, they did shit like post the top 15 grades in grade 12 (complete with names!!) for the whole school to see. they also did ""effort grades"", which supposedly measured how hard you tried. hahaha, you could show up exacly once but still get a good effort grade if your marks were good enough & the teacher liked you enough. you also had to be doing at least 2 extracurriculars or you were a lazy weirdo (bonus mandatory sports! yay!)
my mum told me she wished she never sent me there, i agree but i met my best friend there.
so now if there's even a slight chance of failure, i'm not gonna do the thing, i can't focus during lectures, my grades have plummeted. i don't know if being "g&t" had anything to do with that but it sure seems likely. also, i'm never gonna talk about this outside of kintsugi because somewhere along the line my brain got convinced that help == bad!

this turned inti a long rant & i'm really angry & shaky so i'm gonna post it & leave

 

*instant rage*
Man, fuck Kumon. Just fuck them so hard. It's like they deliberately set out to instill a hatred of math in as many kids as possible.

 

I am good at writing therefore I must be good at physics.

I physically have trouble calling myself intelligent or interesting.

I was too advanced for forth grade math in elementary school and so just didn't have a math class for some months

 

I love it when asked if I'm happy about going back to uni, I answer honestly (aka not particularly happy because I don't want to be going back to uni because it's hard work and I've already got a degree, but it feels like the right choice for me), and am then told that I'm wrong and I'll love it and it's super easy and that if I just quit "that game" (World of Warcraft, which I stopped playing consistently long before I graduated the first time) then I'll get VHAs and it'll be fine and easy and I just need to stop being addicted to that game I don't play. Thanks, Nan. That was really encouraging, and not at all dismissive of my feelings and showing that you don't know anything about my life and want to continue using external shit as an excuse for why I started bombing out in school. I doubt mental illness had anything to do with it, we can ignore that this all started long before WoW came out, and VHAs will just fall into my lap as long as I don't play a game. I don't even need to work for them, my natural smarts will just materialise them. I am feeling SO motivated, you guys.

Gah. I hate this.

 

See, I am G&T, and all my sisters are, so much so that the American public school curriculum even at some of the best ones in the country was not challenging enough. I actually cried when I realized how much better the curriculum in the IB program was and how fucking wasteful my schooling was overall. And then I promptly started failing because I was flipping out over the pressure I never learned how to handle and had untreated low-grade depression for more than a decade and ADD and maybe autism and being trans and not knowing it couldn't have helped, so I didn't apply for colleges either, so obviously I was a failure and a worthless human being and everything just got worse for me mentally. I'm still trying to work myself up into doing college because I know I need it, not just to survive but to be happy in a career, but it still feels like helluva burden.

 

I have a hard time calling myself smart. Other people call me smart, but I just... nah son, I am really good at multiple choice tests because they play well with how my brain remembers things. I say cool things in conversations because I go and look things up.

I actually did badly in school when I was in elementary and middle school, and then when I hit high school something just clicked in my brain and suddenly learning things wasn't hard (I think it was the fact that I left a school district where I was constantly bullied to one where people didn't pick on me and I actually made friends). People would call me a machine and an encyclopedia, but I was still operating under the assumption that I was average, if not slightly bellow average intelligence.

I still kind of do, but after enough people tell me I'm smart, I just have to shrug my shoulders and go "if everyone says the same thing maybe I'm the one with the wrong opinion." it still doesn't feel comfortable to say I'm smart. It feels like I'm lying. Especially when I see super smart people here and on kintsugi (and other parts of the internet too, but dang there are a lot of smart people here!), and I think "Yeah, that's a smart person, I'm not even near their level."

 

see people always tell me I'm 'smart' and 'gifted' and I just...don't see it??
like elementary school was easy. middle school was easy. perfect grades, never had to fucking try.
get to high school? suddenly undiagnosed add and depression and psychosis become a real problem, grades plummet, I have no clue how to study or how to even school or shower anymore, and everything is falling apart.
literally felt like I was the dumbest person on the planet because the past several years had been so easy and suddenly I was having all these problems and I couldn't skate by with easy A's like I had in the past and on top of that my mental health was falling apart.
sophomore year, get sent to an alternative school, start doing okay again because engaging topics, but still falling behind everyone else because terrible mental health.
finally get diagnosed in junior year after I tried to kill myself, as a result of getting diagnosed, parents sent me back to regular school. scraped by the last year with decent grades, decide not to go to regular college and instead go to community college.
proceed to bomb the first semester.
like, if there is smart and gifted somewhere in there, I am not seeing it.
on top of that, the sentence usually goes, "you're so bright, but..." and then follows something about how I don't apply myself and suck at school.
so, I don't know. I miss the days when school was easy. now everything is hard. and it kind of feels like I was set up for failure? no one ever taught me how to study or anything, everyone just said 'oh yeah great job, better keep it up!' and I...was never taught how to keep it up when things got hard.

 

I've literally never been able to self-motivate when it came to something I didn't want to do (and it gets worse with a looming punishment/deadline because my executive function shuts down completely and I start spending all day lying in bed in a depression funk and don't eat for days), but because I was really good at schoolwork nobody noticed until I started getting more homework than I could finish in class. And then I got a lot of "Why didn't you do it?" and "Just DO it!" while my grades tanked in any subject that assigned a lot of homework. All of which turned into a disaster when coupled with a nasty streak of compulsive lying and urge to hide anything wrong- I'd cut class rather than have to be there when an assignment I hadn't done got collected, and end up with my grades being a string of As with random 0s thrown in.

I've gone through the same miss the deadline/avoid/miss more deadlines/complete breakdown spiral repeatedly in college; one semester I managed to get an F in everything except one class which I got an A in... Organic Chemistry. No sympathy from most of the people I tried to go to, because I got an A in Organic Chemistry. Never mind that at one point in there, I hadn't left my dorm room or eaten in a week, because leaving was scary and moving was effort.

I also have, as I mentioned in another thread, a friend who went to a counselor because she was suicidal and he ignored her because her grades were good, and another friend got a ton of ~youth accomplishment~ awards from gifted organizations but only did everything as precociously as he did because his abusive mother had decided his entire career when he was something like six and pushed it on him crazy-hard, and he's got a chipped tooth from when he eventually told her no.

 

This article [suicide tw] is unfortunately relevant to this thread. I read it in my therapist's office and just felt so relieved that someone, anyone had noticed the problems I saw and had in my life all the fucking time as a kid, that someone recognized that being rich and smart didn't actually make you immune to mental health issues or abuse!

@LadyNighteyes You might want to get checked out for ADD because you sound like me when I stress-spiraled and I officially have an ADD diagnosis now!

 

This isn't a very direct contribution to specific conversational topics going on right now, but regarding the general concept/issue of G&T stuff: I went to a school for ~gifted children~ that became a cult. So alllllll of these Gifted Kid Problems basically crammed into a tiny, inappropriately controlling community, creating a sort of Gifted Kid Problems greenhouse effect and fucking up all kinds of shit.

People assuming that succeeding in K-12 education (i.e. up to age 18) means you'll succeed in university? That fucks up ALL the shit. It's basically the reason I got kicked out of university: the university selected me based on how I performed in K-12, then got pissed off when I didn't thrive in a completely different environment. And when that happened (to me and to others), and we asked for help, the response was basically 'You knew this would be tough. If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen!'

But like... we're not the ones who said we were good enough for Oxbridge. People told us we were all our lives, and that being "Oxbridge material" automatically means that you have to go all the way, take that opportunity, do whatever it takes to get there and graduate. Not trying is not an option. (I actually briefly considered turning down Cambridge to study at Glasgow instead. I thought that it might be less stressful, and therefore better for me academically as well as emotionally. I confessed this to my mother, and the next day, my dad said 'So, I hear you're thinking of not going to Cambridge because it's too difficult?' and I was so ashamed to hear it put that way - because Gifted Kids don't do shit like that!! UNGRATEFUL!!! HOW DARE YOU WASTE YOUR GIFT LIKE THAT - that I never brought it up again. In retrospect, I was completely right; I should totally have turned Cambridge down and gone to Glasgow instead.)

Once we're actually at Oxbridge, though, we're expected to thrive in a completely different system to the one where we used to get straight As. And when we don't, they put the blame on us, even though they're the ones who arbitrarily decided that our straight As in school indicated that we would thrive in their system! We were kids at the time, and trusted the adults from the ~*~Prestigious University Elite~*~ when they assured us that we were Oxbridge Material. They're the experts. They have decades of experience with this. We're kids. And after we're hand-picked by the university, in an extremely gruelling and unforgiving (not to mention archaic and sexist/racist/classist) selection process, they turn around and mock us for believing we were good enough.

 

@autopsyblue : I wasn't very far into the article before I was going "yeeeah, I'm not surprised." Reminds me of how I once visited Cornell, and somebody told me that they had one of the highest rates of successful suicide in the US because of the combination of prestigious school and bridges over really deep ravines everywhere.

And yes, it's very possible that's what I have going on, especially since I have relatives who incontestably have ADHD. (They actually tried putting me on ADHD meds once and I had basically zero response, but I know it can take a lot of experimenting to find meds that work.)

@Elph : I know that tune. >_< I got the same "well if you're any GOOD you'll go to [prestigious school]" thing.

 

I apologize to all on this thread, after my first post I fully meant to read and contribute, but I can read about three posts before I get really, really worked up about how much I hate the primary school system and all the wrongs it does for almost every possible kind of child, but especially children with undiagnosed disorders or diseases, so, turns out, I cannot read this thread. Apologies.

Also apologies for the shit you went through, some of which I skimmed briefly before I worked myself into a tizzy about it.

 

Hey, so.

I went to an elementary school that had a "gifted program" that was a full class. Because the entirety of the gifted program was just teaching you the stuff from a full grade level above. So the fourth-graders learned the fifth grade curriculum, and the fifth-graders learned the sixth grade curriculum, and the sixth-graders learned pre-algebra and other seventh grade subjects.

So then we go to middle school, and at the middle school there are enough kids who come from these accelerated classes that they have an entire bus for the kids going to Algebra 2 and Precalc at the high school so they can show up in time for the next period classes in the middle school.

And then the high school is the kind of place that gets featured in US News and World Report for being one of the best public high schools in the country. The front office ladies were talking about how they were getting phone calls from parents in India and China asking 'how do we get our kids into this school' and their responses would have to be 'um??? move to this school district and establish residency??? it's a public school???'

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that my parents still didn't think this was challenging enough? So I went to a Chinese school on Saturdays. And cycled through a variety of other cram schools.

(One of them was called Ivy Academy. I shit you not.)

Then I was eight, and my younger brother got diagnosed with autism, and the office that gave him the diagnosis is like "...hey can we check out your eldest daughter too" and then I end up with a HFA diagnosis also.

My parents basically treated this diagnosis as "ha ha, the gullible Americans think you're disabled, let's use this to bilk the school out of accommodations so you can look even more brilliant", which is nice except for the fact that I actually do have organization and executive functioning problems and they were --

Well, by middle school my parents agreed with the school that I needed to have every single teacher sign my planner every single period, to make sure I was writing down all the homework assignments. Which is all well and good if you assume the parents are reasonable. My parents sat down at the dinner table with me, every single day, and did not let me get up until I was finished with every single piece of my homework, even if it was actually a long-term project that was supposed to be spread out over several weeks.

And then they punished me if I didn't bring home As.

(The only bright spot is that for one year I was in a non-insane school district because my father's job transferred, and that meant my cram school stuff also had to be online, and the online classes were where I met some of the first friends in my life.)

By high school my parents had given up on the dinner table thing and just constantly yelled at me for not getting my assignments in, while simultaneously still sending me to the cram schools for extra work and telling me I needed to have a social life while never giving me the time to do so.

(Oh, and my high school teachers were quoting that the ideal ratio of class time to outside-of-class study time was 1 hour to 3 hours. If I actually followed that ratio, I would never sleep. As it is, I think someone dies from an amphetamine overdose at this school every other year.)

I had a 6PM curfew in college because my parents wanted to make absolutely sure I was doing my work. I failed out anyway because by then I was horrifically depressed and the Internet was the only thing that made my life anything less than unending shit.

The other students from my elementary school accelerated program are posting on Facebook from Princeton and Stanford and Berkeley.

I hate my life.

 

...what the fuck, I always thought this applied to university, not high school. And even in university this ratio seems too skewed towards outside-of-class study time.

I wrote about my own amazing school experience here. Sometimes I still get these pangs of inferiority, because I keep hearing about my classmates having become successful artists or lawyers or athletes (and in some cases, two of three at the same time) in the same time it took me to acquire an undergraduate degree and a decent, but not stellar job. Then I think about all the people I knew in my school who were just sort of... elegantly disappeared, because my old school can't really mention the uncool alumni and it especially can't mention the people who broke hard enough to drop out before graduating and I feel mildly better. I'm not the only one who didn't become the 1%.

 

can confirm, my mom went to cornell and ive been there a ton of times for various things (her reunions and a fencing camp one year, namely)
they have nets appx halfway to the ground under all the bridges now because the suicide rate was that concerning