The Kintsugi School for the Gifted and Talented

Inspired by an epic derail in the CDCF, a thread for talking about experiences and thoughts on the whole "gifted and talented" thing.

 

Thanks, Rigs.

But serious, fuck that shit. It makes kids who aren't feel dumb and makes the ones in the program feel dumb when they fuck up later in life. UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS, HO!

 

thank u rigs c:

yeah tho... realtalk the day i got my autism diagnosis was like atlas putting down the globe.

 

Oh boy!

I did well enough that no one caught whatever executive function thing I have going on, and I made it to college before I dropped out of the B+/A- average. Since elementary school I based a fair bit of self esteem on being Smart, so struggling in college was just more proof that I was falling apart, too book-smart and insufficiently street-smart to get by in the Real World.

 

Being in ~gifted and talented~ classes was a world of annoying for me bc my classmates STILL did not want to seriously discuss the symbolism and allusions of the ~special gifted and talented~ novels we read so WHAT IN THE FUCK WAS THE POINT

I CAME HERE FOR THE PRETENTIOUS and stayed bc my name was on a list

 

Well, I'm not sure primary school had gifted classes or anything similar, but my mother used to go on and on about how smart all of my teachers thought I was and how I was destined for great things and etc etc. Once I hit year 11 and things started going downhill (because I never really learnt to study, I had no ability to focus on studying and got by on "natural" smarts until that point) she'd also always follow it up with 'What happened? You used to be so smart'. I don't have a particularly strong emotional reaction to things, but that always bothered me. Then I hit uni and was doing not so great, and it was the same. Good marks got a 'you could've done better' and bad marks got a 'I'm disappointed, you could've done better'. My brother and sister-in-law ended up going back to university and got good marks, and she would talk about it and there was always 'why aren't you doing as good as them' hanging in the air, whether stated or unstated.

'You could've done better' taught me that unless I got 100%, there was no point in trying. It would get the same reaction, regardless. Fuck that noise.

 

#1 thing I will never say to my or any child when they ask for help:

"You're smart. Figure it out." -- My Mom

 

i just remember

sitting in the dining room staring down at a bunch of numbers that didnt make any sense that made sense before in the classroom when i was writing them out
not allowed to listen to music because it would distract me
confused and frustrated, and just writing random numbers down so i could go to bed finally

i even sat down with my math teacher and asked questions, but the questions i asked werent relevant to the math and she didnt have time to explain them to me so i went away blaming myself for being stupid at math

in college i waited until junior year to take precalc even though i needed it
(i am so glad i took precalc first)
and the precalc prof was so wonderful! people who rated her said she spent too long going over everything but for once i finally understood how math worked

and then the next semester i took calc and ended up dropping it because the prof was exactly like my high school teacher- enthusiastic and jumping around subjects and every time she explained something it made it worse

...and that's why i went into psych!

(funny thing actually, psych stats was really fun for me, and so was the math for electrical engineering & digital electronics. but normal calculus makes me actually feel anxiety apparently.)

 

Gifted and smart mostly just meant completely undiagnosed mental illness even though I'm 99% sure that I was experiencing generalized anxiety and depression at least as early as 4th grade, if not earlier.

If you're still getting As, you must not have any problems. Basically.

It also meant thinking I was super smart until I got somewhere with standards and then nope. D:

 

Oh man. Okay, so I had two wonderful math teachers, one right after another. One retaught me and let me retake the tests afterwards. I never got a 100% but I certainly did better then the 40% I'd gotten earlier. Algebra 2 was hard for me. Then Trig! My teacher let me stall on the midterm I'd missed bc I'd been hospitalized until the end of the year. Helped it was multiple choice, I always was better at guess and check with those. Then I hit precal. The teacher, he was a good guy, funny and sarcastic and if you knew what the fuck you were doing, a good teacher.

Me, not so much. I'd get so lost in his fast paced lessons I'd end up playing ACNL. Which, while not a good idea, did make me feel better. I'd do that til we started a new section, rinse repeat. I always tried at first, then gave up after I just got so lost it was like listening to my friend KC talking about Latin.

 

My best math teacher was actually my high school calc teacher, though I didn't really appreciate him at the time because of the Massive Breakdown I was in the middle of having that year. But basically he 100% understood what it was like to Just Not Get something. He'd wanted to be a math teacher but failed out of undergrad for his first try, and then worked on math on the side while doing Other Jobs To Pay The Bills until he could get back in and pass his classes. But looking back, it was nice to have someone who knew what it was like to just fail at something and have to try again.

 

Yeah, that was my algebra 2 teacher too. He understood that it was hard to grasp some things, and as long as I went to him, I always got help, even if it wasn't going to like, stick in my head long term, it kept me above water so I didn't drown feeling like I'd have to leave my magnet program and go to the worst high school in the county, my boundary school. (if you wanna know the school go look for that roosevelt school in fallout 3, it's based on my hs.)

 

yeah my precalc prof was impossibly nice

like she was amazing
i, uh, got her final and another class' final mixed up, and the other class' final was cancelled...
so i panicked and emailed her the day of, and got a reply consisting of "i was just about to email you to find out why you were gone today! come in anytime this week and i can set you up"

if i ever have kids im naming them after her probably

 

Oh man, I hated that one. Did you also get "You should already know this"? Or "Why are you acting like this is difficult?"

My older sister and I were both pegged as "gifted" in...first grade, I think? And our school district was tiny and poor, so they didn't do much with it, except use it as a reason to hold us to higher standards than everyone else. My sister became a neurotic perfectionist who never got less than an A-; I did the bare minimum necessary to pass my classes, and spent a lot of time having panic attacks. My brother, who was not "gifted", has social skills and far fewer mental health problems. I'm pretty sure he came out the best of the three of us.

 

oh my god, so

in 2nd grade it was my first year at a new school because we moved

i was small and quiet and not so good at making new friends and also miserable

and my 2nd grade teacher was pregnant, and awful to me. just. awful.

she was constantly holding me in for recess for "disobedience" even though in most cases i was literally misunderstanding what she wanted

in one case she told me to go get paper towels, and i parsed it as "more paint" and brought her more paint, which cost me my second recess that day

anyway

the whole year was miserable until about april or whatever when she went off and had her kid

great

fine

ok

except that it turns out that

a) she married someone who had almost the exact last name as me, off by a letter or two and pronounced the same

b) gave the kid my birth first and middle name


just

eeguuuggghhhh

 

oh god that's baddddddd
oh god wth

im laughing but out of sympathy, honest

 

it's kind of hilarious but when i found out she'd named her kid after me (about 6-7 years later becuase my mom ran into her at the grocery store) I was like D:

 

@Keffy
What the ever loving fuck??? that's just. that's just being a shitty teacher and then just being weird.

 

oml. dude, okay. after the mensa thing--which requires a timed IQ test--my brother was next. like... if *i* was that ~*special*~ he had to have something, right? yeah. two standard deviations below me on the test, just low enough to not qualify for mensa himself, but higher than everyone else in his grade level, and since i'm a year older than he is they'd already figured out what they wanted to do with me, so instead of cautious 'let's put you here and see what happens' like i got, they tossed him right into my shadow and expected him to live up to everything i did. they had no idea i was working myself to nightly panic attacks and only excelling where i did because my autism brain meant i could do those things without any effort at all.

my brother is NT. he couldn't hope to keep up. so while i was crying into my pillow at night and learning the fine art of faking sick so that i could skip school, he was just... checking out, mentally and emotionally.

now he's 22, has a criminal record for fighting and failing to appear before a judge about it, hasn't bathed in actual YEARS (yes, years, that isn't hyperbole) and lives in a pigsty that the rest of the family is afraid to touch because of germs. he hasn't brushed his hair, shaved, or clipped his toenails since before his last shower. sometimes he goes a month without changing his underwear--something i only know because my grandmother feels the need to tell me about it. a lot.

so the 'gifted' thing bit both of us. me because i was, and him because he wasn't.

 

i actually really enjoyed the gifted program i was in for two years (switched to IB after that). i'd been the weird kid and isolated in my elementary school, but now i knew a whole bunch of other people who loved learning (and several whom, now that i know the term, had perseverations.) we even got to do individual research projects on a theme of our choice. (at one point there was a school contest to find how many words you could make with the letters in a sentence. the class produced several pages' worth.) plus i was finally getting work that was actually interesting; i'd been bored as anything most of the time in elementary, and i'd get in trouble for reading.

tbh it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, at the time.