Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of “exceptional children” pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of “Special Needs” but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means “kids that teachers need to make exceptions for”
“Gifted” programs royally screwed my education. I had huge gaps in my knowledge because they decided that being top percentile in reading/writing (and being the weird kid) meant I could just skip out on classes for special little weird classes or sit with higher grade classes. I just had ADHD btw and really liked to read. Anyway, I would LOVE to know wtf they thought they were doing moving a kid around that much in 3rd-5th. I suffered the hardest with math. I was missing bits and pieces, which is pretty gd important in math, and I’d still somehow get the answers right but talked to about my overly complicated or ✨creative✨ solutions lol. Even now I hide my work if I need to solve something because I’m probably doing it weird… Then later it was really fun finding out that I couldn’t really live up to being “gifted”. 0/10 being special made me less educated.
Skipping classes as a “gifted” kid always seemed like a very weird concept to me, you’re making the child lose a lot of interaction with their peers for dubious reasons. It seems to me like it should only be reserved for the most bulging hyperwrinkled brains, like those kids that finish college by the time they’re 16 or whatever that would obviously be extremely understimulated when going the normal pace. Even then you could argue the gigabrain kid would probably benefit greatly from socializing with their peers, I mean where’s the rush really? They’re young, they can always learn more later.
those kids that finish college by 16 usually just have parents that pay a fuckton of money to skip their kids through the honestly very simple and bleak public schooling experience. has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with not dragging out units for ages and paying a small fortune to get private tutors and certified testing done.
For what it’s worth, math can be taught very linearly, but I think it can be explored and approached many different ways. I did the same thing, the teachers would say “I don’t know how, but you got the right answer”.
I kind of wish we leaned more into the way individual kids intuitions of math worked, I think you could teach the foundations much faster that way.
3-5 is mostly arithmetic and intro to word problems anyway, I’m awful at arithmetic but it doesn’t affect doing any of the important parts of math.
I think a good part of that is because ‘average human’ is not a good way to represent who we are individually. I’m probably above average at specific things but in many other respects I’m average or below or wherever I’m supposed to be. Maybe most people are above average even though on average most of us are average.
Fully above average people IMO are like astronauts and stuff. We all live in the shadow of that former navy seal/doctor/astronaut who is like 45 or some crazy shit.
This really depends on the distribution. If some or all of the people in that bottom 20% are very, very stupid it could actually work out that 80% are above average, because the average is being pulled down by the people at the bottom.
This is why we have different averages like mean, median, mode, and RMS because they each give you different interpretations of the raw data. For example the mean electro motive force of the grid is around 0 volts because it spends as much time in the negative as the positive. We use RMS here because negative numbers become positive when squared.
Just the fact that you’re thinking about this in terms of a distribution that’s non-normal indicates that you’re on the right side of that distribution.
To be honest I don’t think intelligence can be boiled down to a single number. Like somebody or something can have a slow processing speed but can do a lot of different things, versus something or someone that is incredibly fast but limited in it’s usage. To some extent this actually happens inside human minds with things like system 1 vs system 2 in psychology having different roles within the brain/mind of a human and being suited to different things (flexible but slow and single tasking vs dumb but fast and parralel in this case).
Also I am considered by my society to have a mental disability. So regardless of how far right of this distribution I might be there are still things I don’t understand that more average people can. You could argue that those things are only domain-specific forms of intelligence but I don’t know if that’s actually true or not. There are too many variables and anomalies we don’t understand.
I was in the “gifted and talented” program as a kid and all it meant was I got more homework lmao. Good thing I loved reading and actually enjoyed being assigned novel chapters
I think I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that I was effectively being punished for understanding the normal material more easily than my classmates, and I didn’t get why my “gifted and talented” work was necessary, since it was, to me, bonus material, and not even interesting bonus material.
A core memory of mine is after showing up one time without an assignment done, my teacher decided to go around the room asking what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. All my G&T classmates said standard kid answers like doctor, lawyer, firefighter, whatever. Not being a smartass, I gave the genuine answer that, because I really liked Taco Bell, and there was a taco bell in walking distance, I’d be happy to work there and get some free Taco Bell.
Teacher called my parents.
How the fuck was I supposed to know giving a real, and in hindsight significantly more attainable answer was unacceptable? We were in elementary school, so why the hell would I know at that point that basic food service is basically non-viable in America?
At first, us “academically gifted” kids were only separated from the general population for language arts, but later in middle school they expanded the program for math, and the way they implemented that was we skipped 7th grade math entirely and took the normal 8th grade curriculum, “pre-algebra.” So that as a freshman in high school, I would take 10th grade math, etc.
I think I took less time than the average 6th grader to “get it.” I didn’t need 50 practice problems for homework to become proficient in long division, 30 would do. I think a 7th grade math class that included a little less plug and chug practice and more word problems and practical application, ie reinforcing what this math we’re learning is for and how to really use it, would have helped me a lot.
Instead, I was just thrown forward a year and expected to just handle it, and even taking a course called “advanced math topics” which amounted to “algebra 3” rather than taking pre-calculus my senior year of high school, I never caught back up.
Something really similar happened to me in lower grades. As a result of their fuckery I had big gaps in basic math and it caused me problems/self doubt that lasted… Actually I’m still really self conscious about it god dammit. Everyone saw that stupid rain man movie and little ADHD “weird kids” like me that just really liked reading got screwed
This isn’t true at all. IQ isn’t some magical catch-all measure of a person’s intellectual ability, but it’s not entirely total quackery either.
I suspect that academic success would be very strongly correlated with having a supportive home life, but IQ not so much. Maybe the gifted kids you refer to were the academically successful ones and not the high-IQ ones?
They once had me take one of those horoscopes and one part of it was a rorschach test. How is that not quakery.
Another part was to have me write a short text wich fair enough.
fill in mulltiple choise questions that were deliveratly obtuse and ambigous.
The only part that i would expect to corrrelaete with intelligence was when i had to memorize a string of numbers and repeat it after a while. But even then this is an ability you can train.
IQ is bullshit in the sense that as a measurement of cognitive abilities it doesn’t really work, but that doesn’t mean the only factor influencing intelligence is social upbringing either
i mean, say what you will, but i could have the most supportive environment on earth and i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t ever be the second coming of messi (or michael jordan for you gringos), same should go for newton, knorozov or whoever
Of course. Humans are not clones. As long as they are not there is some variance due to physiological inherited factors.
That being said a lot of intelligence can be trained.
And a lot of it is culturally loaded. Im sure the average paleolithic hunter gatherer was smarter than me because they have to constantly solve complex problems. While people today rely on civilization to take on the load.
We dont actually do t need to be that intelligent know a days. And actually very few people relly care about it. For example there is some disiese going around that has about 7% chance of leaving you mentally handicapped. And you can catch it reapeatedly. No one really cares. Because they never came to a situation were their inherent intelligence was the bottleneck to solve a problem. Once eventually everyone loses 10or 20% of their intelligence they will still be fine.
So most of these asholes going woe is me im so samart. 1-Are not really that smart. 2-inherent phisiological limitations to cognitive avility have never been an actual limitation in their lives.
The iq is bullshit in the sense the the tests are bullshit. Only the part testing working memory relates to those innate charachteristics.
You are the one trying to start shit here. If you had a more nuanced response. In this case, an example would be descriving your experience. You would get a more nuanced response. See the other guy.
All I did was say I took an IQ test that didn’t have any of the elements in yours. You came back calling me stupid.
Elaborate on how I started shit with you. Explain yourself. How the fuck do you envision yourself as being justified. How the fuck do you explain your perception of me starting shit with you.
I know lots of people that didn’t grew up in a supportive environment and have a high IQ. I mean on the level of “my parents/father (it’s mostly the father) never cared about me and now I have sevear depression and tried to kill myself” level. And partially they were pregnant at the age of 13/14
And I did grew up in a supportive environment and am stupid as fuck.
Maybe on average, but you’ve got my ass who was put in the gifted program from 2nd grade on, with a single mom who was working two jobs and thus wasn’t around much, and who couldn’t afford childcare so I had to spend most of my before and after school time with my physically violent and abusive grandmother. Not that being in said program did much good (between the bad home situation and my ADHD, I was constantly in trouble at school), I didn’t even finish my bachelor’s in the end, but there were a few of us “smart” kids with fucked up home lives in there too.
Yeah the comic reeks of PMC brainworms. I say that as someone with PMC brainworms. “You’re special enough to make decisions, but make sure you cultivate too much self-doubt to make true change.”
I had to do an official test along with a psychological examination for reasons when I was almost 18 years old, so I know at some point I was in the blue zone or above, but it doesn’t really fucking matter when you have autism, a mood disorder and have been neglected by your parents so you never learned things like determination or frustration tolerance. I think I shaved a solid 10 IQ points off anyway from almost a decade of substance abuse issues, so now I’m just autistic and dysfunctional without the gifted part.
Serious question: what kind of drug abuse does it take to shave off 10 IQ points? I’ve done my fair share and would prefer not to have that happen to me - if it hasn’t already.
“with all that million dollar you still can’t be a doctor, did you know your nephew could play violins blindfolded while performing a surgery when he was still 3 years old. What a disappointment”
The secret is we’re all gifted and talented in our own ways. Our society is structured to benefit and work for a specific kind of gifted and talented. You got to an early start, and then when it was determined your talents weren’t profitable, the problem was framed as you wasting them instead or the system failing you.
Not to mention our current identification of gifted and talented is basically just “So you know how that one kid has ADHD and his lack of structure in their home life results in poor grades? Well we put them in the remedial class. There we will teach them coping and organization skills. Meanwhile, this other kid? They also have ADHD but we don’t realize it because their grades are fantastic. Turns out their home life is stressful in a specific way that means they get good grades, but they don’t really know why or what structure is helping them. I school we will put them in the gifted and talented class. There, they’ll be in an unstructured environment where they can learn and explore at their own pace and OH NO NOW THEY’RE ANXIOUS AND UPSET BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO BECAUSE THEY WERE THRIVING IN THE STRUCTURE OF A REGULAR CLASSROOM”
Our education system is not based on individual need and instead on assuming everyone is basically the same, just more or less advanced
I definitely identify with the second kid. Being tossed around so much because they tried to figure me out and failed definitely doesn't help. "You're good! But not good enough."
I had a moment in elementary school I’m still working through. I was in 5th grade and reading a book I thought was really fun and exciting and I was enjoying it. My teacher pulled me aside one day to inform me I was underperforming my reading level because the book was written for a 3rd grade reading level and I was capable of reading at a 9th grade reading level. But here’s the thing: what 10-year-old wants to read a 9th grade set of books? What 10-year-old wants to read To Kill a Mockingbird?
I honestly haven’t had the enthusiasm or fervor for reading ever since. I’ve had bouts of being able to focus on reading for a few months at a time, but the energy always burns out after a while. It’s something I have to focus on when I’m in a book store or library that most of the printed word is, at the end of the day, schlock, and that’s a GOOD THING. We all like schlock-y things. Whatever schlock that it is that you’re into, you’re into it. Maybe you like three camera sitcoms even though the laugh track is cheesy. It could be you like superhero movies, even though Marvel puts out 3 a year, and it’s hard to keep up with them and everyone you know has been less enthusiastic about them ever since Endgame. Perhaps you love video games, but you spend some time every day investing time into a completely non-challenging game on your phone. I’d even include foodies who go to Taco Bell every so often. We all have non-challenging schlock that we enjoy and consume, and that’s OKAY. It’s what makes the non-schlock elevate itself to a higher level when you experience it.
So bottom line.
Don’t let anyone detract your schlock. They have their schlock, you don’t judge them for it. Love your schlock unironically. You’re beautiful and perfect, and so is your schlock.
Doubt is a sign of intelligence. Which can sometimes lead to confidence issues. Just try to keep things in perspective and not let doubt keep you from taking calculated risks. It’s when we allow ourselves to become paralyzed that things regress. A lot of it is environment as well so there’s no simple answer but I can assure you thet you’re not alone.
Others have touched on this, but ultimately the most vital trait a person can possess is perseverance and a bias for action. I would gladly work with a mediocre person who works relentlessly at improving their skills and figuring out solutions. I don’t enjoy working with “gifted” people who have plenty of ideas and few actions to show for it. Intelligence can make you risk averse, and you’re useless if you’re too afraid to take any action.
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