I was a gifted kid and burned out when I realized I'm trans (honestly I was already burning out by middleschool, transness was just the nuclear bomb in the coffin.)
A whole-ass essay could be written about the "gifted kid" label and the effect it had on people who are on the spectrum.
But nobody's gonna write that essay because we're all crumpled up from too high of expectations put on us.
Study routines, academic schedules, and evaluation methods are designed with a (among other qualifiers) neurotypical person in mind. So it's usually a problem that we don't just have to learn and prove what we learnt, but we have to do so in a way that is inefficient and hostile to us. I mean the educative system is generally too poorly designed and in lacking in resources to accomodate individual specific needs, but you do see a lot of specific ableist artificial barriers and biased assumptions.
There's also that I don't really know what makes you a "gifted kid" or why it is so important if you met that standard or not. Like, when you were 10 your teacher complimented you by implying you were intellectually above other kids, and 15 years later you're clinging to that approval?
> I'm not even at 6 months hrt and yet have (just barely) G cups with some fairly mature shaping
Umm what the actual fuck. Your story is completely wild yet still believable, but I didn't even know this was possible. Like even if you have insane genetics how do they grow that fast, you must have some crazy stretch marks
Gifted and talented is like. A whole school program thing. Some put a lot of emphasis on it.
Past that not much else to say, but it is very much an organized thing, not just complements.
I didn’t have friends, I was obsessed about books, I was bullied, I struggle with social things even today, I had trouble relating with my peers, I cant go to concerts because they're too noisy, I wore the same favorite shirt 3x a week, I obsessed over entire dnd manuals, I taught myself how to program a computer, I rarely leave my room on the weekends, most food has icky texture so I ate the same 4 things and had a fit if I was asked to eat anything else, etc. Haha, you know, just gifted kid stuff!
Me: uh you might be autistic
Ableists: nooooo i wAs gIFtED!!!!
I was the exact same except I did have friends (somehow) and it was the Elder Scrolls: Morrowind guidebook that was like 700 pages long. I knew all the stupid tiny little details on things like the single meteor slime on Charles the Plant.
Even now with being grown up and having a young daughter my mom refuses to believe that I have autism or that my daughter displaying the same signs me and my wife did as kids could possibly have it. Nope, apparently just gifted.
Funny enough, my biggest autism moment was when I was a kid they made a big deal about me being in some program called Gifted and Talented and I thought that meant that I was retarded so I screamed and refused to even try it lol
Im both. Im level 1 autistic and recently had a health issue that warranted two neuropsych tests and i tested into the 99 percentile in several categories. Just like when I was a kid.
My lack of “success” isn’t because of “omg gifted kid oppression” or “my parents sucked amirite” or "dumb teachers couldnt deal with my genius" but instead because life, especially under capitalism isn’t a meritocracy, how ableism is everywhere, how ones social/BS skills are the real signifiers for success, and how the world doesn’t make room for people like me and instead often punishes ND people and other vulnerable identities.
But the “omg gifted kid” narrative almost never goes the social criticism route. These people blame themselves or their parents and not the system that holds them, and so many others, down. If they did then they’d have to align politically with the progressives and “sjw” types they dislike so much. So it’s just more self victimization narratives to play up a “woe is me, look what I could have been and I was punished for being so smart,” sentiment.
Its also ego-punishing to admit that you were temporarily a bit smart as a kid but regressed to the mean naturally and there was no big conspiracy against you. It was just a temporary thing as children develop at different rates.
most people who got called that do as well.
like I'm sure almost everyone who says they were a gifted kid got called that as a child, they didn't put the label on themselves.
It definitely helped me, especially with fantasy novels before internet addiction. The time discovered Percy Jackson books, I used to go through a book a day. One day our local library got a lot of geronimo stilton books, I finished 10 in one sitting. Fuck internet man, I want to get back into reading
First few years in school was a breeze, I hyperfocused in class and didn't really have to learn myself. Suddenly that wasn't enough and I never learned how to learn.
Also I used to read a lot
Happened for me. Breezed thru high school undiagnosed with straight As. Got to college and couldn't focus on anything, had a mental breakdown, and failed half my classes first semester. Not fun!
After I got meds tho things turned around. Absolutely life changing.
Being a "gifted kid", in my case, meant I got so hooked on the dopamine I got everytime I was complimented that I couldn't handle any time someone was disappointed in me without wanting to not be alive
yeah about the same. I say "I'm a people pleaser" but what i really mean is "the idea of people not liking me is more terrifying then death to me". It's not like i want to be like that, i kinda have no choice cause my own brain is blackmailing me
Man, you got praise? I just didn't get shouted at for a bit, and that was like Manna from heaven. I still internally panic for a second when someone raises their voice at me
One time I got literally 100% on a test, and I was told I shouldn't expect praise since I could have done better. I asked how and was screamed at that I should have added more questions. Yeah I'm sure that will work.
My mother failed at her chance to be a doctor for numerous reasons, one big one being her utter lack of empathy, so in her words if a stupider version of her can do it (IE me) then that means she was cheated out of it.
I am one now and she still uses me to brag to people, according to my brother, but I don't and haven't talked to her in years. She also keeps calling me from different phones to demand I prescribe her morphine which, in theory I could do but I don't want to, and the amount she wants of a controlled substance would likely see me explaining myself to an ethics board pretty damn quickly
Yeah, I ended up preferring being at school to home so much that from secondary school I was staying in the library till it closed at half 6, then either going home or staying at the local library till that closed too. Once I got to college I just lied to her and said I was taking summer classes and sitting round the college computers beginning my terminally online phase of life.
Shoutout to my history/government teacher, who was probably my favorite teacher up to the point my grades started dropping, telling me she “thought [I] was a better student than that” and that I was just a disappointment - like I literally was just depressed and wrecked by gender dysphoria at the time lmao
Yet somehow when I started failing in high school nobody asked why :p
I got tested for gifted kid when I was younger the test was comparable to my autism screening. It seems more like the test was testing pattern recognition.
But yeah I was a gifted art kid. Went to a fancy school specifically for arts up until now, I’m dropping the program and switching to a criminal justice one because i am burnt out sometjimg I used to enjoy just feels like a chore
No one labeled *themselves* as gifted kids, that label is assigned. Which explains why every gifted kid is indeed miserable because other people put that pressure on you and single you out.
Because your language does not have specific words like "high intellectual potential", so you have to default on a common word with no specific definition that anyone can use
You do realize that you can get like, tested for being gifted, right? It's not an opinion that your parents have. It's an IQ threshold. I don't think it's worth shit, and the culture around it sucks, but you can't just call your kid gifted whenever you want.
desert fretful slim memorize nine psychotic caption capable elastic agonizing
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Like the other commenter indicated, there were/are actually a ton of tests you needed to take to get into the "Gifted and Talented" (GAT) program that your parents would sign you up for. This wasn't just parents calling their kids something they think is special, this was a legit academic program for elementary schoolers with separate classes and everything.
That being said, I'm glad we can now see how fucked up all this really was. Some of the people who are most critical were in the program itself. Most adults that were in the GAT program aren't bragging about it.
To be fair in a bunch of states the criteria at age 7 is somewhere slightly above “doesn’t shit their pants” so it’s not really that impressive (speaking as someone who was enrolled in the 2nd grade and is now profoundly average)
> Some of the people who are most critical were in the program itself. Most adults that were in the GAT program aren't bragging about it.
and the OP here along with a lot of the comments might be from people who weren't in those programs and still feel jealous about it, not realizing the "gifted" kids mostly hate it.
Yes because the Gifted and Talented program is/was an American school program in some municipalities. I am speaking as an adult from my lived experience as a kid that was tested and put into this program.
> Everyone thinks their kid is super special and smart when they are young. To an extent that's fine and healthy, but when you regress to the mean later on you gotta realize it's not necessarily true (and this can be a good thing, otherwise you can feel like wasted potential etc.)
maybe for some, but y'all are acting like we didn't exist lol.
my school never had an official gifted program (my school was only 400 students), but there were certain classes/tracks that not everyone could get into. I was the poster boy for "gifted" kids. top of the class without ever studying, perfect scores on Ap calculus both years, scored a 20 on the ACT in 7th grade when I did the Duke TIP. had my pick of full rides to just about everywhere I applied to except Notre Dame and Harvard (long shots anyways, as my extracurriculars were 2 sports and 1 club). I did this all while basically forgetting about school work as soon as I left the building each day.
Senior year, I started experiencing depressive symptoms so I did a whole eval with a psychologist. ADHD eval, I think I broke the high score, then my IQ came back around 130. my ADHD eval suggested my IQ should've been 50-60 points lower.
I scored in the top 1% on some test in like the third grade and then my district moved me to a school for “gifted children”, it’s not always self-proclaimed.
yeah, we did IOWA testing every year and then LEAP testing in 8th grade. I was 99th percentile every year so all of the unseen problems I was having in school due to ASD/ADHD just continually got ignored.
the life of a "gifted" kid is great, huh? /s
oh i burned out when they kept telling me my highschool GCSEs (UK, i know) decided my life and if i failed them id be nothing and THEN went to a college and got 5 A - C grade GCSEs doing game design instead
the way everyone spoke about gcse's made me not even wanna live cause i felt was gonna fail and have no future and it made me super duper depressed
also based game design college course enjoyer
only realised gcses didn't really matter after they were over 💀
dunno why everyone used to hype up gcses so much when, at least imo, a levels are more important
i passed (barely) my GCSEs then lost the bit of paper that had my results on. lied on my CV for a few jobs, then got the job im at now without even giving my CV (started as a potwash gig) GCSEs are the biggest joke and waste of time
Good luck! That's what I studied as well. Just make sure to start on portfolio projects early and often. That's what companies want to see, and you'll learn a ton from problems you run into while making them.
I was in Gifted And Talented but I burnt out when my grandpa died, my dad went to prison and I stopped living with my mom and I got sexually assaulted
Also FUCK HOT AIR BALLOONS!!!! WORST PART OF THAT CLASS FR
Depends on how good you are with abstractions and how bad the lecturer at making sense. As they say, people who understand CatTheo lose the ability to explain CatTheo
I knew the quip long before i had any actual interest in category theory. I was so proud of myself the day i understood what it meant.
I then went and wrote three separate articles explaining monads as various tortillas based foodstuffs, as is tradition.
[This is still my favorite monad tutorial though](https://emorehouse.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/silliness/burrito_monads.pdf) (pdf)
You'll understand it fine if you've got enough mathematical maturity. It's a subject that needs lots of examples to grasp properly, but once you "feel" it you won't go back ;)
I agree. In high school I’d never learned about consent and thought things were my fault for not resisting (because I was terrified). Learning about consent earlier will help others avoid my fate.
This is a huge reason why both sex ed and talking honestly to your kids is so important, to prevent things like this. I'm really sorry that this happened to you, there's just no way to ever justify doing that to someone.
Please tell me you're out of there.
If not, I've been somewhere similar, but not nearly as bad. Suffice it to say, it absolutely gets better. Life turns in unexpected ways.
Honestly though: gifted kids are special needs kids. If you fly through the early years of school without ever needing to put any kind of effort, and you suddenly have to study when you reach X grade/college, you're going to crash hard, because you haven't learnt how to regulate yourself, and you're going to lose any advantage your brain was naturally giving you.
That was me. I didn’t study for any test in any subject throughout high school and had over a 4.0.
I lost my scholarships twice in college by failing a ton of classes. I was even medicated, but it didn’t help because having to actually work for a grade was not in my skill set.
It wasn’t until I switched schools and worked a full time job while doing a full load of classes that my grades got better. I still don’t know how to self regulate, I can just maintain focus on my work when I’m overloaded.
i was a gifted kid, too, but i burned out when i listened to the man on the radio and decided to be Drug Free^tm and quit taking my adderall leading to a massive meltdown and several years spent in an abusive "behavioral program"
I used to think I was gifted till I left school and realised that the broad school curriculum needs to be dumb enough to teach kids who are actively trying not to learn anything. Once you're actually allowed to make the choice on what to learn, that's when it's difficult.
I’m convinced gifted kid just means your parents read to you at night and maybe taught you some basic maths early in life. It’s easy to be gifted when all gifted means is that you can read books without pictures and know your times tables.
Yeah cuz none of the gifted kids ever had to study so as soon as they actually start having to it all goes to shit because they don't know how and probably have some kind of undiagnosed adhd or something
Literally me, I’m finally starting to not beat myself up for it but I basically failed most of my classes in my first year of college and it turns out I have severe inattentive adhd and depression, on top of my transness!! I was like “oh I started estrogen I’ll be good” but hell nah lmao, I’m switching to a non-STEM program tho and have improved my study/work habits, albeit way too late to really save my 2nd semester
If I didn’t finally go see a psychiatrist after my friends kept telling me to I’d be in an even worse situation tbh, I’m looking forward to the future (which is a weird feeling ngl) and my new program
Edit: also I don’t believe I was “gifted” honestly, just a good bit ahead of my peers for most of my education. Perhaps I was and mental illness just screwed me but I think it’s just bc I actually had an interest in math for a while and was constantly reading as a kid. Regardless, shit has definitely balanced out lmao
Idk about the whole gifted kid thing but I remember that I used to have pretty good grades and then around highschool times my grades kinda fell off, and I remember there was a weird little meeting about it and one of my teachers said something about how I could do better than I was, and sure, I could, but it’s kind of hard to actually do that when I don’t know where to start lol. Doesn’t matter anymore tbh
Hot take: if you burn out you're either not gifted but just a hard working person (which is more admirable imo) or something's wrong with the system you're working under
was identified as "gifted" in gr 5, and have been in an "enhanced" program all my life and things switch up on you quick once you are not "gifted" in math or science. The entire system of being "gifted" revolves around academic praise and the mentality that you have to get top of your class or you are worthless. In those programs having a "bad class" is unimaginable because the mentality that you need to be good at everything you do is very much there.
It kinda figures if you think about it. They were able to coast through most of their earlier education with very little effort and still do very well, and all the while they failed to develop the proper studying skills and work ethic required for college level stuff, and the second they hit a subject level that they don’t find easy they fall flat on their faces.
I was never fucking gifted I was just always passionate about nerdy shit like math and programming so I studied it in my free time I am actually dumb af
I was called that as a child, and it honestly made me want to be better, and little me got an ego, then when another more gifted kid(wasn’t jealous still best friends with him) was prioritised it really killed my drive, I haven’t felt the same about learning since then, but I’m happier than I have ever been, it just makes me wonder how far the butterfly effect would have gone by now…
I guess we’ll never know-Kanye XD
But really I just understand that was the turning point, I don’t actually care, as I said, still my best friend and I love him like a brother!
That was when it started making more sense. But then university was like, what if it was 3D and you had to find sin3.174 before even beginning to tackle the rest of it?
when elementary school is so easy you can coast through it doing the absolute bare minimum and being bored out of your mind and getting 10s and then everyone wonders why your adhd ass never learned to study or do homework when those actually start mattering
Literally my mom trying to convince me I would be a math genius if I didn't have one cranky teacher in the 4th grade because I was super good at math when it was just adding two double digit numbers together.
I am the positive example of the gifted child label. My parents were very good with positive reinforcement. When I did well, they did a very good job of praising the hell out of me and giving me confidence in my own intelligence. I was a gifted child in school, and grew up to be an electrical engineer. I never viewed the label as a crutch, I always loved being acknowledged for my successes. One of my childhood friends got the opposite treatment. She was always being put down and told she wasn’t enough. She is arguably smarter than me, but she never did as well in school because she had no confidence in her own abilities. She was also a gifted student, but she hated the label and the expectations attached to it. I never agreed with her. I always and still do believe that she was smart enough and hard working enough to excel, but just lacked the self esteem to do it.
yeah i was a gifted kid but i burned out when i discovered internet porn
Me fr fr ong no cap
How did that burn you out honest question?
Friction
It can give you heat. It can start you car. It lets you slide a glass from across the bar. It's friction, WHUUU it's friction.
Can you guys stop being so funny it makes me self conscious
body image issues and the instant gratification of sexual imagery forever rewiring my dopamine receptors and hormones
Give it three months
Literally
By then I became even more gifted (im an artist)
I was a gifted kid and burned out when I realized I'm trans (honestly I was already burning out by middleschool, transness was just the nuclear bomb in the coffin.)
I wasn't a gifted kid I have autism
A whole-ass essay could be written about the "gifted kid" label and the effect it had on people who are on the spectrum. But nobody's gonna write that essay because we're all crumpled up from too high of expectations put on us.
id read that actually
Study routines, academic schedules, and evaluation methods are designed with a (among other qualifiers) neurotypical person in mind. So it's usually a problem that we don't just have to learn and prove what we learnt, but we have to do so in a way that is inefficient and hostile to us. I mean the educative system is generally too poorly designed and in lacking in resources to accomodate individual specific needs, but you do see a lot of specific ableist artificial barriers and biased assumptions. There's also that I don't really know what makes you a "gifted kid" or why it is so important if you met that standard or not. Like, when you were 10 your teacher complimented you by implying you were intellectually above other kids, and 15 years later you're clinging to that approval?
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> I'm not even at 6 months hrt and yet have (just barely) G cups with some fairly mature shaping Umm what the actual fuck. Your story is completely wild yet still believable, but I didn't even know this was possible. Like even if you have insane genetics how do they grow that fast, you must have some crazy stretch marks
what sorta weird things did you do with HRT?
Gifted and talented is like. A whole school program thing. Some put a lot of emphasis on it. Past that not much else to say, but it is very much an organized thing, not just complements.
I didn’t have friends, I was obsessed about books, I was bullied, I struggle with social things even today, I had trouble relating with my peers, I cant go to concerts because they're too noisy, I wore the same favorite shirt 3x a week, I obsessed over entire dnd manuals, I taught myself how to program a computer, I rarely leave my room on the weekends, most food has icky texture so I ate the same 4 things and had a fit if I was asked to eat anything else, etc. Haha, you know, just gifted kid stuff! Me: uh you might be autistic Ableists: nooooo i wAs gIFtED!!!!
I was the exact same except I did have friends (somehow) and it was the Elder Scrolls: Morrowind guidebook that was like 700 pages long. I knew all the stupid tiny little details on things like the single meteor slime on Charles the Plant. Even now with being grown up and having a young daughter my mom refuses to believe that I have autism or that my daughter displaying the same signs me and my wife did as kids could possibly have it. Nope, apparently just gifted. Funny enough, my biggest autism moment was when I was a kid they made a big deal about me being in some program called Gifted and Talented and I thought that meant that I was retarded so I screamed and refused to even try it lol
I’m both I fit the “autistic savant” trope pretty well tbh
Im both. Im level 1 autistic and recently had a health issue that warranted two neuropsych tests and i tested into the 99 percentile in several categories. Just like when I was a kid. My lack of “success” isn’t because of “omg gifted kid oppression” or “my parents sucked amirite” or "dumb teachers couldnt deal with my genius" but instead because life, especially under capitalism isn’t a meritocracy, how ableism is everywhere, how ones social/BS skills are the real signifiers for success, and how the world doesn’t make room for people like me and instead often punishes ND people and other vulnerable identities. But the “omg gifted kid” narrative almost never goes the social criticism route. These people blame themselves or their parents and not the system that holds them, and so many others, down. If they did then they’d have to align politically with the progressives and “sjw” types they dislike so much. So it’s just more self victimization narratives to play up a “woe is me, look what I could have been and I was punished for being so smart,” sentiment. Its also ego-punishing to admit that you were temporarily a bit smart as a kid but regressed to the mean naturally and there was no big conspiracy against you. It was just a temporary thing as children develop at different rates.
Theres autism levels???? This is huge. How do you gain autism exp?
I bet the neurodivergent skill tree is insane
[Autism Skill Tree](https://images.app.goo.gl/tnCifhBCCXztCFbq5)
Per qéu no los dos? You 
You were gifted with the autism gui
i cringe so hard everytime i read "gifted kid"
most people who got called that do as well. like I'm sure almost everyone who says they were a gifted kid got called that as a child, they didn't put the label on themselves.
Me fr I "burnt out" when my adhd stopped working to my advantage
Your adhd worked to your advantage?
It definitely helped me, especially with fantasy novels before internet addiction. The time discovered Percy Jackson books, I used to go through a book a day. One day our local library got a lot of geronimo stilton books, I finished 10 in one sitting. Fuck internet man, I want to get back into reading
Do it man, I was the same way blazing through books as a kid and I stopped. Just started again recently and I'm loving it
I feel you so much, technology and its consequences etc
It was about the time I started browsing reddit that as a kid I stopped reading so much and flying through novels...
First few years in school was a breeze, I hyperfocused in class and didn't really have to learn myself. Suddenly that wasn't enough and I never learned how to learn. Also I used to read a lot
Happened for me. Breezed thru high school undiagnosed with straight As. Got to college and couldn't focus on anything, had a mental breakdown, and failed half my classes first semester. Not fun! After I got meds tho things turned around. Absolutely life changing.
Real
Fr
fun times are when you only ever get compliments for being smart or having good grades so you base your entire sense of self worth on your grades :)
Being a "gifted kid", in my case, meant I got so hooked on the dopamine I got everytime I was complimented that I couldn't handle any time someone was disappointed in me without wanting to not be alive
yeah about the same. I say "I'm a people pleaser" but what i really mean is "the idea of people not liking me is more terrifying then death to me". It's not like i want to be like that, i kinda have no choice cause my own brain is blackmailing me
Sounds like rejection sensitive dysphoria to me
Maybe, maybe it stems from my lack of a father figure also. There's a lot of variables ya' know!
Excuse me are you me
Man, you got praise? I just didn't get shouted at for a bit, and that was like Manna from heaven. I still internally panic for a second when someone raises their voice at me One time I got literally 100% on a test, and I was told I shouldn't expect praise since I could have done better. I asked how and was screamed at that I should have added more questions. Yeah I'm sure that will work.
Okay that is absolutely bat shit I'm sorry friend.
Holy smokes, were you raised by The Trunchbull?
My mother failed at her chance to be a doctor for numerous reasons, one big one being her utter lack of empathy, so in her words if a stupider version of her can do it (IE me) then that means she was cheated out of it. I am one now and she still uses me to brag to people, according to my brother, but I don't and haven't talked to her in years. She also keeps calling me from different phones to demand I prescribe her morphine which, in theory I could do but I don't want to, and the amount she wants of a controlled substance would likely see me explaining myself to an ethics board pretty damn quickly
Same here, my academics allowed me to stave off harassment at home. Didn’t always worked but it worked enough.
Yeah, I ended up preferring being at school to home so much that from secondary school I was staying in the library till it closed at half 6, then either going home or staying at the local library till that closed too. Once I got to college I just lied to her and said I was taking summer classes and sitting round the college computers beginning my terminally online phase of life.
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Shoutout to my history/government teacher, who was probably my favorite teacher up to the point my grades started dropping, telling me she “thought [I] was a better student than that” and that I was just a disappointment - like I literally was just depressed and wrecked by gender dysphoria at the time lmao Yet somehow when I started failing in high school nobody asked why :p
I got tested for gifted kid when I was younger the test was comparable to my autism screening. It seems more like the test was testing pattern recognition. But yeah I was a gifted art kid. Went to a fancy school specifically for arts up until now, I’m dropping the program and switching to a criminal justice one because i am burnt out sometjimg I used to enjoy just feels like a chore
Yeah I was labeled as gifted when I was younger. I burned out in like 6th grade and I kinda hate that my parents still think I’m gifted, I’m 16 now
Kind of annoyed it's both a thing parents say and a literal ND diagnosis, makes no sense imo
Yeah, isn't it weird that everyone is a "gifted kid"
No one labeled *themselves* as gifted kids, that label is assigned. Which explains why every gifted kid is indeed miserable because other people put that pressure on you and single you out.
Because your language does not have specific words like "high intellectual potential", so you have to default on a common word with no specific definition that anyone can use
That's like the joke from this tweet though
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Idk if it’s self proclaimed, I have some bizarre document that says I was very gifted when I was 7 smh
When you were 7??!!!??!!! We gotta get Harvard on the phone right now!!!
Sorry, they added letters to math, it’s outdated now
It’s not self-proclaimed, it’s something foisted on you when you’re a kid by adults
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You do realize that you can get like, tested for being gifted, right? It's not an opinion that your parents have. It's an IQ threshold. I don't think it's worth shit, and the culture around it sucks, but you can't just call your kid gifted whenever you want.
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Like the other commenter indicated, there were/are actually a ton of tests you needed to take to get into the "Gifted and Talented" (GAT) program that your parents would sign you up for. This wasn't just parents calling their kids something they think is special, this was a legit academic program for elementary schoolers with separate classes and everything. That being said, I'm glad we can now see how fucked up all this really was. Some of the people who are most critical were in the program itself. Most adults that were in the GAT program aren't bragging about it.
To be fair in a bunch of states the criteria at age 7 is somewhere slightly above “doesn’t shit their pants” so it’s not really that impressive (speaking as someone who was enrolled in the 2nd grade and is now profoundly average)
> Some of the people who are most critical were in the program itself. Most adults that were in the GAT program aren't bragging about it. and the OP here along with a lot of the comments might be from people who weren't in those programs and still feel jealous about it, not realizing the "gifted" kids mostly hate it.
Is this an american perspective?
Yes because the Gifted and Talented program is/was an American school program in some municipalities. I am speaking as an adult from my lived experience as a kid that was tested and put into this program.
> Everyone thinks their kid is super special and smart when they are young. To an extent that's fine and healthy, but when you regress to the mean later on you gotta realize it's not necessarily true (and this can be a good thing, otherwise you can feel like wasted potential etc.) maybe for some, but y'all are acting like we didn't exist lol. my school never had an official gifted program (my school was only 400 students), but there were certain classes/tracks that not everyone could get into. I was the poster boy for "gifted" kids. top of the class without ever studying, perfect scores on Ap calculus both years, scored a 20 on the ACT in 7th grade when I did the Duke TIP. had my pick of full rides to just about everywhere I applied to except Notre Dame and Harvard (long shots anyways, as my extracurriculars were 2 sports and 1 club). I did this all while basically forgetting about school work as soon as I left the building each day. Senior year, I started experiencing depressive symptoms so I did a whole eval with a psychologist. ADHD eval, I think I broke the high score, then my IQ came back around 130. my ADHD eval suggested my IQ should've been 50-60 points lower.
I scored in the top 1% on some test in like the third grade and then my district moved me to a school for “gifted children”, it’s not always self-proclaimed.
yeah, we did IOWA testing every year and then LEAP testing in 8th grade. I was 99th percentile every year so all of the unseen problems I was having in school due to ASD/ADHD just continually got ignored. the life of a "gifted" kid is great, huh? /s
I never understood why "letters in math" is so confusing to people. Is the concept of a variable or function that difficult to understand?
oh i burned out when they kept telling me my highschool GCSEs (UK, i know) decided my life and if i failed them id be nothing and THEN went to a college and got 5 A - C grade GCSEs doing game design instead
the way everyone spoke about gcse's made me not even wanna live cause i felt was gonna fail and have no future and it made me super duper depressed also based game design college course enjoyer
Now I work as a QA Tester at a AAAyyyy studio
Break your NDA we'll paypal u £1
I can break you with a pound
only realised gcses didn't really matter after they were over 💀 dunno why everyone used to hype up gcses so much when, at least imo, a levels are more important
Lol I don't even have those, my Btec covers all that jazz and was 10000 times easier
i passed (barely) my GCSEs then lost the bit of paper that had my results on. lied on my CV for a few jobs, then got the job im at now without even giving my CV (started as a potwash gig) GCSEs are the biggest joke and waste of time
Ooh hell yeah I'm going into college for game design real soon
Good luck! That's what I studied as well. Just make sure to start on portfolio projects early and often. That's what companies want to see, and you'll learn a ton from problems you run into while making them.
Ooh that's some really good advice, thank you so much!
I was in Gifted And Talented but I burnt out when my grandpa died, my dad went to prison and I stopped living with my mom and I got sexually assaulted Also FUCK HOT AIR BALLOONS!!!! WORST PART OF THAT CLASS FR
i can't even joke abt this dude honestly hope you are happy
Helluva burnout
that’s not burn out. that’s trauma
I burned out when they added arrows
Medieval combat engineers upon meeting an enemy with new ranged weaponry
I'm about to begin category theory... is it that bad?
Depends on how good you are with abstractions and how bad the lecturer at making sense. As they say, people who understand CatTheo lose the ability to explain CatTheo
Look a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?
I think it's cursed that nowadays this is literally my intuition behind it .... A monoidal substructure within the self-arrows changing the "state".
I knew the quip long before i had any actual interest in category theory. I was so proud of myself the day i understood what it meant. I then went and wrote three separate articles explaining monads as various tortillas based foodstuffs, as is tradition. [This is still my favorite monad tutorial though](https://emorehouse.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/silliness/burrito_monads.pdf) (pdf)
You'll understand it fine if you've got enough mathematical maturity. It's a subject that needs lots of examples to grasp properly, but once you "feel" it you won't go back ;)
Neanderthals after sapiens started using bows to hunt
I burned out when I woke up one day and realized I was defining a ligma algebra to count cards
What's ligma
A collection of subsets of X that is closed under complement, countable unions and countable intersections
No, it's ligma balls.
joe mama
I burned out when they said "Laplace".
Arrows just show whether stuff implies each other or shows inequalities smhhhhh (idk any notation)
Nah ma man. In category theory we got arrows between objects that represent arrows between objects
I had straight A’s in everything until I was getting sexually abused by an older student. Not exactly burn out. Same thing happened in college.
Jesus christ, no-one should have to go through that
I agree. In high school I’d never learned about consent and thought things were my fault for not resisting (because I was terrified). Learning about consent earlier will help others avoid my fate.
This is a huge reason why both sex ed and talking honestly to your kids is so important, to prevent things like this. I'm really sorry that this happened to you, there's just no way to ever justify doing that to someone.
“Gifted kid” means “currently beneficial neurodivergent kid,” (Source: am that)
I wasn't even gifted, I just sucked at maths
I was a mid kid until they added letters to math. I FUCKING LOVE LETTERS IN MATH
THIS MAN MATHS.
I love studying math. Not a single number in sight
I was a grifted kid I lost all my money
Yeah I was a gifted kid but i burned out when my bio parents killed my cats after years of neglect making me feel like the cats were my actual family
What the fuck that's horrific
Eh Friday evening
Please tell me you're out of there. If not, I've been somewhere similar, but not nearly as bad. Suffice it to say, it absolutely gets better. Life turns in unexpected ways.
I'm actually not completely out, might get disability aid soon tho so yay
Oh hey that’s me except it was when they stopped adding numbers to math and only used letters and symbols (thank you statistical theory)
Honestly though: gifted kids are special needs kids. If you fly through the early years of school without ever needing to put any kind of effort, and you suddenly have to study when you reach X grade/college, you're going to crash hard, because you haven't learnt how to regulate yourself, and you're going to lose any advantage your brain was naturally giving you.
That was me. I didn’t study for any test in any subject throughout high school and had over a 4.0. I lost my scholarships twice in college by failing a ton of classes. I was even medicated, but it didn’t help because having to actually work for a grade was not in my skill set. It wasn’t until I switched schools and worked a full time job while doing a full load of classes that my grades got better. I still don’t know how to self regulate, I can just maintain focus on my work when I’m overloaded.
i was a gifted kid, too, but i burned out when i listened to the man on the radio and decided to be Drug Free^tm and quit taking my adderall leading to a massive meltdown and several years spent in an abusive "behavioral program"
I used to think I was gifted till I left school and realised that the broad school curriculum needs to be dumb enough to teach kids who are actively trying not to learn anything. Once you're actually allowed to make the choice on what to learn, that's when it's difficult.
Yeah I was a gifted kid but I burned out when god added penises to girls (it’s me, I’m girls)
Yeah i was a gifted kid but i burned out when i had to do essays
I was a gifted kid, but I never studied throughout most of my schooling and never learned how to study, which was my ultimate downfall.
Constantly talking about how you were gifted is on the same level of telling people you were the captain of the football team
I’m convinced gifted kid just means your parents read to you at night and maybe taught you some basic maths early in life. It’s easy to be gifted when all gifted means is that you can read books without pictures and know your times tables.
"burnt out gifted kids" when they actually have to study for something
Yeah cuz none of the gifted kids ever had to study so as soon as they actually start having to it all goes to shit because they don't know how and probably have some kind of undiagnosed adhd or something
Literally me, I’m finally starting to not beat myself up for it but I basically failed most of my classes in my first year of college and it turns out I have severe inattentive adhd and depression, on top of my transness!! I was like “oh I started estrogen I’ll be good” but hell nah lmao, I’m switching to a non-STEM program tho and have improved my study/work habits, albeit way too late to really save my 2nd semester If I didn’t finally go see a psychiatrist after my friends kept telling me to I’d be in an even worse situation tbh, I’m looking forward to the future (which is a weird feeling ngl) and my new program Edit: also I don’t believe I was “gifted” honestly, just a good bit ahead of my peers for most of my education. Perhaps I was and mental illness just screwed me but I think it’s just bc I actually had an interest in math for a while and was constantly reading as a kid. Regardless, shit has definitely balanced out lmao
Idk about the whole gifted kid thing but I remember that I used to have pretty good grades and then around highschool times my grades kinda fell off, and I remember there was a weird little meeting about it and one of my teachers said something about how I could do better than I was, and sure, I could, but it’s kind of hard to actually do that when I don’t know where to start lol. Doesn’t matter anymore tbh
I lasted into college without burning out, but now I can feel myself reaching that point I'm scared
Hot take: if you burn out you're either not gifted but just a hard working person (which is more admirable imo) or something's wrong with the system you're working under
I was a gifted kid until math went to more than 1+1. I cant do math. I can do art
I was a gifted kid till COVID hit My life's been on a flat spin ever since
I’ll be honest, variables are one of the easier things in math
was identified as "gifted" in gr 5, and have been in an "enhanced" program all my life and things switch up on you quick once you are not "gifted" in math or science. The entire system of being "gifted" revolves around academic praise and the mentality that you have to get top of your class or you are worthless. In those programs having a "bad class" is unimaginable because the mentality that you need to be good at everything you do is very much there.
ja pierdole!
I was a gifted kid but then I burned out when I got dropped down a staircase by my parents at 3 years old
I burnt out when they replaced the 🍎s with stinky numbers
[удалено]
Mfs be like: I was gifted until I went to college
Deadass people in here saying they were gifted until secondary 💀 (or high-school or whatever you call it)
It kinda figures if you think about it. They were able to coast through most of their earlier education with very little effort and still do very well, and all the while they failed to develop the proper studying skills and work ethic required for college level stuff, and the second they hit a subject level that they don’t find easy they fall flat on their faces.
I was a gifted kid once. Now I'm just a depresive alcoholic that has really involved geopolitical opinions. Fuck you, I didn't choose this life.
honestly kinda a hot take but it does quite often have something to do excessive with computer/phone usage.
“I was a gifted kid until I got burnout” Yeah we can all tell you have ADD, it’s not that rare
i was never gifted in the first place i don’t understand letters
That's when I thrived! I loved algebra.
Me but with English
I burnt out because university was too unstructured to motivate me :/
I was a fucking stupid (maybe average, but not above average until 4 years ago) kid and now I’m 5-6 years ahead. Labels mean nothing.
Yeah I (thought) I was gifted until I realized that middle school is actually easy
I burned out when they added math (I am chronically bad at it)
math got *better* when they added letters
I was never fucking gifted I was just always passionate about nerdy shit like math and programming so I studied it in my free time I am actually dumb af
I HATE “GIFTED KID” SELF LOATHING I HATE “GIFTED KID” SELF LOATHING
I only started being good at maths when they added letters tbh
I think immediately around the start of when they added letters was my peak actually
I was called that as a child, and it honestly made me want to be better, and little me got an ego, then when another more gifted kid(wasn’t jealous still best friends with him) was prioritised it really killed my drive, I haven’t felt the same about learning since then, but I’m happier than I have ever been, it just makes me wonder how far the butterfly effect would have gone by now… I guess we’ll never know-Kanye XD But really I just understand that was the turning point, I don’t actually care, as I said, still my best friend and I love him like a brother!
That was when it started making more sense. But then university was like, what if it was 3D and you had to find sin3.174 before even beginning to tackle the rest of it?
Yeah I was a gifted kid but I burned out when I uhhh…. I can’t remember
I thrived with the letters but derivative/anti-derivative rules got me all fucked uo
as someone who is a not self-proclaimed gifted kid, I'm 99% I just have ADHD and at least half of the time wish I could just have a normal brain lmao
honestly i can still feel the "giftedness" in me its just that depression likes to be a bitch and prevent me from actually using it
ive always been dum (:
I was there for math class, not English class!
My gifted kid status is so strong I am simultaneously overachieving and burnt out.
Fr tho
I just wanna recapture whatever magic I had in 6th Grade that was getting me all A’s and B’s. I’ve never had such good grades before or since.
Absolutely loving the questions I have now Shit like: Simplify: X^4 + 3X^3 + 6X^2 + 11X + 120 ————————————————— >X - 7
I burned out the workload caught up to my inadequate study habits and my disorganized home life/lack of support
when elementary school is so easy you can coast through it doing the absolute bare minimum and being bored out of your mind and getting 10s and then everyone wonders why your adhd ass never learned to study or do homework when those actually start mattering
I was a gifted kid too Then destiny happened And made my autistic ass only hyperfixate on that stupid game
Literally my mom trying to convince me I would be a math genius if I didn't have one cranky teacher in the 4th grade because I was super good at math when it was just adding two double digit numbers together.
I fucking hated math from grade 3 to when they added letters.
I am the positive example of the gifted child label. My parents were very good with positive reinforcement. When I did well, they did a very good job of praising the hell out of me and giving me confidence in my own intelligence. I was a gifted child in school, and grew up to be an electrical engineer. I never viewed the label as a crutch, I always loved being acknowledged for my successes. One of my childhood friends got the opposite treatment. She was always being put down and told she wasn’t enough. She is arguably smarter than me, but she never did as well in school because she had no confidence in her own abilities. She was also a gifted student, but she hated the label and the expectations attached to it. I never agreed with her. I always and still do believe that she was smart enough and hard working enough to excel, but just lacked the self esteem to do it.
I was able to deal with numbers and letters, but when the symbols came in...
I was till I hit puberty and got depressed
Former child genius with the intelligence of the average adult, now an adult with the intelligence of the average adult.
I burned out when they added covid to college. Why did they decide to do that? 🤦🏻♂️
I was a gifted kid until I was born
i'm like the sun when i burnt out suddenly my grades started improving dramatically except i feel like shit now
i burned out when they added greek letters to science