That's the cost of designing education for the worst students.

I feel like you watched me grow up. For a long time I was smart enough to pick things up naturally, I was even offered to skip grades.

Then the math got complicated and I didn't know how to learn it. I went from being the smart kid to being the stupid one in remedial math. Being smart was all I had at that point, so when I "lost" that, I lost everything in my eyes. I was stupid and I was never going to be anything because of it.

I ended up getting my GED as an adult and I now have a promising career in insurance- so I didn't really lose everything, but when I was 15 it sure felt like I had.

Excuse me, I resent being attacked at 5am on a Friday, tyvm.

Wow, that's exactly what I've... heard... too!

Agreed 100%, being a specialist in something always has led to someone taking a pot shot at your deficiencies.

It's actually insane how many teachers and other education professionals waved me off with 'you're smart enough, just try harder' while I was obviously suicidally depressed and extremely dysfunctional. Having undiagnosed autism because I was a teenage girl in the '00s was fun.

"Gurtaj is a principle software engineer at Google you know! You used to be the same grade in school. What happened?"

"Dad, I'm running a multimillion dollar startup right now"

"Tsk tsk"

"I'm a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else."

Go with what makes you happiest, most often more effort can lead to less rewards. Ultimately you have to find your comfort zone.

No, people in the red zone think they're in the green zone.

Sometimes we wish that our impostors syndrome was true

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

The older I get the more I profoundly identify with Cypher. Ignorance truly is bliss.

I get what you mean… though, I feel like an IQ test is a biased test, I took one as a teenager and scored high. Which was a morale boost at the time, but a few months later I had medical problems and ended up having a stroke and had to basically start all over with speech, motor and memory.

Sure, I survived. But I went through every therapy, started back up and realized I wasn’t close to what I was before. Which was crushing, sure I knew it wouldn’t be the same and I’m still above average, but the latent memories of my capabilities before constantly haunt me.

I didn’t mean to depress anyone, just enjoy the blue zone if at all possible. I constantly try remembering, it can get worse. /hug

Yes, this is funny, but anyone worth knowing in a PhD program will quote Hawkings at you if you take the green part too seriously.

"Only losers brag about their IQ."

Or Thomas Edison (and yes, he was actually a decent engineer before he realized how much easier it is to just own a company)

"Great accomplishments depend not so much on ingenuity as on hard work."