...yeah jocks getting life-changing injuries in their school years is actually pretty comparable to "gifted kids" getting traumatized by this shithole version of America
not funny ha-ha so much as what the fuck is wrong with americans, why are they like this to their kids
Reminds me of the bunnies and tortoise dance - the story behind it is that there's fast learners, and then slower learners that have to work extra hard to keep up, more than the fast learners, but in the end they all burn out except the one last kid left alone. Sad af, cool dance, cool idea.
Not exclusive to the US. I’m Canadian and I found high school awful and traumatizing.
Meh...
I was successful in science/engineering for about 25 years before I burned out. I did make it, I'm just tired.
"Gifted" programs are so fucked up.
They separate kids out for being "smart", put them on a pedestal, endlessly gas them up with wildly unrealistic expectations and then only teach them how to be good students at the expense of all social development.
All these kids go into the world thinking that being good at math or memorization is 95% of what it takes to be successful when in reality it's like 10% intellect and 90% social ability.
The worst part is that these kids usually aren't even extra smart, they just have more involved parents.
It always ends up that the kid with infinite potential lives up to none of it and has a massive ego complex because they got gaslit into believing their parents pipedreams were realistic and that it's their fault for not living up to them.
Edit: It's really funny all the former gifted kids are taking this as a personal attack.
This is such a horrible take. Gifted programs offer accelerated offerings for children who are so goddamn bored in normal level classes. They allow people who to get ahead, give additional opportunity for faster advancement, and really don't even separate kids that much.
Literally everyone is bored in normal level classes. Most of us just express it by getting bad grades so we're excluded from the gifted stuff.
1000x this.
I'm not going to mess up my kid the same way I got messed up.
I'm going to find a new and novel approach that will despite my best intentions mess him up in new and novel ways
Hey, that level of self awareness is way more than what the people who forced these shit programs had.
Nobody gets out of childhood unscathed or unscarred but having parents who actually listen goes a long way to reducing the pain.
Ehhh, to each their own. I was in those classes, fully separated streams. No idea why you'd assume having a more interesting class would nix social development. (You can't learn to socialize if the teacher doesn't have to slow down?)
Fully wide range of outcomes but a lot of the kids with the potential went and realized it. Sure, not all of us did but from my small circle one's on the second highest court in Canada, one's set up a reasonably famous company, one's a cardiac surgeon etc.
Im not sure you are correct as no one was telling us we would be successful because of these classes when I was in them.
What we DID miss out on was seeing kids learn how to do things we already knew. This would have been very helpful when I got to the point where I didnt immediately understand the lesson and found myself having to learn how to do things years after most kids learn how to be taught to.
The real problem IMO is watching others learn is useful to the process of learning and taking the kids who know the lesson out of the room deprives them of this experience which in the long run creates other problems.
Personally, I can't say I experienced any of that. Especially the "extra involved parents" part.
I was in gifted programs from K-12. Turns out hyperlexia is now a well known indicator of autism.
Instead of all these random gifted programs that are all or nothing, we need to start treating earlier grades like high school where some students take advanced classes and others do the bare minimum.
Our whole education system needs a rework. Between the dogshit structure and the universally low pay for teaching we are going to end up far far more ignorant than we are now.
I stand by that every class-year should begin with an explanation of why you're expected to learn the topic and what skills you're expected to develop in the class, along with a paragraph or two sent to the parents on it. It won't fix everything, but it will encourage students to quit thinking of their literature classes as a waste of time because they're going into STEM or that their science classes are a waste because they aren't.
I hated civics class and thought it was boring, but my mom made clear I was inheriting this country and I needed to know how it worked so I paid attention and by the end I was the sort of person who doesn't avoid jury duty and who doesn't resent paying taxes, just what's done with thst money. Similar for learning to write and speak from my father who made clear that a stem job involves a lot of writing and public speaking.
Hey now. Some of us were smart but predated ADHD diagnosis. So we got put in there, did some fun higher maths, but still didn’t finish our homework and then barely graduated.
Yeah, my "gift" was undiagnosed ADHD which has made life absolutely miserable to navigate once I left the extremely structured environment of school.
Is it really about explaining why they're not more successful? Personally being "burnt out" was more of a realization that I don't even want that kind of success, I just want to get as far away from the way my life was in highschool as possible.
Fuckin' PREACH
My gifted program (late 90s) literally consisted of:
What I wished they’d taught:
In my case the "gift" was undiagnosed neurodivergence and that seems to be the case for a lot of people.
Yep! Only I was in the "could be good if she applied herself" group
Ah, fellow late diagnosed ADHDer
Oh I made it, I make more than a lot of my peers in highschool, not all of them, but I make a good wage. But I fucking hate the dev industry man. I was unemployed for 3 months and I got so much done. Agile methodology sucks the soul out of me, I don't have anything left for my personal projects. It's micromanagement incarnate. Oh you had two bad dev cycles in a row? Guess it's time for a PIP. Oh you had to step away for an errand a few times this dev cycle? Let's not make it a habit, even though all your work is done. Oh you have mutiple 2 hour meetings to attend and we still label you as having full capacity meaning you have to figure out how to do 8 days of dev work in almost half that time. I'm so fucking tired of it.
It's also full of boot lickers. Had people on my team that were like "oh I'll just work this weekend to make the deadline" and I'm like why. They made the deadline even though we told them it was too aggressive. You don't get paid more for hitting it or for putting more hours in. Stop enabling them and devaluing labor.
"I was good at math until they added letters"
"I used to get straight A's"
"I was gifted untill they realised I was neuro divergent"
Bro you're dumb now. Why should anyone care that you were above average as a literal child.
What do you mean I can't get by with the bare minimum effort anymore? That's all I really learned! That was my real gift!
It's true and like 80% of people on Reddit and Lemmy think they're gifted kids who just were too lazy/neurotic/something or other to properly use their natural talent or intelligence.
Lazy intellectuals™
I think what you are referring to is neurodivergent people. Many of which are now aware of said neurodivergence that they didn't know about as a "gifted kid".
Or just millennials and some of gen Z. We all grew up being told constantly that we were special and gifted, could do anything we wanted if we put our mind to it.
Accepting that we're actually just another nameless joe-dipshit in an ocean of millions of people that could easily replace us without causing even so much as a hiccup to society... was a hard pill for a lot of us to swallow.
Nowadays I thought "gifted kid" was just a sarcastic way to describe most of us: average at best.
After 40 years and 3 months of testing I finally discovered everything wrong with me is because I have ADHD.
So yeah, if it wasn't from my injured mind I could have been someone lol
Yep, burnout and depression can hit everyone and anyone.
Its nice to have a narrative for yourself.
That and "I totally would have gone to grad school, had [situation] not happened"
Fr though I totally would've gone to grad school had I not been disowned. Ignore that my sister also decided not to go last minute
There's a lot of comments in here addressing the social skill reduction, as if those kids in gifted programs (hello, fellow former gifted kids) didn't still socialize with their peers in just about every other aspect.
Even the kids in 'charter school programs' here were just separated from a group of 400 to a group of 50 or so kids for half or so of the day and then the rest of the stuff they attended classes with the other 350 kids. Even if they were completely separated off, they still have peers (admittedly, also 'gifted' peers).
Ignoring that portion, and you've still got the fact that you MUST challenge a child while developing. If I didn't get put in the 'gifted' track, I'd have goofed off even more and paid even less attention. NONE of my peers had their parents doing their homework (like some commentera have put), we just finally had homework we couldn't do on our own on the bus ride home. If you don't challenge a child's mind, they can't grow. And people who think every kid learns at the same pace, and that learning slower than the pace your brain can handle has no negative side effects, have no idea what they're talking about and should look into child development as a focus of psychology and come back to this comment thread.
Either you are called lazy for being chill despite knowing how much potential you could show to please yourself and others, or you could be pushing yourself to burnout and despair to please yourself and others.
Be burned out is more like trying to run a life long marathon at 125%, it works find in the start but at some point the body needs to recover.
Truth is, most kids who are gifted in school grow up to be perfectly average.
Imho the gifted program is where you send smart kids to lose their social skills.
IDK about that, the gifted kids at my school seemed to have their shit together the most out of all of us and always seemed like the adults in the room. I don't know what they were getting that the rest of us didn't but I sure could have used some of it... I always felt like I was missing things that came so easily to them.
Ouch that's a lot of damage.
Obviously yeah, my injury is addiction. Any further questions
"I could've done physics" is the billionaire equivalent of "could have gone pro."
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