The Shocking Truth

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Orthodox Ascension Day (Orthodox)
UN World Environment Day
Anniversary - AIDS
Constitution Day (Denmark)

 

The “Draw Yerself As A Teenager” meme has reminded me of something I’ve wanted to touch upon for a long time, and it starts with a simple confession: in school, I was labeled “gifted and talented.”

 

Yes, yes. Cue the long speeches. There’s a lot of talk about gifted kids, some of it interesting, some of it right nonsense. But me, I want to focus on an aspect of being gifted that doesn’t get looked at very often—it’s a downright elusive fact, something most people don’t know or realize.

 

“Gifted” kids are lazy buggers.

 

“But wait!” you say.* “That can’t be right! Lots of gifted kids get all A’s in school all the time! They take AP classes for fun in high school! They always clean up the academic awards for debate and Spanish and National Honor Society and chess club and whatnot! They can’t be lazy!”

 

See, that’s the thing. Gifted kids don’t look lazy, because we do all those things in high school—win the awards, get the A’s, do the extracurricular activities. But what people don’t realize is that all this intellectual, academic shit? That’s what we’re good at. Unlike other kids, academia comes easy to us. We test well without having to bust our asses studying; an hour on an essay gets us A with honors, and we do all those extracurricular activities because it looks good on a college application and requires minimal effort. And the reason we get all those awards? People just keep handing them to us, even though we’re phoning it in.

 

There’s another kind of kid at school who gets all these awards and participates in these classes—the ones who aren’t gifted, but work at it. They spend hours on homework, study for the SAT, and run themselves ragged working on all those extracurriculars, either because they’re driven or because their parents are. Some of these kids do well and turn out more badass, the awesome god damn Batman in the face of the gifted loser Superman, but a damn lot of them seem frantic, overworked, neurotic, and unhappy about their work; their only return for this investment seems to be raising the stakes for next time.**

 

Gifted kids don’t get this. We don’t understand either why these people have to work so hard at school, or why, if it is so hard, they bother. We sure wouldn’t. That looks like work.

 

That leads to a problem. Gifted kids have a very specific kind of gift—they are endowed with the particular abilities prized by schools. This makes it look like we’re doing hard work, and so people try to lay off of us for other things. And so we never got encouraged to try the things that were hard for us—sporty things, or arty things, or even the academic stuff we weren’t as good at—because we’re good at the things that count.***  So we get lazy. If we’re not good at something right off, we get discouraged, and abandon it, because who wants to spend time practicing something? It takes forever. We conclude that it’s not our forte, and stick with things that are. I’m an awful artist and never tried to get better, because Drawing Is Hard. I hate sports because I lose, and I’d keep losing for quite a while before I started to win. I’m used to always winning by default.

 

Of course, when we are genuinely interested in something, we will go above and beyond to pursue our interest. But it usually falls in with our forte anyway—like studying—and we don’t consider it work because we’re interested. If it bores us, though, then unless we need to do it we won’t bother either.

 

I didn’t quite get this when I was a kid. My mom, who read all of those Raising Your Gifted Child books, spent a lot of time trying to Enrich our lives. But when I was bad at things, I would resist her. Who needed that?

 

I’m not sure how to help any of this. Schools have their hands full with the majority of students who need the help, and can you really expect harried teachers to tailor a program to challenge gifted kids? Parents can try, but they may come up against a Wall Of Uninterest when trying to engage their kids. I just thought I’d put it out there, because I see all sorts of commentary on these kids, and that never comes up. And since I’m a week away of ending school, and entering into a world where I’m not always on top, I had to confess to someone.

 

 

*Unless you are gifted, in which case you’re saying, “Shit! She’s outing me!”

 

**I still think that trying to make your child gifted is a form of abuse. I’ve met parents who will go to absurd lengths in pursuit of the gifted ideal. Making their kids study for hours, signing them up for everything, long disapproving lectures when the kid gets a “minus” next to his A, etc..

 

***Everyone always says that gifted kids get frustrated with school because they aren’t challenged. That’s bullshit. Gifted kids don’t want challenges. They want to be left alone so they can go back to whatever they were amusing themselves with before you interrupted them with a bunch of damn analogies or math problems.

EDIT: Speaking of lazy bastards, I edited this to change the font color back to normal. I accidentally turned the text in my LJ document on Word green because I've been printing all my papers in green or blue ink since I ran out of black ...

Comments

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

God, this is so right. I was in the Gifted & Talented program in grade school, and ended up dropping out of college. In hindsight, I was a lazy little schmuck in GATE: I gravitated towards the "learning stations" that I was good at (mainly because I already knew the material), avoided the ones I wasn't good at, and most of the time just sat at the Macs playing "learning games"* and Tetris, and sometimes fooling with a music composition program**. Mostly Tetris. The one time we had to do a project, it was a geography thing where we had to do put together a presentation on another country. I drew Uganda, but their consulate never got back to me, and I didn't really care. It didn't affect my grade, I wasn't interested, and it was a hassle, so why bother?

I never really developed the ability to push myself, so when I got to college and didn't have my parents there to push me, I slacked off like whoa.

*like Space Invaders clones where you have to shoot the numbers that match a formula

**I didn't know jack about music theory; I barely had an understanding of notation. But I could experiment with it, make noises, and get praised for it.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yup. That's me all the way. Sure, people think I'm smart--I keep going back to the shit I'm GOOD at already!

I admit, I would get bored and try to "level up" at things when they got too easy, but it usually came with the confidence that I was ready for the next level.