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

[10cents.livejournal.com]

Since its somewhat related, have you seen this article? I'm not really sure what I think of their view, but given that it's been so long since I was in a formal academic environment, I was wondering what your impression was.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, my! I DID see that when it came out! I'd completely forgotten. Explains where the seeds of this entry were planted, though.

I think they actually do have it pretty close ... for me, having to expend effort felt like failure. The idea was that my abilities were innate, so having to try meant that my intrinsic ability had FAILED me.

Praise is not completely bad--like they say, it's the type of praise, as well as the frequency--that matters. I think "You're smart" even works, but you've got to emphasize that there's more to it than that. (Although it doesn't always work. Mom tried Enrichment crap with me, and I resisted.) And too much praise starts to sound empty. You've got to reserve it for when you really mean it.

Since I started this writer's group, I've been learning more about the balance thereof. If you don't praise anything in the story at all, the person feels like there is nothing worthwhile in it; but critiques would help improve it and make the praise sound genuine. It's an interesting balance to strike.