To revive an old thread...
I was raised in a very loving, supportive environment. My parents did end up explicitly keeping me out of the GATE program because they didn't see the value in being pulled out from regular classes... and from the sound of it, they had a point. My mom recently told me that they measured everything in that program and it didn't seem like a healthy system for learning (this was the 80s).
They never told me that I tested gifted, though, yet they had this general expectation that I should be getting mostly As. I did get As, pretty much without having to work at it, and I thought that seemed unusual. If a C was supposed to represent average, why wasn't I getting those for an average amount of work? The only answer I got was "you're not most people" with no elaboration.
I spent most of my youth feeling like an outsider looking in, and no one ever explained why that might be. That's the only thing I wished I had known. I had to figure it out for myself...this year.
