Indigo, I'm glad you brought up that point. We are having a hard time trying to explain on behalf of the gifted kids. It almost helps to try to explain it here. Say, a school makes classes easier and more people get straight As. Unfortunately, that doesn't make all of those straight A students gifted. It sort of just wastes the gifted students' time, forces them to self-study on their own time at their own level if they want to learn at their level and we think sets other students up for a big surprise when they are out of school that, "Hey, wait a minute. I thought I was a straight A student." Well, the school was too easy. Now, on the job, for example, they are average or cannot keep up or are not that successful or don't have an unbelievable memory or cannot speed read, can't absorb instantly and it is confusing to people and can leave them very unhappy. While the gifted person might find everything easy, does everything very quickly, makes fewer ( if any ) mistakes and now people (if the other people even can perceive the difference) might be wondering how they are doing that. Well, we tried to explain that gifted people are different, just no one wants to hear it. But, we almost feel embarrassed for people who are going around saying they are gifted and / or that their kids are gifted, but if you really examine it, it is not true and it just holds up the issue for the gifted students. And, it leaves the gifted people thinking how can those other people think they are intellectually gifted if there is no evidence to support it? So, even in residential areas that may have the highest per capita per household incomes, if you talk to a family that is obviously gifted in that town, they will tell you honestly (and off the record), that it feels like everyone in that 'elite' town thinks their kids are gifted, but they are not and it clouds the issue for the mentally / intellectually gifted kids that people are trying to help with special education in this type of gifted discussion forum. It has proven to be a tricky dilemma that we did not expect, especially given that online you can find IQ estimates for every job that there is and given that there are consistent characteristics of gifted minds that are exhibited. But, being polite and pretending that everyone has the traits of a genius (if you even want to use that label) is a waste of time. There is no proof to support it. So, uniform achievement could be a real obstacle for gifted families. It is challenging and borderline offensive to have to say to a principal, a special education employee, a gifted support employee, a friend, etc. - "Hey, we are going through something here. This runs in our families. We need to figure this out for our child. Could we please stop pretending that you know what we're going through?" It can be exhausting for a gifted person to have to lie / white lie in order to be kind / nice / polite / not hurt someone's feelings. So, what we have found is that schools have to waste a lot of time with identification, because everyone thinks their child is gifted or non-gifted people want to have their opinion on the topic.
Meanwhile, we are wondering if brains are hardwired differently for different types of performance, can one type ever really understand the other. Say I found a way for there to be a virtual experience of what it feels like to have an IQ of 180 just by wearing a helmet. Now, put that helmet on three other people - with IQs of 70, 90 and 120 respectively- wouldn't they all have different interpretations of what it felt virtually to be a person with an IQ of 180?
Some families we meet have no problem discussing IQ even if they have children who are intellectually disabled. It comes up if you are truly communicating because people are trying to figure it out and problem solve. Like, this current national U.S. commercial campaign in which various tremendously successful people are coming forward and stating in commercials that their child has autism. We want to know if our highly intelligent child is likely to have a child with autism. There might be a link. There might be a pattern that in families that have the anomaly of very high IQs, there are also signs of autism. Some 'gifted' people feel they have some autistic characteristics.
But, with many families you can't have a discussion about IQ, they think it is labeling, they say there kids are gifted but they are not and you can't figure it out if everyone is forced to be politically correct (for lack of a better term) and pretend that everyone has the same intellectual ability when we think it is pretty obvious that is not true or if it is true, then no one has yet found the key to click the on switch to make a mind gifted.
