Hey,
I'm so glad to find a GT board that's currently active(I've seen Hoagies during its multi-month stagnations) and I'm almost too eager to get advice from kind people like yourselves.
I'm an 18 year old male who has never formally been labeled as gifted but has psychometric test scores which put me in that category.
I've been struggling with underachievement for roughly my entire time in high school (I'm graduating in a matter of weeks =P) and although it probably has been amplified by my bad work habits, its roots are still unknown and tortuously puzzling to me.
I'm at a loss for where to start...my history would drag on for pages even when reduced to just relevant info, my current predicament cannot be understood without proper precedent; I guess I should be straightforward and say that right now I'm a mess.
Historically I have been in straight honors and AP classes for my grade level(there's a GT math class that I'm not part of)
and my grades have ranged from B's to D's on a downward trend for the last 4 years. I'll admit that in high school I have hardly ever been diligent about doing my work and my grades are in part a result of that. However, I believe myself to be a naturally motivated person since I had a rainbow of self-initiated interests as a kid. If up until this point, you've been wondering why this sob story of a lazyass teenager is in the 2E forum, your curiosity will be sated starting...now.
When put along side classmates who are identified as "gifted" and in the ultra-magnified eye of the student body as "super geniuses", I pitifully don't measure up. That satisfyingly short learning curve gifted kids are fabled to have never comes for me. Just about every lesson in my classes leaves me drowning in questions about apparent inconsistencies in the concepts and their presentation.
In English I rarely figure out the meaning of poetry and only grasp it partially after many agitated explanations. I've never been a bad writer, just it takes me soooo freakin long to compose an essay. I have no clue where all this time goes; I can prewrite and organize ideas just fine, hell I can visualize an entire essay in my head...I just spend almost all the allotted time in the process of writing these things out with a meaning that makes sense to me. When it comes down to it, the actual content of my writing is usually not satisfactory even for myself. I can rarely synthesize the prompt with the given materials to make a satisfactory thesis. My teacher's remarks hardly disagree that I "miss the point" of many of the passages.
Math and Science give me great frustration especially when I'm told I have a head for them and yet I still fall flat on my face.
Many times I'm left behind when a new concept is taught, even if it is based on prior more basic ones. I hear my math teacher beating into the class's head time after time that the beauty of math is the reliability that numbers will always behave the same, no matter what situation they are applied in. I take this to heart, say that e^lne = e, etc.
In other words, I take math at face value and don't procure irrational ideas about math concepts when my classmates whine, "you never said it couldn't mean that!" Ultimately through some faulty reasoning, somebody in my class will discover the right answer, and I will still be stuck on step 1. I'm not gonna attempt to redefine a logical argument, but I'll say that if somebody can't explain, in a heavily logical class like math or science, how they got their answer, they shouldn't be getting it in the first place. As a result, I feel like I'm simply regurgitating everything I have to memorize in order to get mediocre grades in math/science even though I get praised for the consistency of my method and told that I am "so good" at it(and not by my mommy).
Apparently I've had this kind of difficulty from the time I entered school and it lead to lagging achievement at one point(I had below level reading comprehension in 2nd grade). I remember having really sloppy handwriting and losing my place in the middle of a multiplication problem. This was the stuff which led up to me getting evaluated.
Maybe this is relevant in a way I don't yet know, but I had a motor problem until I was about 7 or 8. They called it spacial orientation + executive function or something and it just meant that I got dizzy when I closed my eyes. (Who walks around with their eyes closed anyway?)
Anyway, the tests, which did not expose my "motor problem" gave me a 135 VIQ and a 100 PIQ and said that my overall level of functioning was inconclusive(NO SHIZ).
After all that, they had the nerve to say that I didn't seem to have a learning disability(somehow they denied the possibility of NVLD) and with an unknown classification my case manager is still unsure of, gave me special services. They didn't do much good and I resisted them (I was in a support class with retarded kids, I wasn't gonna be babied).
Somehow through all of this, I always gave the impression that I was really smart and because I tried to socialize with the only other halfway competent person in my support class (he was 2E, a communism-obsessed nut with aspergers) I soon got slapped with that label. They tried to justify it with my motor problem and the fact that I wanted to talk with my age-appropriate classmates about Lord of the Rings, genetics, and programming, not Arthur or Beanie Babies.
Despite all of this resentment, I was still very diplomatic. I never had the meltdowns or made the clueless social transgressions that my poor aspie friend did. I fit in perfectly fine in smalltalk conversations until it was my turn to discuss interests.
Come middle school, I still had this unidentified problem, ineffective support, and erroneous classification that only held because I couldn't "do well in school"(I got A's and B's). I got depressed and so they fed me happy pills (risperdol and zoloft) which worked for a year but crapped out when I got to high school.
Currently, I still carry this label of Aspergers. My motor problems have long been conquered(I play sports at the jocks' level), I have had 6 girlfriends, have been moderately popular (except when my depression resurfaces and I destroy my rep) while my aspie friend struggles to understand why people care if he smells like mineur(when he doesn't shower for 2 weeks).
I got reevaluated again this year for college accomodations, and finally had my erroneous special education plan revoked.
I scored 137 full scale with a 135 PIQ and a 131 VIQ (no typos) with at least half the subtests at or above a 16 (I hit ceilings on two of them). My valleys were in digit span(10) and somewhat in block assembly(13) and similarities(12). The tester described me as highly anxious and attributed a somewhat rigid approach (which surfaces without the presence of anxiety) to those aforementioned scores. I discounted the memory subscore since I have personal experience self-teaching myself 25 japanese kanji in a day(after about 2 months of study I'm almost literate). I'm guessing those kind of things are devastated by anxiety.
Anyway, I feel like I have made some amazing and impossible recoveries(how many people have NVLD which suddenly disappears?)
But I have still not figured out how to do well academically, even when I apply myself and do my work conscienciously. 3 psychologists and 2 learning specialists have not solved the mystery of my academic inability.
In spite of all this, I scraped by with a 2220 on my SAT's (an incomplete essay killed my score) even though I consistently hit 2400 on practice tests given by reputable programs. My brain crapped out the same way on the SAT's as it does all too often in class.
After this long hostile account of my dilemma, please don't think too badly of me. I apologize for seeming conceited and/or arrogant but this trouble has been driving me crazy for too long.
What strategies do you believe can best help my problem? I'm a staunch existentialist and I'm not ready to let shrinks or teachers control my future. I am happy to provide any additional info (in a completely concise way =P)
Thanks again for your time (reading ALL of this!)
-Jake
