Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Were you a "smart kid?"

Everyone else says I am smart.
I have them all fooled. LOL
I did however have a friends of the library award from middle school. I think they made that one up just for me.
A lot of what Cathy A said could have been me. I still do many things on auto pilot.

The reason I think I am not smart, is when I meet people that are smart, I feel somewhat dumb. At my sons school the parents are smart, they remeber everyones name, the kids remember everyones names, and I think, hey, that person looks familer.

I can't spell, I use bad (poor) grammer. Math was always week, and I have no long term memory. I can barley remeber any ES. But I moved almost every year. I think 5 ES 1 MS, 2 HS. I was tested once in ES and was going to be placed into a special school, or so I have been told. My mothre said that they gave the test to me two years early, and that they wanted me to be older. I have no memory of this, but I think we moved. My GPA was poor, only when I apply myself I do well (Imagin that).
DW is bright, got along wel, and has friends from ES. She remebers all their names, address, phone numbers. She did well in school.
She thinks I am smarter then she is. I have her fooled too.

Our DS6 seems to be a nice blend of both of us.
I really have enjoyed this thread, I see many of us trying to avoid some of the pain we experance as children for our children. Somtimes I wonder if the fire needs to be hot to make the metal.

You know, I think the big difference for kids is between 0 friends and 1 friend, kcab. As long as a kid has one person to talk openly with, I think the chances of a "manifesto in the woods" developing are greatly reduced.

And good mental health care matters a lot, too, of course. (A caring mom doesn't hurt either. Luckily, he's got that one in the bag! )

I was one of those smart kids, too. I was always bored in school, and I usually got into trouble when I was bored. I did not have many friends during early childhood until I became the class troublemaker and became popular (or, maybe, infamous). However, social rejection at the start of my schooling may have had more to do with where I grew up (inner city neighborhood) and where I went to school (suburban community) than with my intelligence. In retrospect, I don't think that my teachers expected my test scores from an "underprivileged" kid. I think that a lot of people resented me because I came from that neighborhood and out-performed them.

Even while succeeding in my studies, most of my teachers and classmates thought that I must have been pretty stupid to get into trouble that often--even the ones who knew how high my scores were. I even was advised to drop out of school, as a trouble-maker like me didn't belong in education. I took their advice, as I already had begun researching in my disipline during junior high and part of high school. Fortunately, I came back to formal schooling eventually and have since learned about giftedness (and found out my scores--much higher than I had thought--from my parents). My experiences with school and with my difficulties fitting into my age-peer group make more sense knowing what I know now.



My dad had hated school, too, and attributed it to being the youngest in the class (rather than an IQ of 160), so I was always the oldest in my grade (not a big help for an advanced kid, I'll say). My mom was very bright, as well, but she excelled and was well-recieved in school. My grandparents and other relatives were very bright, too, but they did not receive a formal education much past 4th grade (grand-grandfather helped pioneer nuclear physics, grandfather became a factory engineer and free-lance architect, uncle in particle physics). Education was never a big deal in my family, as we tended to excel in our careers even without a formal background in our disciplines. I guess that was why no one really cared when I decided to drop out of school...

Jumping in a bit late here....

School was easy for me for the most part. Looking back on it, they didn't know what to do with me through 3rd grade.

In 4th grade, we started subjects like social studies and science. We spent a long time studying the geography and cultures of Africa, and I was fascinated by it all. I got out of spelling with a few other kids, and we got to take Spanish lessons.

We even did engineering-type stuff. Once, the teacher challenged us to see who could build the strongest platform out of straws. I came up with a design that supported a math book. Other kids improved on it, and pretty soon we had made some very strong platforms out of nothing but flimsy straws. Fun!

This stuff kind-of compensated for being forced to go through language arts material I'd tested out of in 3rd grade!

For the most part, I wasn't terribly challenged in school. I didn't learn how to study or attack a problem I couldn't figure out immediately. This led to problems in high school. I read the books for English and did my homework, but rarely tried hard. (This was my fault at that point, of course.) In spite, I still managed to graduate around 10th in a class of 396. ??

I make sure that my kids are challenged. My husband and I both try to teach them how to approach a problem or task that appears impossible at first. We take it easy on scheduled activities too.

Silly influence: I was bored out of my little tree in 1st grade reading class. But it's strange how things work out: I remember a lot of the lessons. I guess because I could already read by then, I was able pay attention to how it all fit together.

Fast forward many years. When my DS-then-3 asked us to teach him how to read, I pulled out my old memories and took him through what I'd learned in 1st grade. Trippy, huh?

Val

My IQ is normal, 120. My smarts are in language and artistic genres. I felt different growing up because I was thinking of adult things, creative ideas, books, thinking deeper thoughts than my peers who were concerned with gossip, clothes, fads, and stuff I thought was silly and superfluous to life's meaning. But that's because I'm an artist, not gifted. I found it pretty daunting to have a kid with one of 153 and argued like a trial lawyer at 6.

Artists are gifted! You're probably a right-brainer - what an interesting family dynamic you must have with your little left-brained trial lawyer!

I was a "smart kid" too, (and an artist) and grew up hearing that. I was also ultra responsible and big for my age, so I was used to people thinking I was much older than I really was. My mother says I stopped napping at age 3, and I talked early and NONSTOP. I rewrote the lyrics to Beethoven's 9th as soon as I could write, and read Watership Down in second grade. I'm not sure when I learned to read because back then we didn't have to know anything when we started kindergarten.

Of course I also had a terrible lisp until 6th grade, rocked until I was 12, wore braces on my feet as a toddler, and had to have a hearing test in 4th grade for attention problems, LOL!

Not really. I was average, maybe a little above. In college I always had a 4.0 in my field, but not in other subjects. Unlike my husband, I did have to try to get good grades. My DH was in a gifted program at school...I would guess he is moderately gifted. I worked pretty hard in school to get good grades...but some things came easier than others. I think because I was not a super smart kid, having a HG+ kid is a major shock to me.

There's a big difference between "smart kid" and HG+ kid, right? Shellymos, getting 4.0 in your subject is definitely "smart" in my book - many people work hard and can't get an A grade. And really, college isn't manageable for everyone, KWIM?

If this thread is "were you a HG+ kid" then I need to delete my post!

Since I was born in 1960, I was a "good student". Only boys were smart at that time. There was no such thing as gifted. My father was a "genius" - another out-of-date term.

We only had private kinder and I attended that, but it was just for play. I read early, against my mother's judgment. She was a first grade teacher and they did not advise that back then. We had all the books at home - Dick, Jane, and Sally. I just kept asking what a certain word meant until I figured it out. I guess I "bugged" her into teaching me.

I had a great first grade teacher and she let me have my own reading group. Of course, we had high, medium, and low back then. I worked with various ones - mostly medium. They did not really test levels that much before computers, but she knew that I had read through the books and could help the other students.

I totally loved it. I enjoyed being the teacher and have been this in every phase of my life. I can usually understand something fairly fast and others come to me for questions.

I usually got more out of a "unit" than others, but enjoyed it. Around third grade, students began disliking me for my abilities and that hurt. I never bragged, but there was this girl-jealousy thing.

Most of all, my parents took me to museums and other trips that stimulated my interest. I read a lot of biography when I was young. We had no internet back then, so I went to libraries to look up topics.

I was a "smart kid" too. Fat lot of good it did me. I was very introverted (with a very extroverted mother, who still drives me nuts). Always well behaved, never talked back, had few friends, loved books. Never challenged in elementary school; the teachers loved me and I sat in front and got 100s on everything. Supposedly around 7th grade I must have been tested, I guess, because my mother claims to have known my IQ, though of course now she can't remember (she thought my brother's was 88, LOL, and he now has houses in like 4 countries, so... honestly I think she has alzheimers but only because she can't remember more recent stuff. but that's another story.)

I was traumatized in 8th grade by a guidance counselor. We moved to a new school district and my mother and 7th grade math teacher from the old school were trying to get the appropriate math placement. I never spoke in any of the meetings. So the guidance counselor says *to* me (keeping in mind that I was a total mouse, and probably less than 5 ft tall), "well, maybe you're not as smart as you think you are." I would still love to tell her off. She was old then so I suppose she's no longer among the living.

and looking back I'm a little ticked that my parents never thought to have me apply to the gifted high school - it never occurred to them that I could be smart enough. They were very focused on sending us to religious high schools (my mother had been a nun, a la sound of music but without the singing. got kicked out for smoking). It didn't occur to anyone that I got one of the top few scores on the entrance test; my mom was just proud of the tiny scholarship that went along with it. Too bad there were very few real teachers there. I slid by, working a job and having fun, and the underachievement continued.

It finally got better in law school, but still I was, and am, forever the imposter (the profession is full of them). DH likes to crow about having scored better than me on the LSAT but there were only two-tenths of a percentile between us. I'll never be as smart as he is and it doesn't matter because I've lost like 50 IQ points over the last 8 years since I've been pregnant or nursing or trying to get pregnant the whole time. (here we go again, no sudoku for me for another several months. but this one was not on purpose. so now you know why none of this gibberish makes any sense - preggo brain strikes again.)

Ultimately, I guess I managed to do "fine" but looking back all I see is waste (kinda like when I used to watch jeopardy and say, "I should know that!" but didn't. Plus those rejection letters from the likes of harvard et al. for both undergrad and law school; good scores, weak grades. At least DH got into harvard, but they didn't give him the big fat scholarship that led him to me )

I'm hoping that my kids do just that notch better and avoid the underachievement trap. In my family growing up, having lots of fun was just as important as school success - why didn't I have more friends over, boyfriends, etc. - and it was way too much social pressure for me. I'll be satisfied if my kids are content in their own situations. My mother knew I was smart but didn't really have any idea of the ramifications of that. It would have helped if she had listened to me as if my opinion mattered growing up. Working in a law firm was the first time anyone really cared what I had to say. I don't want that to happen to my kids. But with all their 2e-types of issues, it's all I can do to keep up. I was kinda hoping we could do private for middle and high school (there are a couple schools here that would be appropriate, academically; small and extremely expensive) but with 6 kids that's going to be a tall order. I'm just worried the public high school will be too big (thousands) though it sure will have course selection and has a good reputation. My parents never thought much about this, but for that one 8th grade episode re: math, so I guess that's the big difference between us.