Maybe this should be a diff. thread, but what about your parents? Were they gt in your opinion? Did this seem to affect how you were raised/schooled?
My dad was definitely GT. No question. He was a math whiz from a very young age, and he wound up an engineer. I am definitely his kid. Even though I went the English path instead of the math one, I am all about logic. Dad and I disagree on politics, but we have wonderful, interesting discussions about WHY we disagree, and often we find that we have similar views at the heart, but he values one aspect of the issue slightly more, while I value another aspect, and that puts us on just opposite sides of the political divide. But we never have heated debates. Just interesting conversations. When does anyone ever have that with a parent about politics when they disagree?
It's pretty cool.
My mom...I really can't say for sure if she's GT or not. She is all emotion, so if she's GT, it's a very different sort of GTness. She is really creative, a doer, so my gut instinct is to say that she is GT. But she thinks about things SO VERY DIFFERENTLY (!!!) than I do that I'm not sure. We have a very hard time communicating. She doesn't understand logic, which makes her seem to me to be not GT. How can anyone not understand logic? So things that seem simple to me are absolutely incomprehensible to her. But then again, she has these great, creative approaches to the projects she takes on that seems to say that she is GT. Is that because she's not GT or because she has a different personality type and a different, more creative, less analytical sort of GTness? I really don't know.
Now that I'm writing about it, I wonder if the problem I have with IDing her as GT isn't the same problem I have with IDing my DS4 as GT or no. Both look very different from the rest of us in the family, both are highly emotional and tend to be artistic rather than logical. Hmmm...
Did my parents' GTness (or not) affect my educational experience?
Yes. My mom thought I was God's gift to intelligence. Not that smarts were all that mattered: it's her mantra (which I've adopted with my kids) that "It's nice to be smart but it's smart to be nice." I believe that, and we lived it. But I always felt pressure to be smart; accomplished; a star, not just a "regular" person.
That led to perfectionism. I felt the pressure to succeed--and I had a very strict idea of what would constitute success; it had to be an intellectual endeavor. I had to use what I had been given. I was always driven to succeed, without much thought about if/how I *wanted* to succeed. As I got older, I felt a real sense of confusion about my goals. It wasn't until I neared 30 that I made any serious moves to get over that and to be what *I* wanted to be in life.
Was that coming from them? Probably subconsciously. But I was also a people-pleaser, so I'm sure I took the ball and ran with it! They would be horrified to think that they pressured me. They were the king and queen of "You can be anything you want to be," so it certainly wasn't their intention to pressure me, and I don't blame them for any of it. But I am trying to avoid putting that sort of subtle pressure on my own children. I encourage mistakes and exploration. I never felt like mistakes were okay for me.
BTW, my mom worried a lot about my choice to homeschool DS7. She seems to be over it now, but she felt like I was rejecting her choices because they were wrong for me. I told her quite honestly that I think those choices are wrong for *him*, but I don't think they were wrong for me.
Sure, there are some things that could have been better for me. I wish I had been challenged more when I was young and I wish I had felt more okay about just being who I am without the (subtle and unintended) pressure to succeed in a specific way. But I KNOW that my parents did the very best they could do for me. I am grateful to them for that. And the best I can do is all I'm doing with my kids. I think that's all any of us can do.
