Thoughts from an Ex Gifted Individual

Today, I was told that gifted children don't ever resent being gifted, and usually enjoy being taken out of "regular class" with all their friends to be put into gifted classes. My Human Growth & Development professor said that gifted kids enjoyed the creativity they got to indulge when they were put into their "special" classes.

This is simply not (always) true.

It was in a class setting that this offense occurred, and I didn't want to be the douche who said "Well... as a gifted child..." (I hope you read that in a nasally, obnoxious voice), so, instead, you are getting to read about my affronted indignation. Lucky.

When I was younger, and enrolled in the Mentally Gifted program at Afton Elementary (looking back, I can't believe "mentally gifted" was what they actually called it. Does it seem a little politically incorrect?), I hated it. I was a strange kid, and people thought it was weird that I read during lunch and recess. There were some "looks" when I told a group of girls in my fourth grade class who were discussing perfume that their lovely scent was most likely made with ambergris, a flammable gooey substance found in the intestines of a sperm whale (that's a conversation I'll never forget). All I wanted was to fit in with the people I went to school with, and I didn't know how. Because I wanted to talk about why Beethoven wanted us to switch hands back and forth to play the same series of notes in that A section of Fur Elise (did he just want to add a display of grandeur? did he want to ensure that the pianist played it with the articulation he thought appropriate? What was he thinking!?), and my classmates wanted to discuss the Barenaked Ladies and kissing.

Saying that I didn't fit in is a wild understatement. It was even more noticable, I think, because I so desperately wanted to. I would repeat things I heard other people say in different theaters because I figured if people liked it when they said it, they would like it when I said it, too (false). But there were other things, like the fact that I hated brushing my hair, and wanted to climb trees more than I wanted to pick out my own clothes (the result: tangled hair with leaves in it, and a solid color sweatsuit that my mother picked out. In teal.) So I'm sure you can imagine how I felt about it when all my classmates stared as I stood up and left the class at a certain time every day to go and be "special." 

I did the least amount of work possible in those classes. If I had to be there because I was smart, then I would be as dumb as I could. Unfortunately, at 8 or 9 years old, I didn't know how to convince everyone I wasn't smart enough for the classes. Failing to do all the homework, but then finishing the test in under ten minutes was not the way to go, lesson learned. It just taught everyone that I was lazy.

I think eventually I gave in to the freak flag thing. I started dying my hair blue and purple, and playing vocabulary games for fun. But to this day, in my second to last semester of my graduate program, I can honestly say that I have only put forth my best academic effort on one single project. It was a clay and cardboard replication of the Appalachian Mountains. And it was beautiful.

Fortunately, I had my brainiac brother to cover all the smarts of the family. So I learned to be funny and sort of smart, and it's served me pretty well so far. Sometimes I wonder if my procrastination, horrible spelling, and lazy school attitude are inherent or learned, and today put me a little more on the "learned" side of things.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that some kids don't want to be different - even if it's "good" different. Some kids just want to fit in, so if you're going to torture them through admitting that they're smart, put them in a school with a whole lot of other smart kids, where 8-year-olds talk about ambergris.