Gifted and Talented

Idit left me a message: Wow! I am so impressed: Duke TIP is so hard. At 6th grade. My god... I wonder - was it hard to be gifted as a child? and as an adult?

My guess is that she would like answers, and she would like them on my wiki. This forum is so cool!

To answer, sort of. I don't think I was identified as gifted and talented (GT); I don't even know if my high school had a GT program. I went to Johnston High School's Liberal Arts Academy back when both existed. Johnston, next door to TEACPA, is now Eastside Memorial High School and the Johnston Campus. The Liberal Arts Academy moved to LBJ High School to be combined with the Science Academy. It's crushing that my alma mater no longer exists, but that's a whole 'nother topic. Perhaps I'll get to it at some point.

Anyway, I started my education in private school, which gave me a solid foundation. We took Latin in third grade and Spanish from first grade on. My math classes were especially rigorous.

I was known as a smart kid who always finished work early, effortlessly, and sloppily, then roamed around the room (with my teachers' permission, of course) to help other students. Unfortunately, this wasn't the best route to being popular, and the private school kids were cruel, as kids can be.

When I got to public school, I was determined not to let anyone know I was smart. I kept up the charade all the way until my freshman year of college, which ran concurrent with my senior year of high school (which made it hard to claim less-than-brilliance). I played up my natural ditziness and bleached my hair blond.

I finally got over it when the bulk of my friends realized that the high schooler taking upper-level classes (and one graduate seminar: The Literature of Afro-Cuban Slavery) in college must be smarter than the average bear. Today, I try to stifle my tendency to blurt out answers (with very limited success). It's difficult to hold my tongue when I've been rewarded by authority figures for having good, insightful answers over the entire course of my academic life.

However, I am a firm believer that anyone who has at least one advocate supporting his/her education can be "gifted and talented." If you look at the tests that the Austin Independent School District administers to select students for their GT programs, you can tell that what they test is quite learnable--anyone could pass given proper preparation. The GT test is just another way to reward kids who have been exposed to the material in and outside of school and to segregate them from the equally smart but less-experiences peers.

Moreover, a core belief of mine is that everyone is naturally brilliant (secret's out, kids: I say I teach only naturally brilliant students...do you see the trick?). In other words, if you plucked any baby out of their environment and gave them the blessings I was given--two Ph.D. for parents who made my education a giant priority, enough money to afford tools like computers and fancy calculators, and lots of stability at home--that baby would grow up to be "gifted and talented." In the nature versus nurture debate, I am way over on the spectrum.

So yes, being smart was difficult to accept and is today difficult to control, but I don't think my experience is necessarily unique.

Thanks for the question, Idit. It's clear I had a lot to say--another failure to avoid blurtatiousness!