It’s the first day of school, for a lot of people that I know. They, or their kids, are heading to campus with school supplies and first-day anxiety to begin new routines that will last the year or the semester.
And, because journalism tries to be timely, Time Magazine has published this article, Are We Failing Our Geniuses?
I’ve seen it in more than a few places. Mostly because people are using it to explore how they feel, as adults, about having been considered gifted as children and now inadequate as grownups. The tone is mostly one of regret, sorrow for what they might have accomplished if only their parents/school systems had taken more care.
I was a fat kid. But I was also a smart kid. A gifted kid. A kid with one of those IQs. And I lived a weird and solitary kind of existence because a) my parents left me alone a lot and b) the other kids teased me because I was fat and I hated them because they were stupid. I was never in a gifted program – I changed schools too many times. I DID go to a better middle school for a year and a half in a different county. But then we left the country and it was back to the school-changing merry-go-round.
Might I have benefited from a program tailored specifically to my intellectual and social needs? Sure. We all flourish when placed in a specially designed bubble that centers the world around us. But should this bubble be necessary?
Kids that are the kind of gifted talked about in the Time article are almost invariably, as is mentioned in the article, autodidacts. This is a good skill to have because, even if your brain is nurtured and cherished, at some point you aren’t going to be in school anymore. At some point, you’re going to need to know how to learn on your own. Which is not to say school systems shouldn’t be working to challenge and engage these kids. I was lucky – my teachers were adequate but I found the library at an early age and pretty much dove right in there. But I don’t know that centering the world around kids who are already being told how special they are is the right way to do it.
And so, I didn’t get a fancy, customized education tailored to my strengths and weaknesses and encouraging me to expand my mind as far as it would reach. And, you know, yeah, sometimes I feel inadequate as an adult.
But that’s about as far as it goes. Because having that education would not have made me any more accomplished of an adult. The things I struggle with are the things I have ALWAYS struggled with – unexciting and everyday mundane details. I still don’t like most people because they are stupid. I still have one of those IQs.
I think it is much easier to focus on gifted children because all they have, pulling on their attention when it comes to responsibility, is the pursuit of knowledge. And maybe some chores. And that doesn’t belittle how weighty the learning process is – it just points out that, for kids, learning is a full-time job. When kids are gifted, and they are spending all of their time learning it is an awesome thing.
But we all grow up and, when we enter the world on our own (if we do so), we simply have more to do. We have a full time job, in addition to everything else we want to accomplish.
And our pace slows. Because there simply isn’t TIME for it all.
We’re still those gifted children – except now we are gifted adults with a lot more to do. We aren’t judged by grades and test scores any longer.
And why should we be?
If you’ve failed to reach what you see as your potential, define that potential. Sometimes I sit down and think about everything I COULD have done. And there are a lot of things I could have done. And then I remind myself why I DIDN’T and not one of those reasons is “I wasn’t nurtured enough.” Every answer is, “I decided I wouldn’t be happy doing that.” Well, every answer that isn’t, “I decided that wasn’t worth the effort I would have to make.”
Both of those are totally valid answers. And if you, as a grownup gifted child, are beating yourself up for not reaching your potential, you might find a lot of your answers are the same.
The article references future medical careers as a marker of success for smart grownups. It’s not something the writer questions or seems to even consciously think about. It’s another one of our cultural biases. Smart people have careers in the hard sciences or medicine or computers.
I think defining success in this fashion is one of the ways we’re setting our adult selves up for feeling inadequate.
I’m still an autodidact. The majority of my learning happens because I teach myself. I hold down a full-time job, participate in a healthy relationship, have a full and active social life, and pursue more hobbies than one little craft room can ever really contain. I read and I watch and I question. I don’t know if I’m a success by any standards people monitoring gifted children would recognize, but I have to say, that’s okay. I am not curing cancer, but I am happy. And, hopefully, I am changing the world in other ways. Smaller ways.
I don’t mourn the missed opportunities of my gifted childhood. I am too busy engaging in a gifted adulthood.
13 Comments
I have to say that I loved this article. I’m at a point in my life now where I feel I have to evaluate what I want to do. I was also a smart, fat child and I’m still a smart, fat adult. I’ve felt inadequate when comparing myself to what I think others are doing. But when I’ve thought over what I have accomplished and how I’ve grown as a person I definitely feel like a success.
Yeah, I like the ultimate conclusion that the article author draws.
I HAVE felt inadequate before – usually when I am judging myself by standards to which I would never hold anyone else. *grin* I think accepting myself as a fat person has really informed my ability to more realistically judge myself in other areas as well.
Daytona Beach in the mid-60s had a program for gifted children. I was in it for three years. I would have thought Orlando would have had something much better. But I’m not sure if you grew up there.
I’ve always enjoyed my work and I’ve done pretty well but things have changed dramatically since losing weight. Quite frankly, I’ve never been more successful since changing careers last year post-WLS and I have to admit I feel that is at least in part to how much differently people perceive me and respond to me now. Sometimes I feel like a former fat girl spy with a secret, knowing that I’m getting treatment I wouldn’t have gotten before.
I can’t say that I was a gifted child, I made A’s & B’s in school, could have been an honor roll student but I didn’t want to work that hard (I spent my class time doing the next day’s work so I could use my study halls for reading). Every library I’ve ever been in has been a refuge from stress and strife. According to my mother, I haven’t lived up to my potential, but I also wasn’t expected to go to college either. I, however, am happy with my life. I raised a child on my own, and have a great relationship with him. I have a loving husband (only took me 35 years to find him) and I have grandkids that I love and love me. To me, those are the best things in life. Yes, I could have done more, gone farther, had a career doing almost anything I wanted IF I had wanted to expend the time and effort. But I had other priorities and, all in all, I’m happy with my life. I have regrets, I think we all do, but I don’t let them rule my life anymore.
Delurking to say what a beautiful essay this is! Your conclusions are wise and mature. No matter what regrets we may have about past potential, it’s healthier to focus on the present moment and keep our dreams alive for the future.
Also, thank you for pointing out that the bias toward the hard sciences that our society holds onto. The humanities and social sciences are fields where intelligent and gifted people are needed and can make valuable contributions.
I’m not sure if I was a gifted child or not. I live in Mexico, born and raised here. I was almost always the smartest kid in my class.I do often think about if things would have been different if my parents had moved to the states like my mother wanted when they got married, as it is obvious that the ‘oportunities’ I would have had would have been much greater. I graduated college a couple of years ago, and during my last year of school and this past two years I often think about what I could have done. But i’m slowly trying to teach myself to redefine my notion of success. I really loved this post. Thank you.
Thank you for writing that. I was a gifted child who changed schools at least once, if not twice each year. It is nice to know I’m not the only one who has reached those conclusions. Thank you for the reminder.
*sigh*
I kind of feel like I’m about to be the lone voice of dissent- not for anyone else, but for myself.
I had the kind of extreme childhood when, after being tested like a lab rat on every conceivable scale doctors and psychologists could come up with, they made the mistake of telling my mother what their findings were.
Which led to my being pushed *so hard* as a child/teenager/young adult to succeed that I cracked completely at the age of 23.
“Nurturing” never entered the picture. It’s just that failure was not an option. And when you define failure in academic terms as “anything below 90%”, there might be some problems. I have told this one sentence anecdote more times that I can count, but it’s still true- I was grounded from February-June of 1983 because I got a single 85 in English.
When I was in grammar school, I was required to do book reports *for my parents* (my mother and stepfather), because they didn’t feel I had enough schoolwork to do(because I did mine too quickly, and had *gasp* free time). If I got a 97 on a math test, my father (absolutely verbatim) would say “What happened to the other three points?)
Have I failed to reach “my potential”, whatever that is? *Absolutely*. No question. Because after cracking that hard, you never fully recover. It’s like falling off a cliff- you never walk quite the same way again. And the amount of *time* that’s been lost because of that is something I’ll never get back. I’m reasonably 10 years behind where I would want to be right now, and that gap becomes greater all the time.
And I can’t find a way to be happy with that.
Sorry.
*nod* I relate to this. Same experience growing up – fat kid, “gifted”, autodidact yada yada. I did end up in quite a few gifted programs but oddly enough, they seemed to be a bit more geared to letting us have our individual quirks than in forcing us into what they saw as “traditionally” smart fields. Which is good because I had rather demanding parents. Not as bad as what bronxelf was put through (and oh, man, I am SO sorry you were put through that nightmare) but bad enough that I spent a fair amount of my early 20s being deliberately average because I *could*.
At various times in my life I’ve felt like I wasn’t “doing what I’m supposed to” or doing all I CAN do. I find this usually happens when I start listening to other people more than I do my own inner voice. Which I think translates to the same thing you said – Deciding *for myself* what I would and wouldn’t enjoy doing, or find personally fulfilling. Now I feel a lot more in tune with my true potential – true being where what I can do and what I want to do coincide. And that in terms gives me a lot more self confidence and – most important – a lot more faith in myself as a person.
I really loved this post, thank you.
My dad had a similar attitude to yours, bronxelf. If I got an A, it was “why isn’t this an A+?” I rebelled. I did the minimum necessary in school. To this day, I find it difficult to do whatever it is that I think I’m supposed to be doing.
Luckily, my mom, my brother and I left my dad when I was 11. To a large extent, I raised myself and my brother after that. I provided emotional support to both my parents. I had to take on a lot of responsibilities as a teenager. I became fat. I lived in the poorest neighborhood in a wealthy school system. I lost whatever privilege I may have had, and that’s when my life started to even out, when I became happier, and when I started to accomplish things – when no one expected anything of me.
Have I lived up to my potential? Very few people do, and having a talent with standardized tests and analytical problem solving is not the most valuable thing in the world. Being unusually good at picking up skills is nice, but it doesn’t provide motivation or direction. I don’t think we (as a society) are very good at identifying or nurturing high potential, because the criteria we use are flawed. I don’t think that we really understand the nature of intelligence, or its role in human achievement.
Knowing what you want is valuable. Having the ability to work with both confidence and humility is valuable. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it.
I think if gifted children aren’t put in a program, then they’re dumped in Special Ed. They’re told they have problems, but not how to fix them, because these problems really don’t exsist. Like not understanding social cues.
What I learned from not understanding social cues, is that I needed to become a bully like the other students I was dealing with in school. I wasn’t helped because if I had a problem, it was assumed something I caused because I’m a SPED brat.
I don’t care what they call it, as long as it seperates the smart kids, from those students who would enjoy preying on them. Special Ed doesn’t do that, it places students who have sensitivities, with students who have “conduct disorders”. Which as far as I see it, is PC for being a bully.
I know my years in school were wasted because, every day brought a new trumatic experience there. I was told something was wrong with me, when it was clear that the school was letting the popular kids behave as cruelly as they please.
I thought it was bad then, I imagine it’s worse now with this fat hysteria. I don’t see why people are so against homeschooling. Ok, so your children won’t enjoy having the social skills, learned by being tormented around by a bunch of bullies. Yeah, a real loss that is.
Homeschooling means your child is in a controlled learning environment. In one where they won’t “fall through the cracks”, because the faculty would rather see them as a problem student, then actually get up and help someone who needs it. It’s alot easier to cast someone out as a bad seed, than re-educate the rest of the school’s little sadists on how to treat human beings.
Is it any wonder why Columbine happened?
Except, not understanding social cues is a problem, and it’s a problem that a lot of very “smart” kids have. Autistic spectrum, anyone?
Isolating the “smart” kids isn’t going to help them learn to navigate in human society, and being able to deal with other people is pretty much a prerequisite to success in life. In fact, kids who find it easy to learn abstract concepts and difficult to deal with other people should be encouraged to spend more (not less) time learning social skills. Up until the teenaged years, the focus of education should be on balanced learning; not just on developing strengths, but on mitigating weaknesses. That’s why a lot of people think that home schooling is a bad idea.
Ideally, a person with good analytical skills and an ability to think for herself should be a leader, not a recluse. Intelligent people who feel most comfortable in a controlled and predictable environment should be challenged rather than catered to, so that they can become more adaptable. It’s important to be able to think on your feet and to feel a sense of belonging and control in any environment, even a chaotic and unpredictable one.
I was bullied in school, too, and I fantasized about going on a shooting spree, believe me. But, would I have been better off coddled? No. All kids would be better off in an environment where bullying behaviors are not tolerated. The answer is to change the system, not to opt out. Don’t even get me started on the social costs of fear and social isolation in the US right now. People are disengaging when they need to take responsibility for changing things.
I am on the Autism spectrum. I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I take you kindly to respect that not everyone on the Autism Spectrum is some hapless retard.
Funny you say a lack of understanding social cues is a problem. I see many more people who have a perfect understanding of social cues, that don’t even know how to find a DVD by alphabetical order in a store without a computer to aid them. Yeah, understanding social cues so they could gossip in school, instead of learning, has sure worked for them!
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