Its certainly not the be all/end all. Work ethic and ability to self assess will probably get somebody a lot further.
A friend of mine was telling me about a class of potential future anesthesiologists he was teaching. In the human analog set up, the patient was going to die regardless of intervention. The test was how well you evaluated your own performance rather than in the measures taken to try to save the āpatientā.
Over half the class failed, and were directed to find another specialty. Thats a pretty damn good bunch of smart and hard working students, but that wasnāt what was being tested.
I donāt think intelligence is all that different from āgeneticsā as lifters generally understand it. Weāre all born with different caps on what we can realistically achieve, but most people have all of the tools they need to achieve quite a lot by simply following the established process.
Youāll also never know how gifted you really are unless you push your limits and find out.
All of the high-potential outliers who manage to put it all together are what pushes the herd to greater heights. They do this by figuring out all of the best ways to get better, and then explaining it to the rest of us.
I love how much awareness has spread on psychology, and so many mental health issues have become destigmatized just since my time in high school. Unfortunately, I think itās overcorrected to the point that people now go out of their way to share all their issues with everyone as almost a sort of badge of honor. True psychological disorders are something for which we should have acceptance and empathy, but they are still disorders that people struggle to overcome. This trend of telling everyone on social media that you have OCDābecause occasionally you count how many times you brush your teeth back and forth or go back to check that the garage door is downāgreatly diminishes the real struggles of someone who misses dinner with friends because the 50th time they cleaned the stove still isnāt perfect enough.
Yeah. Earlier I was going through the chapter review with my son, as he has a test tomorrow. So theyāre doing ordered pairs and line segments on a cartesian plane. He has a solid grasp of it, and it became clear that he is getting bored with it when I asked him how he solved a question. He basically brain doodled around to arrive at the correct answer.
So I gave him a little extra to chew on. He then intuited that it would be neat if there was a way to find where shapes overlap (systems of equations) which kinda surprised me. I told him that there is, but that would be jumping ahead way too far.
I was also in this program for years. At my school it was in a trailer as a separate class, but we were all fucking psychopaths. It never felt āspecial,ā we were singled out FOR the assumption that we were smart. Gifted isnāt testable intelligence. I used to do dumb shit like phonetically write my homework in different accents just to play with language, or fill out arithmetic forms in Roman numerals just to stop being bored.
After those years I asked to be home schooled, but that devolved into a couple of years of self-directed studies by watching talk shows, biking miles to the library and spending hours reading, breaking into homes in the middle of the day (not to steal stuff, just out of curiosity,) and studying people who just ignored a random kid in a public space.
I could see where he was coming from with the comparison, but yes, you could point out the differences all day.
I went to a very rural cornfield school from K-10. I was always a bit ahead of my age group, but the only real āgifted and talentedā treatment I got there is when my 9th grade geometry teacher stuck his three best students in a small side room and encouraged us to play chess instead of study geometry while we got 90ās-100ās on the very easy geometry tests. Otherwise I did the things that were accessible to all of the other nerds, like summertime trips to the nuclear power plant.
The government didnāt truly begin experimenting on me until my junior year of high school when they took custody of me at their institution, where they were cool enough to let us smoke cigarettes.
I would appreciate it if some of the psychologists could explain that situation for me.
I think the word āgiftedā makes it seem like an appealing psychological condition, especially with IQ touted as a factor, when the real set of characteristics are all generally best suited for anti-social behavior.
That definition may be years past my understanding of gifted education. Iām not exactly sure what the word āgiftedā means to you with regard to anti-social behavior or as a psychological condition. I think of it more along the lines of attributes and potential.
My experience with gifted education wasnāt inherently negative and I certainly learned a lot about learning, even if everything they let us do is pretty wild by todayās standards. It was a lot of things, but anti-social isnāt one of them. Unless you count punk rock type of behavior.
High IQ people can certainly do a lot of harm in the world, and they have.
Yes I can see why something like that can lead you into all kinds of wild directions. It is similar to how normal behaviors of children can now be interpreted as signs of mental illness. None of that is my wheelhouse at all.
In my experience and observation what the education system misses is real world application of motivation, and as you mention instead tries to measure and rank ability based on increasingly difficult boxed curriculum. There is no real point in GT classes aside from a moderate GPA lift, and it becomes an existential exercise to participate in gifted courses.
I dropped GT classes because I didnāt see the point. I knew my goal was college and I knew my GPA and test scores would allow me to go without the GT boost.
All the GT courses provided was an āopportunityā for extra effort to the same end.
There was no thrill in the additional challenge, and no real reason to undertake it, so it was pretty easy to āoutthinkā the system. And I went on to an internationally recognized university where I lived a very Van Wilder experience and still did fine academically.
So the real gift, in my mind, is the ability to hit the 315 bench without really trying, to the earlier example of gym ability vs sweat equity.
And what education needs to be better about is helping students discover not only how, but why they want to keep pushing to 405. Especially when everyone is stuck on 225. Otherwise gifts are just sitting in boxes.
The problem is most in education arenāt gifted, and they canāt structure experience or educate āupā to students.
I personally see value in specialty schools, but would like to see more real world application in a Montessori style built on a sort of apprenticeship model, and led by instructors who can match brain power and share vision.
Has anyone picked up on the the bullshittery going on with the DSM?
The diagnostic tools are developed by psychiatrists, but patients are diagnosed by psychologists, who often refer over to psychiatry to manage their behavioral disorder discovered by the psychologist.
Almost as if thereās like a system thatās designed to funnel people seeking help into taking medications they dont need for disorders that cant be quantitatively defined.
Or something, idk.
I donāt mean to make assumptions about your experiences, but I think there are things about those circumstances that can be very helpful once someone reaches adulthood. (They can also be achieved in other ways than by just ignoring a kid.) Something Iāve noticed, as Iām about in-between the two eras and work with a lot of young kids, is that children donāt have much opportunity to explore and get into trouble. Many of them have never just spent an afternoon where no adult really knew where they were or what they were doing. Thereās a place where freedom becomes neglect, but some freedom does a lot to build confidence and itās in short supply these days.
Itās a difficult needle to thread when you want to build confidance, fearlesness, ambitious adventures who are self-aware, and value kindness coming from strength.
But Iām worried that it requires being broken. That spark of rebellion was was the catalyst for everything. I know it influenced me, but I canāt be my fathers to my sons. Sharing the darkness scares me.
The art is in the application. Like, you probably wouldnāt look at me and think I was taking an antidepressant, because Iām taking an antidepressant. . Wasnāt even recommended by my therapist, but something I decided would be better for me.
On the other hand- I knew a real whackjob of a lady in recovery (AA). She talked a real hard game and seemed attractive to some people, but I recognized her as the nurse that cuffed half of a shot of morphine I was supposed to get after a procedure on my esophagus.
So anyways, she takes on this sponsoree, who sheās supposed to guide through the steps using her own experience, strength and hope. . Cool.
Unfortunately, part of her strong mouth game was to tell people that they arenāt really sober if theyāre still relying on medication.
So her sponsoree, who she had known for all of a week of brief conversations took her advice and stopped her antidepressants.
Then about a week later she blew her brains out with a shotgun.
. So this kind of stuff is really best left to professionals. Not saying your thoughts arenāt valid. Maybe some practices do that. But weāre also not privy to a lot of the inner workings of the people they treat.
Aside from parents not encouraging or allowing reckless and adventurous play, the opportunities are still there. All you really need to do is hop on your bike and begin adventuring or start bushwhacking somewhere you probably arenāt supposed to be. The more, the merrier. It was the obvious thing to do when indoor entertainment wasnāt NEARLY as cool as it is now.
I have come to understand how precious a gift boredom was. I think all kids need it and so do most adults, which is another way of looking at stuff like hiking or camping when we try to shut as much off as possible. The parents I speak to seem to really be wising up about limiting screen time and internet access after we all kind of blew it with your age group.
Iām curious if child psychologists will begin recommending that parents begin forcing their children to leave the home for at least 4 hours at a time three times per week. Age 8 or 9 seems about right to me, especially now that we understand that helmets can protect childrenās heads while riding their bikes.
Thereās probably a GIGANTIC bra waiting to be found somewhere in the neighborhood, but no 10 year-old will ever find it if they donāt start poking around the teenagerās make-out spots and wading through the creeks.
Then again, the town I live in now has a lot of crackheads. Those were a two hour bike ride away from me in Gary when I was a kid.
I have no education or direct experience with the whole mental health system and have never been on any prescription medications, so I can never say if one person should or shouldnāt be on medication. Taken as a society, it sure looks like too many people probably are.
Iād be curious to learn how common it is for people in this field to refuse patients for being well. If a 15 year-old is seeking counseling for, say, a breakup of a 3 month relationship, at what point do you send them on their resilient way with a little encouragement?
Or does that patient tend to remain a patient as long as possible?
. Wasnāt even recommended by my therapist, but something I decided would be better for me.
. Cool.