Gifted Adolescents

[hpprinter100]

Good read, how did u stumble on the link?

[Lundis]

Hmm p4, did you fail in school because you refused to do useless crap? My first math teacher in middle school actually managed to convince me into writing out my thoughts on the paper lol, it works for most of the time. She was a good one, the ones that succeeded her sucked hard. :/

[leetnigga]

Your "refusing to do useless crap", etc. sounds like lack of persistence and discipline to me. A lot of crap is useless, I won't challenge that, but an "I can do it, I just don't want to" attitude leads to no good in my experience. And trust me, I have experience in that area. A lot of school is about learning to "do the work" as undoubtedly you will have to do later in your life some day. I forgot about that in the high school years of my life, myself.

Excuse me if this is disrespectful, but I don't really buy the "gifted" thing, especially as portrayed in the article. I found the read excruciating.

I get that you can be good at something, and that things come more naturally to some people than to others. I guess I would call this "gifted". I kind of hate the word. It makes it sound like it doesn't take any effort on the part of the people, which I highly doubt.

Here are some quotes from the article that reek of nonsense to me:

And I was the misfit because I would not do what they wanted the way they wanted. The world I grew up in had no idea what giftedness looks like—unless it is compliant and achievement focused.

High school is not the place to "express yourself", at least not in the current system. He doesn't seem to get that and calls himself gifted for it.

But after one math teacher gave me F after F simply because I couldn’t properly show my work, I stood up, left and never went back into that class again. Supposedly, I’m “gifted” in math.

The math teacher failed him because he couldn't show his work. Either the teacher was being an asshole, or he was bad at expressing himself. I suspect the latter. In either case, how does "giftedness" come in anywhere? Being able to express yourself and show your work is a skill. Apparently he was lacking it, and instead of working on it he walked out.

Written work seemed disjointed, almost incoherent—unless someone discussed it with him to discover the huge leaps of logic and reasoning that carried him from place to place.

This makes my bullshit meter explode. He made huge leaps of reasoning in his mind but not on paper. That's being a retard in communication and not understanding what is expected. In math (the subject he is "gifted" in), showing your work and later proving it in a scope that is agreed on is especially important.

Maybe the article is just badly written, or giftedness in this form really is bullshit, at least in the case of Joseph Hughes.

[crashacid]

I rather like the word "special" then gifted ...

[bad_brain]

well, leet, gifted people often have a lack of social interaction skills, and being gifted also doesn't mean "being good in school". just look at Albert Einstein, he surely was a gifted physician, but in school he was a total failure in languages and was almost thrown out because she showed total disrespect against the principal, even more than that, before school he was that what nowadays would be labeled as retard (he began to speak aged 3, and not already aged 6-12 months as "regular" babies).

being gifted is often a problem for the gifted one, because it makes you different from the others, which is especially hard in the times of adolescence because in that time all you usually want is to be part of a group you can identify with. that's another reason why gifted people often act kinda antisocial, they feel like being rejected from society....and why learning stuff from a society that rejects you?

[Artificial Interceptor]

Well said b_b ...
i was i total mess i ground school (as we call it in Denmark) i was lacking that social connection the others in class had. They teased and herased me badly, beat me up several times, that is all just memory now, but if i here that someone is being herased the same way as me, those memorys flashes, glimts etc. comes back ... so from what you are saying b_b i can only 100% agree with you, we are all special and gifted in different ways, we just have to be nice to eachother...

[Lundis]

Isn't thinking in a different way than the general public the most essential thing to what they call "being gifted"? Like solving problems your own (often superb) way instead of the way they tell you to?

[Artificial Interceptor]

Yes ! When you think your own instead of being mainstream and thinking like others you are unique