You’re gifted enough to cruise through the first few stages of your education without trying, so you forge an identity as “the smart kid” but never build up skills in learning or studying, so when you finally get to a level where your natural intelligence can’t carry you anymore you can’t keep up with the people who did learn those skills and you start to fail and lose your identity as the smart kid which causes you to break down because that’d how you defined yourself for so long… or so I’ve heard.
That’s the cost of designing education for the worst students.
This is actually the reason. Because there is no such thing as “natural intelligence”. Not more than there is “natural strength”. There are natural predispositions, yes, but what you get is function of what training effort you put in. Whether you realise, and/or like, putting effort into training your intelligence, is is another thing. So people who are “above average” were in a favorable environment that fostered their development without it feeling forced, or unnatural. And then, when the environment was replaced by the school’s, it sadly didn’t foster personal development anymore. I would argue we would need to redesign education, now that we have internet. We don’t have to design courses around physical limits.
I feel like you watched me grow up. For a long time I was smart enough to pick things up naturally, I was even offered to skip grades.
Then the math got complicated and I didn’t know how to learn it. I went from being the smart kid to being the stupid one in remedial math. Being smart was all I had at that point, so when I “lost” that, I lost everything in my eyes. I was stupid and I was never going to be anything because of it.
I ended up getting my GED as an adult and I now have a promising career in insurance- so I didn’t really lose everything, but when I was 15 it sure felt like I had.
Did you know that 80% of people think they’re above average intelligence?
I was in the “gifted and talented” program as a kid and all it meant was I got more homework lmao. Good thing I loved reading and actually enjoyed being assigned novel chapters
I think I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that I was effectively being punished for understanding the normal material more easily than my classmates, and I didn’t get why my “gifted and talented” work was necessary, since it was, to me, bonus material, and not even interesting bonus material.
A core memory of mine is after showing up one time without an assignment done, my teacher decided to go around the room asking what everyone wanted to be when they grew up. All my G&T classmates said standard kid answers like doctor, lawyer, firefighter, whatever. Not being a smartass, I gave the genuine answer that, because I really liked Taco Bell, and there was a taco bell in walking distance, I’d be happy to work there and get some free Taco Bell.
Teacher called my parents.
How the fuck was I supposed to know giving a real, and in hindsight significantly more attainable answer was unacceptable? We were in elementary school, so why the hell would I know at that point that basic food service is basically non-viable in America?
There’s that joke about wearing regular clothes on Halloween to go as the “gifted kid”, and when people ask what you’re supposed to be you sigh and say you were supposed to be a lot of things.
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
Gifted kids aren’t necessarily smarter than anyone else. They just develop their adult levels of intelligence faster than normal. So there is no guarantee that the amount they will be able to maintain that performance gap going forward. Indeed, they are likely to do worse as they never had to develop the skills to do well in school. So once school gets hard enough for them to need those skills they don’t have them.
Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of “exceptional children” pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of “Special Needs” but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means “kids that teachers need to make exceptions for”
“well if those kids are so smart surely they can do more with less right?”
-average conversation at an budgetary meeting for education, probably
“Gifted” programs royally screwed my education. I had huge gaps in my knowledge because they decided that being top percentile in reading/writing (and being the weird kid) meant I could just skip out on classes for special little weird classes or sit with higher grade classes. I just had ADHD btw and really liked to read. Anyway, I would LOVE to know wtf they thought they were doing moving a kid around that much in 3rd-5th. I suffered the hardest with math. I was missing bits and pieces, which is pretty gd important in math, and I’d still somehow get the answers right but talked to about my overly complicated or ✨creative✨ solutions lol. Even now I hide my work if I need to solve something because I’m probably doing it weird… Then later it was really fun finding out that I couldn’t really live up to being “gifted”. 0/10 being special made me less educated.
Skipping classes as a “gifted” kid always seemed like a very weird concept to me, you’re making the child lose a lot of interaction with their peers for dubious reasons. It seems to me like it should only be reserved for the most bulging hyperwrinkled brains, like those kids that finish college by the time they’re 16 or whatever that would obviously be extremely understimulated when going the normal pace. Even then you could argue the gigabrain kid would probably benefit greatly from socializing with their peers, I mean where’s the rush really? They’re young, they can always learn more later.
those kids that finish college by 16 usually just have parents that pay a fuckton of money to skip their kids through the honestly very simple and bleak public schooling experience. has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with not dragging out units for ages and paying a small fortune to get private tutors and certified testing done.
I am good with knowing my deficiencies. What sucks is being told that they are my fault because I should be “smart enough to overcome them”.
It’s actually insane how many teachers and other education professionals waved me off with ‘you’re smart enough, just try harder’ while I was obviously suicidally depressed and extremely dysfunctional. Having undiagnosed autism because I was a teenage girl in the '00s was fun.
Girls, undiagnosed autism, and suicidal tendencies? Name me a more iconic trio!
People who say that are just trying to be a dick to you. Say something soul-searing to them in response and they’ll stop.
Most people just don’t understand that being really good at something doesn’t mean you can’t be terrible at something else. Like, I can problem solve a wide variety of things, but there are a few things that I just have no success at even if I know the problem and the likely solution.
The most infuriating one for me is that if I can’t see something then I cannot line it up right. A screw or bolt out of view means I have a 50/50 chance of ever getting it started even though I know how I can move it to fit in. Like I know to tilt and whatever, but without a visual frame it becomes impossible. A ton of people just yell me I am not trying hard enough, even though attempting to learn for decades hasn’t worked out for me.
But with even the slightest view I can get it started no problem. Being told I am not trying hard enough is infuriating when I am just being honest that it is my limitation.
Agreed 100%, being a specialist in something always has led to someone taking a pot shot at your deficiencies.
Or being a jack of all trades and getting potshots for not being an expert in everything just because you pick up the basics quickly.
was just joking around with a sibling about how some of the most intensely “being highly intelligent is my identity” people from high school with supportive families grew up to be dumb as hell.
the gifted valedictorian became a nurse, then went full “iraq had WMDs, but it was classified” chud, quit the workforce to have 4 children, is a god-tier horder with rooms full of actual garbage, and now is entangled in several MLMs shoveling a spouse’s very high income into a blackhole.
the “actually, i have a 160 IQ” inherited a bunch of $$, bought a bunch of vehicles, had 5 kids, went full blown “dance mom” facebook+social media freakshow, and spends most of their effort trying to cultivate inappropriate relationships and fabricate dramas with other married spouses in their neighborhood.
excellence and success are subjective. a life of curiosity, personal enrichment, family, and friends can be excellent without needing accolades or other features of careerist striving. but i’ll be damned if some really “smart” people don’t take their potential and, in defiance of the odds, turn it into a shit smoothie.
You sound bitter and cruel. Nursing is a wonderful profession that requires a lot of intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with having children. Hoarding is a fucking mental disorder and one of the most intelligent men I know struggled with it.
you sound like you are entangled in several MLMs.
I don’t mind being aware of everything, but I do mind that nobody else is
As you get older, you sort of get used to the fact that the majority of your fellow passengers are oblivious to the fact we’re on a bus speeding towards a cliff, driven by depravity and delusions of grandeur. And you realize short of a miracle, nothing is going to change it. It’s either that or you go mad. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I like the term “twice exceptional”. All of my biggest strengths are aspects of myself that come with tradeoffs. For 20 years straight, I was praised for the strengths and scolded for the tradeoffs. Motherfucker, you can’t enjoy how quickly I learn things I’m interested in and also treat me like I’m lazy when you expect me to sustain equal amounts of interest in 10 different things that bore me and I fail. You can’t enjoy all the art and tech I make and then get annoyed when it’s difficult to break me out of a hyperfixation.
I firmly believe that the tortured artist stereotype is bullshit. There’s nothing about being an artist that requires you to be miserable. But we sure do treat people like shit when their brains work differently.
The later half is so true, early on when you’re a statistical anomaly you can get special treatment, but once you become a small problem or the skill backfires they blow up as if it couldn’t have been seen coming. They expect 100% efficiency like you’re a battery to sap and don’t care how it affects you mentally.
I wish my iq was 20 higher or lower, idk just gimme out of the blue zone
The guilt that “you could have done more with your life”, despite being a successful engineer with a happy family.
The creator of this comic is a self-described pro-sweatshop neoliberal, which explains the “woe is me, I’m too smart for my own good” delusions.
Do you have a source for that? I cannot find anything about it online in Google, Wiki or even in ChatGPT delusions.
Sure, because something so egregious would definitely show up in a Google search for “Zach Weinersmith sweatshop”, right?
Unless…you’re exaggerating on the Internet to stir up outrage?
I don’t think he’s ever come out in favor of sweatshops? Maybe you’re think of Matt ygelsia from vox.
Yeah the comic reeks of PMC brainworms. I say that as someone with PMC brainworms. “You’re special enough to make decisions, but make sure you cultivate too much self-doubt to make true change.”
I still suffer from this. Promising early start, intense self-confidence issues and depression by the end.
IQ is bullshit. The gifted kids were just the kids that had supportive homelives
Human intelligence definitely varies. People in remedial education are not there just because they have poor home lives.
