Rambling about being "the smart kid."

[clockworktomato]

Another mailing list I'm on was having a discussion on how teachers often don't know how to handle kids who read, kids who are independent, etc.  I posted some anecdotal crap from my own childhood, and wondered if any of you experienced similar difficulties for being the smart kids

Comments

[clockworktomato]

Gifted programs, or enrichment classes, or whatever the PC-term has come to be now, were so great for my classmates and I. Honestly, my feeling is that the point wasn't so much to separate us from the other students and make them feel bad but, rather, to challenge us enough that *we* wouldn't turn unruly out of sheer boredom. In a way, it almost was as if we were "handicapped" in that we honestly needed that aspect of extra challenge to keep us interested in school. I was in gifted classes from 2nd grade, and only really had problems being able to attend when that 6th grade teacher expressed her disapproval of them. (I later found out that she felt that my attending gifted classes was unfair to the other students in the class because it was a "direct affront" to them to point out that they were "lesser than me." The thing was, though, at least at that age and level, none of the other kids knew where it was that I went at 1:45 each day. They didn't question my leaving the room any more than they questioned the kids who went to

[peachyswan]

Jeepers. That's quite a tale. I think you're onto something about teachers who don't know how to handle the exceptionally gifted child. These days, with student achievement being so low as a norm, this makes the difference more glaringly apparent. The teacher, frustrated with the slow ones, gets frustrated with the smart one who has done her work. So she takes it out on the smart one. Not good at all.

I never skipped a grade because my math skills were always bad. They also kept me out of enrichment. But I did read everything in sight. We had a librarian in my elementary school who I still see at church when I'm home. She saw that spark in me and fanned the flame. She kept giving me more stuff to read that was more advanced than what my peers were reading. My first-grade teacher also encouraged it. So in a way, I owe them big time for starting me in my lifelong love of reading and writing.

[clockworktomato]

Oh, you've reminded me that I have to take back what I said about never having a good teacher before high school. Librarians, all of them, loved me, and my favorite day of the week was the day we went to the library. I rode the bus to school so I often arrived early and made a beeline for the library, checking out all the books my constantly-strained backpack would hold. Checkout limits never applied to me, and I was even allowed to check out books restricted to older grades, etc. That was a real feeling of privilege, right there

[sonatamoonlite]

Wowie. You already told me all of this, but still. Damn. It's pathetic. Paddling? Yeah, yeah. I was paddled several times in Catholic school for having an "attitude problem" (i.e., too. much. sarcasm.). Heh. I was never punished for being "too smart". Actually, I was pretty ADD and had an overactive imagination, while also being very introverted, so I basically zoned out (literally) ALL DAY in my classes and made solid Bs until the 8th grade, when I finally started paying attention in class and making all As. (I seriously could not focus longer than 10 minutes at a time before that, and by the time 8th grade came along, nobody bothered testing IQ and considering transfers to "gifted" programs anymore... you had to step forward and request it yourself, and I didn't care. Nah, but I did get asked to take the SAT b/c of my verbal scores on TCAP, and I did well enough on the SAT to be in some kind of gifted program, but I didn't do it) And I mean, ALL DAY. My teachers never noticed. They never singled me out, which is kind of

[clockworktomato]

Dammit. I had a really long post going and the page refreshed. Bah

[marchharetay]

i'd say thank goodness someone else mentioned that hostility - except that it's not so much thank goodness and more of a damn so that's not exclusive to decatur illinois?.

[clockworktomato]

It's like a Lisa Simpson (TM) malady of sorts. "Look at that funny pointy hair-ed smart girl, har har har."

And another thing that makes me incredulous about this is that I really can't deal with most kids, mostly because I have an incredibly hard time relating with them. But cute, intelligent, precocious kids get me every time. They're just like mini-adults, and that I can dig. I genuinely like the kids with thick glasses who sit around and quietly read books or spout off trivia facts about the human head weighing 8 pounds. So teachers, who are supposed to (theoretically) do their jobs because they like kids and want to help them, etc., are picking on the kids that even *I* think are cool and awesome. What gives? If you can't like the smart kids, then how on earth can you appropriately deal with the real troublemakers?