Gifted? Is that what they're calling it these days?

I figured out part of the reason why the parents who are always prattling on and on about how gifted their children are annoy me. It's not only because I find their kids to mostly be on the stronger side of average, yet they seem to think they're on the fast track to Nobel just because someone said they're moderately intelligent. It's also because I think the gifted designation has come not to mean anything in recent years.

I was in said program when I was a kid, and it wasn't what it is today. Today, they just basically do somewhat advanced coursework, and it's very academic in nature. It's not something I would ever want my kid to be a part of, nor that I would have wanted any part of as a kid. I spent my academic career trying to get the teachers to leave me alone so I could do what I wanted to do. Being smarter than the average bear, this was easy to do in the early grades, but it would not have been easy to do if gifted amounted to just more classroom BS. That's awful.

No, what I think of, when I think of gifted education is a lot freer than what it is today. We had tables in the classroom, yes, but we never used them. We mostly sat on the floor, or in bean bag chairs, and did what interested us. We read Shakespeare (a lot! For some reason, the weirder the gifted kid, the more they love Shakespeare.) We wrote and put on plays. We did Euclidean Geometry. We designed and built boats, and tested them in a pool. We learned about botany, geography, and whatever else interested us. We ran through approximately one teacher a year, because this job was probably not easy. The only teacher who completely sucked was the one who tried to shove us into the normal classroom mold that wasn't working for any of us in the first place, which is why we were there to begin with.

The other thing is that I think the gifted designation is horribly overused these days. It seems like any kid who's marginally good at academics is now considered gifted. When I went though, there was more to it than that. In fact, with the knowledge that's out there these days, I'd say, of my gifted class of 8 kids, 6 of us would promptly be diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome if we were kids today. The gifted program, and having that place where it was ok to be who we were, was totally invaluable, because being thrown in with the rest of the world in the normal classroom, was disaster for every single one of us. We couldn't really relate to the other kids on any decent level, a high percentage of the teachers despised us because we never really would just fall in with the rest of the class, and if you talk with any of us, we'll all describe to you what it was like to have the world trying to shove us into this "normal" box we simply did not have the means of fitting into.

I often wonder what would have happened back then, if they'd classified us as Aspies rather than just calling us gifted, and leaving it at that. I guess my whole thing is if they're letting every Neurotypical person and their brother into the gifted program these days, what becomes of the Aspies? Is the gifted program just another circle of hell now, just one more place not to fit in, and to be socially ostracized by peers just like in the regular classroom? Do they no longer consider Aspies gifted? I think that's crap. We ARE gifted. If you look at the most brilliant people in the history of the world, at least half of them were (or are suspected to have been) Aspies. According to Dr. Hans Asperger, brilliance requires a touch of Autism, and in looking at history and the present, I can buy that at least to an extent.

I'm not saying there aren't brilliant Neurotypical people out there. There most certainly are, and tons of them at that. I just wonder if the true intent of gifted education has been cast by the wayside in the name of including people who don't really need it, at the expense of those who really do. It just seems mighty average these days, and that's a shame. Maybe I should tell the most braggadocios of the parents that. No, I won't. It wouldn't accomplish much. It is rather tempting, though. Gifted isn't gifted anymore, and hearing about average kids who are being told they're gifted is so annoying.