Gifted children

[ssk7882]

Another ex child prodigy underachiever here, weighing in a bit late 
on this debate.

Shaun wrote:

> The problem is that over 50% of gifted children are 
> underachievers...

Well, naturally they are!

You say this as if you think that it's a *bad* thing.


> . . . .and a significant number of these kids are underachievers 
> because their school environment is inappropriate to them.

Why do you make this assumption?

I was always under the impression that "underachiever" meant
"somebody who has prioritized their values very differently than I 
have, and in a way that makes me feel upset and threatened."

Certainly I have been labelled an "underachiever" all of my life,
and that's always seemed to me to be what the word actually means.

Usually when it is applied to a child, the it refers to iconoclasm 
and rule-breaking.  As an adult, on the other hand, it more often 
seems to refer to money and lifestyle choices.

So what precisely are you using the term "underachiever" to mean
in this context?  Surely not IQ tests, right?  Your Gifted Children 
are the ones who did well on those, so presumably they "achieve" just 
fine when it comes to certain types of standardized tests.  I am 
therefore curious: just where do you sense a failure in their
achievement levels?  Are they breaking rules?  Not following orders?  
Not getting the right grades?  Not reading the right books?  Not 
earning enough money?  Not sharing your own values or interests? 


Tabouli wrote:

> The problem is, by the time the child has cruised to his or her mid-
> teens, they take effortless success and adulation for granted.  It 
> is their right.  It is *normal*.  It is their identity.  And then, 
> all of a sudden, a new and terrible element enters the success 
> equation: effort.  The child has never had to stoop to such a thing 
> before.  They see it as beneath them.  Other children have to do 
> that stuff, but not me.  But slowly, inexorably, as the effort 
> component increases in importance, some of those lowly inferior 
> children start to catch up.  How dare they?  

And that, my dear, is when one learns the all-important lesson that 
while all geniuses may be prodigies, *not* all child prodigies turn 
out to be geniuses.  Some of them are just plain precocious.  And 
precocity, by definition, does not last.

Oooooh, yes.  And it really *hurts,* too, when that happens.  I can't 
deny it.

I do, however, take some umbrage with this equation:

> At this point, there seems to be a split.  Some gifted children 
> bite the bullet and grudgingly apply themselves to working within 
> the system.  And excel. Others seem to hit a point of
> disillusionment with the whole education process and more or less 
> resign from it.  

And then there are those of us who bite the bullet, learn the trick 
of actually working for things, grudgingly accept the fact that 
sometimes you really do have to work within the system, and then in 
the end leave it anyway, because we eventually come to the 
realization that what the system has to offer wasn't actually what we 
wanted in the first place.

Others tend to think that we have failed to "excel."

We think differently.


-- Elkins (who always appreciates the achievements of those so-called
"underachievers")