I don’t remember being praised for anything at school. Only remember being criticised for being too sensitive which a lot more people could do with being!!!
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Was always told I was the smartest kid in my (very small) primary school (although me and a girl in the class were pretty much on a par) but in secondary school I settled into standard B grade status, which I was more comfortable with. Able to coast a bit and be lazy, no big expectations.
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I don’t quite understand if it is kids who were “gifted” in school who are now struggling because of the pressure put on them means they have burned out or because life isn’t what they thought it would be (because they thought doing well at school would mean they world do well at life). Maybe some of column a and some of column b.
I don’t think you should blame the individual here though.
you nob!
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I thought it was kids who had a natural aptitude for the education system never learnt how to study or be resilient when things don’t come easy to them
Eg I was always a solid B student so couldn’t be bothered to work harder and get better grades, and now as an adult if I am not immediately fairly good at anything I pick up, I assume it simply isn’t for me and give up. That’s why I’ve never learnt how to do percentages despite my job being incredibly reliant on data and understanding % increase/decrease etc. Just got a website I plug the numbers into. Percentages aren’t for me.
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I literally got a ‘Wow’ from my English teacher when they finished reading my short story in class - only child to do so
WHERE ARE MY MILLIONS
My problem? Was amazing in class and verbally but the moment I had to actually write my ideas down/study outside of school hours or do homework I shut shop
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Haven’t seen any of this discourse but there’s definitely a point at which succeeding at school stops being about naturally clever and starts being about how good you are at the more nebulous skill of just “doing well at school”.
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ban all discourse imho
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Its okay mate, we’re self-hosting now 
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When did anything that gets more than 3 mentions online start getting described as the x discourse?
Feels like some attempt to justify lazy journalists pretending that some people getting angry about something on a social media site is news, and that copying and pasting their comments into a document is reportage.
Think it’s definitely this, but have certainly experienced people looking at education / learning in terms of it being a sort of contract - like by doing well in their exams or whatever they’ve kept up their end of the bargain, then feeling they’ve been stiffed when they don’t immediately walk in to a successful and rewarding career. Given that successive governments have viewed education exclusively in terms of numbers rather than there being any focus whatsoever on the benefits of learning for the sake of learning, it’s not an entirely unreasonable conclusion, but it does lead to a lot of disappointment
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Been a while since I saw anyone complaining about being a gifted child and the subsequent disappointments of adult life, but I guess it’s eternal and probably always likely crop up among people who find themselves terminally online.
I was very good at school, teachers loved me, everything came easy, I got straight As at GCSE and A level, yadda yadda. Was just a natural aptitude, same as some people are fast at running and others aren’t. My brother had the exact same upbringing as me and is the total opposite. Can’t say it’s had much of an adverse affect on my adult life. Like, it’s annoying that I can’t just waltz through stuff and occasionally have to apply myself, but I can’t say that an easy school life set me up for years of misery. Probably the opposite if anything.
I guess my timeline hasn’t matured to this point yet. I started seeing gifted kid posts in about April but very little of them, since September it’s been ramping up.
Maybe by January it’ll be moving on to anti gifted kid discourse discourse and I’ll come back here to complain about that. Stay tuned.
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I think to a certain extent it’s about the way in which the education system schools paints society and careers as meritocratic, and encourages a framework of 'intelligence + hard work = you’ll get to the top."
Which obviously then dissolves upon contact with reality - that’s never been the case in a capitalist society. Maybe it’s moved on in that in the past intelligence and hard work might not have been a ticket to the top, but at least you’d be ‘fine’/secure - which isn’t necessarily the case now.
I think a some people feel betrayed that the kind of social contract they were led to believe existed at school was and is bollocks. Don’t know if that’s exclusive to ‘gifted kids’ though.
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Think it’s ok to admit you were probably spectacularly thick as a child no matter what adults told you. Why were you listening to them anyway?
Bit of a tangent, but there’s also a bit of a weird cognitive dissonance (and snobbery) around types of careers and how well paid jobs should be which maybe feeds into it.
For instance, I worked as a lecturer in my mid to late twenties. But I was always on precarious contracts and made half as much as mates who left school at 18 who did an apprenticeship or went into certain trades. Now that never really bothered me personally; other than those mates never seemed to grasp their own relative financial privilege. Ultimately it’s just mostly supply and demand in a capitalist labour market. But I can kind see how it might play into a ‘gifted but jilted child’ narrative for those looking for a framework where they personally have been victimised, but who don’t want to reach the logical end point of how capitalism screws 99% of us in different ways.
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Srs reply (vaguely): I was always told I was good at maths, and I kinda was, so I basically coasted through A-levels and into uni to study maths, where I became upsettingly familiar with the fact that it gets harder to blag the higher up you go.
Basically, I was told I was good because I was clever, and maybe that’s why I’ve spent a lot of my life coasting through jobs *there’s a lot of overlapping neurodiversity stuff in there as well), when I probably “should” be in a “better” job.
That said, I’m well over complaining about the downside of a ridiculously privileged upbringing, and am quite happy with who I am/what I do at the moment. So I guess things have (for now) turned iut alright.
Might be the wrong person to ask, I went to Medical School so know quite a few people in this boat who lucked into a career that actually ticks the right boxes (albeit quite a stressful one at times).
It is luck though, isn’t it? No 18 year old really understands what they are getting into and there are plenty of equally bright people who take different paths and so often find themselves in unfulfilling circumstances. I think the difference is that they feel they were promised better because of their abilities and navigating the maze to get there is not entirely down to ability.
There are other things as well - I had a supportive family, well off enough to provide financial assistance and I respond well enough to stress that I can function under pressure. Those things are nothing to do with how quickly you pick up maths at school - it is all luck and the older I get the more I realise that I have been exceedingly lucky.
I think the done thing to do at this point is to pull the ladder up? Tbh the world would be a lot better if so many lucky people didn’t believe they had earned everything themselves and appreciated the millions of tiny circumstances that collaborate to get anyone anywhere.
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Wonder if part of it is linked to class and wealth. I was on the gifted and talented list at school (I know, form a queue boys/ladies) and didn’t have to work hard until A-levels, then worked really hard at uni just to keep up with the kids who had been to private school and knew how to blag their way through seminars about Baudelaire by using big words and sounding confident. I did languages and a few people in my classes had spent their summers at their second home in France so were nearly fluent already. One person literally spent part of their year abroad taking cookery classes in Paris. Then when the grad scheme applications started some of them seemed to already know what to do and some had an in with big companies whereas I didn’t even know what a grad scheme was until it was too late and all the deadlines had passed. I’m happy in the career I chose but I know it’s not the same for some of my friends who were in a similar position at uni and I seem to only see this gifted kid chat from people who didn’t come from money.
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Ahhhh, the girl in my uni year who got a first in her dissertation on the previously undiscovered, major religious artwork, that had been recently found in the chapel on the grounds of her family’s château in France.
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