Were you in the "Gifted Program" ?

I was in the first year of the gifted program in my city. Basically the most 'ghetto' schools, known for drugs and drop-out rates started gifted programs, I suspected even at the time, to up the calibre of their student population.

Since I was in the first year it was a bit wild - the administrators and teachers were expecting a bunch of keen, studious nerd types and ended up with 30 class clowns all competing for the spotlight.

Most of us had been used to coasting and only a handful really applied themselves. It was actually a lot of fun.

In the 1970s I'd been put into various 'enrichment' programs which I suspected were just a way to keep the brightest kids out of the way so the slower kids could catch up. I myself could be a bit of a distraction to others because I'd get so bored...

Still, there was something really demotivating about the entire gifted programme. You were no longer competing with nearly every other kid for marks but with other really bright kids. So a lot of us were no longer automatically on top, and in the 'advanced' stream the studious but maybe not all that brilliant kids were now at the top of their classes, since all of us super-smart ones were no longer around to compete with them.

Did they develop any gifted child's particular abilities or give us much direction as to where to go in life? I don't know about other schools or other programs but in mine if you weren't into maths and science, it was a BIG FAT ZERO.

I spend the entire time in school and even later when I was out, frustratedly pleading, "gifted in WHAT??" I still don't really know - I'm quick to learn and figure most things out much more quickly than others seem to but I don't know what I really excel in when it comes to specifics. No special, outstanding talent that I've ever found at any rate.

Originally posted by Segwayguy
First post on ATS:


Certainly these will be disconnected details but I was, a year ago, given a shocking and disturbing image through the internet by someone (likely) hacking my computer. The image was somehow added in to the album art section in iTunes, specifically added to some music I had produced that previously had no other artwork added. When I played the song I suddenly saw a large grotesque image. The photo shows an incredibly occult looking masked figure, their body split in half down the center with one half male one half female, with a keyhole carved into their chest and holding in their hand a ceremonial dagger, in their other hand is a key. The photography, makeup, lighting and costume are all absolutely professional quality and I have been unable to find this same chilling image anywhere else on the internet despite a lot of searching. Odd to say the least...

(edlt: just wanted to also add: one side is white, the other is black and covered in decaying looking wounds and chunks of flesh missing)

I have not posted it to the internet (yet) mostly due to how creepy it looks...

.

edit on 3-6-2012 by Segwayguy because: Forgot one detail about the image description

any chance I can see this image? I'm just really curious. i'm also curious as to why it bothers you so much.

could you Pm it to me and tell me why it bothers you?

had to try...

reply to post by yourmaker


It's insightful to me that you realize why you're doing this. Most people hide the real reasons why they do things. For example, if they are forced to work 40 hrs at a low-paying job, they say it's because they haven't earned the 'right' to higher wages and don't blame their employer for not paying them more even though they could and just cut the ridiculous CEO's pay rate or shareholder's dividends. So, most people essentially manipulate their own thought patterns but do not admit they do it. The fact that all of us can* is pretty scary, because it allows us to continue to do things that are against our own best interests and in effect remain miserable but smiling at the same time.

I can't come to do such things. I call bullpoop as soon as I see it, but I probably self-manipulate to keep myself from doing things that I don't like. It's sort of a hedonistic way of living, but I am not saying it's wrong. I think anyone who believes life should be difficult has been guilt-tripped by others. The manipulators always see their fellow manipulators. A "takes one to know one."

I was never in the gifted program. I tested as borderline on the test overall, and they left it up to me to decide. I figured it might put a strain on me, so I opted out of it. I still ended up graduating in the top 4% of my class with over 300 people. That is a bit of a "curse" (gifted programs) and doing very well in school. It can lead to an elitist attitude and "I'm already better, so I don't need to prove myself anymore." So, I see potential for GT programs to negatively affect children. It could lead to further feelings of "I feel different even more now."

*most

I don't know whether they had such things where I lived as a child or even when I was a child (I'm in my mid-forties) but I do remember having regular IQ tests and "assessments" several times a year from when I was 4 up until leaving school at 18. In my secondary school (high-school), in which I was the only child with a non fee-paying place, I was one of only a handful who regularly had to sit such assessments.
I even was put forward to join Mensa which I did as I thought I might meet people who could help me on my path through life but never kept it up as it mainly consisted of D&D players and precocious children with the personalities of grapefruits lol.

reply to post by Roundtree

I am so smart that I once even outfoxed myself. Then they tried to make me sit in a room with a bunch of people and listen and do stuff, most of it boring! some pretty interesting! the rest was kind of meh! Then they gave me tests to do, but I was on to them and there tricks. That is if I did those tests and passed them or went to fast through them they would of made me sit down and do more boring stuff, so I played dumb and did an average job, so ya I totally outfoxed them to.

Then they had people watch and look out for me, shadowing me, but luckily my family moved a lot so did not have to put up with it to much from school to school but apparently they keep records, but only of some things. And in any case I learned some major ninja skills, and I alluded them to, bam, poof, gone just like that into the shadow, I even fooled my parents into thinking I was still in school for years without them knowing it or anybody being none the wiser. I had to intercept my mail and change a few things in the addresses here and there, but still. My only regret was that when I skipped I ended up more often then not in the library reading stuff. Which totally defeated the purpose of trying to get out of school because they made you learn stuff.

Now that I am older and a bit more wiser I am thinking maybe I should of stayed in school, but then another part of me says maybe I should of tried to find a way out of kindergarten as well, that way I could of freed up my time to do cool and important stuff at that age as well.

Oh ya and I have been trained by secret bad ass ninjas, and even dam aliens telling me all kinds of # I dont want to know, and all types of other cool stuff. So ya to all you special kids, I swear sometimes it's like a circle jerk with these things.

Oh and I can also ride my bike with no handlebars....Its called skillz.

reply to post by NotAnAspie

I don't know anything about "star children" or whatever, but I was in the gifted program. At my school it was called "Spotlight". I was in it from 5th Grade until High School, when it merged with vocational technology classes, of which my choice was Computer Programming.

We did a lot of really neat and fun projects that "regular" students didn't do or participate directly in. We took special trips to local events and exhibits that other students couldn't attend, and competed in district/state tournaments like Chess and a Jeopardy-like game called "Knowledge Bowl". I was terrible at chess and terrible at knowledge bowl lol. One thing we did in my first year (5th Grade) was write an essay on one big change we would like to see in our school. It didn't take me long to decide. Our school was using out of date 1980's Apple computers, and at this point Windows 95 was out and I think the first pentium processors were in use. So I wrote an essay on all of the benefits of upgrading to more modern computer systems. Within a month our entire school was using Windows 95 with Pentium I processors. These gifted programs were a great way to keep more intelligent students challenged and prevent them from misbehaving due to boredom, which was a common trait of mine... even after I was in the program lol...

Nevertheless, I am glad I was in such a program in school, and I highly recommend anyone who has children to try and enter them into the program.

Originally posted by Chickensalad
reply to post by Whatsreal

 

Again, your "friend" with a high IQ was subject to the public school. Maybe his parents should have given him better opportunities. You can't blame the public school system for that.

But, if the public school system that the taxpayers pay for, decides to single out a few and give them a better education, then that's under minding the potential of other students, that are there on a free ride as well.

Like I said, a high IQ obviously doesn't mean your any smarter, you would think that if somebody had such a high IQ, then they would know that heroin destroys your mind and body. So much for being "light-years" ahead of others.

Ever thought that maybe these kids were taken out so that more 'average' kids could compete on the same footing with each other? And make it more 'fair' for them?

I'm going to sound patronizing but anyone who is really brilliant knows that they are much quicker and just 'get it' more easily than most other kids did. It takes a high degree of intelligence to be able to recognize it in others - people of average intelligence simply cannot. They cannot grasp that someone can simply figure things out on their own in the space of a few minutes when it takes them hours of study, etc. There are simply these intuitive 'leaps' that gifted minds make that average kids do not seem to make. It's hard to describe but it's almost a different way of thinking, looking at things or maybe channelling something in the universe. Or my brain was just better at filtering out anything irrelevant; I knew what was time-wasting or useless, and what was valuable.

I NEVER had to study to get better marks on tests that other kids studied their asses off for. I didn't even prepare for tests half the time, or do the requisite work. I cut class, daydreamed, did no homework, did my assignments putting in as little as I could get away with and still got 'A's all through elementary school. Even in University I still got 'A's and I was out drinking every single night. But when I needed to focus, I could. Everything came easily and if I was interested in something I did very well, if I wasn't interested in something I still did OK, even if my efforts were completely half-assed.
It isn't learning differences or teaching methods, just the 'statistical outlier' to the right of the bell curve. While I do agree with the concept of 'multiple intelligences' and so forth, there ARE people, many of whom ended up in myriad enriched or gifted programs, who really are different than everyone else.

As for heroin, the former head of the National Health Service in Great Britain was a heroin addict. Heroin isn't nearly as destructive as alcohol, not nearly as addictive as cigarettes and if it were legal wouldn't be that much of a problem according to doctors who have studied it extensively. Some reckon some people simply need additional opiates and so long as they have a steady, reliable supply they function quite well.

On a lighter note...

In my city the gifted program had it's budget massively cut well before other institutions were getting austerity. In the late 90s they cut it down to two schools, and then in the 2000s just a single school with gifted program served several million people in the core city. The class sizes also got cut so that there are now only about a dozen kids in the class and due to the demographics of their testing (possibly) there are never more than one or two girls in the class, often just one which must make it quite a trying time for them, especially junior high school years. In highschool the gifted program is much larger than in primary school. As far as I can tell the high school level fared a lot better because the students still get specially assigned guidance counselors and more variety of books than other classes.


Anyways back to my class, which was the 5/6 split class and in the late 90s. Whereas the rest of the school had "BRAND SPANKING NEW" iMacs, our class had an absolutely ancient old macintosh. Whereas the rest of the school had field trips our class had a unique lesson for life!

We were tasked to put together a bake sale, by our teacher. We all planned for a month, held it in the schools basement and made something like $400-500 in 1990s money! You could buy a bag of chips and a pop for $1 back then. You could buy a pattie and a pop for $1! My what you could get for your dollar back then (Archi comics were $2). Anyways we baked our asses off and so we were thrilled to make this hefty amount of money but there was the question of what to do with said funds.

Our teacher, who was the most "the man" teacher I ever had, decided we should just give all the money to the principals office to decide what to do with it. Because, y'know a class full of young creative highly intelligent kids couldn't have thought of something....

To make a longer story short there was another grade 5 and grade 6 class at that school: the regular kids, who generally clobbered us 'gifties' at any opportunity that presented. This class, that year, got to go on a field trip to Canadas Wonderland! The purpose of the field trips: studying the PHYSICS (or should I say FYZX!) of roller-coasters, or pretty much the coolest possible field trip ever.

Our class, to our dissapointment, did not get one stinking field trip that whole year. It would be the next year we would sleep over at the island school and even then that's like the cheapest most free field trip you can get.

The lesson I learned valuable lessons that applies to all of life.

Originally posted by Segwayguy
reply to post by NotAnAspie

 

Going out on a limb, I would venture to bet that the reason the image you posted was in your i-tunes folder is because it is an album cover.

Bring Me the Horizon/ There Is a Hell, Believe Me I've Seen It. There Is a Heaven, Let's Keep It a Secret.

Reverse image search is a wonderful tool.

The band is unfamiliar to me but I'm willing to bet this sounds familiar from your playlist



For what its worth, it's nothing nefarious. Most of the current mainstream music apps automatically download and match album art to your library regardless of how the music file was procured ( ).

I don't remember what it was called but yeah. We'd go around and compete with other schools in an academic quizshow like way.

I graduated in 2009 so this happened in the mid-late 90's

reply to post by Drunkenparrot


Woot. Thank you for solving the mystery. Never heard of the band, never downloaded any of their tracks before though so still confused as to iTunes suddenly adding this album artwork to songs that were fully labelled with track info and were created on this computer, by me.

I guess I'll have to check that album out now. If the music sounds similar I will find the coincidence hilarious.

reply to post by daynight42


Very well put. I agree that 'gifted programs' and school in general can be demotivating. That's another aspect to it - that sense of entitlement almost. For me it was more that with a bunch of other really gifted kids I felt quite mediocre for a while, and discouraged. My parents pushed me because they liked the status of bragging that their kid was in the gifted program - I got back at them by letting my marks slide to where I was barely passing anything I didn't like having to take... On top of that many of the kids I was now around had really outstanding talents in specific areas like drawing, story-writing, chemistry, etc. while I just seemed to be 'above average' - decent enough but not brilliant in anything in particular...
And yeah, some of them could be quite priggish. I do however find that with very bright kids there usually was a much wider anti-authoritarian streak than in other kids - that whole 'questioning' everything and sometimes opting not to do what others would think of as the 'rational' choice.
I was given the option half-way through kindergarted to skip up to the first grade. They took me around to the class I'd be in. I stood in the doorway and stared around at all the rows of desks - no toys, no sandbox, etc. and I'd have to be there all day as well. I chose to stay in kindergarten...

Whenever I meet really bright younger kids nowadays I give them the advice I wish I'd been given at the time - just follow whatever you are really interested in and it will fall into place, because if you are really bright and can stay focussed on something, it does. It just might take a while. If you do things mainly to please your parents, or for social status (like a degree when maybe a trade would have been more suitable) you won't end up as happy or probably as successful, especially if you also have an innate revulsion to the crowd-following ass-kissing prevalent in much of corporate culture.

reply to post by Drunkenparrot


WOW AUGH! LOL

I started listening to that track and it's nice and light and sort of dreamy and I'm thinking, wow I'm surprised that this music could be so decent with such an evil looking cover and then

WHAM!

Holy freaking satan that crap is loud. I am listening through a laptop and it still blew my ear drums out. THis is the kind of music I could never listen to without suffering migraines for a week so won't be listening to any more after alll!

Couldn't even take ten seconds of it hahaha

I was often asked to go to these classes.......

but for some reason, I just didn't want to go.. at all. I guess I thought it would be harder and didn't want to do all of that.

pshh.. I should have went. Oh well.

I was put in a gifted program at grade 7 We had to complete these odd rituals killing animals.

And once a year we had to capture and kill someone our own age.
Then there was something we had to do infront of a camera naked i forget now thinking back but i remember seeing a few politicians i now recognize on the tv.
strange memorys

C-3 reading in kindergarten. I was rank two in CA. Mostly because i got tired of answering stupid questions the testers already knew the answers to. So when I got pissed off on the 3 rd eight hour day I started making up outlandish # that could have been possible and they called it off.

The top 10 or so kids were taken away from their parents for 3-10 days for a special "retreat" which was more stupid questions and being stuck in a building where all the doors were locked. Researcher 'vacations' dont impress kids much.

Originally posted by Bixxi3
I was put in a gifted program at grade 7 We had to complete these odd rituals killing animals.

And once a year we had to capture and kill someone are own age.
Then there was something we had to do infront of a camera naked i forget now thinking back but i remember seeing a few politicians i now recognize on the tv.
strange memorys

why don't you try being funny or something?

or better yet, talk about something interesting... like what's your avatar of?

Originally posted by yourmaker
when I was a kid, man...I was insanely rebellious. I would pretend to be stupid so I didn't have to do anything.
I would sneak away during vaccines, or come up with stories for whatever I needed...

School was not my forte at all except to learn how to manipulate people or situations I didn't like.

I was in my own gifted program.

Me too. I quit/was booted in ninth grade for not participating. Passed the GED with a 98 two days later.
You were supposed to wait a few months to take the GED but my dad made it happen.

In the sixties and seventies, my schools didn't have gifted programs. They let you skip a grade if you were
ahead.....I skipped as often as possible...not grades....school

I was in a gifted program called STRETCH (Supplemental Teaching Resource for Educationally Talented Children). Most of the time, a core group of "gifted" students would gather on Tuesdays and Thursdays around 1 pm (Just after lunch) in the school building. We were still responsible for the material in or normal elementary class during the time we were away, so we were pulling double duty. I really enjoyed it, though. On Thursdays we would fill out the "News Quiz." This was a sheet of paper with questions about recent events. The categories included U.S., World, Sports, Geography, etc. Since I can remember, I enjoyed Jeopardy. News Quiz was similar in its structure. There were five questions for the eight categories and each one was a little harder. The easiest would give you one point and the hardest five points. I always did the best at News Quiz and, on occasion, would beat Mrs. Glazer (the STRETCH teacher).

We would also play "Stories with holes". Basically, Mrs. Glazer would read us a story. The conclusion wouldn't quite fit with the details of the story, so we had to figure out what detail was missing to make it all fit. I'll give you an example. "A man boarded a plane and sat down in his seat. The plane began to fill up with other passengers. The man saw one of his friends. He waved to his friend and said something. Seconds later, the man was arrested and taken off of the plane. Why was the man arrested?" The group of children would discuss the details fot the story and throw out ideas. Basically, it was a smart kid brainstorming party. After about two minutes, we all agreed that the man's friend's name was Jack and the man said, "Hi, Jack." That was correct.

We took a few field trips, just the gifted children. There was never any pressure in these classes and I have fond memories of getting out of my normal elementary class. If my classwork and teaching was structured all the time, I think I would have been more engaged. I was a good student, but I think I would have learned so much more.

I still think about some of the other gifted children. I wonder how their lives turned out. I wonder if my children will be smart. I hope teaching them at home will help to inspire them to love to learn.