"Gifted"

My wife got a post/email on the local homeschool board about a lady that thinks her kid is "gifted". I just happened to sit down in front of her computer and see this silly post sitting there. My number one response: this lady needs a blog... that's the perfect platform for bragging about this sort of thing. Come to find out that it is a piece for a newspaper column she writes. So the somewhat pointlessness of the article is forgiven to a certain extent, viewing it as an article, and not a message board post.

But the whole thing is still silly. Her fundamental question is this: "Is my son gifted or just really smart?" He's reading at this grade level, and mathing at whatever grade level, and so on, but is he "gifted"? To me the whole concept of "gifted" is just stupid. It serves no real purpose, except perhaps to single out the "gifted" one. I mean everyone has some sort of "gift", right? Besides, there's a lot more to success than merely high academic performance.

It might be relevant to say here that I was labelled gifted in elementary school, and it is a hard label to shake. We even had a gifted program, called SWEPT, where all the gifted kids could get together and have learning about stuff that presumably the masses were not capable of understanding. From what I can remember, we did a lot of dinosaurs and stuff, or maybe it was more independent study - where the kid picked the topic, and I just chose dinosaurs...er, rather paleontology. I do remember even in first grade being carted off to this special class with two other kids, both from second grade, where we did mathy and sciency things, like using litmus paper. Sadly, I struggle with litmus paper to this day. Though I think I did get a fair sense of scientific method along the way - maybe it started in this pre-SWEPT.

One thing I really remember from the gifted program was in middle school, the gifted room was this little room off the cafeteria, and one day we all found access to the IQ scores of all the kids in the gifted group. That was fun - I was one of the highest IQ. But the funniest thing is that the kid with the lowest IQ of all of us ended up at Harvard, and works for like Warrenn Buffett or something now.

Forget about Harvard, the kid that was a drug dealer (not in the gifted program) in high school is part owner of a restaurant now. Some of the smartest kids in my class now are stuck in uninteresting jobs for big companies. Some have found peace serving God. Some just get by doing art. Some of the rest are making their mark. I haven't seen a high correlation between "gifted" status and life happiness.

Labelling doesn't do anybody any good. It is a convenient tool to make it easier for schools to determine how an individual should be treated, based on the labels that are applied.

So in the end, this reads more like a rant, but I think I'll let it fly. The point is that it doesn't matter if a kid is gifted or just really smart or whatever any of that is supposed to mean. What matters is a person finding a thing to do that they love, and making the most of it. What matters most above all is a person being happy.