Both, attended TAG programs, skipped a grade, was constantly criticized for not applying self more
I was definitely the latter, I was a disgrace to the school, would never amount to anything etc. Always underachieving and was blamed for it
🖐️ teacher’s pet.
In elementary school, the former. I was the darling of the teachers and hated by the students.
the second for sure. once a year there’d be that teacher who’d try to connect and it always went the same way. they’d assume i was feeling insecure about my ability and statements like “i hate touching this paper” or “grades are meaningless nonsense” were part of that. they needle me until i said fine and did a weeks worth of class material in one sitting. then they go “oh see this is amazing you’d be a straight A student if you applied yourself”. meanwhile my stress level is at an 11 from all the tactile sensery hell. and from that point on i’d just ditch their class.
If you were a teacher and were trying to get the best outcomes for kids like you, what would you do?
my son is in a great communication and interaction program with dedicated space inside the school. lots of sensory adaptive tools and quiet areas. theres awareness that some of the kids just dont care about being praised, but making the content contextually relavent and assuming they have the self awareness to decide does work. though praise definitely works with my son. had a lot of really interesting discussions with his teacher. i may very well have had a wildy different experiance if that space had existed 30 years ago. at the time all that i wanted was to do self paced remote classes where i could submit everything via computer. which by highschool was an option. but at that time the only goal was me in a gen-ed classroom with my behavior adjusted to make everyone else around me comfotable. allowing me to do what would work for me was seen as failure by everyone making decisions.
for the tactile part specifically. e-readers, stone paper for writing and terraslate if i need printed materials. have significantly improved my life.
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Applied self and stop day dreaming. It also didn’t help I had two older brothers who were known trouble makers. So by the time I got to school the teachers’ perception of me was already skewed. For the most part I just fell through the cracks and was pushed on to get rid of me. I graduated eighth grade with straight Fs.
Somehow both simultaneously
Good multi tasking! I approve
First one, then depression kicked in and I was neither
The first one ☺️ and I still like being called a good boy to this day 😇
Well, can I be both? At least I was until this year (second half of high school). Now I’m just lazy and half-ass everything.
Hey, nice seeing you here.
Teachers usually said I was gifted but a pain to teach and I’d get in trouble frequently for disrupting class, this went on even in university. My psychiatrist says it’s likely I’m actually gifted, but I don’t want to know if I am or not because I’m already too arrogantHeeeeyyy! Nice to see you too 😊
I was in the “we’re going to put you in advanced placement as a form of special ed, because you get bored and start asking questions that are too advanced for the rest of the class” group.
Yes, those advanced “you’re so gifted and talented, so we’re going to put you in a cool class where you get to do logic puzzles instead of regular math” classes were a form of special ed. They were designed to sequester you away from the rest of your class. Not as a punishment, but because the modern school system relies on students in each class actually being at the same level. If students are above or below a certain range, they slow down instruction for the entire class, as the teacher is forced to spend extra time with just those individual students.
Most people think of special ed as just being the disabled kids, but the reality is that special ed is any kind of class that pulls you out of the rest of the class. Again, because class time is focused on the 80% of students who are at the same level, not the 10% who are above or below it. If you’re too far below, the teacher has to spend extra time rehashing material. And if you’re too far above, you end up asking a ton of questions that the teacher hasn’t built the groundwork to answer yet.
Maybe your class is learning module {A}, and students will tend to ask questions about {A} or maybe {B}. But you immediately grasped the concept of {A}, read ahead to {B} because you were bored, found a shortcut to get to {C}, and are asking questions about {D}. All while the rest of the class is still learning {A}. And the questions you’re asking won’t even be relevant until you get to {C} or {D}, so devoting time to answering them would be a waste of time for the 80% of the class that is learning {A}. So instead of letting you slow the rest of the class down, they ship you off to a “gifted and talented” class once or twice a week, to be with kids at your own level.
In middle school, I was in learning disability class and the gifted program at the same time. In retrospect, the LD was probably just due to organizational ADHD stuff. I was first diagnosed ADHD in the early '80s, but my parents didn’t tell me until 20-something years later.
I got sent to saturday school at the high school when I was in 4th grade (which meant my mom having to cancel anything and drive me there to a place I’ve never been leaving me in complete horror) because I would finish my work and couldn’t just sit still and do nothing. My mom asked them to give me more work to do and the teacher refused.
The second half. I’d get failing grades in final projects (e.g. math) because I failed to read the instructions, would complete only one side of a test because I forgot to the check the other side, would tell long stories to my teacher in class, would just not take science seriously, but studied my butt off for history (which was so much reading). I don’t think my teachers generally liked me (some didn’t at all), but that sort of changed when I moved states from red to blue and got better instruction.
