You’re gifted enough to cruise through the first few stages of your education without trying, so you forge an identity as “the smart kid” but never build up skills in learning or studying, so when you finally get to a level where your natural intelligence can’t carry you anymore you can’t keep up with the people who did learn those skills and you start to fail and lose your identity as the smart kid which causes you to break down because that’d how you defined yourself for so long… or so I’ve heard.
That’s the cost of designing education for the worst students.
This is actually the reason. Because there is no such thing as “natural intelligence”. Not more than there is “natural strength”. There are natural predispositions, yes, but what you get is function of what training effort you put in. Whether you realise, and/or like, putting effort into training your intelligence, is is another thing. So people who are “above average” were in a favorable environment that fostered their development without it feeling forced, or unnatural. And then, when the environment was replaced by the school’s, it sadly didn’t foster personal development anymore. I would argue we would need to redesign education, now that we have internet. We don’t have to design courses around physical limits.
I feel like you watched me grow up. For a long time I was smart enough to pick things up naturally, I was even offered to skip grades.
Then the math got complicated and I didn’t know how to learn it. I went from being the smart kid to being the stupid one in remedial math. Being smart was all I had at that point, so when I “lost” that, I lost everything in my eyes. I was stupid and I was never going to be anything because of it.
I ended up getting my GED as an adult and I now have a promising career in insurance- so I didn’t really lose everything, but when I was 15 it sure felt like I had.
I still suffer from this. Promising early start, intense self-confidence issues and depression by the end.
I am good with knowing my deficiencies. What sucks is being told that they are my fault because I should be “smart enough to overcome them”.
There’s that joke about wearing regular clothes on Halloween to go as the “gifted kid”, and when people ask what you’re supposed to be you sigh and say you were supposed to be a lot of things.
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
The guilt that “you could have done more with your life”, despite being a successful engineer with a happy family.
Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of “exceptional children” pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of “Special Needs” but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means “kids that teachers need to make exceptions for”
The creator of this comic is a self-described pro-sweatshop neoliberal, which explains the “woe is me, I’m too smart for my own good” delusions.
I don’t think he’s ever come out in favor of sweatshops? Maybe you’re think of Matt ygelsia from vox.
Sure, because something so egregious would definitely show up in a Google search for “Zach Weinersmith sweatshop”, right?
Unless…you’re exaggerating on the Internet to stir up outrage?
Do you have a source for that? I cannot find anything about it online in Google, Wiki or even in ChatGPT delusions.
