Gifted and Terrible

A very long time ago (like … honestly maybe a year ago now?) we asked TTFA listeners how their school’s gifted and talented programs messed them up (or didn’t). In this bonus episode, Nora listens to your voicemail, reads your email, and responds to them.

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” Premium. We are working on our next season, which will be available in September, but until then, this is where we are making episodes. And this is one that I've been thinking about for a long time. And so have many of you, because I raised this question … to our listeners, to people who follow me on Instagram. I asked, “Did you get into the gifted and talented program? Did you not? And how do you think that affected your adulthood?”

And obviously I'm going to tell you how I think it affected mine:

Not well. Not well. Not well. 

I was not aware of what it meant to be gifted until I switched schools in second grade. I switched a little bit into the school year. So I was not just arriving in second grade to a school where most of the people have been there since kindergarten. But I was also arriving when the first day of school jitters had given way to comfort amongst each other. To congeniality. To, you know, grade school classes are mixed up from year to year, or they were at this school for me. And, the new alliances had already been formed. A classroom culture had already been formed. And then I arrived. 

Our school was a three-story, old Catholic school. Our gym was like a sub-basement that was a nuclear fallout shelter, I believe. And I believe that because there was a sign above the second stairwell that you had to take to get down into the depths of the Minnesota earth that said "fallout shelter." 

And while we went down to gym class to play various forms of dodgeball that were actually more dangerous and more violent than the original, a certain group of us, a faction of our classroom, would just sort of peel off at the regular basement level. And they would go into this room that had a lot of mystery to it. It had rugs, it had bean bags, it had a chill vibe, but also it had a vibe of superiority. 

Because in that classroom, these were SOAR kids. S-O-A-R. What did the acronym stand for? I couldn't tell you, except that I believe the A stood for “advanced.” And when I found out that there were kids in my class who were special, I said, “Why am I not one of them?” Why did my former teacher not send word that a illuminary would be joining their midst? I read The Hobbit when I was 5. Was it an abridged version from the library that came in a plastic baggy that had the plastic handle on the top that snapped together? You can just feel when you got it right and it snapped. And it needed a baggy because it also came with a corresponding cassette tape, so you could follow along with the words you were hearing? Yes, it was, it was an abridged version, but nonetheless, it was The Hobbit. 

I belonged in that room, but I couldn't get into that room until we had done testing, statewide testing. And when we did the results came back and they said this girl can read, baby. Yes, she can. And I got to go to SOAR, and it was soooo underwhelming. It was so underwhelming. They weren't doing anything in there. They were not doing– maybe building a couple extra dioramas. It was basically advanced crafting. 

But I still felt pretty damn special when all the other kids would go down to sweat it out, in little squads doing basic calisthenics or the presidential physical fitness test. And I was just reading a book? Yeah, that felt pretty special. 

Now, I have grown into the kind of adult who is in therapy, the kind of adult who has been in a lot of kinds of therapy. The kind of adult who has really struggled to separate her value from what she does or what she has accomplished. The metabolism rate I have for success of any kind is so, so, so fast. I can barely enjoy the feeling of a job well done because it could be a job perfectly done. And perfectly done and faster and better than anybody else. And I know a lot of people like this, a lot of insufferable adults who can't take criticism without feeling like they're going to die immediately because obviously the criticism means that they're a terrible, no good person and they should give up. Adults who really, as my friend and former producer Hans Buetow put it, are only as good as their last interaction or their last accomplishment. The kind of adults who really truly struggle with not being good at something the first time, as though we were all born experts at everything, as though we did not need to learn how to walk, wipe our own butts, tie our shoes. 

So I put this out on the podcast. I put it out on Instagram, and I said, “How'd this affect you guys?” And these are some of my favorite kinds of episodes to make, because they include your voices. In some cases, they include more of my voice because I'm reading emails. I got permission to read them. It is okay. But here we go. Here are your own gifted and talented stories.

Caller: Hi Nora and everybody else. I'm Natalie, and I was in the gifted and talented program at school. I'm now 29, and it has taken me most of my 20s to realize that when you are gifted and talented, all that meant for me was that my anxiety was never seen in school as a bad thing. It was just like, I cared about getting straight As. It was anxiety. It was perfectionism. And because my anxiety showed up in wanting to get good grades, no one was like, “Oh, this is not a bad thing.” 

Okay. I highly relate to this because yes, being gifted was an outlet for my own anxiety and I was just a very anxious child in the nineties, but we really just called anxiety being annoying at the time.  

Caller: I was plucked from the masses of second grade and put in a gift and talented program, but the gifted and talented program at my school had, like, two tiers. And there was, like, a really gifted and talented and a kind of gifted and talented. And I was in the kind of tier and the kids in the kind of tier just, like, got a special spelling book with harder words, and the kids in the best tier got to, like, go on the bus and go to a special place to learn harder school. And they got to, like, go to Sonic on the bus after their class, their special class. And I was very, very, very, very, very jealous. And I had them test me twice, even though I was, like, legitimately in second grade. I did the test and I only made the first tier and I was like, “Hit me again, like test me again. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.” And I've had testing anxiety ever since. So, yeah. 

Right. It's not enough to stratify kids into smart and regular. You also have to stratify the gifted kids and say, “Now look, some of you are so smart that you ... deserve Sonic. You deserve a slushie and a plate of tater tots delivered through the car window. That's how gifted you are.”

Caller: I actually graduated from the then-number one school in the nation, The School for the Talented and Gifted. And that was my high school. I graduated actually, I believe it was 47th out of 47, bottom of the class, No. 1 high school nation. And I don't feel very gifted! 

Look, someone has to be number 47. Someone has to be the 47th smartest kid in the country, and that person was you. That person was you, but just … if there is a flaw to this system, I think it is pretty well illustrated by this caller and feeling like being dead last in a class and school filled with the best of the best made them a loser.   

Caller: When I was in first grade, I was pretty on the ball about getting my work done and whatnot, and I didn't somehow pass the IQ test to get into the gifted program. So they retested me. And they literally told me my IQ was seven points too low to get into the gifted program. And therefore they wouldn't let me in, even though I was fairly good at getting my work done on time and fairly efficient with all of that. So they tested me again in third grade, and they wouldn't let me into the gifted program again, because probably my IQ was too low. But they did give me extra work I could complete inside the class just to fill my time, since apparently I had some time on my hands. But I've been pretty bitter about that ever since. And mostly I think gifted programs aren't really what they're supposed to be. 

Caller: You mentioned when did the gifted program fuck anyone up? And, well, I don't know if I can say fuck on here, but, uh, when I was about in third, fourth grade, I was made to take two different tests to tell if I was either gifted or slow, because my teachers couldn't tell which. And that's what they told my parents. And that's what my parents relayed to me. Probably could have been handled better. Um, yeah. So how's that for some validation to sit with for the rest of your life? Still pretty pissed about that. Okay. Bye! 

As much as I want to believe that your parents didn't tell you that you were either gifted or slow, I bet they did. I bet they did. And I also bet they're like, “No, we didn't.” And you're like yea, no you did. And even if you're being slightly hyperbolic, it doesn't even really matter because guess what? That's how it felt to you as a kid. That's how you felt.  

Caller: Hey there. I am calling in regards to elementary school me and the gifted program. I am a dyslexic female. I was diagnosed in kindergarten and, from there on out, pulled out of class every day by another teacher to go to a special needs room to where they tried to teach me. It affected my life greatly and the lack of self confidence is huge. I feel like I'm always pulled out of class and on the flip side, still have more regular intelligence and street smarts than most, and my brain works in different way. And I do feel extremely capable of all things. But it definitely sucked.

Yeah. When we talk about the curse of the gifted child, there's also the curse of the child who was labeled as not gifted. I don't know if they still do this. But as children, we were often asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And we were told, well, like, “School's important, the permanent record is important, because it's all adding up to who you will become as an adult. And so if you do not make this, if you are not picked here, then you will never be picked.” And I am sorry that you didn't get picked, but also, I have almost no street smarts, so you could rob me and tip the scales of justice whenever you want.

Caller: At my school, we started distinguishing kids from least intelligent to most intelligent around third or fourth grade. And the moment that we started doing that, I started having extreme anxiety dreams that I would be placed into what I considered to be the dumb group at the time. And my school did not make it very difficult to distinguish which groups were which, because they used an extremely transparent, even for a third grader, way of classifying the groups, with the red group being the group for the least intelligent children and the green group being the ones for the most intelligent children. So I'm not sure if they even thought that was gonna go over our heads or if it was literally just as obvious as it seems. But those, that sense of anxiety that I wasn't gonna be intelligent enough has– I've carried with me throughout my entire life. And it's never been proven to be true that I'm not intelligent. And in fact, the opposite has been proven many times, but I can't shake that feeling that I'm just not smart enough to accomplish the things I wanna do in my life. And at this point, I graduated high school a year early, and I'm a senior in college. I'm a neuroscience major, and I'm applying for PhD programs, but somehow I still think I'm stupid. And whenever people ask me my biggest insecurity and I say “my intelligence,” they literally laugh in my face, but for some reason I can't get it through my head that I'm an intelligent person. And I guess, you know, that's, that's what the gifted program did to me.

Caller: I was put into the gifted program starting in kindergarten. I was at the pink table, which was the only table of kids that could actually read books starting in kindergarten. From that point on my small class of 60 kids, there were 10 of us in the gifted program. I was the only female there. I was constantly competing with all of these boys to see who would get the best grades. Um, to this day, I still feel feelings of inadequacy. Four of us went to the same engineering school afterwards. And I look at our jobs, and I just can't help but think, “Oh, my engineering career, where I'm doing phenomenal, isn't as good as so and so's engineering career.” And I really think that that all started from being in the gifted program.

I hate that you feel that way, but I love that you are an engineer. I love that you are out there breaking the glass ceiling, and I love that you are a woman in STEM. I still do not know what an engineer does. So if you want to call and explain it to me in very, very simple terms, I would really love that.

Caller: I was deemed gifted in kindergarten, which … I don't even know what I was doing that was so great when I was 5 years old. But I feel like from that point on, everyone – teachers and parents – it was kind of like telling you, “Hey, you should be good at this. You will be better than everybody else at this at school at the time.” And whenever that is just pounded into you for so many years, and then you get out into the real world and people are better than you, I struggle so much when I'm not the best at something. And now I'm in my 30s, and I just feel like if I fail at something, or not even fail, I'm just not the best, those kinds of things will haunt me for years. I mean, something I did when I'm 20, I'll think about over and over again about why I didn't do better. And now I'm a parent. I have a daughter. And she's in the second grade and … she is not the best in her class. She's not the worst. And that's totally fine. 

Caller: I went to elementary school in the ‘80s, and in fourth grade, we all got tested at the beginning of the school year to see if we were gifted. And when the results came in, it turned out that everyone in my fourth grade classroom was gifted except for me. And so, every week, one day a week, I forget which day it was, they would all go to the library and have their gifted program. And I would stay in the classroom. And my mother and teacher actually worked together to find an alternative activity, and so I went into the special ed room, and I actually read books to other kids, and I really enjoyed it. And usually when I tell this story, I talk about how it was such a good thing for me. But it also did leave me wondering, like, “Am I special? Am I not good enough, not smart enough?” You know, why am I not gifted like every other kid in my class? Anyways. The next year, fifth grade, I didn't even bother taking the test, because I knew I wasn't gifted. So again, I went and I read to the kids in the special ed classroom, and I certainly don't regret that. And I … I am gifted in empathy and kindness and creativity, even if I'm not in the gifted program.

Okay, if every kid is gifted except one, are they really all gifted kids? Are they? Are they? Maybe I'm just saying that to make little child you feel better for staying in the library, doing your little activities. And I know it was good for you. I know it was good for you because you said it was good for you. And you know what? You grew up into the exact kind of person that I hope I raise. I don't give a rip how my children are categorized or how they test on things. I want them to grow up gifted in empathy and kindness and creativity. So, good job.

Caller: I went to a school district that was a feeder school district for an Ivy League. So everything was just, like, honors system on steroids. When we were learning to read, I kid you not, there were, like, four or maybe five different reading levels. There was like, remedial, normal, above average, super above average, and like geniuses. And I remember, I was in the super above average, but not genius category, and my friends were in the genius category and I felt ostracized because I wasn't reading, I don't know, War and Peace at like 6 years old. 

Caller: I got into the gifted and talented program at some young age. I don't know, fourth grade, fifth grade something. It was great, actually. I loved it. I was a pretty oblivious child, so normally when people tried to offend me, I was just like, “Oh, they're weird!” But, because I, whatever, passed the test to get into this program, my family started berating me if I didn't get an A on a test or something. And actually on several occasions, going over to a family member's house, they would let everyone else in my family, in, in their front door, except for me. And then they would close the door, leaving me outside, give me a riddle, and not let me inside until I could answer the riddle. Like, I'm from California, so I wasn't stuck out in the winter snow, okay? But I was stuck when it was like 111 degrees outside, trying to think of an answer to a stupid riddle. I to this day absolutely hate riddles. 

Okay. This is another one of the flaws of this kind of system, which is that there are so many different kinds of intelligence. I cannot solve a riddle to save my life. I cannot think of a riddle to save my life. I was with one of my friend's children who I'm sure is in a gifted and talented program. I think all children are gifted. I think all children are talented. I think all people are. Everybody has their own unique set of skills and insights that are completely unique to them and can not be replicated, but damn, do we love a categorization!

Anyway, this child, this wonderful child went around the table and said, “Let's all say a riddle.” I had nothing to say. I could not think of a single thing at all. And not only could this kid come up with a riddle, the riddle rhymed. And I could not for the life of me think of what it was. The riddle was basically like, “Everywhere I go, there're two of me. And the further away I get, there's more of me?” Anyways. It was footsteps. The answer was footsteps. I, if somebody would have been holding a gun to my head and said, “If you do not solve this riddle, you will die,” I would not be recording this podcast because I would be a cadaver.

Caller: I was in the gifted program, I think from like maybe second grade onward. And, I mean, it's definitely a weird thing to get, like, bussed out of school somewhere else for the day then come back. But the worst memory I have is in fifth grade, my regular teacher was just kind of the worst kind of guy. Like, I still have bad thoughts of him in my brain, but anyway. I'd left for gifted for the day to do like paper mache masks or, like, learn about the Holocaust. But I came back, and my fifth grade class was learning about how to measure using a ruler. And I missed, like, most of the lesson. And so I got there and I didn't know how to use a ruler. I was in fifth grade. Nobody ever taught me that. And, I didn't know the answer to one of the questions. And he looked at me and goes, “Oh, Miss Gifted, don't even know how to measure. Who's gifted now?” And then I just burst into tears and cried the whole night, and my mom had to call and then he apologized the next day, but I'll never forget that. Probably has messed me up for life.

Oh, I feel that. “Oh, Miss Gifted don't even know how to measure. Who's gifted now?” Yeah, you know what? A lot of us don't know how to measure things. A lot of us actually missed out on crucial parts of our development because we were in a little room building a sort of scale diorama of a colonial Williamsburg home, even though I lived in the Midwest, I would never lay eyes on colonial Williamsburg. Although I dreamed of it. Which is, you know, probably problematic, but I did. I really did. A lot of us missed out on some basic schooling to be in the gifted program.

This is an email that I got, that I think is a really compassionate take on the entire situation. And one of the things that I have to say is that I am not blaming teachers. I'm not even blaming administrators. There are a lot of problems with our education system. It's just very underfunded. There's a lot of problems with American education. If you are a teacher and you want to talk about that, let's get into it, baby. Call me, email me. I would love, love, love to talk about that. I cannot imagine how difficult it is to be a teacher right now. I cannot imagine trying to tailor the learning experience for multiple kinds of children. And their different intellects and abilities and hearts and minds and souls and backgrounds and family lives. It's all so much. And I don't think that any teacher is like out there being like, “God, how can I really jack up a kid's life? Let's label them as gifted, let's label them as a dumb dumb.” Sure there might be a couple out there, but probably not the vast majority. So, here's what I really liked about this email. This listener was put into gifted and talented in third grade. Their friend did not get into the program, and so things got weird, which, mm hmm, I can see that happening. 

Email: The education system is a scalding hot mess. And this is just one example of a well-intentioned initiative absolutely crapping the bed. I fully appreciate the need to challenge kids of all abilities and I don't at all have a better solution to propose. I just know this one in so many ways wasn't good, and so much of what happens even now in terms of how kids are grouped and managed isn't good either. And so much of it comes back to schools not having the resources and staff they need to really approach these complicated challenges with ingenuity, grace, and compassion for all involved. And it just really, truly, horribly sucks. I don't know the answers, but until we invest in the people that maybe do have them, or at least have the ideas for what the answers might be, it's going to keep right on sucking. Blessed are the teachers navigating this chaos every damn day. I actually go back and forth every time I hear this discussion around how much weight I think is fair to give the program in terms of the neurosis it may have instilled. Because here's where I'm at: perfectionist, overthinking, terrified of failure, constantly feeling guilty for not living up to my potential, hating myself for not immediately being the best at every single thing I ever attempt. Word on the street is a lot of other GT kids struggle with these things too, yes? And maybe it's entirely because of the program. Maybe it's partially because of it. Maybe it's not because of it at all, and this is just the fun manifestation of my anxiety that I would have no matter where I went to elementary school. But really, every time I come across the Twitter discourse of how gifted and talented messed us all up, I'm torn between taking it as a glorious validation versus resisting it as yet another instance of our society wanting to pathologize every little thing. Maybe it's because of gifted and talented, maybe that's a part of it. And maybe we're just people.  

I want to read an email that I got that ... it just, it really, really stuck with me. There are so many others, too. There's also this huge Venn diagram between gifted and talented programs and neurodivergence and people who really were on the autism spectrum, or people who had ADHD. People who had anxiety, who were just sort of pushed into this program and told, “Well, this means you're special.” And there's also an entire group of kids who had to witness not being picked. Who had to witness what it felt like to basically, if you're not special, if you aren't put in the special category, what does that make you? Does it make you ordinary? Does it make you average? Which, there's literally nothing wrong with that. Or does it make you garbage? And I think when you're a kid, and I say this as an adult who is constantly getting different forms of evaluation, that is, you know, even if you just work a regular job, right, you get evaluated every year. Somebody will give you a 360 review. I get that, too, just my 360 reviews are public and mostly about how I have an annoying voice, or an unpleasant face. I mean, those are the, those are the bad things. Other people say lots of nice things to me too, and about me and about our work, and that's wonderful, but, the minute that you can ... if you are inclined this way, I should say, cause I do know several mentally healthy people who are like, “No, I literally could not have cared less about that whatsoever. It didn't affect me at all.” But if you are a person who is predisposed to having your value tied to praise, having your value tied to the way that you perform a task, if you are a person who is really, really affected by extrinsic forces and approval, then yeah, not getting picked is also gonna jack you up a little bit. Like the caller who sat in the library while all of their classmates went to go do gifted stuff. What the heck? 

So I got this email. I'm going to read it to you. Cause I, it really, really affected me reading it, and I wanted to share it with you. 

Email: Growing up, I was not in the gifted program, but my brother and many of my friends were. I was terrible at math and my brother was in double advanced math. Side note, what is that? I'm sorry, this is Nora, not the email writer. Double advanced math sounds fake. I later learned that I had undiagnosed ADHD and that made it so I wasn't able to do well on the timed standardized tests that were used to determine who got into those programs. I spent years thinking I was stupid and resentful about all the extra fun stuff my peers got to do. A lot of them would subtly brag about the fact that they were in advanced classes and it made me so angry. In high school, I had teachers realize I was smart enough to be in honors and AP classes, and I got into those classes and I did well, but there's a part of me that still thinks I'm not good enough. I get so mad when people talk about how hard it was to be gifted. Try thinking you're stupid for years. At least the gifted kids got to think they were special for some part of life. When people talk about how hard it was to be gifted, it sounds to me like they're complaining that not every system is rigged in their favor like the education system. I realize it's a lot more nuanced than that, but it still deeply frustrates me. I'm glad that life isn't determined by some standardized test you took in third grade. It frustrates me that some people seem to wish it was. 

Damn. That hits. That really, really, really hits. 

And when I think about my perfectionism, when I think about my inability to have compassion for myself – and often for other people who make mistakes – when I think about the way that I have to metabolize my, my successes so quickly, and, you know, I, I just cannot ever seem to even get enjoyment out of them, I can see how having sort of a hand on the scale that tipped it into my favor, that made me feel like things should be easy for me or that, you know, I should just naturally be good at things, was not good for me. And also was not good for other people, other children, other future adults. These are also things that are prevalent, regardless of the gifted program, these are all just sort of the symptoms of living in late stage capitalism, where everything has been commodified. Everything can be measured. 

And when I think about, and I see all these sort of direct-to-consumer brands that are packaging up our lives – the things that we do, that, that connect us with each other – and repositioning those as inconveniences that they can sell us a product based on supposed convenience so that we can work more, essentially and use our hard earned money to pay for these goods and services that will give us our free time back. But what do we do with our free time besides scroll Netflix or binge watch TikToks is: We work. And if we do get enjoyment out of something, it is very, very easy to get sucked into, “Well, what is it for? What can it do? What can I do with it?” 

Raise your hand if you had a hobby and were told that it should be a side hustle. Raise your hand if you have a hard time resting or relaxing, because well, one, you probably have a hard time resting and relaxing because you are forced to work that much, to keep up with just the rising cost of living. And/or because you're so used to having things measured, and being rewarded for the things you do, that you're sort of married to productivity. 

I might be projecting now. I often do. But based on the number of emails we got, I, uh, I just know, I know that I am not the only one. I know, the same uh, thing that I think I told you at the beginning of this episode, which is, I am just not that special.  

This has been “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” Premium. Thank you so much for being here. I really, really do appreciate it. We are working on a regular season, normal TTFA stories. In the meantime, we were making this sort of additional bonus content, just that you know, we're, we're here, we're working. We're gonna figure it out. I appreciate it so much. 

If you want to call and talk about this or any other thing, please do. Our phone number is (612) 568-4441. And actually, I made a brand new email that is just for you all. It is only for Premium subscribers. It's ttfapremium@feelingsand.co. That's spelled out. So it's, ttfapremium@feelingsand.co. Thank you so much for being here. 

And you know what, here's what I really want. Here's what I really want to say at the end. I think you're all gifted. I think you're all talented. I think you're all special. And yes I already said that if we're all special none of us are special, but I think that's good. We don't need to be special. You can be gifted and talented and deeply unspecial, and that is just fine. That's us, baby.