I was placed into the "gifted" program in the 1st grade of elementary school and told for many years that I was somehow special or "very" intelligent.
I never believed them, of course, because of two observations:
1. The adults who were telling me this did a lot of stupid stuff, which undermined the credibility of their claims.
2. Despite their best efforts to insulate us from the normal students, I knew people my age outside of the gifted program who were as clever -- if not even more so -- than my so-called "gifted" peers.
As an adult, I'm glad I never bought their hype. It's a one-way high-speed trip to narcissism, laziness, entitlement, and creepiness.
I was in the "Talented and Gifted" program all throughout school. I never understood what the point of it was. Mainly it meant I spent a decade interacting periodically with the same teacher who I never really got along with. It was a huge waste of time and resources to have that program at least as it was implemented at our school.
I spent my school years getting kicked out and out back into those classes. Typically they would notice that the normal classes were too easy, put me in the "gifted" program which was just 100x more boring with a 10x larger work load, so I didn't do that shit, got kicked out and the cycle would begin a couple years again.
While there were certainly some very intelligent people in these classes, plenty of other struck me as not necessarily the brightest.
The one exception to this was in 5th grade, I was put into a gifted program that was markedly different from normal classes. For the most part, there was a lot of freedom to work on what you wanted, no busy work. Occasionally the rather group would go outside where we should chill and just discuss various things.
I was placed into the "gifted" program in the 1st grade of elementary school and told for many years that I was somehow special or "very" intelligent.
I never believed them, of course, because of two observations:
1. The adults who were telling me this did a lot of stupid stuff, which undermined the credibility of their claims.
2. Despite their best efforts to insulate us from the normal students, I knew people my age outside of the gifted program who were as clever -- if not even more so -- than my so-called "gifted" peers.
As an adult, I'm glad I never bought their hype. It's a one-way high-speed trip to narcissism, laziness, entitlement, and creepiness.