141–150 of 190 posts
Democracy is kinda like 1 human and 10 chimpanzees living together, with the chimpanzees insisting that everybody are equal, and threatening violent sanctions whenever anybody behaves otherwise.
I don't think our democratic society is very good for gifted/talented people. Democracy is kinda like 1 human and 10 chimpanzees living together, with the chimpanzees insisting that everybody are equal, and threatening violent sanctions whenever anybody behaves otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> one of the most depressing lessons I have learned is that all the social ills of grade school do not disappear when you graduate; they merge into the fabric of daily life. For what it's worth I've learned the opposite. Outside of a mass-incarceration type environment, people are mostly pretty OK. It took me way too long to work that out after I left school.
I think it is that you get far more power in who you surround yourself with and you learn better how to navigate social issues. Also, people are great at faking at being nice... I live in the South (USA) and lots of people seem really nice until they switch to a topic like homosexuality, at which point you find their beliefs are really quite harmful (things like seizing children and force conversion camps). You learn…
I could say a lot about the quality of education: the lack of a challenge, the boringness of the one-size-fits-all curriculum, etc. But boredom isn't that big of a deal. I made up for that by studying what I wanted to outside of school, instead of doing homework. Even with the vindictive teachers that made homework 30% of the final grade, it was still cakewalk to pass their classes without doing a single assignment.…
I 100% believe everything you said, but it's shocking to read. Bullying of the gifted kids wasn't really a thing in my public school in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I'm not sure if this was despite or because of the fact that while we had some gifted classes, we weren't totally segregated from the rest of the kids nor were we extolled as the "elites." More importantly, I'm sorry that happened to you. Nobody should ha…
I've been punched in the face and chest multiple times, spit on, thrown into a creek by three kids, pushed down stairs, you name it. But it was mostly constant emotional abuse. For how much I was called a faggot, you'd swear the WBC kids went to school with me. I can't even imagine how much worse it'd be if I actually were gay. Kids in the '90s were obsessed with anti-homosexuality. I'd usually ditch the cafeteria and eat alone in the stairwells. The worst parts of the day were between-classes. I took to just carrying all of my books with me all day so I could jump from class to class as quickly as possible. Well, that and gym. Gym was always a nightmare.
It was at home where I received by far the worst physical abuse. But, I'm not looking for a pity party for myself here. I'm doing just fine today, and managed to cope with most of it.
And to be fair, I really was a weird kid. The sock thing in the article caught my eye. I would have killed for socks without seams: I was always taking off my shoes and folding the edge of the sock because the seam would drive me nuts. I had all kinds of weird tics, many caused by actual (not trendy) obsessive-compulsive disorder, others by misophonia.
I'd just really like to see people take bullying seriously instead of as a rite of passage. Imagine if you had a coworker call you a faggot and push you down the stairs at work. And so you told HR, and they told the coworker, "hey, don't do that again or we might make you work an extra hour!" and that was it. Yet somehow this is perfectly okay with children, because "kids will be kids."
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It's an interesting idea and I agree with the argument. Having been one of those 'gifted children' and gone to gifted schools where I wasn't challenged, I think this is a good idea. I basically never had to put any effort in until my last year of high school and completely breezed through my education. Once I hit university and couldn't get away with that anymore, I was totally unequipped to handle continuing my educ…
I breezed through university. I might have worked a little harder to get a 4.0, but I knew even then that barely anyone outside of academia cares about GPA, and that I didn't want to be an academic. So I did the math, and I even made some strategic decisions to not complete some graded assignments in my last year. I'm not particularly challenged at work now, either. I'm not a very good employee. I have on several occ…
I don't know if I'm gifted (I score 125 at some IQ test on abstraction when applying at a company, but still IQ is not always a correct to measure intelligence, so take this with a grain of salt), but my psychiatrist tells me I'm intelligent (he might say this to agree with me, maybe he doesn't think so and it's for another goal). Yet I'm unemployed, 30 year old, and can't manage to get hired or to do work that is gi…
I hate my job, have no achievments whatosever and I balance on doing bare minimum not to get fired. Changed job 4 times and it's definitely me. That's despite the fact that I was always going to be a programmer since I was 10, and I loved programming. I'm lazy as hell and I'm astonished every day they won't fire me. Any dreams of success in mine choosen callign are long past.
I also had huge problems with social interactions, married first girl that could look past it (she has similar problems). It wasn't a good decision.
My wife has even bigger problems with employement, but she declines to agree it's her fault (she changes job every year and it's always "them"). We are codependent and use each other not to be alone. We hurt each other a lot. I don't think it's love, but then I find love to be hard to define (I mostly feel "I should be feeling this" instead of actually feeling this, not only towards her).
I should really leave her, cause she isn't happy with me (nor am I with her), but she has her life wasted, in some party because of me, and she depends on me at least economicaly at this point. Or maybe it's rationalization because it's more convenient to continue this.
I'm addicted to internet and gaming, and I'm well aware of the fact that I'm wasting my life. I just don't care. No right to complain really, I had it better than most people, and it's entirely my fault I'm wasting it all. And yet I do, because nothing worthwhile seems achievable and vice-versa.
BTW I know I sound arrogant and selfish, that's because I am. I wondered many times if maybe I'm just stupid (that would explain a lot). In the end it doesn't really matter, results matter and I don't have them.
I probably could get depression diagnosed, but I don't want to cure it even if it's true, because it would mean I have to actually do sth. So my best diagnosis is "chronic laziness".
The Hacker News participant who kindly shared the article that opens this thread is a user whose user name I recognize from the many good articles he submits for discussion here. That said, permit me to not entirely agree with the opinion expressed by the Canadian teacher profiled in the article that "our most brilliant children are among our most vulnerable." That is actually not what the research shows. I agree with the several comments posted before this comment that say that age-segregated, lockstep curriculum school[4] is a particularly toxic environment for gifted learners, and not a good environment for any learner. But I learned, after majoring in Chinese language in university and living in east Asia after graduation, that there are varying cultural perspectives on how a smart person fits into human society. Growing up in the United States, in junior high I read a story by Philip K. Dick, which I have tried to find again but have not yet found in his collected writings, in which he expressed the opinion that the higher one's IQ is above the population median, the fewer true friends one can have, an opinion expressed in a top comment in this thread. I fully agreed with that opinion when I was a child, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I isolated myself from "average" people in my school and neighborhood environment. But when I lived in east Asia, I learned that Confucius said, 三人行，必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). The east Asian Confucian philosophers were very clear than human beings vary in how smart they are, but they also deeply believed that any human being can learn from any other human being. The job of a smart person is to use brainpower to understand other people and make society better. As soon as I adopted those east Asian perspectives, I found it much easier to make friends. Now I proactively tell my four children and the gifted young people I teach in my supplemental mathematics program that they can find rapport with anyone, if they are willing to listen. And I spread this same message internationally among parent email lists and social media groups for parents of gifted children.
To sum up, the article makes strong claims that high IQ is strongly associate with social maladjustment and psychological disturbance. That is not an invariant property of high IQ, and I know many exceptions. All research on the topic confirms that many high-IQ people do fine in social interaction with other human beings, and some who do not start out that way can learn better social adjustment. School has a lot of toxic features for most learners,[5] but gifted children need not fear being social misfits for life.
[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study-Gift...
https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...
[4] http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
I could say a lot about the quality of education: the lack of a challenge, the boringness of the one-size-fits-all curriculum, etc. But boredom isn't that big of a deal. I made up for that by studying what I wanted to outside of school, instead of doing homework. Even with the vindictive teachers that made homework 30% of the final grade, it was still cakewalk to pass their classes without doing a single assignment.…
>Bullying mostly targets the gifted I believe bullies target what is different. Intelligence or lack of it will make you a target in equal measure. Got a birthmark on your face? Boom, you're a target. My kids don't go to a school that accepts bullying. I don't think bullying was seen all that different when I was at school.
Yeah, that was the reasoning behind school uniforms. A misguided belief that simply normalizing clothing would prevent bullying. But instead all that did was make them focus on something else. Your hair, your skin color, your height, your weight, your voice ... anything.
I don't think it'd matter how conformant you got everyone. You have to address the underlying causes and change the mentality, and you also have to increase the severity of punishment for bullying.
> Got a birthmark on your face? Boom, you're a target.
For me it's a scar.
> My kids don't go to a school that accepts bullying.
All of mine completely and utterly ignored it. We learned pretty quickly that going to the adults only made matters worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go to a doctor and let them describe you something for depression. Worked for me. Be open about your problems and don't be ashamed. Most people feel the way you do. I never lie to people about my mental issues - not even at work. Guess what? 95% of the people I worked with (all other programmers) were on some kind of meds, too - for depression, social anxiety, ADHD etc.. Feels so much better just being open about it…
Happily for me, I don't have depression (at least, I think I don't). But when I was a kid, the school begged my parents many times to take me to some kind of doctor, and this only offended my parents, that always refused, the exception is that they once too me to see if I was deaf or not. After I reached adulthood, and flunked hard at life in general, that I went to seek medical help. The results were: 1) the first f…
I could go on about my work experience - which was also similar to yours despite I let myself go - but when I start raging it's hard to stop and afterwards I often feel worse than before. ;)
I learnt that I get mostly motivated by projects I come up myself, so I try stick to my own stuff for a while to level up my skills. (I _need_ an outlet for all my creativity...) And try to connect with people who are also building interesting things (and aren't assholes) and from whom you can learn new things. DIY scene is pretty nice place to be in really.
I try not to focus so much on work and career for now, because to be honest - working at that last office left me a bit with a trauma and I came to realize that I only have one life and I don't want to have to waste it with doing something I hate or that makes me feel like s*. So no more offices for me at the moment.
About the meds and therapy - it is a slow process, yes. And I actually had to try seven or so different kinds of meds until I found the right one that helped. It still makes me feel a bit weird and dull (sometimes annoying), but so much better than before...
I'm also 28, unemployed, in debt. But meh, still could be worse.
I could say a lot about the quality of education: the lack of a challenge, the boringness of the one-size-fits-all curriculum, etc. But boredom isn't that big of a deal. I made up for that by studying what I wanted to outside of school, instead of doing homework. Even with the vindictive teachers that made homework 30% of the final grade, it was still cakewalk to pass their classes without doing a single assignment.…
If it makes you feel any better, if you fight back you will get hit harder.
The physical pain wasn't even the worst of it. What hurts the most 20 years later is the fact that I stood there and did nothing. I'd have rather had memories of losing fights than having never fought at all.
And honestly, getting kicked around by a full-grown adult at home was worse than anything another sixth grader could have dished out. I really don't know what I was so afraid of back then.