Was your gifted program just a class of high performing students or was it a group of people who scored 130+ on IQ tests?
Mine was the latter and we only had 7 ppl, while for some people (i guess) gifted was for people who did well in classes.
Which was yours?
I remember putting random answers on a test that didn't make any sense to me in the second grade
a few weeks later they told me I was highly gifted
when i took the iq test, one of the questions was what is wrong with this image? and the image was a family out on a boat. completely stumped me. there was absolutely nothing wrong with it! and i answered that, and they said um actually a moving boat has a wake behind it. But there was nothing that implied the boat to be moving, or moving at a fast speed. a boat, if not moving or moving slowly will not have a wake behind it. Anyway, add +3 to my iq because that was bullshit
F'real.
Start with intelligence quotient, a trainable measure of students relative to their peers as a data point for counselors to use.
Then, let a eugenicist get hold of it and turn it into an absolute measure of intelligence that white people happen to score higher on.
Desegregate schools.
White parents panick, need alternative means of segregation, introduce the gifted program, premised on test scores and IQ tests.
Said kids get told they're smart their whole life when in reality they're just white with less trauma.
They get to a point where hard work and a growth mindset is required. They have no tools to deal with it.
They burn out.
What a fucking grift.
I was in catch up classes for math and english because my grades were so poor. The school thought I had a learning disability but nothing ever came out of it which is funny. Went on to do Dean's List in my senior year of college, because I actually gave a shit about undergrad while high school I hated.
Damnit, I came here to make that joke. I guess I’m not a gifted student
Both. They took the high performers out, and gave them IQ tests to see if they would score high enough.
A little bit of both. While I was in the program I was told that it was high-performing students, and most of the people in the program were top students. However, years later I discovered that what I had though was just a funny puzzle test was in fact an IQ test. Apparently everyone in the program also had an above-average IQ. I'm not sure how much of a role the IQ played into it though, because it basically only showed up once.
My handwriting is still at a 5th grade level because we all used laptops from that point on
Just good grades, high "reading level," or even just high levels of creativity
If it was a major city, it possibly could have been a real IQ test, but otherwise it seems unlikely. As shit as they are, IQ tests aren't an exact enough measure of parental wealth to meet the profit motives of a private school. I'm also realizing that the whole gifted thing blocked out any hope I had of anyone addressing my other neurological quirks, and now as an adult I'm getting to navigate that on my own. Shit sucks. Solidarity.
When they saw that I was failing my classes but also testing in the 85% they just put me in the gifted classes, which I continued to fail.
I think it was just if you, your parents, or your teacher wanted to be put in gifted classes, they'd put you there.
These kids dont fit the curriculum. Better remove them from the curriculum so our standardised testing rates are good so we can get more funding
I was testing great, I was just not doing any work in class. I think it was to stop me from disrupting class more than anything
The former. They picked the four top students from the five feeder schools. The 20 of us all tracked together for two years. We got a lot of privilege and bent rules, looking the other way for blatant infractions (weed).
Mine was just an opt-in at the start of the year, if you did good in the honors courses Freshmen/Sophomore year you would be allowed to take AP courses Juinor/Senior year. Presumably if you did poorly they would bump you down, but I did terribly (on account of not doing homework) and they never did, so you would have had to really blow things off to get bumped.
Was a gifted student, was cohorted with gifted students, no idea how it was determined. Seemed like the more involved your parents were, the more likely you were to be in a gifted class. It was good to have smart classmates, we challenged each other to be better. Then I became a teacher and taught (some) gifted students. But by then it was high school and gifted wasn't really a thing. I'd take an average student with good work ethic over a lazy gifted student 49 times out of 50. A gifted student with good work ethic, though, that shit is poggers :che-poggers:
Yes. Regularly.
Fun fact: in addition to the general bullshittery of IQ, there's little correlation between childhood IQ test results and IQ test results when the same person reaches adulthood.
Mine was just people who did good in classes. I scored really well on all the stupid fucking tests they gave me. I was top 3 in the state for writing and reading comprehension but they still tried to put me in remedial for bad grades lol
