I can’t do math. AT ALL. As I said, I was also very shy and hated recess. My public school system didn’t even have a gifted program, and I got stuck in the classes with remedial learners and/or profoundly disturbed kids who set fires, carried knives, cut themselves, etc. All because I didn’t fit the paradigm of the “normal” students. I nearly had a nervous breakdown because I couldn’t find a way out of a college math course (elementary statistics) I would’ve needed to get my degree; I did pass the course, albeit with so much stress I nearly attempted suicide.  I got all A’s in humanities and behavioral & social sciences courses that I took, mostly electives for a liberal arts degree that comprised 95 percent of my transcript. I’d been lucky to avoid math until the very end, because while I could both read and write at a high-school level by the third grade, I still — at the age of twenty-five — cannot convert between fractions, decimals, and percentages or remember my times tables without the aid of a calculator. Plus, I had planned on being an English major once I transferred after graduation; tell me what, exactly, a journalist or fiction writer needs to know statistics for in the first place?

Look at China. This is what this country (U.S.) has become, only in the reverse — we expect these kids to perform as “proficient” on stupid standardized tests, so we hammer them with academics to the point where they develop ulcers and do attempt, even commit suicide — but the ones who are exceptional or “twice exceptional” and don’t do well on bubble exams but are genius-level innovators otherwise, they’re basically thrown in the s**tcan unless their parents can afford private school or home-tutoring or programs like Montessori, Sylvan, etc. Me, I just “didn’t fit,” so I went to an alternative program all right, but it was more like Bellevue than the Lycee Ecole de Paris. Talk about an infinite monkey theorem, in the grander scheme of things you’ve got a bunch of banana-brained missing links running the government, and reverse Social Darwinism quickly becoming the status quo in the education system as a whole.

America sucks; it deliberately dumbs kids down with repetitive crap and politically correct coloring-book education, yet expects everyone to be savant-like machines or else the schools lose federal funding. Meanwhile the true “baby geniuses” or “little professors” end up clinically depressed and in years of counseling (usually by idiot psychologists at that), and not really living up to their true potential. Scott is right that a lot of gifted children/adults are falling through the cracks simply because of the circumstances they’re in. Most low-income minorities in Mississippi, regardless of intelligence, aren’t going to be Oprah, nor most single parents living in decrepit flats in Edinburgh going to be J.K. Rowling. It’s sad, but until there’s a real-life Hogwarts for child wizards from all walks of life, I fear a lot of our hoped-for brilliance in this world may simply go *poof* and disappear. We used to be #1 (or thought we were) in a lot of things, but now I think we’re #2 in more ways than one.

- Jack Leak
Customized Fat Loss

- Jack Leak

Everything is circumstantial. If a gifted child has a supportive environment who credits his/her ability, there might not be an identity crisis to worry about. However, if a child doesn’t have others to help cultivate their genius, they will be more susceptible to fall victim to their talent.

I will never allow my children to be given an IQ test. Although they are both in the ‘gifted’ programs at the schools insistence.

I am writing a book on my experience….and revealing my genuis ‘secret’ to the world. I have lived in SHAME because of that label.