The Ups and Downs/ Myths and Truths of being Gifted

The Ups and Downs of Being Gifted

Other children often think that gifted children have everything set up for them and their life is perfect. However, this is not true. Even though, gifted kids have a lot of ups, they also have some downs. What I mean by ups is something that is to the gifted children's advantage. The downs are the gifted children's disadvantages.
As a gifted child, I have experienced a lot of advantages along with disadvantages. I will being putting my personal experiences along with statistics in this blog. An advantage of being gifted is being able to take advanced classes. For example, I am taking Honors Geometry at the high school, and I am also taking Rogate 8. I am truly lucky to be able to experience these opportunities because my sister and my brother both had to take Algebra 1 multiply times due to their middle schools not offering higher math. However, a disadvantage of being gifted is being made fun of. Other students will often call gifted children names, like nerd or geek. Sometimes the gifted children will dumb themselves down. They could do so much that their brain actually believes they are not gifted causing them to waste their potential.
My second advantage of being gifted is that it helps you with college. Having gifted classes on your resume like Rogate 8, helps you when college are picking students. Those gifted classes show your  intelligents in one area or multiple areas and based on your report card and GPA they can tell in which areas you are gifted. This helps you because if you are majoring in the subject you are gifted in,  they will think of accepting you more. A disadvantage of being gifted is asynchronous development. Asynchronous development is when one of your 4 maturities mature faster than all the others. For example, if your intellectual maturity matures faster than your other maturities you could not be able to handle the stress of the advanced classes. If you have a lot of responsibility and a lot of homework because of advanced classes, than it would be harder to handle all the stress and work. I have experienced this. Last year, I had a lot of homework one night including a paper due the next day and a test in Algebra I.  With all the pressure, I just could not handle all the stress. My mom helped me through by completing one step at a time. This is the method that helps me best when I am stressed. I recommend gifted children find something that comforts you and helps you with stress for the future ahead.

Myth About Gifted Children

The child is getting poor grades he/she cannot be gifted.

Gifted students are happy, popular, and well adjusted in school.

 

Truths About Gifted Children

The truth is the person with poor grades is actually just bored. The gifted child is bored by not having a challenge. Therefore, the child sees no point in trying or they could produce bad study habits causing the child to fail. In addition, poor grades could  be due to being made fun of and being classified as a nerd. So the child dumbs himself down to fit in with the popular crowd. Either way the child needs to be helped so someone can fix the problem.

Most people think gifted children are fine with school and fit into the "crowd". However, this is not true. Gifted children can be called mean names, such as geek and nerd. If the gifted children do not fit into the "crowd", then they often can be bullied. Studies show "that 20 to 25% of gifted children have social and emotional difficulties about twice as many as in the general population of the students." If help is not provided, than the difficulties could get out of hand,s and there will not be as many gifted children because of dumbing down.

 

There is a lot of misconceptions about gifted children. Everyone needs to step back and give gifted children a chance. If most people do this, there will be very little misconceptions than abundances of misconceptions. Also, gifted children should not be afraid of showing what talent they have. With these actions, I think there will be many more gifted children in the future.