Episode 30: The Gifted Kid Mindset and Educational Trauma (2/4/2021)

Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.

Today’s episode: Gifted Kid culture, the perfectionism it creates, and my own process of escaping it.

The ideas that our public school system traumatizes the students it deems unintelligent and that it traumatizes the students it deems intelligent are ideas that can and should coexist. For those it deems unintelligent, school is disheartening, discouraging, and makes students feel dumb, incapable, and hopeless. Accessibility is in dire need of improvement and students with learning disabilities are often underserved if not completely ignored. However, for this episode, at least, I’m going to focus more on the students that public school deems intelligent, because that is my lived experience and I can see the stories that aren’t being told.

When I was in the third grade, my elementary school started to sort kids out into a group called AIG, or Academically and Intellectually Gifted. Third grade AIG was more of an introduction to the program and mostly focused on critical thinking skills. We tried to solve riddles and read some short stories, but we didn’t meet all that often. I think that it was just the time that the school used to sort students into their groups. I was in it. Some of my friends were. Some weren’t. Even though we didn’t do much, the existence of the separation made the kids that weren’t in it feel bad about themselves. Which sucked. But in a way, it also sucked for the kids in AIG.

You see, when you tell kids that they’re smart and capable, they start to believe it, which is a good thing. But when you tell kids that they’re smart and capable because they’re in this AIG class, they start to believe that if they aren’t in it, they aren’t smart or capable. In addition to the damage this does socially by teaching kids to judge other kids by something as meaningless as fourth-grade public-school-assigned intelligence, it also does a lot of internal damage.

In fourth and fifth grade, we would be placed into the AIG class by unit of math and reading. So at the beginning of each unit, we’d take a pretest, and either get assigned to AIG for that unit or stay with the rest of our class. So we were only “Academically and Intellectually Gifted” sometimes, but not others. Being in AIG was a status symbol, so there was a lot of pressure riding on these unit tests, because if we didn’t do well, that meant we weren’t smart anymore. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification of what was actually happening, which was placing kids in different classes so everyone could learn at a rate that worked for them, but fourth graders often think in oversimplifications because they’re literally nine. As hard as you try, I don’t think you’ll ever convince my twin sister that not being in Math AIG in fourth grade when I was doesn’t actually mean anything about her intelligence or mine. As she describes it, “fourth grade is literally the source of all my insecurities.”

By the time we get to high school, middle school has increased the pressure on individual tests as a make-or-break measure of intelligence. In some of my classes in middle school, tests were heavily weighted in our grades, and our grades started to feel like they mattered. Middle school is the time where grades start to stick around after you’re finished with the class. I’m pretty sure they don’t get sent to colleges, but I and anyone with access to my grades (AKA any teacher, any administrator, any counselor) could go back and look at my middle school grades if they wanted to. You know. Just for fun. Middle school teachers and counselors spend half their time telling you that you need to start worrying about your grades before it’s too late and the other half scoffing at you when you fret over a single point on a test. There were some exceptions, obviously, mostly young teachers who weren’t so far removed from the current system as to have forgotten the damage it did to them. These teachers worked very hard to make their classrooms actually healthy learning environments, but those were few and far between.

So then there’s high school, complete with AP and honors courses, stressed out upperclassmen friends, and every half-present adult in your life breathing down your neck about college. The years of teachers handing you a 93 and saying, “Please tell me you’re not one of those kids who thinks everything below a 100 is failing,” and taking that paper home to your parents who lecture you for the third time this week that a 93 isn’t enough to get into Duke. The years of pulling all-nighters for your four and sometimes five AP classes that each gave hours of homework and walking into school the next day to a presentation on how healthier sleep will boost your mental health and your grades. The years of being told that you shouldn’t take so many hard classes but also that you’ll need those AP credits to afford the degree you think you should get. The years of being told that colleges look for lower grades in harder classes more than perfect grades in easy classes, but also that a low grade in a hard class makes it look like you’re not actually as smart as you think.

It builds upon itself and it breeds perfectionism. It tells you that if it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing, but also if you feel like it’s hard, you’re not good enough and how do you expect to get anywhere in life being this lazy? Let me give you an example. I recently made an extremely difficult decision to drop my Latin 3 class. I needed to do it and there’s no question that it was the right decision, but at the same time, it was something I had to convince myself to do. I needed to do it because some scheduling errors got made and missed and I got put into the class a week late only to find out that it was following a completely different curriculum pathway than my previous Latin classes and I needed to bail before my underprepared quiz grades made it to the gradebook. When you find out that everything you’ve ever learned about Latin was covered in these kids’ Latin 1, and there’s no time for your completely virtual teacher to teach you the entire Latin 2 curriculum when you’re supposed to be learning Latin 3… you withdraw from that class. And so I did. But it was such a stressful decision because of the way Gifted Kid culture has embedded itself in my brain.

“You can do it if you just work harder,” it whispered as I stared blankly at the notes. “If you stay up late studying and practicing like everybody else, you can do it.” I tried to shove the voice away as I clicked answers and tried to decipher the explanation as to why I was wrong. I didn’t want to stay up all night like the others. Even if they were probably going to go to prestigious colleges because of it. Even if I had been teased and warned that my college choice wasn’t a good enough school. I didn’t want to do that to myself. But the voice persisted. “If you can do it but you won’t because it’s hard, that’s just being lazy.” It’s wrong. Right? It’s wrong? I could theoretically put in the effort to pass Latin 3, I just didn’t want to. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I just didn’t want to put in the effort? I just didn’t want to work for it? I’d rather quit than do something hard? No, that doesn’t sound like a Gifted Kid to me. That sounds like everyone they told you that you shouldn’t be.

It’s easy to spiral into thoughts like this. Because it sounds right, doesn’t it? But what the Gifted Kid mindset fails to realize is that there are consequences outside of maybe not getting into a prestigious school and not meeting the public school standard of intelligence anymore. The Gifted Kid mindset fails to consider my actual wants and needs. Because at the end of the day, while I desperately wanted to take Latin, this was not a Latin class I could learn from. I could pass it, but I wouldn’t learn from it. I’d end the class with a heavy reliance on a binder full of notes and a patchwork foundational knowledge to a tear-stained book of advanced Latin grammar. And I didn’t even need the credit to graduate.

And the Gifted Kid mindset ignores all of that because it doesn’t care about learning. It cares about social standing and extrinsic motivation. It cares about doing what it’s told and getting validation from authority figures who scorn it for not being good enough. The Gifted Kid mindset is a bully, and it’s the kind of bully whose belligerence comes from a deep, deep insecurity.

It’s scared of not being good enough. It’s scared of not living up to expectations. It’s scared of failing, not just in the sense of grades, but of failing as a person. And so it feeds this voice in our heads pushing us to do better, be better, even against our best interests, while at the same time covering its tracks with imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome, if you haven’t heard the term, is the feeling that you don’t belong somewhere and that you’ve tricked everyone else that you do. You feel like you’re not actually capable or good at what you do, and everyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you or you’ve tricked them into believing it. Imposter syndrome is especially damaging to people who are experiencing mental illness, because the stigma against mental illness puts pressure on people to act like they’re okay. So sometimes people with mental illness are faking it and have successfully tricked people into thinking that everything is okay, so it’s very hard for those people to decipher what is imposter syndrome from what is reality.

For me, my particular mental illness has never damaged my grades, but it is incredibly distressing and damaging to other parts of my life. But because grades are the thing that people worry about, I was able to convince everyone in my life, including my therapist, that I was totally okay and not having any problems at all. I was afraid that if I talked about it, that would make it real, and I didn’t want it to be real. It was irrational, but that’s how mental illness works. Irrationally. The only reason the curtain got lifted is because my therapist suggested meeting less often because I seemed to be okay, and over the course of the extended time without a meeting, I had a complete breakdown. I confessed that I had been faking it and that I wasn’t okay and that I did need help. And after that, I finally started to actually get help.

So when imposter syndrome does strike, it’s difficult for me to figure out because I know that I’m entirely capable of tricking everyone around me into thinking that I’m better than I am. So when I think, “I’m not actually smart or good at math, I’m just faking it and everyone believes me,” it seems actually plausible, even though that’s imposter syndrome talking. That’s the elementary school trauma of having your identity of Academically and Intellectually Gifted ripped away from you because you didn’t already know all the math on the unit pre-test.

I wish I could follow this up by telling you that I’ve figured out how to tell imposter syndrome from reality, but no, I don’t know anything, I have no idea. But my experience with it has gotten better, somehow. I think part of it has come from positive self-talk and confidence building, and part of it has come from trusted authority figures giving both positive and constructive feedback, and part of it has come with getting a little bit older and claiming a little bit more autonomy and beginning to trust myself. And if none of that is true, and I have tricked everyone, including myself, then I’ve done a damn good job of it and that deserves a pat on the back too.

So while I can’t tell you how to fix imposter syndrome, I can tell you some things I say to myself to help gently combat the Gifted Kid mindset that got rooted in my brain. First of all, as it pertains to my Latin class, making choices that make your life easier does not make you lazy. It’s okay to want to make your life easier. Making your life harder is not something that you want. Latin offered me exactly zero benefits, but even if it had, dropping it was still the right thing to do because of how much damage it could have done to my mental health.

Second, it’s okay to be mediocre. I was talking to my friend about this, and when I said, “you know, it’s okay to be mediocre at some things,” she followed up by saying, “it’s also okay to just be bad at things!” Which, even though I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, I had not yet considered. But she’s right! It’s okay to be bad at things! Not good! Not mediocre! Not okay! Literally bad! I am bad at art and I will never be good at art and it doesn’t bring me joy to draw badly, and all of that is literally okay. Sure, it’s okay to be bad at things and do them anyway because you enjoy them, but it’s also okay to be straight-up bad at something and not want to do it anymore because of that. It’s literally fine. You don’t have to be a great artist. You don’t have to be good at math. You don’t need to have some higher calling or passion to choose a career. You don’t have to be the best at your career. All of those things are nice, yes. All of those things are good. But even though possessing or being those things is good, the absence of those things is not bad.

You don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to be everything. It is okay to be a few things, or one thing, or no things. The only thing that you have a true responsibility to be is yourself.

A nice thought, right? I try to believe it. I know reality isn’t so simple. I frame this podcast as a place for me to learn new things and admit that I don’t know some things, but in reality I hardly ever write about something I don’t know about. If someone suggests to me a topic, my most common reason why I didn’t take the suggestion is that, “I don’t know enough about that.” Which sounds silly, right? That’s the whole point of the podcast. Isn’t it? I don’t know. It’s a real challenge to branch out and try to do things you’re unfamiliar with. The Gifted Kid mindset whispers in your ear, “what if you get it wrong?”

I’m trying to be more gentle with myself. I’m trying to notice when past trauma is being a bully, and I’m trying to acknowledge the pain and fear that the traumatic system causes in myself and in others. I’m trying to be more understanding of my own feelings, because when feelings are understood, we can become friends with our feelings instead of feeling constantly at odds with them. Gifted Kid culture is a product of a society – a capitalist one – where the only things that have value are things that earn money or have the potential to earn money later, like education and overworking yourself. It’s a society that ignores the value of feelings, of rest, of human connection, and of joy. Hobbies don’t have to turn you into a master of something, they can just be interesting. You don’t have to stick with something forever if it doesn’t bring you joy. You don’t have to overwork yourself to become a marketable product that society can sell.

Most of all, I think the way to heal from educational trauma in particular is to remove all self-blame. It wasn’t our fault that the system treated us this way, and it wasn’t our fault that we succumbed to the pressures, and it isn’t our fault that escaping it can hurt as the system tries to drag us back down. For people that school deems unintelligent, as well, self-blame is a product of the system. It’s hard to not blame myself for the years I spent overstressing and overworking, but I try to remind myself that it wasn’t my fault and that I can grow from here and spend my time in school learning instead of just doing school.

Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. Be sure to follow this podcast to be notified whenever I release a new episode, and you can follow me on Twitter too, @FastFactsPod. This is Callie, signing off.