Why geniuses fail school

At a time when our country needs a deep intellectual talent pool, the squandering of these bright young minds is a national tragedy. There are hundreds of thousands of highly gifted children in the U. Many school districts have no gifted programs or offer only token enrichment classes.

But all children are entitled to an appropriate education, insist the authors, those left behind as well as those who want to surge ahead.

I strived to be the best at games and made sure everyone knew it. I practiced alone for many hours so that the next time I could display my skills to my friends, I would be significantly better. I did not want to fail in front of them, so I made sure no one watched me in my weakest and stupidest moments.

I believed I was the best and made sure that I did everything I could to stay at the top. Even if it meant undermining others and putting people down. Looking back, I think my inflated ego and aggressive desire to win came from the need to suppress the inferiority complex I struggled with. I also think it was a consequence of my parents trying to build my self-esteem and confidence by telling me I was naturally great at everything I did. They helped me develop a natural confidence that helped me tackle new, scary things in life and become a stronger person.

So how did I protect my belief of being an innately smart kid? I stopped trying. Because trying would mean I could fail. I deliberately did things that would affect my performance negatively in order to give myself an excuse for not doing well.

I learned this from an interesting article on procrastination on The Atlantic. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying. I was able to create a safety net to protect my ego. If I succeeded, I could attribute it to my innate talents and could further inflate my ego.

I was able to get through elementary and middle school without studying with decent grades. I decided to protect myself by saying that I simply did not care about studying. I could flourish and show everyone how smart I am. Too bad they only keep teaching me all these useless things.

I indulged in the victimhood mentality. In this world, I was powerless to my oppressors, and could pity myself for the situation I was in. If only they could realize my true potential. If only someone would see that I was a smart kid and could do well if given an opportunity.

I stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class. I started skipping classes, which turned into days. I started finding ways to deceive my parents to stop them from nagging at me. School work got harder. My grades got lower.

My parents and sister grew frustrated with my indifference. This time it would take her about 7 minutes to finish both. Both perfect. Many students scrambled to finish the last few questions before the bell for the end of period would sound. I stopped this scaling test experiment after I had her complete four tests in one sitting, from 5 th to 8 th grade.

I stopped testing her on the 5 th grade curriculum and started to give her high school math. She did it effortlessly without ever asking for clarification. I revisited her 4 th grade report card and noticed that in math the year before she had earned a few Bs.

Her response is something for another time, and another blog. In the other core subject I taught this student, English, I noticed that she put minimal effort into written responses. She only answered questions when she picked up on my frustration with attempting to guide my group of brilliant ten-year-olds to an answer that seemed to frazzle everyone into silence.

When I pushed and was direct with my expectations relating to her grades for lack of writing, she turned out paragraphs that mimicked everything I required of my 5 th grade essayists. Instead of pushing this future left-brained savant into critically analyzing elementary short stories, I shoved a BAR exam prep test on her desk.

While students were busy reading and responding to short stories about a boy who lost his hockey sweater, and was sad because he got it from his now-passed grandpa, she was using her logic to determine which conclusion was most accurate based on a case study and a set of circumstances. And then she would move onto the next question. Between the school work that I made her do in order not to ostracize her already socially maligned position in the class and annoying classmates, she managed to finish a section of the exam over the course of a school day.

There were 25 questions and I had the answer key. She got 19 correct. To be honest, I was fearful of graduating this student to the next grade to simply see her in detention for not writing down the homework in her agenda. I formalized the paperwork for gifted testing and this student was on her way to an alternative school the following year.

I have no idea where she is now in terms of her academic career but I do know that if she stayed in the traditional school, we would have been as easily misguided and confused as her. And she probably would have gone on earning As and hypocritical Bs in classes like math and English all the way through, completely missing out on her genius potential.