When I was in the second grade, I took a test that placed me into my school district’s Talented and Gifted (TAG) program. At first, I was totally resistant to joining the class, as it meant moving schools and leaving all of my friends, but eventually, my parents convinced/forced me to start TAG, and that program ended up becoming my community from the third to eighth grades. There were thirty students in the program for the third-grade year, so all of us were in one class, taught by Mrs. Juriga. She had been teaching third grade to the TAG students for many years, so she knew the problems that could often arise in elementary school students that are labeled “gifted”, the first of which being gaining a big ego. A lot of these kids had consistently been the person in class who always knew all the answers, or read at the highest grade level, or got the best scores on tests, and now they were being separated from the “General Ed” students because of their talents. Excelling in that way without having to work very hard can give people a sense of superiority at any age, but in eight-year-olds it can have an adverse effect on the development of young personalities. Luckily, though, Mrs. Juriga was equipped to deal with this problem in a way that now, looking back on it, I see was very important. On the first day of school, she sat us all down and reminded us right off the bat that “being in this class doesn’t mean you’re better, it just means that you learn faster.” This was the first of many, many lessons that six years in a Talented and Gifted program taught me about intelligence, life, and schoolwork.
People have very different strengths
It was made clear to my fellow TAG students and me very early on that we had different strengths from General Ed students, but it took being a part of the program for a while for me to realize that even within the people who “learned fast”, there were lots of different ways that we excelled and struggled. In my third grade class, a lot of our projects were based on our responses to a learning styles test, which shows what method of learning is most helpful for each student to synthesize and retain information. For example, I’m an auditory learner, which means that I learn best through hearing and listening, but a visual learner might gain a better grasp of a concept by looking at pictures or charts. This understanding has helped me in choosing my studying methods for many years, but it also showed me that there’s no shame in being bad at something. Everyone has areas they struggle in, and if it feels like someone is doing way better than you, they probably would need help in an area where you’re really strong. Everyone has strengths, and identifying them can help you in every situation, but to identify those strengths, you need to try and be bad at a bunch of other things.
Being a part of a community can make hard things easier
Middle school is really not the greatest time for anyone, and it’s a time where anything that makes someone different can be picked apart and made fun of. The students in my TAG program faced consistent teasing and rude nicknames from the other students at my middle school, but we did not have to endure the typical soul-crushing experience of middle school bullying because, together, we were a strong group. The thing that often makes bullying so awful for the victim is that they are made to feel alone, but in this situation, there were 30 people experiencing the exact same thing that could confide in each other and hold each other up. This taught me very early on that a sense of community can drastically improve almost any problem and the powerful impact that a support system makes. I knew we weren’t experiencing the worst of bullying because we had each other, so now when I’m going through something hard, I know that the best solution is to confide in trusted people, and the fact that I have that instinct has impacted my life in unimaginably positive ways.
One program won’t prepare you for everything
A final big lesson I learned from being educated as a “gifted kid” is that one group of people cannot teach you everything, and learning the truth comes from looking to people who aren’t like you and places where you’re not comfortable. This came not just from the curriculum, but also from the experiences I had after leaving that program when entering high school and having classes with people I didn’t know for the first time in six years. Over the course of high school, I made friends with lots of different types of students, many of whom had very different attitudes towards academic success. A big hallmark of kids who succeed academically is a kind of hyper-focus on grades, a behavior that is encouraged by parents and teachers. Learning and working with students that didn’t always expect a 4.0 GPA taught me that grades are important, sure, but they’re not the most important thing. I remember a specific moment when I was agonizing over whether my honors precalc grade was going to round up to an A-, and the friend next to me (who was two grades above me) interrupted me and just went, “Katie, come on. I am working so hard just hoping to get a C in this class.” I had to take a step back and check that gifted-kid ego that I thought I had avoided in the third grade—I was obsessed with my grade in this class when in reality, I was doing fine. I was doing comparatively well. I was so used to the TAG students getting together and calculating precisely what score we needed on our final grades to get As in all our classes, but outside of that little bubble, I was in a comfortable spot, I understood the material, and I was working hard. I needed to learn to look outside of what I think I know, because the world is so much bigger.
When I started substituting extra science classes for advanced music courses in my high school schedule, I felt guilty, because I was supposed to be academically driven and constantly checking the boxes of college readiness, and music classes were often seen as an easy way out in the academic environment I grew up in. I didn’t think I was living up to being the smart kid I was supposed to be, but as I have moved further along in my study of music, I have learned that wasn’t the case at all. I’m now a music major at Kenyon, hoping to become a music teacher, and I’m able to be academically focused in advanced studies, even though music is not seen as a traditional “core” subject in grade school, and I’m able to use all the skills my gifted program taught me, even though I’m not going to become an engineer.
At the end of the day, being in a gifted program taught me so much over the six years that I was a part of it, and it gave me a community that carried over into my high school friendships, and even a few of my college connections. But while programs like this are helpful in many ways, they don’t need to define a student’s identity, and that was a lesson I only learned once I entered a wider learning community, that being a “Gifted Kid” could inform my choices, but it didn’t have to define them.