Yay G/T and School

I'm taking a week-long training session in Midland. From Fort Stockton to Midland is an hour and a half each way. I'm going with two of my fellow science teachers. For some reason, they decided that no, they don't have to let us get a hotel in Midland, we can leave at 7:00 am and get back at 5:30 pm, that's not unreasonable! Because of that, they don't have to pay for any meals. We can request reimbursement for lunch, but they won't reimburse tax, tips, or anything like that; and while they process the paperwork that's ~40 bucks that we don't have. One of the people I'm going with is planning for a baby - 40 bucks is huge to her right now.

The workshop is actually quite interesting - it's a 30-hour course in training us to recognize, assess, and plan instruction for gifted and talented children. Yesterday we learned about what makes a child gifted vs. extremely hardworking, motivated, and reasonably bright. We learned about some common characteristics of gifted children, and common misdiagnoses of gifted children.

I was in the g/t program for three years - 4th grade through 6th grade. After 6th grade, I looked at what the g/t program was going to be, and my parents and I both agreed that it was wrong for me. Unfortunately, the regular classes weren't that great for me either. Once I got to high school things were better because I could take honors classes, but my first high school screwed me over because I wasn't there for 8th grade, so I couldn't be sorted into the math/science school, where I probably should have been, and I couldn't be in the Leadership Training Institute at the school I did go to, which was really just as well because LTI would not have been a good fit for me. Of course, the school focused on the LTI kids, and the rest of us got what was left over. So I didn't get put in some honors classes I should have because they were full from LTI kids. I didn't care enough then to throw a fit and have my dad throw a fit with me and get me moved or home-schooled; I wish I had.

To use the technical term, I went underground. Even in honors/AP classes, I could use my disinterest to pretend I was on the same level as the kids around me - I wasn't, in most of them. It really hurt me, because when I got into college, I suddenly found out that I wasn't at all ready to deal with a class where I'm surrounded by people who are just as bright or brighter than me - I had no study skills, no patience to work through something that didn't come naturally, no coping mechanism for not getting anywhere near the highest test grades. I wasn't happy with Bs and Cs in high school only because my parents got mad at me and took away privileges, not because those Bs and Cs weren't reflective of my abilities. Underachievement became a way of life. When I got to college and had classes where Bs and Cs really were reflective of how much I was learning in a class, instead of developing the skills to make myself study and learn more, I learned to accept Ds and Fs. After all, B wasn't good enough - if I couldn't do good enough to please my parents or myself, why do anything at all?