Gifted and Talented... Adults?

 

One of my classmates from Irish has been posting stuff on social media lately about how all of us kids who had to go to Gifted and Talented programs were led to believe we would somehow have a fabulous future, but it was never explained to us how to achieve it. She, like me, is a low-level public servant, so we have respectable jobs with good pensions but not what anyone would call an amazing career. This got me to thinking about how when I was a kid in Catholic school, there were three of us in first grade who went to the fifth grade classroom for reading. I have no idea what ever happened to the boy, so maybe he is working on the cure for cancer or designing rockets or something, but I know what happened to me - I'm a blogger with a minuscule following and a semi-professional musician with a state job to support my music habit - and the other girl is a disaster. She moved out to Seattle and barely works, and she never married but just had tons of flings. I was telling this to my buddy from the Union and the bus, and he said he also had to go to those Gifted and Talented programs as a kid, and now he's a low-level public servant too. You would think we would be faculty members, not the hourly drudges supporting them. How about the faculty members - were they Gifted and Talented as children? Or are you more likely to be successful if you're kind of smart but not one of those super smart kids that stand out? Were we all so embarrassed to be singled out for our brains that we tried to blend in, and so now we're living very average lives? Or did the kind-of smart kids learn to work harder and so they succeeded more? I'd love to hear from a Gifted and Talented alumnus who is what the world would call a resounding success. 

Or am I not looking at this the right way at all? Maybe we really smart kids cared more about what made us happy than outward success, so we just got jobs that would pay the bills while we lived interesting lives on the side, while the less smart kids grew up playing the game, so they have more money but less happiness. As possible proof for this, I submit the fact that there was an article in our campus newsletter about faculty who have interesting hobbies, and I thought, "Huh, EVERY staff person I know has interesting hobbies. Are they so unusual among the faculty that they have to highlight them?" For example, the woman who first posted about this teaches Irish dancing. Maybe the faculty are so busy working that they don't have time for interesting lives. So then maybe we hourly workers really are the smart ones!

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