Intelligent or gifted people are really screwed by the system

I just read an article about intelligent or gifted kids that irritated the helll out of me. So much so that I'm going to have a little rant here.

Heh, I also learned a new word today, 'autodidacts' which is big word for 'self taught'. I also learned that being more intelligent than the average can lead to a person almost exactly like me. Depressed, alone and pretty much socially isolated because I'm considered weird by most people.

Now I don't have the highest IQ in the world. It's only 140 but it's still genius level and it's far enough above the average that I find few people to talk to or that can even understand what I'm talking about. So besides being smarter than average Karma played another great trick on me and my personality type just happens to be very rare too. I'm an INTJ type. If you don't know what that is just Google it and you'll find plenty of sites to explain it. Yep, it makes me even weirder to most people.

Heh, I could read before I started school. I'm highly curious about a lot of things but my favorite thing is why people do what they do. I'm not much of a talker but I most definitely am a watcher and a listener. I make a lot of people nervous because around most people I just don't talk much. I love it when I can predict behavior based on just a few minutes of watching in a group.

A few I talk to a lot but they understand me and what I say and what I mean. It's rare for me to find someone I like talking with. Lol, I joined Mensa for awhile but they didn't understand me either. However that probably had more to do with the way I was raised than it did anything else.

So I'm an autodidact. Left totally alone I turn into somewhat of a nerd. It's to bad that I had to make such a bad choice so long ago when I was way to young to make it. There is no way I'd have survived my life by choosing to be a nerd. Tough and hard ass was my other choice. So I chose tough.

Physically tough and mentally tough. Independent to a fault. Able to suppress all of my emotions except anger and that surfaced a lot when I was a drunk. I'm still very irritable now and then but it seldom comes out as anger. Just an irritated tone of voice.

Lol, I'm also told I'm cocky, arrogant and a know it all. ROTF, asshole is one of peoples favorite terms for me because I don't suffer fools gladly and I tend to be a bit blunt and tactless. IOW I don't sugarcoat things or tiptoe around issues or problems. There are those who are bigger and stronger but I still tend to be the Alpha male wherever I go. People find me very intimidating.

I have enough credits from seminars, courses and company training plus my own sense of curiosity that I could have a couple of college degrees but they don't really matter to me. I quit formal schooling after 9th grade because it was idiotic and boring.

I can tell you that most educators I've talked to think 'No child left behind' is the worst thing Bush did to the country. The fact is it's leaving every child behind. Not just the highly intelligent or gifted.

I didn't choose to be born with a high IQ. MOF I think it's one of the worst things that happened to me. Heh, more Karma. Not did I choose to be an INTJ. More freaking bad Karma from my point of view. The other worst thing is Trish making me feel emotions again.

Yeah, yeah, I know she didn't make me, that it was my choice. It was my choice to let her do it. I'm big on being personally responsible for your own choices and I take responsibility for mine at all times. Don't always like it but I do it. I certainly have a lot of dumb crap I did that I'd like to blame on someone else but hey, I made the choice to do it.

Anyway, go read the article and then do something at your kids school to make sure the intelligent kids are challenged. No, don't pair them up with someone in special ed or someone with a 50 point lower IQ. Doing that just frustrates them even more and makes them more likely to drop out.

Because some days I have, or wear, the trappings of success, schools have asked me to come in and speak to older kids about school and life. I always tell them sure but I never get accepted to do it because I have one condition.

That one is pretty simple tho. Just that I be able to tell the truth as I know it about education and business. About the value of schooling and about what a waste a lot of it is. So when I throw that in as my condition all of a sudden they don't want to hear from me anymore. To bad they didn't know I'd only finished 9th grade when they asked me.

Lol, the institutions that are supposed to revere truth and learning above all don't want to hear the truth of the real world. That they don't teach kids the most important things in life. How to think for yourself and how to make decisions. There are others but those two irritate me the most.

So now we have a crappy education system that doesn't really educate anyone about anything. We are getting short changed with our current system and even worse so are generations of kids. Stupidity at it's finest.

So go read the article and do something at your school to make it better. From my perspective it won't take much to make it better. http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/failingourgeniuses

Schools, intelligence and depression

While I was beaten and molsted all of the summer before I stared school so I couldn't wait to start school. If nothing else it was going to get me out of the house and to a place where I wouldn't be hurt. Life was going to be better going to school than it was going to be at home.

Guess what? School had a major problem with me. The way I'd been raised and was being raised none of their rules scared me. Besides, it was kindergarten so what could go wrong. Lol, everything could go wrong. While I wasn't truly disruptive I was the toughest kid in my grade and also one of the smallest.

Then they discovered another bad thing. Not only was I the toughest, I was also the smartest. To be honest with you I don't believe being labeled smart is a good thing. My brain never quite worked the way other peoples did and I didn't see things the same way other kids did. To put it simply, I didn't quite fit the mold the school had nor was I like the other kids.

Don't get me wrong, I liked going to school but I was radically different. I spent 58 years wondering what made me so different from other people. Why I could see things they couldn't and why I couldn't make them understand.

To digress a bit here, I finally found out last year why I was different, why I had/have no patience with people. I've had a lot of court ordered personality tests and when the net came along I took a few on the net too. One day I stumbled across this place http://keirsey.com/ and they have a test which will tell you what type of temperment or persnality you have.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. " —Henry David Thoreau

Not only don't I hear the same drummer as everyone else I don't even come close to hearing the same band and very, very few hear the drummer I hear. I discovered that being intelligent wasn't my only problem but this explained it to me. http://keirsey.com/personality/ntij.html Unfortunately for me less han 1 in 100 people have these same traits.

I can not only see plan A in it's entirety, at the same time I can also see most of the permutations of plan A and at the same time see plan B, C and D. Some of this is done with intuition and some of it is done with knowledge. To put it simply I an see a master plan and all the backup plans and possibilities very easily. I almost always have a plan and a backup and a bckup for the backup. They just spring full blown, into my mind.

The problem with that is it's very difficult for me to explain to other people how I arrive at the conclusions I do or to even justify, in a way they can understand, what I do. People almost always laugh at me because I'm different but what they don't realize is I'm laughing at them because they are all the same.

Once again, a shrink told me I was on the outside looking in and wanting in and I took exception to that. To me the people on the inside were/are locked in and behind walls and I was outside of their walls and free to go in any direction I wanted to go. They were in societies version of prison because they all conformed. Sheep!

Anyway, school discovered that I was very smart. with all of heir stupid tests they determined that I had an IQ of 140. Argh, now they had high expectations because I was 5 points over genius level on their charts. I suspect I'd be much happier if I was less smart and my brain couldn't do the things it can do in problem solving or seeing solutions or being able to make decisions.

That was also very depressing and I suspect is part of what causes my depression now. Still no one understands me and I seldom take the time to explain anymore.