I’ve written on many occasions of the difficulty exceptional children have in schools. My mother could never understand why I got straight “A” grades but straight “C” in conduct; why I ended up in the principal’s office as often as any of the “bad” kids; why I got detention on numerous occasions in 7th and 8th grades, and two suspensions in 12th; and why I was nearly expelled mere weeks before graduating from high school. The answer of course, is that I was bored to tears and no less talkative than I am now (a deadly combination in a system designed to churn out docile, obedient factory workers). I realized that before I turned 18, but it wasn’t until I already had a Master’s degree that I understood how I could be so intelligent, yet also so abysmally bad at any subject I couldn’t master just by sitting in class and taking the tests: I never learned to study, because in my formative years I never needed to. So this passage in an essay I recently read caught my attention:
Gifted children usually sail through their first years of schooling without ever having to develop what psychologists call executive functions — a broad category of mental skills, two of which are self-control and planning. Why would you need to plan your homework nights, for example, if you can finish the whole worksheet in under a minute because you mastered the material three years prior without any real effort?
As I read, I saw a lot more that intrigued me, especially this:
…in most western countries, the intellectually challenged receive much more funding than the intellectually gifted, despite the obvious benefits the gifted bring us. Gifted children’s needs are rarely met and rarely recognised in law…they often suffer immensely in outdated and ill-equipped school systems. These are children who read classic novels under their desks yet are forced to circle adjectives in class. Children who write twenty-page short stories about string theory, yet must endure mundane assignments about their summer holidays. Children who have mastered multiplication and division long before entering school, yet are forced to learn to count to ten with the rest of the class. Children who spend all night coding, yet must sit through six hours of other subjects they have no interest in. Children who are our greatest and most wasted resource…
Please read it, and then perhaps you will understand why I am so hostile to people who pretend that it’s not only acceptable but moral to treat exceptional kids like this. 
“Children who spend all night coding, yet must sit through six hours of other subjects they have no interest in. Children who are our greatest and most wasted resource…”
I have long regarded the obsession with making children ‘well-rounded’ as one of the greater sins of our society.
I was “gifted” (tested as reading at high-school-senior level in first grade) but did not do well in school, which drove my mother (a retired teacher who thought she knew everything there is to know about children) out of her tree. I struggled and struggled with math, which she took as a personal affront, and she meddled endlessly with my education, which I did not welcome.
Mom had a bonnet-bee that getting me through school ahead of my age group would make me more desirable in the job market. It didn’t. Her ideas about school and the job market had crystallized by the early 1950s. She ruined the Bicentennial for me, for which I will never, never forgive her, by shipping me off to a summer school/camp program in a neighboring state, over my loud, repeated protests and shouts of “NO!” And then when my grades weren’t good from the school part, she took it as a personal affront and threw an absolutely epic tantrum.
Thanks largely to her monkeying with my education, I wasn’t on campus my whole senior year, which is one reason I’ve never had so much as a sniff at a career-track job in the 40 years since then.
I never learned how to study, either. School was just too easy for me. Nothing was ever difficult until college, and then I didn’t know how to do anything.
Totally right. Absolutely right. Story of my life. Of all my lives.
When I saw each of our two kids begin to experience this very same thing as they entered our local school, I got “involved” (well, as involved as a parent can get) in my local area’s (several different) “gifted” programs. I learned a lot about my own experiences in my childhood and in school!
(There’s a “triple-nine” society out there, for those whose IQs would be found only once in a random group of a thousand people. I found that being one of these people didn’t always mean that I would feel “at home” among that group of people!)
Our kids’ mother and I were able to mitigate some of the worst features of “school days.” Our kids, now adults, seem to have found places where they and their strengths are able to be reasonably accepted, welcomed, and rewarded. But for a long time it wasn’t easy. It isn’t always easy, today. There are still lots o’ people who haven’t got a clue about us so-very-scarce people.