This seems like a story of many gifted children. I was a teacher at a school for gifted children, and a frequent story of how the parents discovered their children were gifted was something like this:
“The child was originally in a school for muggles which was so boring the child couldn’t focus on lessons, and started making trouble. Teachers suspected the child cannot pay attention because of mental retardation (!!!) and sent the child to a psychologist. The psychologist gave the child an IQ test, concluded that it’s actually Mensa-level smart, and told it to parents, who then used google or some other source to find the school for the gifted children.”
Another random data point: Spending hours listening to boring stuff is something I cannot do even today, as an adult. Every meeting feels like a torture. Or if the meeting is longer than an hour, I sometimes fall asleep, which caused some trouble in one of my previous jobs (the managers insisted on having 90-minutes meetings every month, where they spent the first hour repeating the very same basic company strategy, only at the end getting to the new stuff). A child is expected to do similar stuff for 6 or more hours a day. I would go insane. Of course the usual coping strategy is to do something else to keep yourself awake, the main difference being what specific things one chooses to do.
I made a little trouble, but mostly I found ways of killing time. (Drawing a tesseract in 4 point perspective is educational the first few times, doing it again and again is not. And most of my doodles weren’t quite that cool.) Killing time is a bad habit I’ve still got.
This seems like a story of many gifted children. I was a teacher at a school for gifted children, and a frequent story of how the parents discovered their children were gifted was something like this:
“The child was originally in a school for muggles which was so boring the child couldn’t focus on lessons, and started making trouble. Teachers suspected the child cannot pay attention because of mental retardation (!!!) and sent the child to a psychologist. The psychologist gave the child an IQ test, concluded that it’s actually Mensa-level smart, and told it to parents, who then used google or some other source to find the school for the gifted children.”
Another random data point: Spending hours listening to boring stuff is something I cannot do even today, as an adult. Every meeting feels like a torture. Or if the meeting is longer than an hour, I sometimes fall asleep, which caused some trouble in one of my previous jobs (the managers insisted on having 90-minutes meetings every month, where they spent the first hour repeating the very same basic company strategy, only at the end getting to the new stuff). A child is expected to do similar stuff for 6 or more hours a day. I would go insane. Of course the usual coping strategy is to do something else to keep yourself awake, the main difference being what specific things one chooses to do.
My first grade teacher refused to believe I was gifted until the principal showed her my standardized test results at the end of the year.
(I eventually ended up in special education because of behavior problems. Ugh.)
I made a little trouble, but mostly I found ways of killing time. (Drawing a tesseract in 4 point perspective is educational the first few times, doing it again and again is not. And most of my doodles weren’t quite that cool.) Killing time is a bad habit I’ve still got.