1/26/2024 0 Comments Gifted student failing collegeShe loved the academic challenge, but not the social environment. Saturn started the gifted program in Grade 5. As for her parents, Saturn says they wish they’d never put her in the class. “They almost put me on a pedestal,” she says.īut her time in the gifted program was anything but glorious: she experienced depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. As a bright child who enjoyed school, she was eager to take on the challenge, while her parents were happy to have a gifted kid. Ody Saturn* and her parents were excited when she got into the gifted program. For many gifted students, coming to university is a struggle as they question their life choices, intelligence and even their identity. But some former gifted students say that while they were made to feel smarter than their peers, the program made education more difficult for them in the long run. ![]() ![]() Gifted programs are supposed to give exceptional students a space to succeed in public education. “Because they’ve been told that they’re so smart and so capable for so long, they really struggle to ask for help.” Finally, Sauder says gifted students often struggle in silence. Sauder says students can experience a “crisis of self” as their gifted identity, which once set them apart, suddenly feels meaningless. Further, they may have never failed an assignment or a midterm until university-so when they do, it can feel catastrophic. Then in university, they’re faced with a more difficult work load-but no study skills. Despite being in academically advanced programs, many gifted students are smart enough that they don’t have to work hard in elementary and high school. In her doctoral thesis, a 2015 study of 39 students who had been in gifted programs, Sauder found that these students faced significant challenges at university stemming from their gifted experience.įirstly, gifted students have to “learn how to learn” in university. Sauder herself was identified as gifted in Grade 3 and now she’s a sessional instructor at King’s University College at Western University. All gifted students in Ontario have an Individual Education Plan.Īdrienne Sauder researches how gifted students adapt to university. The program offers advanced academics, smaller class sizes and more personalized attention from teachers. A typical gifted program operates within a regular public school but separates students from their non-gifted peers. He Ontario Ministry of Education defines giftedness as “an unusually advanced degree of general intellectual ability that requires differentiated learning experiences of a depth and breadth beyond those normally provided in the regular school program to satisfy the level of educational potential indicated.” In other words, gifted kids are too smart to learn with the other kids. Now, he thinks the way to help gifted kids may be simple. Singh says that gifted kids are unlikely to ask for help, given that they’ve been conditioned to believe that they don’t need it. He failed some courses, barely passed others and after two years, he dropped out, watching his gifted peers surpass him. Having mostly coasted through education before, he’d never developed the skills to study and manage the heavier workload. Becoming a doctor meant helping people, pleasing his parents and making good money. He figured the program would be pretty easy, thinking he would just “look at bones”-and it seemed like the obvious next step. Only “raw STEM intelligence” was valued-science, technology, engineering and mathematics.ĭespite this, Singh pursued pre-med at University of British Columbia (UBC). He was getting into poetry, but in gifted and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, subjects like English were considered “soft skills,” that didn’t lead to valid careers. He pushed himself to take more and more advanced classes, thinking, “I want to go faster, I want to be a phenom, I want to be something special, and this is how you do that.”īut by Grade 11, Singh started to feel like an impostor. By Grade 3 he was in a gifted program, and after his family moved to B.C., he skipped Grade 7 and started Grade 8 in a new gifted program. As a child in Seattle he was tutored by his parents-an electrical engineer and a computer scientist. ![]() Mar Singh, a third-year mathematics student with an option in computer science, was raised to be an overachiever.
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