I am a person with a relatively high IQ (a paltry upper 120-low 130) and a rap sheet of mental health problems, including ADHD.
There is a stubborn narrative out there that smart people suffer for their braininess, but a cursory Google shows that IQ is positively correlated with almost any positive psychological trait you could imagine.
**However**. It is worth noting that there is a subgroup of high-IQ people for whom IQ is correlated *inversely* with general well-being. This paper finds that they fit into a cognitive profile of high(er) verbal iq and low(er) processing speed. High correlation with ASD.
I suspect many troubled ex-gifted kids fall into this “biotype.”
There are some other papers that have similar findings, if you dig for them.
I had my IQ professionally tested once, and found that my verbal IQ was 145 and my processing speed was only in the 90’s (in one subsection there, I actually scored in the 30th percentile.)
I was not a gifted child but I was a child with a diagnosis of “High Functioning Autism”. My husband is a former gifted kid. He not only has better social skills than I do, but his social skills are one of his greatest strengths. Also, when I was a kid I gravitated toward adults and preferred speaking with (or at…) them. Nothing to do with my peers not being smart enough for me. This is actually not abnormal with Autistic kids.
Somehow as an adult what passes for my social circle is predominantly made up of former gifted kids, and the ones who flounder are floundering due to OCD or ADHD or Bipolar Disorder. It there’s friction around their intellect it’s only if their favorite topic of conversation is how much smarter they are than everyone else. Or if they act like being intelligent means they only have to read about a topic casually and they’ll know more about it than someone of average intellect who has more extensive experience.
(This is my long-winded way of agreeing that Georgios’s Asperger’s was probably more to blame for his social difficulties than his IQ. I mean. It’s a disorder defined by deficits in social skills so saying this feels like stating the obvious…)
> I’m miffed about the math score, because I’m insecure about my math ability and think this was an unfair assessment of it. An 800 on the math SAT isn’t even table stakes for the world of genuinely cracked math kids.
I wouldn't worry about it, the upper end of the math SAT is an "attention to boring details" test, it doesn't have anywhere near enough resolution to identify real math ability. At the risk of revealing how arrogant I am: I got a 730 and ended up being a noticeably above-average math student at [school that gets ranked first sometimes]
Oh hey! Similar background here--went to school in Pennsylvania, never skipped a grade, and also took Logic and Reasoning at CTY Lancaster the summer after 7th grade. I feel differently about the experience, though--angry, still, after twenty years. Part of the difference might be that I went to a Quaker school that was low-key ideologically opposed to tracking/giftedness, so there simply weren't any advanced classes to take.
It felt, and feels, terrible to realize that the system defaults to wasting your time. Having to spend years of your life in a class you're getting nothing out of, not particularly *expected* to get anything out of, but also not allowed to stop paying attention...I'm sure it's more humiliating if the reason you can't get anything out of it is a learning disability, but it's still plenty humiliating when it's because you already know most of it.
CTY was so great, though! And definitely better for socializing, although, again, that's compared to a tiny K-8 Quaker school.
I am a person with a relatively high IQ (a paltry upper 120-low 130) and a rap sheet of mental health problems, including ADHD.
There is a stubborn narrative out there that smart people suffer for their braininess, but a cursory Google shows that IQ is positively correlated with almost any positive psychological trait you could imagine.
**However**. It is worth noting that there is a subgroup of high-IQ people for whom IQ is correlated *inversely* with general well-being. This paper finds that they fit into a cognitive profile of high(er) verbal iq and low(er) processing speed. High correlation with ASD.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.02.21265802v1.full.pdf
I suspect many troubled ex-gifted kids fall into this “biotype.”
There are some other papers that have similar findings, if you dig for them.
I had my IQ professionally tested once, and found that my verbal IQ was 145 and my processing speed was only in the 90’s (in one subsection there, I actually scored in the 30th percentile.)
ah that's crazy I had same thing, ceiling effect in verbal information & vocab in the WAIS-IV, 102 in processing speed
I was not a gifted child but I was a child with a diagnosis of “High Functioning Autism”. My husband is a former gifted kid. He not only has better social skills than I do, but his social skills are one of his greatest strengths. Also, when I was a kid I gravitated toward adults and preferred speaking with (or at…) them. Nothing to do with my peers not being smart enough for me. This is actually not abnormal with Autistic kids.
Somehow as an adult what passes for my social circle is predominantly made up of former gifted kids, and the ones who flounder are floundering due to OCD or ADHD or Bipolar Disorder. It there’s friction around their intellect it’s only if their favorite topic of conversation is how much smarter they are than everyone else. Or if they act like being intelligent means they only have to read about a topic casually and they’ll know more about it than someone of average intellect who has more extensive experience.
(This is my long-winded way of agreeing that Georgios’s Asperger’s was probably more to blame for his social difficulties than his IQ. I mean. It’s a disorder defined by deficits in social skills so saying this feels like stating the obvious…)
> I’m miffed about the math score, because I’m insecure about my math ability and think this was an unfair assessment of it. An 800 on the math SAT isn’t even table stakes for the world of genuinely cracked math kids.
I wouldn't worry about it, the upper end of the math SAT is an "attention to boring details" test, it doesn't have anywhere near enough resolution to identify real math ability. At the risk of revealing how arrogant I am: I got a 730 and ended up being a noticeably above-average math student at [school that gets ranked first sometimes]
How would you recommend structuring kids' learning going forward?
Oh hey! Similar background here--went to school in Pennsylvania, never skipped a grade, and also took Logic and Reasoning at CTY Lancaster the summer after 7th grade. I feel differently about the experience, though--angry, still, after twenty years. Part of the difference might be that I went to a Quaker school that was low-key ideologically opposed to tracking/giftedness, so there simply weren't any advanced classes to take.
It felt, and feels, terrible to realize that the system defaults to wasting your time. Having to spend years of your life in a class you're getting nothing out of, not particularly *expected* to get anything out of, but also not allowed to stop paying attention...I'm sure it's more humiliating if the reason you can't get anything out of it is a learning disability, but it's still plenty humiliating when it's because you already know most of it.
CTY was so great, though! And definitely better for socializing, although, again, that's compared to a tiny K-8 Quaker school.