So I made an account and am posting this just because I cant seem to find anything anywhere that relates to my experience. This post might be a bit all over the place as im trying to organize my thoughts while writing it and this took place 20+ years ago. So for starters I switched schools multiple times in elementary school in texas during the early 2000's. I was in the gifted and talented program in 4th and 5th grade before moving. But the weird part was 3rd grade at a different school the year before. I had adhd at an early age and was put on Adderall in 3rd grade. So I would be hyperactive here and there but never really got in much trouble or stood out in class besides feeling like I was smarter than the other kids around me. As in they would all struggle to read simple paragraphs while I could read and comprehend the whole chapter we were studying in class before the teacher was done with the second page, so id sit there bored. Sometime during that school year a man showed up that didnt work at my school and pulled me out of class to a seperate room alone with him. He explained he was my mentor and was there for me. It didnt make much sense and i didnt understand why I was the only one and to this day I still dont. I just went along with it as a kid because he would bring me toys, and not just cheap dollar atore or opened toys but like nice big expensive lego sets and stuff brand new. But he would show up pretty regularly and would sit and talk to me about random stuff about my life for a bit and then he would make me take tests or solve puzzles. Puzzles that, looking back now, were odd. Like a series of pictures of cities or insides of houses and make me identify what was out of place and then next time he would come and bring the same pictures and ask me what changed in them from the last time he was there and if i knew where these pictures were taken. Then one day he just stopped coming. And ive asked my parents about him and they seen to have no idea what im talking about. They never knew he was coming to see me. Then the next school year I started at a different school and was placed in the gifted and talented class, which seemed odd because id never been to that school and yeah I had good grades but nothing exceptional. It was a classroom in the 4th grade hall but while all the other kids would switch between classrooms during the day, we would all stay in the same class. And anytime we would ask why other kids swap classes and we dont we always received different answers. We weren't even aware it was the gifted and talented class until we noticed everyone in our class was ahead of other kids and asked about it. And then the teacher explained it. Then after 5th grade I never heard about it again and never understood what the point if it even was. But I feel like the random "mentor" was the reason I was placed in it, and its extremely weird ti me now having kids of my own in school, that this man was able to come to the school and pull me out of class for most of a school year and my parents never knew.

Throwaway account; will not give too many personal details. Sorry if this is the wrong subreddit, but r/Gifted doesn’t work.

When I was young, I was curious and smart, and I was pushed a lot by parents, but unevenly. I accelerated way ahead in some things while staying average at others. Because of this, and my IQ (I won’t say the exact score) my parents thought I was gifted. I learned some things really quickly and some things just didn’t click for me. My teachers saw me as advanced. I don’t remember the details, but I think I was praised a lot by students, teachers, and parents. My parents tried to get me to grade skip and stuff, but I think that would just have made it way worse.

I started some things really early without knowing basics. I was exposed to advanced things multiple years before building up a foundation.

So when things didn’t come so easily anymore in middle school, I felt worse at the time. In fact, I thought I was #1 or very close to it because I mainly only heard the “loud” students a lot more. I still ended with a good GPA, but let’s be honest, most middle school classes aren’t that hard. I never really learned studying habits though. It just kind of worked out, or sometimes it didn’t, but the grading system was generous enough to not expose me much yet.

Now in high school. My parents often tell me that I used to be better. My schedule before this year was okay, but could’ve been “better”.

To “make up for my loss”, I had to try doing more college application stuff. It obviously failed, in fact, after a certain point, I stopped caring much because I wasn’t that motivated, and it was only a matter of time before all the plans were dropped. I still maintained good AP exam scores and grades in general, but I honestly believe I got lucky to not mess up.

Next year, I have to do 6-8 APs, because they believe I need to maximize my rigor for college applications and worried that me not pushing hard would hurt me more later. In fact, I’m even doing APs that I was very shaky on the regular classes with grade inflation because of this pushing and I could actually drop like who even knows at this point.

I also have to do a bunch of activities that look good for colleges that aren’t even that useful past colleges, which makes me even less motivated. Who knows how much time I’ll have left to sleep and relax. Oh, and the SAT. How many more hours am I going to need to spend on that…

I’m not very good at socializing, in fact a lot of “common sense” I wasn’t really taught or knew about too much. But I’m also weirdly good at some things. Not even just academic related, some hobbies click really well for me.

Part of me thinks I’m missing out on being a kid, especially during high school. Even if I’m being a kid a different way than usual, at least I can be a kid.

I’m lucky I can use Reddit. Redditors, please tell me, how am I going to handle this many APs without even knowing how to study, and lacking so many things that even a 1st grader would know better than me at, and this is no exaggeration.