For us, gift identification happened in kindergarten. By HS it’s a totally different ball game because there are all different levels of classes already built in.
In our experience, there was a huge continuum of kindergarten readiness, especially in reading and math. The biggest gaps we saw were between K-5.
I agree with you that K-5 is when the gaps develop. I would contend that there is very little giftedness even here. Some kids and families take an interest and encourage kids to start early. And some families have other priorities in early education. The kids that start early are far ahead by the time they get to high school. Our older son read the Happy Potter, all 7 volumes in 3 months in his first grade. Because he had an 85 year old “granny” teacher than made all the kids start reading in pre-k. I just brought the books home, hoping he might pick them up. Didn’t force him to read. I told he could if he wanted to. But he was prepared by prior exposure to reading in the school. I really don’t believe in giftedness for the most part.
Interestingly, that pre-K education has also served other kids very well. There were several others in that 15 person class that have done far better than average – we’ve kept in touch. One of the other kids is joining the same company that my son is going into – you might call it a feeder 
(sadly the old lady has since passed, and the school shut down). My son’s pre-K classmate and him are going to room together next year in their first foray into work life.
Depends on the elite college. Plenty of places to hide at Harvard or Yale. But not so at Columbia, UChicago, or MIT due in large part to demanding distribution requirements.
I tend to agree with you about giftedness. I would say in our fairly large circle of gifted learners, only three would be consider truly exceptional. The others, including my D, were what I call early learners. Just way ahead of the curve in the early years, but then eventually the rest of the cohort catches up by HS. D’s IQ is still very high and she always tests in the 99th percentile of things, but she’s more what I would consider the average excellent type kid we read about on CC. She’ll graduate with honors this week with another 250+ students, so not that atypical.
There are places at Princeton to hide. You need to pick the correct majors. It is a question of how low the floor is for each department. I was given an example of the mol bio major this weekend. I hear it is brutal. At the thesis defense, your advisor is excluded, and your examiner has access to your entire transcript, and can grill you on whatever material they think you should remember from the prior four years of course work :-). Math is similar. I am told CS is easy. etc.
I don’t believe this happens. Knowledge compounds in non-linear ways. And you learn to correlate disparate things you know. If you have an extensive reading habit, you grow fast in complex ways. But then of course you are not competing with anyone else. Other people are growing in their own way. And there is no concept of some cohort catching up with you. Your journey is your own.
At Columbia and Chicago, students weak only in math and science can still hide such weakness in courses like physics for poets or physics for future presidents that can be used to fulfill general education requirements.
So you think everyone has the same ability to learn, create, and problem solve?
Small differences (which surely exist, because the brain is not made in a factory) can either generate large differences 15-20 years down the road, or not, depending on what you do with what you were given. In my experience the initial differences are small.
Have you ever met a kid like the one described in the original article?
A close friend in college was rather like that. Just astonishingly talented at anything he turned his hand to (in his case as able to do high level math as he was graphic design, journalism or philosophy). Over the last 30 years I’ve met a few people who know him (he was also head of derivatives for a famous bank), and without fail they will say he’s the smartest person they’ve ever met. That was much more than a small difference in initial ability.
I know a few people like that. Not many.
But I attribute that to continuous motivated learning through the years.
Not intentional learning. Just interested learning.
Large differences are rare, but they exist. IQ has a normal distribution. What you achieve depends on learning and motivation, but does the US do a good job of providing learning opportunities to the kids who can do the most with it? Or just those with the most engaged (or pushiest) parents?
This is what I used to believe too. But I’m an adoptive parent and I can tell you that real genetic intelligence differences certainly exist. My kids are about 30pts apart in IQ testing, one is gifted, one is average. The difference in their ability to learn is astounding.
If referring to the top 0.1%, or about 4,000 students per year, that means one every several years at each high school (and less frequently at elementary schools, since elementary schools are smaller and more numerous than high schools), if they are well distributed across regions. That means that high schools and elementary schools will have little experience with such students (and the one who shows up this year may not show off-the-scale achievement in the same subjects as the one who showed up several years ago, so the previous one is not a good model for how to handle the current one), and such students are unlikely to find any sort of peer group in their high schools.
In terms of a more expended range of high achievers (like top 2% or top 10% in an elementary or high school), it is likely that engaged or pushy parents has a large effect on which students get into gifted programs or advanced courses if there is not enough space for all who could benefit from them. (And sometimes the pushy parents push their kids further ahead than is optimal for the kids.)
When it comes to college, parent financial limitations are typically the dominant factor in a student’s choice of college, with the student’s academic achievement mattering only within the parent financial constraints. That adds another factor that prevents all of the “gifted” (whether at the top 0.1% or 2% level) from going to the same colleges.
I live in Lake Woebegone where all the kids are above average. There are tons of kids like Giorgio around here. The public schools are excellent for above average kids. It’s the average kids who struggle there because so many kids in the schools are high achieving and they draw a lot of the resources and then the kids with special needs draw a lot of resources too and the kids in the middle fall through the cracks. Many many nerds here. We are also great at Ultimate Frisbee and kinda suck at football.
Oh, and there are several different levels of gifted programs in the school including a self-contained program that pulls the Profoundly Gifted kids out of their regular schools and puts them all together in a special program. “Regular” gifted kids are taught at their base schools. I believe there is a nurturing gifted program for K-3 kids who show promise, too, but may lack resources at home.
The high school my daughter attended classifies 40% of its students as gifted. And yet at the TAG info session for parents a few years ago the program coordinator said that not all (presumably gifted) students need to go to college. That’s a very different gifted compared to the article in the first post here.
Our conversation in the house has never been about being gifted. I don’t think that phrase was ever uttered, even away from the kids. It is about finding things you like, and having fun. This is what I was sending the kids today, and a half a dozen of my adult friends: https://youtu.be/d-o3eB9sfls. It was shared with me on my college dorm social media group. That means there are more people that have nothing better to do
At some point a couple of years ago my son shared this with me, something I am still trying to understand given the limited time that I have for this kind of stuff: Noether's theorem - Wikipedia , or this: Continuum hypothesis - Wikipedia
When I get on a flight I take either soft or hard copies of stuff that I want to learn like the above.
There is beauty in all this kind of stuff that kids and adults can get excited about. The idea is to get them excited. My son was telling me that the kids that are most deep in some area often got interested at something particular (this for example for one of his friends during their high school years: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem - Wikipedia) and spent the next two years digging deep to try and understand everything around it. The rest will take care of itself.
I am just giving math examples because this is our experience. But it applies to other areas as well. You don’t need some external gifted program to cater to the kids’ needs. Nice to have, but not absolutely essential.
I find this point of view uninformed of the research in the field and, frankly, quite presumptuous in the assumption what up to 2% of the population might need or not.
As someone upthread noted, the IQ follows the normal distribution. By refusing to acknowledge the existence of the kids 2 standard deviations on the right end of it (call them gifted, talented or whatever), the same logic will imply that there are no kids 2 standard deviations below the average. Are we going to deny those kids with intellectual disabilities the right to the services they need as well?
Gifted and especially profoundly gifted kids (> 3 standard deviations) are in need of differentiated instruction, especially in K-5. Otherwise the negative psychological consequences are quite large. Just because some families are lucky to be able to provide that kind of differentiated education for their children, doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist for others.
It is an easier ask if you simply ask the school to put them 1, 2 or 3 grades ahead in whichever class they seem advanced in, than to ask for a lot of resources to create a special kind of a program. I am not saying you should not differentiate kids that are far apart in the classroom. I am also saying that calling someone gifted is harmful to them (the kid). And rarely is it the case that these differences stem from large differences in innate ability, as opposed to developed ability. And that’s fine. The kids deserve to not get bored.
Incidentally a lot of research in this space has to be seen with a skeptical eye. Can you imagine how devastating it would be if you called a kid gifted, and he ends up in college and has a difficult time for whatever reason?
To me this feels similar to when people claim to “not see color.” Sure, you can pretend differences don’t exist or aren’t in any way meaningful but that doesn’t make it true, and you can justify it by saying it is somehow better for the person of color to be viewed as exactly the same as everyone else around them, but really that only invalidates their lived experiences. It is the same with the gifted label. You can reject it, but that doesn’t mean that gifted students don’t exist and that they don’t benefit from accommodations.
That is not appropriate for many if not most gifted children. While they may be cognitively advanced in some areas, they often are not as socially and emotionally advanced and simply don’t fit in with older, more mature children. In many cases, this only compounds their discomforts with school and, in the worst cases, can lead to bullying for being the younger, weaker “weird” kid. You can’t just toss young kids in with older ones and expect them to thrive, not matter whether or not they are capable of the academic work.
It happens all the time. Why is it any more devastating for a gifted student than a non-gifted student? I imagine it sucks no matter who you are.
But gifted and other highly intelligent people may struggle in college for a variety of reasons - sometimes mental health/depression, sometimes poor social adjustment, sometimes burnout or the disillusionment of an existential crisis. I’ve seen numerous highly gifted students crash and burn in college. It says nothing about their intelligence nor does it in any way negate their intellectual capacity. It is the product of human frailties to which gifted students are not immune.