My experience in school matches that of "The Guy" pretty closely. To this day I still am not quite sure what to make of it; I went to private schools that were

My experience in school matches that of "The Guy" pretty closely. To this day I still am not quite sure what to make of it; I went to private schools that were probably more challenging than other places I could have been, and I obviously learned a massive amount just being there doing some of the work (to say nothing of the social education), but I just could not make myself care enough to get good grades, especially in classes where homework was weighted heavily. It's not like I was doing anything worthwhile instead. Playing video games, mostly, and running around in the yard during the summer rather than completing the "summer math packet" and prescribed readings. I always doubly dreaded the end of summer, because I'd never done the homework. I think the constant dread of the moment of reckoning when homework was to be turned in, and I was empty-handed, gave me a serious sort of imposter-ish syndrome that persists to this day. Back then I was constantly having doors closed on me because of my slacking, and while I am quite successful now in my career I am still reticent to try opening doors because I'm wired to assume they will be locked. Anyway, it turned out that I can actually be a functional member of society and a valuable worker (software engineer, natch). But my basic incompatibility with school made it a real crapshoot whether I'd get the opportunity to prove my worth; if it wasn't for a lucky break getting an internship referral from a professor who liked me, my life would probably look very different right now. I'd probably be dead, honestly; I don't take care of myself well when I'm in a depressed and aimless mode. What to take away from this, I don't know (which is frustrating). I don't know what my IQ is, and I don't really care at this point in my life, but I'm certainly not the sort of scintillating Von Neumann-esque intellect that you hear about a lot in threads like this. I'm not sure what a path to some "school for the gifted" would have looked like for me, whether I would have been accepted or not, and whether that would have "unlocked my true potential" or just left me in the same situation with the added wrinkle of material so difficult that I couldn't BS through it anymore (I started to really run into this in higher-level university classes). I am smart, though, and I want to have kids and I assume they'll be smart too. I'd like to know how they can avoid the same pitfalls that held me back earlier in life, because if they can, I think they could be much more successful than I've been.