As a "gifted" student in a tiny town, I had my 3rd and 4th grade math "class" in the hallway, where the teachers drug my desk and slapped down a geometry textbo

As a "gifted" student in a tiny town, I had my 3rd and 4th grade math "class" in the hallway, where the teachers drug my desk and slapped down a geometry textbook and told me to teach myself. In other classes they tried to get me to help teach my classmates the concepts, which is not a great place for a 4th grader to be in. By high school I'd learned to read the textbook, ace the tests and do fuck-all for homework to the frustration of every educator at the school trying to teach me hard work alongside the actual material. There were actually AP classes in high school that I never qualified for because I never learned to actually work at school, and by high school I didn't really care. I was completely unprepared when Junior year in college, it actually got so hard that I had to study. I almost flunked out. I can empathize with the gifted kids that are just a different shade, not getting challenged, basically getting the small town experience I got. It is a ton of potential being wasted. I agree with the article, throwing away gifted programs and just lowering the bar is a mistake, but raising everyones bar to the gifted level... that's going to leave some of the most vulnerable behind which I don't think should be done either. Maybe working to shore up the problem of black/brown kids having equal test scores and not getting into a gifted program is the first hurdle, and then we can look around and see what to do next.