What I Learned from Being a GT Student

gifted and talented

a phrase that i still truly wouldn’t be

able to define if i had to

well luckily for me google provided a

pretty simple definition

of having exceptional talent or natural

ability

but what exactly deems these words a

label what does it mean to be labeled as

such

similar questions apply to the gifted

and learn gifted and talented

learning program in many schools

throughout the united states

my goal today is to teach you

how the gifted and talented program

works what’s missing from the program

and education in general and my secret

to growing through bad habits to find

semi-success in high school

there seems to be just one criteria to

place into the gifted and talented

program

which is the cogat or cognitive

abilities test

when i took this test as a second grader

i didn’t even know what it was

which meant i wasn’t really learning

from it after i placed in gt

along with many of my friends i loved

the idea of making the exciting journey

just a few yards down the hall for my

classmates who were meanwhile

learning how to excel on their own by

working hard

soon i realized i didn’t really need to

take school seriously

and i wish i could have known how wrong

i was about that

what the gt program is intended to

provide is

a challenging classroom environment

under the assumption

that the work taught in the regular

classroom is too easy or too boring for

some students

and while that’s a great idea in theory

as an elementary schooler i didn’t see

that

i now my teacher did everything she

could to help us

read at a high level and solve math

problems quickly but what wasn’t in the

curriculum was the importance of all

this work

and while our meanwhile while our

classmates down the hall

we’re learning that hard work brings

reward we treated it like an unnecessary

task

to be ignored i started this same

i started middle school with the same

poor mindset

and after the excitement of being in a

new school wore off

i began to notice a slip in my grades

i felt like the standards i was used to

receiving were just a bit too far out of

my reach i became confused

frustrated and anxious about school and

grades in general

and the worst part was that i didn’t

know what i was missing that everyone

else seemed to have down

soon feelings of anxiety and depression

that i’d always been able to push away

became more and more frequent

as i continued a cycle of never quite

reaching my goals

my parents tried to help out as much as

they could asking me what assignments

needed to be done each night

and how they could help me but instead i

brushed off their questions

shrugged and figured that whatever i had

to be done could be done in the morning

now that’s not to say that many students

if not all of them don’t struggle with

procrastination at some point in their

school career

however every professional

procrastinator knows that there’s a

reason that probably seems valid at the

time

my reason was that i had an unhealthy

mindset that i wouldn’t need to work

hard for anything

i just didn’t know it yet

as i continued this cycle of not

ever reaching my goals years passed by

and i struggled

i became confused anxious

and i turned in par i turned in late

work for partial credit

retook tests to get even a slightly

higher score

and finished projects the day before

they were due

i skated by freshman year and when

selecting classes to take for sophomore

year in the fall

i chose ap biology against the judgment

my own judgment and the advice of my

teachers

parents and school counselor

when ap bio started in the fall i

treated it just the same as i treated

any other class since middle school

however as the only sophomore in a class

full of juniors and seniors at a college

level

it needed to be taken much more

seriously

one day after being assigned a difficult

poster project

which i once again waited until the last

minute to complete

having spent having spent hours

distractedly researching

online i remember something my teacher

had told us

at the beginning of the year she said

that if we knew how to study right

that everything we needed for the class

could be found in the textbook

my textbook had found a place under my

bed collecting dust

however at this moment i ran up the

stairs flew the door open to my room

grabbed my textbook from under my bed

dusted it off and read it for hours

i carefully annotated the information

highlighted keywords

underlined summarized and read the parts

that didn’t make sense until they did

then i got to work on my poster right

away

i used a ruler to make sure the spaces

in between the information was

the same i used straight edges to make

sure the lines that i drew were perfect

and i used i color coded and i used my

best handwriting

i printed the best quality pictures off

the internet and finally

i took a step back and i smiled

i was so proud that i had actually

completed something that i was so

confident in

and i had worked on it i had felt myself

concentrating and focusing on something

that i truly cared about

i got a 97 on that poster and something

just clicked

i had been taught all my life that just

because i did well on a test that i

don’t even remember

that i wouldn’t need to work as hard as

anyone else but that’s not how it works

at all

that’s not the point of the gt program

and that mindset shouldn’t be the

outcome

so how exactly can students grow out of

these bad habits

the absolute best answer to that

question is effort it will always be

effort

much easier said than done i know but

putting in effort

but the best way to put in the effort is

finding a reason to motivate yourself

for students your reason may be if i

have if i study now i’ll have time to

watch two episodes of the office tonight

instead of one

i know that’s my reason

for parents your child might whine

might complain but a little help support

and encouragement goes a long way

in fact i want to thank my own parents

tonight for making me work hard all

these years

because tomorrow night when i have piles

of ap laying homework and an anatomy

test to study for

i won’t be thanking you

for teachers please understand that just

because

some students may have passed a test in

elementary school that doesn’t mean we

don’t need help

we need guidance all students need to be

taught work ethic for the future

for when multiplication tables become

calculus and when the mitochondria is no

longer the powerhouse of the cell

but instead a double-walled membrane

responsible for synthesizing atp

even though i’ve grown so much through

this struggle if i would have only known

how to motivate myself early on

i wouldn’t have fallen behind for so

long

and while i might not be a hundred

percent yet the

important thing is that i’m working i’m

working on building the skills that

others around me

have built been building their entire

lives and i owe it all to motivation

thank you