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