Actually, the crumpling in the face of sudden failure isn't so much a woman thing as a gifted kid thing. Kids who learned quickly and were not given the proper study and work skills when they were young (because they never had to) learn to think of themselves as "smart" and think of hard work as something only stupid people have to do, so if all of a sudden they don't just naturally learn something, they freak out because it means they aren't "smart" any more.

It's why current child-rearing emphasizes complementing kids on how hard they worked and not how smart they are.

This is not about women, it's about people. This person has trouble dealing with challenges - why does that have anything to do with her gender? Why do feminists try to cast everything in terms of gender bias.

Even if it's true (perhaps men's more competitive nature is an advantage here), what does she expect us to do? The goals is (supposed to be) a gender-neutral world.

If some people cannot or will not compete; if they drop out of the rat race for whatever reason? That's their decision and, if they see it as such, it's their problem. Whether they are male or female, black or white, tall or short - it doesn't really matter.

That's Carol Dweck's research (on complimenting kids on how hard they worked rather than how smart they are) -- mentioned with some frequency on my radio show (on shows with Paul Tough and others).

http://blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon

I was deemed a "gifted" kid and, for quite some times, avoided failing. It just took a decision to be braver than that and doing the work in order to change.

You can't know everything, but you can learn anything.

" . . . I tried and quickly tossed aside . . ."

Sort of what others have said; this isn't about gender; this is about a lack of discipline. The author started and then dropped piano lessons, ballet classes, and basketball?

Why didn't her parents make her "stick it out"? While it might not be ideal to force a kid to do everything it is important to try to instill in the kid a sense of discipline.

Quitting one thing would be okay, but if there was a pattern of quitting (she does call it a "habit" after all) then her parents should have parented more.

To some how or other blame it on gender doesn't make any sense.

I could be really cold and say if she had developed a better sense of discipline she might be a better writer; or, in the very least, a writer whose ideas would be better thought out and not just hashed together.

Well said, Nicole. What many don't or won't remember is that brains are something a kid is born with. Like beauty. It's not healthful OR fair to allow such gifted kids to dwell on those accidents of birth - what about those who have neither gift?

Or, as Kipling wrote: "There is nothing so unlucky as to compliment children to their faces." (Though I'm guessing he would have disapproved of praising kids even for their hard work - something no one would agree with today.)

Also, too many parents think nothing of it when their kids get sterling grades with little or no work - when do they learn to work HARD?

For many kids it might be a good idea to push them to skip grades as often as possible, as in "Cheaper By the Dozen" - it could help them to avoid the over-confidence and swelled head that one gets from always being the brightest kid in class. (This worked - and didn't work - for Charles Schulz. That is, he skipped a grade, but he suffered terrible feelings of inadequacy as a result of always being the youngest in the class, which, of course, became fodder for "Peanuts" later on.)

Charlene (from Canada) said in 2006:

"I went through that. I wouldn't recommend it. It doesn't help kids avoid overconfidence - it gives them a raging sense of inadequacy and underconfidence, because even if they are intellectually ahead of their old yearmates they're always one year emotionally and mentally behind their new ones. Gifted classes are the way to go."

Just curious. Do parents still feel like they are supposed to "prepare" their kids for the world?

Starting seeing it not done w/my kid's generation. No need to do chores, clean up their room, actually work, get up off the ground - wipe your nose - try again (I was 'insensitive'.).

Doesn't matter how bright/smart a kid is - he's a kid. There is lots of stuff he can not do and needs to learn to get over it and try again.

In my school days, I observed a lot of this from students who were good at getting good grades from deportment rather than demonstrated learning. (And more than half of such students were girls.) They were, as the author of the piece writes, teacher's pets. In elementary school they basically got good grades for being nice. In high school they had to do more work, but they were always able to get extra-credit assignments and credits for extracurricular activities that weren't available to students that didn't have as good a relationship with the teachers. They they hit college and those tactics didn't work anymore, and they collapsed. Meanwhile, the unpopular and anonymous students had been busting it to master the material and stay ahead of the various traps that high school laid for them, so they could eke out B's. And they got to college and they thought, "Wow, all I have to do is learn and study and pass the tests? This is a breeze!" For them, college is a liberation. (Or at least it used to be; in today's politicized colleges, maybe not so much.)

I was labeled a gifted child in elementary school, but such label was often not a compliment: it meant I was a pain in the ass. My fifth-grade teacher (a very nice lady and a good teacher) told me at the end of the school year: "Sometimes when you're so eager to answer every question in class, some teachers will think you're showing them up. Be careful about that." Then I hit high school, and for various family-related reasons my entire life turned to shit. Every single aspect of my teenage years, both educational and personal, was a monumental failure. The one good aspect of that was that I graduated (barely) high school with no more fear of failure; I learned a lot of life improvisation skills that have served me very well since then.

It seems like the consensus here is that children who are extremely smart or gifted somehow won't be quite so smart as to recognize on their own that they are much more advanced than their peers when it comes to academic achievement.

I'd like to point out that this conclusion is utterly unfounded. Very smart children will instantly know that they are ahead of their peers even if adults actively avoid classifying them as smart or gifted.

That is one of the hallmarks of being smart/gifted... understanding the world around you and how you fit into it compared to others.

That being said, some people who are gifted slack off and coast through life and end up achieving nothing particularly impressive while others work very hard at finding fields that challenge them and push them to the limits of their abilities.

This issue is one about drive and ambition... not innate intellectual ability.

"For many kids it might be a good idea to push them to skip grades as often as possible"

Yeah, the plusses and minuses of this is well discussed above. I went through something sort of like this. I started out in a private school, and then in fifth grade I got dumped into public school system in Tennesse that was way behind. For me, fifth grade was basically a rerun of fourth grade. My parents talked about asking the system to skip me ahead a grade. Age-wise it would have worked out, since the grade cutoff was only a couple of weeks before my birthday and I was always one of the oldest kids in the class. In the sixth grade I was the tallest person in my class, even though I'm only of average male height now.

Well, eighth grade came and I went back to private school. This was sort of like skipping a grade, since the public school system had been so far behind and I had lagged the kids who had been in private school all along. And I really struggled because not only had I missed a lot of material, but I didn't really have any way of knowing what I had missed so that I could make it up. Today it would be easy to find all of the material on the Internet, but in the 1970s there was no good source. And my parents couldn't help because they had not been following my educational progress very closely. I needed remedial classes but I didn't know which ones I needed, and in any event the school didn't offer any.

That was terrible. I was constantly confronted with material that relied on an assumption of prior knowledge that I didn't have. Eventually I managed to start clawing my way out of the hole, but it wasn't until near the end of my junior year that I felt like I had caught back up with my classmates.

"This issue is one about drive and ambition... not innate intellectual ability."

That's true, and one of the traps of being labeled "gifted" at an early age. In elementary school you can be a big fish in a small pond. I'm reminded of a former colleauge on a now-dead project that we worked on. This project had by coincidence managed to collect a bunch of people who had been labeled gifted as children. He told me, "Every other place I've ever been, work was easy. This project was the first place I ever came to where I realized, 'Holy crap, there's bunch of people here who are smarter than me. I've really got to step up my game. '"

At 4th grade my parents put me in a gifted class. I hated. They pushed me to keep going and I am glad they did. While I didn't always work hard in school, I did when I had to.

This shows up in my career now. I am a web programmer. I love learning new technologies and thanks to the internet finding help on something is just a google search away.

I am currently learning the admin side of it (which was something I avoid for a while) as when I worked from home, I was the admin. I didn't have a help desk to fix things and I didn't have system admin to upgrade the server.

Grr...preview is your friend. I hated IT [initially].

A lot of what we consider talent is simply grinding practice until we're good at something. You cultivate talent. To expect to hatch talented at something is entitlement insanity.

The late crime writer Elmore Leonard, for whom my boyfriend worked as a literary researcher for 33 years, estimated that a person needs to write a million words to hit their stride as a writer.

Let's think about this for a moment. Supposing it's true that women are afraid of being imperfect and getting a B AND supposing that is the reason behind having fewer women in engineering and economics...

Let's also make the reasonable assumption that the women who do go into these fields are either A) really good at them or B) so passionate about them they don't care what it takes, they'll get there eventually.

If those things are all true, the author is basically saying, "If you get better grades in one subject, you should ignore that and go into a subject you don't do as well in - even though you don't have a passion for it and might have a passion for the subject you are better at."

Sorry Jane, you may love psychology and be totally awesome at it, but you should go into economics because you are okay enough at it to graduate and you simply cannot be happy if there aren't enough women in economics."

I think Cousin Dave nailed it. Many are talking about drive and ambition being gender-impartial. Sure. But the numbers don't lie - there are more women starting and fewer graduating, in "hard" degrees. I think the reason for that lies in what he said:

"students who were good at getting good grades from deportment rather than demonstrated learning. (And more than half of such students were girls.)"

Schools, especially elementary schools, are very feminine-friendly places. The teachers are female, the staff is female, most principals are female. The only males a child sees are custodians and coaches.

The rest of the world, not so much. In that light, it's not too surprising that more females break faster and fall harder then males, when a more gender-neutral world happens to them; when behaving themselves and following the rules and asking politely no longer work as well, and aren't enough, to be successful.

One obvious solution, for this and many other problems, is to make elementary education a more-possible career for men. The obstacles to *that* happening open up a whole other discussion.

@ flbeachmom

Very true, and it is happening more in STEM in college because although universities are also very female friendly, the STEM areas are less so. More male, professors, more foreign professors, less socially controlled professors.

Unfortunately there are those who have been pushing to make STEM more like the rest of University. Which IMO would be a disaster for science.

I think being a gifted child, tends to make you lazy. Everything comes easy, and so you don't learn to work very hard.

One of the saving graces for me, and I went to elementary school mostly in the 60's was that there was so little to entertain us outside of the library.

I have a feeling my education would have been even worse in this day and age, with 200 channels on TV, and a playstation hooked up to the damn thing.

It makes me think of one of the girls I was friends with, the only girl I was friends with, since elementary school. She was in all of the advanced learning courses since 2nd grade, I still remember being part of the group learning basic algebra by 4th grade.

Years later she snapped and no one saw her for a couple years. When she showed up in highschool with a head scarf because she had almost no hair left due to ripping it out, we found out that she couldn't handle not being able to fix every situation with her intelligence. We found out later what the issue was, her dad was gay and of course that can't be "fixed" and shouldn't even be attempted but she did, failed, and went into depression.

This story has nothing to do with the fact she was a girl, it had to do with the fact she couldn't make the world the way she wanted. Essentially, she never failed before and when she did she had no idea how to handle it. The rest of the kids in that advanced learning program (called A.B.L.E. at the time) turned to drugs by high school. Kids need to fail sometimes as a life lesson as opposed to an intellectual one otherwise they see themselves as invincible until they hit a wall and they can take it harder than most.

Isab Says:

"I think being a gifted child, tends to make you lazy."

NakkiNyan Says:

"The rest of the kids in that advanced learning program (called A.B.L.E. at the time) turned to drugs by high school."

Wow... you guys really are laying it on thick at this point. It feels a great deal like the whole "book smarts vs. street smarts" debate some individuals try to have to make themselves feel better about not performing well academically. Just to be clear, those two types of smarts aren't mutually exclusive and there are plenty of people who have neither... yet people will sometimes act as if the more you gain of one the less you have of the other, as if it is a zero sum game (which it demonstrably isn't).

Do any of you honestly believe that the majority of gifted children are lazy, directionless, drug addicts?

Does this really pass the sniff test for any of you? Because if it does you should probably get your nose checked.

Most gifted individuals go on to do quite well in their chosen fields. Those that fall off the map are in the minority.

Let's try and be clear about something for a second. Being gifted doesn't refer to the average advanced placement student, many of them are quite smart... but few could be accurately described as gifted.

Gifted generally refers to individuals who test above ~145 IQ as children (above 130 is considered moderately gifted, but doesn't generally result in being pulled out for special programs at a young age, unless other special circumstances exist or the child is boarder line).

That isn't a low bar either considering that IQ scores are normalized to 100 and each standard deviation is 15 points.

This means that children who we define as gifted are ~3 sigma above average.

That means gifted individuals comprise the top .3% of individuals in terms of IQ score. As a result, if we had a hypothetical high school with 2000 students total (~500 per grade) we should only expect about 1 or 2 gifted students per class.

That isn't enough students to create an entire program for... so instead they are shuffled into advanced classes with the students who are doing well in school and who are smart, but in general aren't quite as smart as they are.

Those students may be very bored by their classes, but in my experience few if any of them are lazy... they simply challenge themselves intellectually in other ways.

Pretending that gifted individuals end up as lazy drug addicts sleeping in a ditch somewhere is a fantasy whose only purpose seems to be to make people feel better about their own intellectual insecurities. Let's try and live in reality for a moment where children who are actually gifted are not nearly numerous enough to fill the advanced placement classes of every high school in America.

Those students are smart and above average... but very few of them could actually be classified as gifted.

I understand that people get touchy about intelligence classification. I often wish that people saw it the same way as being a naturally fast runner.

Generally people don't go to such great lengths to disparage or knock down individuals with physical talents... yet those who are far above average on the intelligence scale are very often classified in a negative light (i.e. lazy, drug addict... etc.).

I think that this type of behavior says quite a bit more about the people making those remarks than it says about gifted children/adults.

I think that this type of behavior says quite a bit more about the people making those remarks than it says about gifted children/adults.

Posted by: Artemis at March 19, 2014 4:45 PM

"Tends to make one lazy"is not a statement of fact or certainty. I know some very ambitious individuals who are also gifted.

So what conclusion do you draw from statements made by gifted people about themselves, and other gifted people?

Problem with gifted educational programs, is a lot of the teachers are not. It does no good to separate out the gifted for special instruction, and then give them a teacher who is intimidated by the intellect or defers to it.

Intellect needs discipline and training.

Sometimes I think it is counterproductive to identify the "gifted" at all.

Smarts are not everything, and can sometimes handicap an individual who has their entire self imagine built around a narcissistic sense of their own smartness.

One of the things I have noticed is that a lot of gifted children see themselves as very special because they have been singled out by being placed in a GT program.

They then make the mistake of assuming that anyone who was not in one of these special programs is "not smart" and can be discounted.

They don't seem to understand that there were a lot of geniuses enrolled in the regular public schools, back before anyone ever came up with a GT program.

Some of them, never even finished high school.

I'd bet money that CousinDave has an IQ above 140. So do more than a few others posing on this board.

In education, "gifted" is usually considered around 130 (two standard deviations above the mean) or roughly the top 2.5%.

I know gifted folks who freak out when really failing for the first time, and many who don't seem to notice. Upbringing and temperament seem (to my experience)to be the most influential factors. Of course, given that we're talking a teensy percent of people, it's not something any of us likely have much experience with to make a firm statement.

One thing many people forget is that the kid with a 160 IQ is as different from that 130 as the 130 is from the 100 (average). So, even when you do get rigorous programs (usually in big districts), you get the kids who are astoundingly mentally adept counting ceiling tiles and wondering if they can concoct an asbestos test that will work from their desk AND not be noticed by the class.

I agree with Isab, I'm sure we've got more than a few smart cookies in here - that's why I come, it's one of the more interesting corners of the internet, intellectually at least (without being part of PubMed or similar).

Isab Says:

""Tends to make one lazy"is not a statement of fact or certainty. I know some very ambitious individuals who are also gifted."

You are right that it isn't a statement of fact or certainty... but the implication of "tends" is that it is a trend.

For it to be a trend would imply that it is more likely than not(i.e. "in most cases").

That some are lazy is not a point I dispute. That they "tend" to be lazy is a point I find to be completely without merit.

I submit that there is no reason to believe that they would be any more lazy than anyone else.

To the extent that gifted people "tend" to be lazy would be the extent that people in general "tend" to be lazy.

Yet if you believe that people in general tend to be lazy there would be no reason to isolate those who happen to be gifted and apply that tendency to them as if it were in some way a unique feature.

"So what conclusion do you draw from statements made by gifted people about themselves, and other gifted people?"

Gifted people are a heterogeneous group. Some are "lazy", some are "ambitious", while most have typical levels of motivation to achieve.

I believe there is a very real danger to confuse boredom with laziness here.

The two can appear quite identical to an outside observer, but they are in no way the same thing.

I don't normally like talking about myself, but I will make an exception in this case so I can give an example from my own experience that I believe will illustrate the point I am trying to make.

I was one of those kids selected out of the normal classroom and put into a magnet program for gifted children from the surrounding communities. For me the gifted program I was enrolled in was one of the best experiences I could have had because I was surrounded by children who could "keep up" with the pace of education that I needed to be at. The teachers were specially trained and we were constantly given projects to work on that were engaging and creative.

That program only lasted while we were young and by high school we were all reintegrated with the children from our original elementary schools. We were in the advanced track in terms of course material, but the truth of the matter was that it was abysmally slow.

It was so slow that I got into the habit of just laying my head down on my desk during class.

Now this behavior could have easily been confused with identical behavior from students in the remedial class who simply didn't understand the material... but I pretty much aced all of my exams. By the time I was done with high school I had amassed an entire year worth of college credits from the AP examinations.

That being said, "lazy" would have been an extremely poor choice of words to describe me.

This is because I had gone out and arranged extracurricular activities for myself that I found intellectually engaging and challenging. For example, I started working after school at a biomedical research facility working on computationally modeling therapeutic drug targets.

Most if not all of the other gifted children I knew had similar experiences. One was extremely musically inclined and would spend almost all of his free time playing the piano and the bassoon. Another did internships at the court house because she was interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the legal system.

None fit this description of the "lazy", "drug addicted" loser that is being portrayed here as extremely common place.

That model simply doesn't fit with reality.

"Sometimes I think it is counterproductive to identify the "gifted" at all."

This is going to sound mean, but there is no kind way to put this.

Forcing children with IQ's in the 140's to spend every waking minute surrounded by people with IQ's around the average of 100 is equivalent to forcing a child with an IQ of 100 to spend every waking minute surrounded by people with IQ's around 60.

That isn't an exaggeration, that is how the distribution works.

If the average person would find such an experience to be extremely frustrating and unproductive then they can understand how it would feel for the person at the 140 level to never have the release of engaging conversation with people who can generally keep up with the discussion.

This isn't to say that interactions with people across the entire intelligence spectrum should be discouraged. On the contrary I believe it is critical for the development of key social skills for people to interact with a diverse array of people with varied talents and abilities.

Yet most people would find something quite abhorrent about taking an average student and compelling them to sit in a classroom all day everyday with students who are classified as significantly below average.

This is no different from failing to identify those gifted children and giving them an opportunity to interact with each other. These kids are 1 out of ~300... they aren't going to generally accumulate in one classroom by random chance.

"Smarts are not everything, and can sometimes handicap an individual who has their entire self imagine built around a narcissistic sense of their own smartness."

Of course smarts aren't everything. Just like having a genetic predisposition to swim well isn't going to win you any medals at the Olympics.

Being smart simply designates the relative rate at which you accumulate and integrate information. It assesses the speed and accuracy with which you identify patterns and notice aberrant details.

Being smart doesn't denote mastery of any particular skill. It simply denotes how quickly you can master that skill with respect to others. It also distinguishes the point at which you hit an insurmountable barrier intellectually speaking.

Hard work is the only way to master skills and push yourself to the limits of your abilities.

"They then make the mistake of assuming that anyone who was not in one of these special programs is "not smart" and can be discounted."

Who does this?

You can't simply look at someone and know if they are "gifted" or not. You interact with people and assess them on the basis of that interaction.

People don't go around introducing themselves with the addendum of their gifted status. If someone knows what they are talking about, how would a gifted individual go about discounting them?

Instead what I notice is that a very large amount of people talk out of their ass on a very wide variety of subjects... and it just so happens that people who are gifted are in a better position to call them out on it because they have accumulated more knowledge than the average person.

I've gotten into the habit of just nodding to be polite when I hear someone pontificating about a subject which they clearly know nothing about. On the other hand, I love it when I talk to people who demonstrate real knowledge of a subject because then I can learn something new from them... and I have no idea how "smart" they are... I just have a good sense that they aren't bull shitting me.

"They don't seem to understand that there were a lot of geniuses enrolled in the regular public schools, back before anyone ever came up with a GT program."

First off, let's please clarify one point. There have never been "a lot" of geniuses. Genius is 4 sigma and higher above the mean. This means that in a population of ~15000 people you will have about 1 genius.

They are VERY rare.

That being said... why would you think gifted children would be under the impression that they are the first group of kids to fit that classification?... not to mention that there are people older than they are who are MUCH smarter than they are.

Newton was probably one of the most intelligent people to ever walk the earth and he didn't even attend public school (because the institution didn't exist).

Going beyond that there are people like Ramanujan who grew up in India during the late 1800's, he had to teach himself advanced mathematics when he was still a young teenager and went on to discover entire new theorems. He was utterly brilliant by every definition of the word and had no modern educational advantages.

To me there is a very large disconnect with how you regard gifted children.

On the one hand they are very smart... and yet none of them seem to be smart enough to know that there are other smart people and that there have always been smart people... even people who were vastly more intelligent than they are.

"I'd bet money that CousinDave has an IQ above 140. So do more than a few others posing on this board."

I can't speak to the IQ of specific individuals and have no reason to disbelieve them if they tell me otherwise.

However, the odds of a disproportionate number of posters on this board having an IQ greater than 140 is very low.

But as you said, "smarts are not everything"... who cares if someone has an IQ of 180 or of 40... if they say something intelligent and insightful that is what matters most.

Shannon Says:

"I agree with Isab, I'm sure we've got more than a few smart cookies in here - that's why I come, it's one of the more interesting corners of the internet, intellectually at least (without being part of PubMed or similar)."

Alright... but let's explore this for a second.

If there happens to be a disproportionate number of gifted individuals who frequent this blog, then if Isab is correct it would imply that a disproportionate number of people who frequent this blog tend to be lazy.

What bothers me about what is being said here is that it commits the very same error that Isab seems to be railing against.

That error is the assumption that you or your group are in some way "better" than the external group without performing a true evaluation.

I'm in no position to assess the gifted status of people who post here... but if you and Isab are correct that many people here fit that description, we cannot escape the associated proposition that they are also probably lazy (unless you agree with me that gifted individuals are no more or less lazy than everyone else).

As someone who graduated with an economic degree, that required a high level of calculus, the only reason I wasn't a straight A student was that I didn't study enough because I held down one full time job and often a part time one. All I can is screw her trying to make bs excuses.

Artemis, When you cannot relate to people of normal and slightly above average intelligence it is a sign that there is something else going on other than just a high IQ, like stunted emotional development or autism spectrum disorders.

One of my classmates in high school after graduating Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Chemistry, from college went on to get his doctorate in solid state physics, and became a designer of fiber optics.

My mother, another genius, (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude in 1946 when it meant something) interviewed him, when she was doing a study of gifted kids who went to regular schools and asked him what he liked best about school, to which he replied "recess"

Contrary to your opinion, gifted individuals are not tortured by interacting with people who are not as smart as they are.

You may be, but you are projecting, (and a snob)

Gifted people like to play tennis, and eat ice cream, and go fishing, and play the guitar, just like a lot of other people.

I have a friend, who is the leading academic in his field. IQ of 170+. He runs marathons for fun, and and is a devout Catholic.

Gifted people enjoy being with people who like to do the same things they like to do.

My cousin, who just got his doctorate in metallurgical engineering, in Stockholm, is likewise, a very family oriented individual, who enjoys building furniture, and skiing.

Intelligence is along a continuum. There is no abrupt break at 145 that makes someone above that a separate species. We all have our academic weaknesses, and our strengths.

When you are a whole bunch older, you "might" start to understand that not only are there people out there, who are smarter than you are, and many of them are subject matter experts on subjects, that you will never have the time to master.

In addition, there will be another whole group of people who may have an IQ a few points lower than you do, but they are so far beyond you in skill and knowledge, and life experience that you will never catch up with them.

Crid, is way smarter than you are, both about people, and a lot of other things. He is also better educated.

You Artemis/Orion, haven't figured out yet, that there are things you cant learn from books.

Hey Artemis,

Since Newton was a gifted individual and much more adept at understanding the world than I , a simple average intelligence pleeb, do you think he would give me good advice on whether a woman should ask a man out?

Sure he never fucked but he was intellectually gifted and gifted people are just better at understanding things because they "have accumulated more knowledge than the average person."

Artemis, I think Isab's point is that any kid that has praise constantly heaped upon him is more likely to grow up with a swelled head, and smart kids aren't exempt from that. However, I will say that generally that was not my experience in school. My experience was that what the smart kids were more likely to have heaped upon them was unrealstic expecatations from parents, and abuse from classmates who regarded them as abnormal and therefore targets for bullying (when said classmates weren't begging for help with their homework). And schools tended to regard students with high intellectual curiousity as a pain in the ass and a discipline problem, i.e., we were often watched like hawks during tests to make sure we weren't helping other students cheat. (And if I had a nickel for every time that someone asked me to help them cheat on a test...)

Changing subjet slightly, there's always been a current of anti-intellectualism in American culture. This started in part as a reaction to the pseudo-intellectualism of the European aristocracy. In the 20th century, it has waxed and waned; it went into hiding after WWII but started to arise again with the advance of leftism in the 1960s. Today we have the worst of both worlds: a virulent anti-intellectualism in the common culture, and a thoroughly European-style pseudo-intellectual ruling caste. True intellectualism in the liberal arts has just about been destroyed in America. The one place in academia it survives is in the STEM fields, but under the combined attack of the power elites and the pitchfork brigade, I don't know how much longer that's going to last.

I was only agreeing with the part I mentioned agreeing with. I do not subscribe to the notion that gifted people are more likely to be lazy - or less - than the general population.

Of course, I also think that everyone is lazy (to some extent) with things they really don't want to be doing and have no reason to put a lot of energy into. You don't care about growing grass in your shady lawn, you might do it half-assed or just put in gravel. Is that lazy or effective prioritizing? A different person might really want grass and spend tons of work growing it.

"I was only agreeing with the part I mentioned agreeing with. I do not subscribe to the notion that gifted people are more likely to be lazy - or less - than the general population."

I agree with this. And I should have made my point better. One of my high IQ friends told me, that problems interest him a great deal, until he figures out what the solution is, at which point he loses all interest in doing the grunt work to actually finish the project.

Because high IQ individuals are harder to challenge intellectually, they are somewhat more likely to become bored with challenges more quickly than the average individual.

I know a little boy who beat Mario Brothers video game twice when he was three, and promptly lost all interest in that particular game.

Unlike others here, I don't see laziness, as an insult. The slightly lazy, but highly intelligent person will often find the quickest and easiest way to perform a particularly boring task, freeing up more time for activities of greater interest to them.

This should be encouraged, rather than condemned as "not working hard enough to reach their full potential"