as small as a world and as large as alone

11:17am July 28, 2013

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eternallybeautifullyblack:

4-year-old genius invited to join MENSA

Anala Beevers is just four years old, but she already knows the location and capital of every US state. She learned the alphabet at four months of age, then at eighteen months learned numbers in Spanish. The precociously intelligent youngster claims she’s smarter than her parents, and both mom and dad agree.

Her genius has not gone unnoticed, and has led to an invitation to join MENSA, an international organization for the ‘super-smart.’ MENSA, which is mostly populated by adults, usually claims members with intelligence in the top 2% of the populace. Anala, who can also identify planets and dinosaurs, is in the top 1%.  [Continue reading and watch video of Anala in action.]

I have done nothing with my life. 

This is… …I’m sorry they’re doing that to her…

…everything about Gifted is awful and it’s more awful the younger it starts.

Anyone that thinks that joining MENSA is something anyone, especially a 4 year old, would want has obviously never been to a MENSA meeting. It’s like a room full of egomaniac hipsters… Or maybe that was just the local chapter.

Just.. Teaching kids to think they’re better than everyone else because they perform well on a few arbitrary puzzles messes them up so badly. It’s a horrible thing to do to someone.

Worth is not defined by puzzles. It really isn’t.

And this kid is *four*. And the younger people are when they start being encouraged to think about themselves that way, the harder it is to get past.

Very true. I got jostled in and out of “special ed" and “gifted and talented" growing up depending on whether my teachers thought I was more idiot or more savant and I saw a lot of people (including myself) internalising what the teachers thought of them on both ends of what society deems intelligent, so I know it is really hard to get past. I’m still trying to figure it out.

I was… gifted-but through most of school.

gifted but broken

gifted but lazy

gifted but what’s wrong with her

maybe we can fix her

why isn’t she doing more with her gifts

I was depressed and dealing with a whole pile of issues from 4th grade until some time in high school at the worst, but I’m still dealing with shit now. I can not tell you how many times I got the speech “You have so much potential. I wish you’d just apply yourself. You’re so smart; you could do so well.“ I think one year I got it from 4/5 teachers and I got that speech at least once every year 6th-10th grade, minimum.

I don’t know if my teachers didn’t notice my issues or didn’t consider them relevant, but I’m not entirely sure how my teachers in 7th grade didn’t notice that I’d actually checked out completely and only got by in classes because typical public school programming is designed for folks like me who do well on multiple choice tests and write well (thanks to reading more than I should, like during class for most of that year.)

I think I was more messed up than I realized at the time and, looking back, I’m sometimes shocked that not one teacher ever seemed to know I had issues, but I also recognize that everyone of my problems and the ways I dealt with them fit into the “Smart, quiet” stereotype combined with the “Smart, lazy" stereotype.

And I *wasn’t* depressed, but for a while people were like, oh, you must be depressed, and if we fix that, you’ll be happy and compliant.

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