4:09am March 23, 2014

Recently I saw someone say something like…

“I wasn’t considered gifted, I was in special ed.”

A reminder:  Lots of people who were considered gifted were also in special ed.  Special ed is not the opposite of gifted. 

Not that I consider gifted a real thing.  But like… I was considered gifted for part of my childhood and I was in special ed for… something like 3 or 4 years, ages end-of-14, 15, 16, and 17.  Not only that, I was in special ed after I’d been to college really early (which almost destroyed me because I wasn’t ready and the pressure was too much).  

So don’t assume anything when it comes to things like this.  There are even kids who have IEPs that are simultaneously for accelerated classes and for special ed classes.  Special ed means you have a disability, it doesn’t mean anything about your ability to do schoolwork or your IQ.

(Note about “gifted”:  I don’t like the concept, at all.  I think it puts too much emphasis on IQ and sometimes on school achievements.  And I no longer qualify, I haven’t qualified since I was 15. How does that work?  When I was 5, I had a high IQ.  When I was 15, it was merely “above average” but no longer in the gifted range.  When I was 22, it was below average.  It’s surprisingly common to “age out” of the IQ scores that get you considered gifted, although it doesn’t always happen as dramatically as it happened to me.  I don’t think it’s something real, I think gifted programs do more harm than good, and I don’t think it means you’re smart or that other people are stupid.  I don’t even think it necessarily means you have any talent than someone else has, other than whatever talents get you a higher score on the test.  (For instance, I was reading early and that boosted my IQ a lot at the age of 5… doesn’t boost it so much when you’re 15 or 22.)

My brother was actually told that he was gifted and had an intellectual disability, at the exact same time.  I have a friend who had a very high IQ but was still diagnosed with an intellectual disability.  So even that is possible (it happens mostly to people who get an extremely high difference between verbal and performance IQs), even though it goes against the current diagnostic criteria.  (The current diagnostic criteria for intellectual disability require a combination of an IQ below a certain cutoff, and difficulties in a certain number of other areas, and all of this starting by a certain age.  But the cutoff is a little fuzzy, you can have an IQ above the cutoffs, and still have the diagnosis if you have difficulty in a large enough number of other areas.)  There are also plenty of people who acquire an intellectual disability sometime in childhood, who go from being considered gifted to being considered to have an intellectual disability, a family friend had that happen to her when she had oxygen deprivation during surgery.

And it's very very possible, indeed common, to be considered gifted and also have other cognitive disabilities, such as autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, hyperlexia, any other learning disability, and a wide range of other things including psychiatric disabilities.  Pretty much any disability in existence, you can have it and still be considered gifted.  And special ed just means you’re in a school or class for disabled people, it doesn’t mean you’re not considered gifted, or that you weren’t once considered gifted.  

So it’s possible to have been in special ed, and also have been considered gifted, even both at the same time.  It’s even possible to have once been considered gifted, and then have an intellectual disability, and it’s possible to have an intellectual disability, and then later be considered gifted, and very rarely someone will diagnose both at once (even if it technically goes against the criteria).

I get what the person in question was trying to say, but I just wanted to clarify this for anyone who didn’t already know.  Being considered gifted, and being in special ed, are not opposites.  They happen at the same time, all the time.  And they also happen to people one after the other, in both directions.  So when you hear someone was in special ed, you can’t assume they were never considered gifted, and when you hear someone was considered gifted, you can’t assume they were never in special ed.

Although the euphemism is somewhat nauseating to me, there’s also a term “twice exceptional” that means you’ve been both considered gifted, and also to have learning disabilities or autism or something along those lines.  And people in that situation have often experienced special ed.

In my case, I attended special ed mostly after I no longer technically qualified as gifted.  (I started going to schools in mental institutions maybe half a year before the IQ test that showed I was no longer in the gifted range.  Of course we don’t even know at what age I would have stopped being considered gifted, because nobody tested me between the ages of 5 and 15, it was just assumed that IQ doesn’t change.  Until I had to get the IQ test as part of the IEP process.)  But there’s no reason that the two can’t happen at once, either.  They happen at once, all the time.  And they also happen in sequence, all the time.

So my experience isn’t the experience of someone who was never in their life considered gifted.  But it also isn’t the experience of someone who has never been in special ed, and never written off.  And it isn’t the experience of someone who stayed in the category of gifted for their entire lives.  I spent less than 1/3 of my life in that category, and only spent maybe three or four years and two short summer programs in gifted programs, which is only a little longer than I spent in special ed.

Lots of us fit into those in-between zones or go from category to category, or are stuck in many categories at once.  Also… I know that I’m far from alone among autistic kids who were considered gifted, in basically being part of the following exchange (note: contains several variations of the r-word):

Me:  I’m in a gifted program

Other kid:  You know what that means, right?

Me:  Huh?

Other kid:  "Gifted" is what they tell ree-tards they are, when they don’t want to tell them they’re retarded.  Hahahaha!!!  You’re really in tard classes and you don’t even know it!

I have a friend who was both in gifted and special ed classes at the same time, and she got told that constantly, to the point she developed a lot of anxiety about whether people were hiding her “real IQ” from her.

Of course, ideally we wouldn’t even have IQ tests, and people’s lives wouldn’t be determined based on IQ, and “gifted” wouldn’t be a thing.  And ideally we wouldn’t have gifted programs, and all the enriched learning opportunities would be offered to everyone, regardless of how they did on tests.  And ideally we wouldn't use tests in this way.  And ideally we wouldn’t have special ed, we’d have education completely individualized for every student, and education would look nothing like school, and etc.

But until then, people get put into categories.  And people often get put into several categories at once, so a person can be considered gifted and learning disabled, gifted and developmentally disabled, gifted and psychiatrically disabled, gifted and physically disabled, gifted and chronically ill, and so on.  And people can also get moved from one category to another over time.  So there’s plenty of kids who were considered gifted and were also in special ed, and plenty of kids who were considered gifted and were also at some point written off as completely useless people who would never get anywhere.

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