Your teachers needed to get you up and moving, give you something more productive to do with your hands. They needed to help you hook into the curriculum in some way--
You know this is interesting b/c I read an editorial in the Sunday paper about the "No Child Left Behind" initiative. No, I will not talk politics, but the author made a good point that sometimes teachers now have to "slow down" too much to get all the kids to catch up. But slowing down means the gifted kids get slowed also and the gifted kids are already bored out of their minds. The author stated that most of the time the gifted kids are the "terrors" in the class simply due to this boredom.
I bet it is hard to "hook them into the curriculum" as you say. But thanks for trying. And it must be all the more difficult with so many parents who think *junior* is perfection and does no wrong. It is the lazy teacher after all, not their kids. When I was coming up I was told by my parents that education starts and ends at home. I think some of today's parents (a small number I hope but I have my doubts) have not learned that - or choose to ignore it.
Yes I was a *gifted*. Cute too. Yes you would have loved me
