Wanted to respond to Geoduck’s comment about giftedness because it’s such a good point, and at times I’ve wondered if my mind went wandering off in class because the class wasn’t challenging enough. Certainly I got by in those early years without having to do a whole lot of studying – which made it quite a shock later on where good study habits were far more essential.
So hard to tease everything apart, really: I remember I started hitting the wall in math class around sixth grade but really started struggling in 7th – was it hormonal? That whole “math anxiety” thing that supposedly plagues adolescent girls? Or was it because 7th grade is when they started splitting off the more advanced students from the rest of the class, and maybe I wasn’t entirely up to the challenge of the advanced class I was in?
Or was it something about that year’s particular curriculum? There seem to be certain categories in math that I grasped and others that left me in the dust.
Or was it just the new setting, the building…or the added distraction of sneaking peeks at boys (sure, there were boys in grade school, but boys were icky then 
)….who knows?
For some reason I have trouble considering myself gifted, although when cornered I’ll admit I was a pretty bright grade-school kid. I have this memory of everything suddenly getting really hard, but what’s funny about that is, for the most part, on paper, it all stays good, even during most of those years when I thought I was struggling so mightily – the grades were all still mostly honor-roll level, with the only really notable exceptions happening during my senior year, when I was emotionally going under pretty generally.
But, truthfully, I can’t see myself as gifted. To me a gifted kid is someone who pursues interests far more passionately than I ever did. I look at people like my husband and my kids and I would call them gifted, but somehow, for me, I just can’t consider that I might have ever worn that badge. Truth, or insecurity issues? Or both?
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