Advice to Gifted and Talented Youth 6 – Mom Doesn’t Know
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
June 22, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: My mom didn’t know what to do with me. She was afraid of not properly dealing with a kid with, a gifted kid, a kid with gifts. She thought the best way to deal with that was to treat me like a normal kid in the hopes that I would turn out normally, which to some extent was not the worst thing.
I was tested in first grade to see if I should be kicked up a grade. And I had the academic and intellectual skills to do it, but then they saw me on the playground as a loner, and correctly realized that putting me with kids a year older than me would’ve further isolated me socially.
So, and then going to school in the sixties and seventies in America, at least, there was not – the era in general and me specifically – there was not a lot of push to excel academically beyond getting good grades. It was nothing in terms of academic push compared to now. I didn’t get homework until junior high, and it was minimal.
There were few AP classes offered and few people took them. The highest you could go in math in school was calculus, and few people made it that far. And there was much less competition to get into selected colleges, which meant that people didn’t have to work very hard at all to demonstrate academic performance strong enough to get into a really college.
The acceptance rate for Harvard during my era was four times the current acceptance rate. 20% of applicants got in compared to 5% now. So, my generation was not pushed enough and the current generation is probably pushed too hard.
Also, it was much less socially acceptable to be a geek. Geeks got bullied and persecuted more. And didn’t get to go out with girls, the current era is much, much more accepting of geeks and nerds and nerd interests.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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Rick Rosner 