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Imagine for a moment that you’re a child of roughly average intelligence and you have been placed in a class of intellectually disabled children. Got that picture in your head?

Imagine painstakingly going over the alphabet again and again with your class when you already know how to read. Imagine practicing basic arithmetic day after day, long after you get it, but never moving on to more sophisticated math. Imagine the boredom, frustration, and apathy that sets in after a period of time. If you’re a quiet kid, you might just get depressed, feign sick to get out of class, or spend a lot of time looking out the window, daydreaming. Even though it’s easy, too easy, your work might suffer. If you’re a little antsier, you might play a practical joke or pick a fight, just to have something to do. Either your teacher gets angry with you for not paying attention or she gets angry with you for causing trouble.

Or imagine that your teacher notices how bored you are, and starts you on the next lesson while she works with the other kids. Maybe you’re not bored anymore, but it’s awfully lonely sitting in the corner by yourself, doing different work from the other kids all the time. Your teacher doesn’t have much time to answer your questions, and there’s no one else in class you can ask. Sometimes your teacher asks you to read to the other kids, or help them, and while it makes you proud at first, it gets tiresome after a while being responsible for everyone else. After all, you’re just a kid. When do you get to learn?

Your classmates are mostly good kids, nice kids, who make good trades at lunch, who try really hard in class, and who love a good joke and the Saturday morning cartoons the same as you do. They may be good friends, but there’s a gap there. You’ll never share the same experiences. They may never know what it’s like to finish high school or go to college, or to read a 300-page novel. They may be your friends and your classmates, but they’re not your peers.

Now slide that gap over, and imagine you’re the lone gifted kid in a class full of kids of average intelligence. It’s the same amount of difference, statistically speaking. It seems absurd that a child of average intelligence in a classroom of intellectually disabled kids wouldn’t immediately be pulled out of the class and put in a class with his or her peers, right? But that’s precisely what we do to gifted kids every day.

I was that kid. Although in 7^th grade I tested well enough on the SAT to be admitted to many colleges and universities, the only accommodation I received in my elementary and middle schools was a bit of acceleration and in-class differentiation. I was fortunate to attend a high school, a public one no less, in which three quarters of the student population was gifted, just like me. It was finally like what I imagine most people’s school experience was. The work was hard, but not too hard, and my classmates and I were working at similar levels. Even among that population, though, I stood out: I ended up graduating third in my class.

I didn’t finish my bachelor’s degree right after high school, so not long ago I went back to university. That old, familiar sense of discomfort I felt all those years in elementary and middle school came creeping back. Granted, I’m a mature student and I stick out anyway, but the real differences are intellectual.

I get vague about grades – most of them are A+’s, but I just tell people I’m happy with what I got. I get selective about raising my hand in class because I’d rather answer the hard questions than the gimmes, and inevitably my profs urge me to give someone else a shot. I often end up saving them from those uncomfortable, answerless silences anyway. I frustrate them sometimes because I am often five steps ahead, and I often ask questions that no one else even understands, much less knows how to answer. I feel like I’m that lonely, awkward little kid again, in a class full of people who will never delight in reading Abraham Maslow for fun; who don’t get kicks out of winning a shiny blue pencil for solving the Math department’s problem of the week, week after week; who write poetry not because it’s the best way they know of expressing themselves, but because they thought creative writing would be an easy A.

I may get down about it, but as an adult, I’m much better equipped to deal with the inevitable disappointments and frustrations. I can provide myself with the resources I need – intellectual challenge and interaction with true peers – and don’t have to rely on the educational system to do it for me. In so many ways, I’m glad I’m not that little kid anymore. The system is still failing us.