I have a high IQ, and I'm failing high school

of course the problem is that because you have learning problems (adhd or something else), you will likely never

make it to the top, i.e. become a string theorist or

a mathematician. Many members of Mensa are in this category and comfort themselves by "If just the teachers in high school would've

recognized my high IQ, I would have been a Nobel laureate by now". Unfortunately, this is self-deception.

discouraged and unhappy wrote:

Recently I've been having a lot of difficulty with my classes. It's not a matter of learning the material, it's really a matter of demonstrating that I've learned the material. I understand everything I'm taught, and some of my teachers recognize this. Most of my teachers do not. I'm tired of being treated like a moron. Even my parents think I'm half-stupid. This pisses me off. I have abilities at the 99.6 percentile, and I have people telling me that I'm "slow." At this point, I'm beginning to doubt that I'm half as intelligent as the Wechsler test indicates. Tell me somebody can relate????

You can have a high IQ and have a learning disability at the same time. Certain types of dyslexia (it's not all seeing numbers and letter backwards) can lead to the type of problem you are stating. You should probably go see a doctor and get tested for a learning disability (even though it might not be the learning part that is the problem, it would still be called that).

SOME highly gifted people find difficulty later on in high school and especially college if everything came so easy to them that they never needed to study, and at some point even the smartest among us needs to learn how to study. It doesn't appear that that's your issue, however.

I've known only three adult people in my life that I consider to be high order geniuses (not just getting a 140 on an IQ test, but MUCH MUCH higher than that), and two of them have made a mess of their lives (one got involved in illegal activity and now does menial jobs, and the other continues to think so highly of himself that he won't work for another, so that now in his mid 40s, he's never held a job and lives in his mother's basement writing what he says will be the next great American novel...problem is that he's been writing it for 25 years). The third one is my wife, and being married to me, she clearly has NOT made a mess of her life!

Bottom line is that a high IQ doesn't guarantee you academic success. I state again that you should go to a doctor who specializes in learning disabilities and see if he or she can help you. You say yourself that you understand it all...appears you have a disability in being able to show that...that's a real thing brother. Go get it checked out.

The third one is my wife, and being married to me, she clearly has NOT made a mess of her life!

Props on thst man. I honestly could never date somebody that was a good deal smarter than me (though I assume you're a cerebral stud yourself). I dunno, personally I would just feel like a dummie everytime I opened my mouth, like my significant other was just thinking "uh-huh, uh-huh, wonderful"

I hated school.

My kindergarten teacher told my mom that I wasn't paying attention and she thought I wasn't ready for first grade. They gave everyone a test and my score was the highest.

My home room 6th grade teacher wanted to hold me back a year because I wasn't paying attention in classes. My mom said they'd had a meeting, and asked me how I felt about that. I said school was boring and if they held me back I'd drop out, so they didn't.

I almost flunked out of high school. In junior college I skipped classes and went to the beach. Later on all the incompletes turned to F's.

At age 25 I was working full time, started running again, took 19 units at a time and got straight A's in college. A few years intervened at each step but I eventually got the M.S. at age 34, scored high on the GMAT but was totally fed up with the university at that point, felt it was dumbing me down, and within 2 years had started my own business.

The crap that they teach in universities is mind boggling. One of the professors said that if you carbo load, you will extend your 1 hour run time to 2 hours, but you won't run any faster for an hour! Another said the morbidly obese were in better shape than olympic runners, because their heart rates were higher at rest!

Those are the kinds of idiots who teach university courses. There are of course some very good instructors, but there are quite a few that are terrible too.

Overall, school is a total waste of time. The greatest people throughout history did not have a public education. Benjamin Franklin only attended through 2nd grade and dropped out. The first thing they teach kids in school is to sit down, shut up, and learn a bunch of worthless drivel, nothing that has any connection with reality. Home schooling is generally much better.

The public school system sucks.

I have usually aced IQ tests, 140, 170 whatever.

JR, I can never figure out if you're a troll or not. Most of the things that you said just now are false and obviously false. The only thing that you MIGHT be able to argue about is the carb loading thing. Why do you think the professor's idea about carb loading is false? The research says otherwise.

Flagpole wrote:

I've known only three adult people in my life that I consider to be high order geniuses (not just getting a 140 on an IQ test, but MUCH MUCH higher than that), and two of them have made a mess of their lives (one got involved in illegal activity and now does menial jobs, and the other continues to think so highly of himself that he won't work for another, so that now in his mid 40s, he's never held a job and lives in his mother's basement writing what he says will be the next great American novel...problem is that he's been writing it for 25 years). The third one is my wife, and being married to me, she clearly has NOT made a mess of her life!

How high are we talking here? I tested at 4 std.dev above the mean, and while I find people and society to be very weird, I'm not eccentric enough for it to disrupt my life significantly. A family member of mine who I think is a fair bit smarter than me (he never found out his test scores - his dad only told him, "you're IQ is higher than mine, and mine was 158"), and he has been depressed pretty much his entire adult life.

"Einstein failed out of school": Nope, not true! Einstein did extremely well in school, and went to a highly prestigious college, where he was one of the best-performing students.

People say that a lot - I guess because it's provocative and sounds nice? - but it's simply not true.

apply yourself

And more to the point, here are two excellent articles:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2007/02/25/the-cult-of-genius/#.ULmYQawhiSo

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

These argue that praising children for being smart *in general*, as opposed to doing well on particular tasks, risks "paralyzing the kid with a fear of not looking smart, to the point where they will tend to shun challenges".

More generally, I'd contend (as have others on this thread) that intelligence gets overemphasized. What matters more is being able to work hard enough to learn a lot and get things done.

(This is too bad for me though, because I'm wicked smart but not very good at getting things done. lol. Doing pretty well anyway fortunately, and hoping for better for my kids.)

mileage man wrote:

(This is too bad for me though, because I'm wicked smart but not very good at getting things done. lol. Doing pretty well anyway fortunately, and hoping for better for my kids.)

If you aren't good at getting things done, then you are that smart.

Please, there is no need to rub this in any further. lol. What you are saying is precisely my point. :)

I think that 'intelligence' is overemphasized. The two articles I link to give a good discussion of this, and the harmful effect it can have, especially on children.

iyugiu wrote:

mileage man wrote:

(This is too bad for me though, because I'm wicked smart but not very good at getting things done. lol. Doing pretty well anyway fortunately, and hoping for better for my kids.)

If you aren't good at getting things done, then you are that smart.

Typo:

That should say: If you aren't good at getting things done, then you are NOT that smart. So no you are not "wicked smart"

If you're struggling in high school, I hate to tell you, but you are not as smart as you think. Even taking all AP classes, high school is obscenely easy for someone at a 99+ percentile. I could understand you getting a noncompetitive GPA (3.5 or so) if you are extremely lazy and don't pay attention whatsoever, but there's no way you would be failing your classes if you were legitimately at a 1 in 200 level intelligence. As far as understanding the material but being unable to spit it back out on exams, I also don't buy this. I tutor a variety of high school kids and I always have a few that claim that they "understand" everything, but are actually entirely clueless. I've never worked with a kid that had a legitimately strong working understanding and didn't get an A.

Raptured wrote:

If you're struggling in high school, I hate to tell you, but you are not as smart as you think. Even taking all AP classes, high school is obscenely easy for someone at a 99+ percentile.

People keep saying that on this thread, but I don't think it's true. One of my buddies in high school got a 1600 on the SAT (supposed to be equivalent to 250+ IQ) and was only mediocre in terms of GPA (Bs and Cs). I'm sure he could have made straight As, but I don't think it would have been "obscenely easy."

I'm going to take Raptured's side on this. I had a friend who got a 1600 on the SAT (which doesn't correspond to 250+, btw, more like 160-170. But this is still ridiculous, like the top .1% or even .01%). And he was also pretty lazy, and almost never did any homework or studying. But he got mostly As, maybe a B here and there sometimes. He would pay attention in class, and that was enough for him to learn all the material so he rarely bothered to do any homework or read the textbooks. Viewed it as a waste of time and did other stuff instead. (Full disclosure, "other stuff" included trying to teach himself quantum mechanics, special relativity and vector calculus...so it's not that he was a complete slacker...it's just that schoolwork and the stuff being covered in classes was way to easy to be stimulating.) But maybe all these 1600 guys are just different?

I've also done some tutoring, and it's *very* common for people to feel that they understand it much better than they are able to express it. This is a classic symptom of understanding things okay, but not quite well enough to articulate them clearly. Once they understand it better, they are able to express it better.

My mistake - I meant to type 150.

There could be any number of differences. My point is just that I don't think anyone outside of a Good Will Hunting type is going to make straight As at a good high school while taking a bunch of AP classes without putting in some effort. I mean, if nothing else, one has to do things like homework, projects, participate in class, etc., which are going to take at least some amount of time.

An intelligent person is going to be bored with dumb things and is doing to do something else.

It is a waste of time to study to learn things that are hypocritical and just flat out wrong.

J.R. wrote:

An intelligent person is going to be bored with dumb things and is doing to do something else.

It is a waste of time to study to learn things that are hypocritical and just flat out wrong.

"[H]ypocritical and just flat out wrong"? Like what? Physics, chemistry, English literature, Spanish, calculus?

J.R. wrote:

An intelligent person is going to be bored with dumb things and is doing to do something else.

It is a waste of time to study to learn things that are hypocritical and just flat out wrong.

What exactly is flat out wrong? Why don't you start with your idea that carb loading is false?