How do people treat you after they learn you are gifted?

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To those of you who are gifted, how do people treat you after they learn that you are gifted? Do they treat you with curiosity, respect, or the opposite?

I don't have to tell them; people generally assume I'm very intelligent after conversing with them.

Well if anyone is being treated bad for being gifted...Ben Franklin said the key to being revered and not resented is a self deprecating humor.

They are utterly stunned.

what's your gift?

One of my gifts is writing. I have a priori knowledge too. It's been documented by friends and others.
But anyway...when you are intelligent and they aren't expecting it they are pretty surprised and can hold it against you. It's happened to me plenty.

If I keep my mouth shut, people think I am ret*d.

If I open it, they think I am gifted.

If they read or hear my case history, they think I am crazy.

They don't think "autistic" unless they've seen it before--but if they have, it's obvious.

I've met exactly three people in my life who took me at face value without assuming either gifted or ret*d. Two of them are also autistic.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where nobody tried to automatically categorize you by IQ or diagnosis.

what constitutes being "gifted?" and why should people believe you if you have to tell them?

My mother always said don't tell anyone because they think you are a know-it-all already!

She kind of had a point.

I still struggle with being a know-it-all.

Gifted: Having one or more skills that is far above (usually the top 1-5%) those of most people. Some schools define it by IQ, but giftedness can exist in areas other than academics and probably won't show up on an IQ test. An athletically or musically gifted child may be a C student, for example...

humm.. . I am not gifted, then.

Merle

I don't tell people that I'm gifted. It's often seen as a form of boasting or of saying that you're somehow superior to others. For me, it's mainly a private matter, just like my personal beliefs, my family, etc. If it's relevant, I might mention it, but I've never run into a situation where it would be relevant.

If you're gifted in some area, people will either recognize it or they won't. If they don't, why make an issue of it? Being gifted doesn't grant you any special privileges in the adult world.

It's never made any difference. It's not like I can hide it. They already know how they feel about me, and it's not going to change anything. There is one exception that I can think of - my kindergarten teacher thought I was simple-minded, and was somewhat surprised when my mother told her I could read. But you're thinking of age-peers, right?

Yeah, it's weird how you almost have to hide it to avoid offending people. It's not like it's something that you worked to acheive; so why should it be a matter of pride anyway? You were just born with it.

Now, you can be very justifiably proud about getting 100% on a test or learning a difficult piano concerto; those things took effort to do, even if it was your base talent that let you do them at all in the first place. If you didn't have those talents, you could be equally proud of getting an 80% or learning to play "Chopsticks".

I would rarely tell someone; they usually figure it out, or at least compliment me on my intelligence (if not my spelling, lol).

People see it quickly in my son, as well. It is the weak areas which end up surprising them; that he cannot spell and cannot write. He comes accross so well upon meeting him; the problems are less obvious.

He is GATE qualified but I don't think his composite IQ is officially gifted - high, but not over 140. The low scoring components pull a pretty heavy drag on it.

In the end we're all a bundle of strengths and weaknesses and IQ is only a small part of the package - it's been a help in life, but far from a ticket to the fast lane. Realizing that will do a good job of keeping one from getting or acting cocky about it.

I sure can tell you how they treated me. They didn't leave me alone with mental arithmetic questions or how to say this or that in another language or maybe geographical questions.

The one thing that stands out is I got hold of a list of my school roll (over 1,000 strong), which I shouldn't have had, and had a particular special interest at the time in people's middle names, which were on the roll. People never left me alone asking middle names, which I must say stuck in my mind with no effort at memorisation.