In the eighth grade I received a plaque for earning straight A’s in all of my classes throughout middle school. Just two years later, during my sophomore year of high school, I failed chemistry and had to retake it … what happened?

I had gone from being at the top of my class to having to stay behind while my peers moved ahead to honors physics. I became demotivated and avoidant, often ignoring homework assignments and procrastinating projects. My story is an example of a fairly common issue.

I had “gifted kid burnout.”

It often starts in elementary school. As kids, some of us are singled out and labeled as “gifted” or “accelerated.” We’re separated and taught advanced topics that the other children don’t learn until later, if at all.

At first, I felt a sense of pride. But looking back, I now see that this system did more harm than good. I was the type of child in school who never needed to work hard to do well on tests. I would simply pay attention in class and retain the necessary information. I rarely ever studied, and I would procrastinate assignments until the morning they were due.

I was putting in minimal effort, yet receiving ample praise for my behavior and grades, and that just reinforced these poor habits. This is where the problem with gifted programs begins: there is a clear focus on pushing one’s knowledge to its limit with heightened course materials, without developing good work habits.

Tara Kumar, a DePaul junior who was in gifted programs throughout her childhood, said that dynamic harmed her self-image.

“I felt like the dumbest smart kid,” Kumar said.

She fell behind, dropped a bunch of her honors classes and took on a self-inflicted label of failure. I faced this same scenario.

I felt this looming pressure on my shoulders to continue to get perfect grades seemingly for the rest of my life. Receiving A’s became a piece of my identity. But when I could not meet these expectations, my mental health declined. I became my own worst critic — another common experience for “gifted kids” like me and Kumar, who also found herself relying on academic validation.

“If you don’t get a good grade, you feel horrible about yourself,” Kumar said.

Gifted programs are not entirely negative. They can build a sense of community for students in the same setting. In middle school, I had most of my classes with the same 15 to 20 people for all three years. By the end of eighth grade, we were like one giant friend group, walking the halls to our next class during passing periods.

But even that camaraderie can have a flip side. DePaul sophomore Urban Aufrecht said that the “gifted kid” friend group at his school was “very competitive.”

“A lot of them hung out together, but I feel like they didn’t like each other,” Aufrecht said. “There was a lot of comparing how good you were.”

While many others and I would use poor grades to belittle ourselves, some students used their academic success to put others down. It was not healthy competition, but rather a way for students to adopt a sense of superiority.

“There was this notion of being dumb if you were not taking any college classes,” Aufrecht said. “They did better academically, but I think socially it kind of stunted them.”

The gifted program I was in introduced me to advanced topics that gave me new perspectives but simultaneously created a sense of separation from my peers, allowed me to reinforce bad habits and added more pressure for me to remain a straight-A student.

Today, my grades have turned back around for the positive. It is not easy to push through this burnout — but it is possible by reframing your mindset. 

After all, the real gift is realizing that you are so much more than your grades. 

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