As a child, my school evaluated all students' IQs, and the ones above a certain score were labeled "MGM" (mentally gifted minors) and put into "gifted" classes. Nothing has held me back more in life than being told I'm objectively smarter than someone else.

It has taken years to respect the virtue of discipline in learning. Throughout school, and then into adult life, if something didn't come easily to me, I would abandon it instantly, because the notion of having to work for a skill was so foreign to me.

We should never praise the child (you're so smart), we should praise their effort (great work on this).

Fuck... I'm too colorblind to tell if I should be flattered or offended

if you're smart enough to know how dumb you are, you're not that dumb.

or something idk

I feel like as a kid I was in the mid/low yellow and now I'm in the blue and that's probably true for basically everyone because we centre education right in the part of our lives when we're least motivated to learn things. Now I'm actually mature enough to understand how cool things like history and mathematics can be but I'm also past any form of public education.

I'm in the green and it mostly blows chunks, for what it's worth.