How ironic this topic is for me.
I attended a well-respected High School in a toney Suburb of Massachusetts in the early/mid 70s. I was “diagnosed” (I use the term advisedly) as in the category under discussion.
My “Crime?” While others would take six weeks to read a book, I would knock the damned thing off in a day or so. As this left me with weeks in which with nothing to do (and the “expert” teachers not able to grasp this simple fact), this somehow made me “dysfunctional.” I distinctly remember my Dad confronting the Housemaster and engaging in a major knock-down drag-out fight over the Housemaster’s lackadaisic attitude and fallacious academic engineering concepts. “You will NOT play your little weepy social engineering games on my Son,” he raged, or something to that effect.
Ultimately, my experience there was over, and I went on to serve 6 years in the Army, followed by a very successful extended career in Electronics, Science, and then Administration.
Yet I was not “normal.”
There is a very real tendency for teachers and their superiors to label students as they see fit; economics be damned. That they have no expertise with which to do so is irrelevant to them. On they plunge, making superficial determinations about our children that have sweeping consequences for their futures. They don’t care; they are “experts” at education, after all.
Parents beware.
