Comment by mcguire

I have a friend who was in a gifted program when he was growing up. (They didn't have them when and where I grew up. Hmph.) As I understand it, they effectively took the gifted students and put them into their own school.

He says it didn't do much academically or in terms of later life, but it did do something he values very much: it gave him a normal childhood.

According to him, they took the ostracized nerds out of other schools and combined them so that some of them were the jocks of their school, some were the nerds, most were run-of-the-mill students, and so on.

He's pretty damn smart.