I appreciate you engaging with me on this, and am of course happy that your HS experience was positive as well.

I guess my concern, is that it's impossible to really say for sure what either of our experiences would have been elsewhere. All high schools have some variation, and between the one I attended (with a "mixed" gifted program within an extremely large and diverse public school) vs specialized schools like TJ vs standard public schools with various levels of funding and demographics - it's hard to say which type benefits students the most. As much as we focus on gifted students having a positive experience from being around each other, I do wonder if there is also societal value from non-gifted students having the opportunity to befriend and learn from gifted students (and vice versa).

While you appreciated the ability to dive deep on things you were already enthusiastic about, I actually felt relieved to have some breathing room to finally learn things that had no direct academic value and as such, were looked down on by some of the college-prep crowd. I very much doubt I could have an equally broad set of experiences if I had attended a more specialized and academically intensive HS. I learned: how to start a punk rock band, how to get and maintain part-time retail/food service jobs during the school year, how charismatic people carry themselves and how to fake it (thank you speech and debate club), how to convince non-nerdy people to care about things that they don't already care about, how to make and spread petitions, how to help my peers prevent being harassed by military recruiters, how to identify situations that were likely to escalate to violence remove myself from those situations, how to make friends with people from completely different cultures than my own (including friends with recent immigrants who didn't speak much english). I also learned that people who know when and where to break rules and how to do it without hurting people (stuff like skipping class, doing drugs, cheating on tests/HW, making flamethrowers from axe body spray) - those people can make excellent friends and teach you a lot (my best friend of the past 15 years can be described this way). And those people don't tend to have great GPAs.

It's interesting, because while what you've described is something you've heard others say they didn't get until college, I've heard the exact same thing from people when I describe my experience (ie, they didn't experience feeling free enough for significant personal growth outside of academia until they started college).

In either case, it seems like college is the great equalizer. My real questions are:

1.) Is the educational experience that a gifted student receives from a gifted HS something that a similarly gifted students from a normal HS cannot "catch up with" once they're college? I don't think so, as of the 2 valedictorians in my college graduating CS class - neither went to a special school (and one, my husband - actually went to the same public HS that I did and dropped out of the gifted program before HS graduation). That said, we didn't go to MIT or Carnegie Mellon - maybe the valedictorians there are all from specialized high schools.

2. Do non-gifted students and/or teachers of standard classes have a more positive (or negative) experience from having gifted students in their classrooms?

3. Are the possible negative effects that gifted students might experience from being in a standard school (bullying, loneliness, lack of challenge) pervasive, unique to being that environment, and are they insurmountable challenges (ie, not possible to address with extra-curricular activities and by dual-credit community college coursework)?

4. Are students who attend specialist/gifted schools less able to relate to (and therefore less capable of solving) "normal people problems" in society? This one is admittedly extremely difficult to quantify - but when it comes to starting businesses and making an impact in the world, being able to relate to "average" people can be very important.