I taught myself how to read when I was four. Not saying I was “gifted”, but I was read to a lot, and decided to learn how to read on my own.
I was sent to first grade, kicking and screaming, at age 6. Because I already knew how to read, the teacher didn’t know what to do with me, so I spent the entire year bored out of my mind and viewed school as a combination torture chamber and penitentiary. She’d hand out reading books every couple months, I’d sit there and read it in a few minutes, and that was it.
It still gives me the major creeps to even remember that. I hated every day of my entire school career. They did let me skip 2nd grade but that didn’t help. I felt liberated the day I got kicked out in 11th grade.
I was also reading before I reported for kindergarten, which was a boring waste of time for me. There were no special classes and my elementary school teachers were either too lazy or too unprepared to deal with a gifted child. I raced ahead of the other kids in class projects and got bored. So I spent a lot of time out in the hall. That’s what they knew what to do with a gifted child who was bored and therefore not conforming to “hands on desk, sitting still” mode. Put them out into the hall. There were no enrichment classes or honors classes available until high school. Today, I would certainly have been earning college credits while still in high school, but they did not have those programs around in the sleepy Midwestern town where I grew up.