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While "you reap what you sow" may be true to some extent, the concept of a just world is generally used as a way to build an illusion of safety. For example:
The woman who gets raped was asking for it. If we are morally chaste, nobody in my family is likely to be raped.
The person who is poor simply isn't working hard enough. As long as I work hard, I will never be poor.

(1) The world isn't fair - being a genius doesn't automatically mean you have compensating disadvantages. It's quite nice actually!

That reminds me of the All Children Are Gifted diatribe.

The moral of the story is, you thought you were doing what the universe demands of those who would not be raped, but your understanding of the universe is flawed.

You thought you were doing what the universe demands of those who would not be poor, but your understanding of the universe if flawed.

You can replace "the universe" with God, or Allah, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it changes nothing.

You know, sometimes being a genius involves standing there, miserable, trying to convince your friends to stop dancing on the train tracks because you can see the train coming and they cannot. When you have too much emotional attachment to walk away, and all your genius brings you is the ability to suffer under the knowledge of what's going to happen to you... it's enough to drive any person insane.

While "you reap what you sow" may be true to some extent, the concept of a just world is generally used as a way to build an illusion of safety. For example:
The woman who gets raped was asking for it. If we are morally chaste, nobody in my family is likely to be raped.
The person who is poor simply isn't working hard enough. As long as I work hard, I will never be poor.

(1) The world isn't fair - being a genius doesn't automatically mean you have compensating disadvantages. It's quite nice actually!

That reminds me of the All Children Are Gifted diatribe.

If you are interested here is a list of IEP states for gifted education. I consider my IEP a crucial part of my gifted education, I can't imagine gifted education without it...good luck =)

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm

I mostly stuck it out with normal students, but I was classified Exceptionally Gifted / Learning Disabled so they really had no clue what to do with me. For example in Algebra II when I did the end of chapter homework for the next chapter without noticing. In class the next day I was like Hmm, I should probably pay attention next time, but what was I supposed to do when it took the class a 2 weeks to catch up to the idea that 3 unknowns in 3 equations was basically the same as 2 vs. 2 when I got that in around 5 seconds.

The basic problem seems to be once you start accelerating students they tend to graduate early without being ready for the next step. So what if I could have passed the GED at 12, I was still not ready for collage so what's the point.

For more moderately gifted people such as yourself a "token measure of responsibility and seriousness" may be sufficient, but for those who are as far beyond you as you are beyond an average five year-old*, school is often torture - worse than merely a waste of time, it's a continuous effort to destroy knowledge, reason, curiosity, and the spirit itself. It's the worst sort of child abuse, and it leaves permanent scars.

For deeper looks into what's behind "gifted underachievement" look at some of the articles at http://hoagiesgifted.org/underachiever.htm

*Such people exist. On the Rasch measure (a provably equal-interval and arguably ratio scale) Stanford-Binet V change-sensitive score (CSS), the top score in the norming group was as far beyond an avarage person as the avarage adult score is beyond a less than three year-old child's. (See "Use of the SB5 in the Assessment of High Abilities" Riverside Publishing Assessment Service Bulletin Number 3 by Deborah Ruf)

[....]
The Home-Schooling Revolution

"School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." Those are the words of John Taylor Gatto, who was named New York state's Teacher of the Year in 1991. Today he is one of the most forceful voices for one of the most powerful movements in American education -- home schooling. In home schooling, kids opt out of traditional school to take control of their own education and to learn with the help of parents, tutors, and peers. Home schooling is free agency for the under-18 set. And it's about to break through the surface of our national life.

As recently as 1980, home schooling was illegal in most states. In the early 1980s, no more than 15,000 students learned this way. But Christian conservatives, unhappy with schools they considered God-free zones and eager to teach their kids themselves, pressed for changes. Laws fell, and home schooling surged. By 1990, there were as many as 300,000 American home-schoolers. By 1993, home schooling was legal in all 50 states. Since then, home schooling has swum into the mainstream -- paddled there by secular parents dissatisfied with low-quality, and even dangerous, schools. In the first half of the 1990s, the home-schooling population more than doubled. Today some 1.7 million children are home-schoolers, their ranks growing as much as 15 percent each year. Factor in turnover, and one in 10 American kids under 18 has gotten part of his or her schooling at home.

Home schooling has become perhaps the largest and most successful education reform movement of the last two decades:

*While barely 3 percent of American schoolchildren are now home-schoolers, that represents a surprisingly large dent in the public school monopoly -- especially compared with private schools. For every four kids in private school, there's one youngster learning at home. The home-schooling population is roughly equal to all the school-age children in Pennsylvania.

*According to The Wall Street J

[....]
The Home-Schooling Revolution

"School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." Those are the words of John Taylor Gatto, who was named New York state's Teacher of the Year in 1991. Today he is one of the most forceful voices for one of the most powerful movements in American education -- home schooling. In home schooling, kids opt out of traditional school to take control of their own education and to learn with the help of parents, tutors, and peers. Home schooling is free agency for the under-18 set. And it's about to break through the surface of our national life.

As recently as 1980, home schooling was illegal in most states. In the early 1980s, no more than 15,000 students learned this way. But Christian conservatives, unhappy with schools they considered God-free zones and eager to teach their kids themselves, pressed for changes. Laws fell, and home schooling surged. By 1990, there were as many as 300,000 American home-schoolers. By 1993, home schooling was legal in all 50 states. Since then, home schooling has swum into the mainstream -- paddled there by secular parents dissatisfied with low-quality, and even dangerous, schools. In the first half of the 1990s, the home-schooling population more than doubled. Today some 1.7 million children are home-schoolers, their ranks growing as much as 15 percent each year. Factor in turnover, and one in 10 American kids under 18 has gotten part of his or her schooling at home.

Home schooling has become perhaps the largest and most successful education reform movement of the last two decades:

*While barely 3 percent of American schoolchildren are now home-schoolers, that represents a surprisingly large dent in the public school monopoly -- especially compared with private schools. For every four kids in private school, there's one youngster learning at home. The home-schooling population is roughly equal to all the school-age children in Pennsylvania.

*According to The Wall Street J

Many of the students who come out of school illiterate did not care for anything else. How about the students who genuinely try hard, for whom a computer and decent internet connection will make all the difference in the world? Our schools are already leaving gifted students behind. A google cache, if the site is down.

I, as a female 4.0 CS student must have missed this memo somewhere.

Pardon my talking about statistics generically referring to women, but I was not pointing at any particular woman or trying to advocate any bias. A good number of articles at this site, though some dated, cover this issue quite well.

Granted, I don't think I made any generalizations to provoke a defensive response. I try to word such things carefully exactly because of my tendancy to get such responses. I'm quite familiar with intelligent ladies who have plenty of capabilities in computer science, as I'm dating one, and she's a fair bit smarter than myself.

As per childbirth, though I'm sure it can be a real problem in some areas, pregnancy seems extraordinarily rare on campus, probably due in good part to readily available birth control at the student health center.