(I made the same mistake when rating my own skills in high school -- I was comparing myself to my classmates because that was my only frame of reference, and they too were a skewed sample.)
This is similar in some ways to what happened to me in grade school. I grew up fairly far out in the country [northeastern MD] and from K-7th went to what I would term a "non-denominational private school" [i.e., non-religious, though many of the kids did go on to Catholic high schools for religious and/or educational reasons]. My parents selected it initially because when I was 5 Maryland did not yet have public kindergarten.
So, since my 24 grademates were almost my only frame of reference as far as childhood intelligence went, I mostly compared myself to them... as in, I thought I was dead average, in a school with a lot of slightly slower kids.
Thus it was a bit of a shock when I got an offer from my parents to get the heck out of there [I spent most of 5th-7th grades begging to go anywhere else because of issues with a particular classmate]: if I could do a year's worth of algebra over the summer, I could skip 8th grade and go to the big public high school -- where with 762 other people in my graduating class, as opposed to 24, there had to be somewhere for me to fit in, someone for me to be friends with.
Silly, naive, oblivious me, thinking everyone could do stuff like that... :)
Whatever we are, seems normal to us, right?
This is similar in some ways to what happened to me in grade school. I grew up fairly far out in the country [northeastern MD] and from K-7th went to what I would term a "non-denominational private school" [i.e., non-religious, though many of the kids did go on to Catholic high schools for religious and/or educational reasons]. My parents selected it initially because when I was 5 Maryland did not yet have public kindergarten.
So, since my 24 grademates were almost my only frame of reference as far as childhood intelligence went, I mostly compared myself to them... as in, I thought I was dead average, in a school with a lot of slightly slower kids.
Thus it was a bit of a shock when I got an offer from my parents to get the heck out of there [I spent most of 5th-7th grades begging to go anywhere else because of issues with a particular classmate]: if I could do a year's worth of algebra over the summer, I could skip 8th grade and go to the big public high school -- where with 762 other people in my graduating class, as opposed to 24, there had to be somewhere for me to fit in, someone for me to be friends with.
Silly, naive, oblivious me, thinking everyone could do stuff like that... :)