"Gifted Programs:" Your thoughts and experiences?

I'm curious what others thoughts and experiences are with putting their kids in gifted programs at school.I tested into gifted sometime in early elementary school. On the face of it, I don't really think I got a lot out of it except networking, which is a weird thing to say about a school activity for 1st graders, but in retrospect that's what it was. Because I was in gifted, I associated more with the "smart people", and therefore as I grew older socialized with them, discussed homework with them, paired up on projects with them.In elementary school our time in gifted mostly consisted of doing work and number reasoning problems that I suppose were more challenging than what was in the normal curriculum, but I don't know. We did work on some other stuff. In 4th or 5th grade had to research a topic and then write an editorial to submit to the newspaper...back when you could submit editorials to the newspaper :).In middle school we did a lot of work on research topics and then were required to prepare a 30 minute presentation on that topic using whatever the Apple equivalent of Powerpoint was in the mid 90s.Anyway, I guess my question is, in 2018 what do you think about Gifted programs? Do they provide anything of intellectual value? Or does it just help make sure your kid associates with the "right people?" via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2NJ5exB