Ungifted by Gordon Korman

astronomer; he has total recall, perfect pitch, a knack for languages, great potential for spelunking. Anything!
    It was a cop-out. The answer wasn’t going to drop from the sky and land at my feet. I’d watched him in my own classroom. Why would he be different anywhere else?
    Actually, he did less for me than he did for the other teachers. At least in his core subjects, he tried and failed. In robotics, all he did was search the internet for graphics to stick on Tin Man. Seriously, to justify the time he spent on Google Images, we would have needed a robot the size of a twenty-story building.
    A convulsive high-pitched cackling filled the lab. When I went to investigate, I found Donovan at the keyboard and Noah peering over his shoulder—holding on to it, in fact—hysterical with laughter.
    Noah never laughed. He had a stratospheric IQ with few commonsense skills, and zero sense of humor. His thinking was lightning fast and flawlessly accurate, but also 100 percent literal. I barely recognized him, convulsed with mirth, breathing hard, his face bright pink.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œLook—” He pointed at the screen, bereft of speech.
    On the screen, a brief video clip showed a barefoot man walking along the edge of a pool. He stubbed his toe on a rubber dog bone and tumbled, arms flailing, into the water. Noah pounded on the desk, choking.
    Chloe appeared at my elbow. “It’s called YouTube, Noah.”
    â€œIt’s the latest thing,” Donovan added. “Ten years ago.”
    â€œ That’s YouTube?” Noah was incredulous. “I’ve heard of it, obviously, but I never—who’s the actor? He’s brilliant! I really believed that he fell in the pool by accident.”
    I sighed. Of course a kid like Noah had never explored YouTube before. When he got on a computer, most of us couldn’t imagine what he was capable of. What he wasn’t capable of were the ordinary things.
    â€œHe’s not an actor,” I explained patiently, “he’s a regular person. Anyone can post a home video on YouTube.”
    He was wide-eyed. “Anyone?”
    â€œAnd anyone can watch it,” Donovan confirmed.
    Noah may have started the day a YouTube novice, but by the end of the period, he could have written a doctoral dissertation on it. Such was the power of his intellect. He took Donovan’s seat at the computer, and disappeared into the site, reappearing only occasionally to explain the math behind his estimate of the total number of videos—over eight hundred million—or the amount of time it would take to watch them all—more than six hundred years.
    â€œAssuming an average duration of twenty to twenty-five seconds each,” he concluded. “I’ll be more precise when I’ve had a few weeks to study it.”
    â€œWay to go,” Abigail told Donovan savagely. “Noah should be curing diseases and changing the world, not watching some dimwit falling in his pool.”
    â€œGive the guy a break from his brain,” Donovan argued. “When’s the last time anybody saw him so psyched about something?”
    I had to give Donovan that. For all Noah’s incredible abilities, the boy would fail out of school if his teachers were to let him. Donovan alone had managed to engage him. Could that be a kind of giftedness in and of itself?
    Regardless, Donovan had succeeded in running through yet another class without yielding the slightest hint as to why he was at the Academy.
    Of all the kids in my homeroom, Chloe was the one most taken with Donovan. It was a crush, not so much on Donovan himself as what he represented—normal middle school life. She peppered him with questions about parties and school spirit and big games and pep rallies.
    â€œI wasn’t really into that stuff,” Donovan told her.
    He was reluctant to talk about his experiences at Hardcastle Middle. Something must have gone on there