Originally Posted by ColinsMum
Originally Posted by CFK
Why the assumption that gifted people are all passionate about learning? There are gifted slackers just like everyone else. Slackers who won't put int the time or effort. Slackers who will not contribute to the class.

And there are high achieving, hard working non-gifted people who are passionate about a subject and who will put in the time and effort. And they don't all have to be labeled with such a pejorative term like "Tiger Cubs".
Agree. It's easy to get into circular reasoning: PG looks like this, and these kids look like this, so these kids are PG, and it's good to be round these kids, so it's good to be round PG kids. For how many of the children you're talking about do you actually know an IQ number, HK? Come to that, don't I remember that you don't have one for your own DD? So these characteristics that you see her sharing to some extent with some, but not all, of her classmates, how do you know they are giftedness as defined by IQ? And does it matter?

Yes it matters.

(And I can use cut and paste here from another thread!)

The real problem seems to be that we need to figure out developmental arc over a lifetime, which I.Q. tests apparently can't do very well.

I suspect that such arcs are reasonably fixed, with some wiggle room, but not much.

The significance is the nature of the arc for the individual, not the score on a test on a particular day.

I also suspect that it's somewhat obvious and able to be seen, in the sense that you can tell how tall someone is.

So, I think we're trying to figure out how to deal with something that clearly exists but we don't know how to figure it out properly or exactly what it is we are looking for, but I.Q. tests kind of tell us *something* about it sometimes, so we will use those even though we know they don't really work that well.