Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Sorry, but your child may not really be gifted

I have IQ testing on both my kids (with DS that testing was done due to him being 2e and a TBI and we were concerned about the other e). But I have to say that just because we have IQ testing, showing high scores, it doesn't really mean much to people. "IQ" is a dirty word, just like "gifted". I always try to come up with an alternate word for their IQ test results, and fail. Teachers/school admin still seem to be convinced that I hothouse my kids and that's the only reason they do so well. Heck, they probably think I hothoused them to do well on an IQ test, somehow. I didn't even know DS would be taking an IQ test. It was just done, and then I was presented with the results. Oh, yeah, and they have no idea what >99.9th percentile really means in terms of how many people in the population exist with scores like that. It could be just a few people in the entire district and they still pooh pooh it and act like it's meaningless, or like the kids are exactly the same as other gifted kids who may only be at the 95th or 98th percentile.

I wasn't offended at all by the article. I think that the teachers run into many parents with well-prepared children who do try to say that high achievement should equal giftedness. There are kids out there who don't demonstrate exceptional achievement before K who are gifted, and those kids may catch up by third grade because they learn quickly. Others may have been extremely well prepared, and once they are learning the same things as others, may not stay ahead.

I also understand how the differences may not be apparent in K. One of my twins has been reading since age 3, and the other learned to read the summer before K. They are both in first grade , and can read at about a third grade level for fiction, but prefer shorter books with pictures. They read higher level non-fiction books, and prefer those because they can learn from them.

The twin who has been reading longest learned quickly and progressed rapidly, but the speed with which his brother has caught up was shocking to us. The twin who has been reading longest does improve each year (and continues to be ahead of his peers) but his brother makes giants leaps in ability during the school year and has shocked me a couple of times this year when I asked him to read a non-school provided book (as the books provided by the school are at a low level). Just last weekend, for example, we were shocked when he wanted to read a page out of the book that his brother had been reading with me (which was at least middle school level) and he read it fluently. He couldn't have read it in December, but apparently made another huge leap in reading ability over the winter break. He probably appears more "gifted" to his teacher than his brother does to his teacher because of his pace of progression, but they both are HG. (Now he has hit the same "wall" as his brother - we have learned the hard way that the school isn't going to let them move more than one grade level ahead in "official" reading levels.)

This is kind of relevant here so I am posting. I am researching published gifted programs in our school district as well as neighboring districts to figure out DD's schooling options 2 years from now (Yup, I am a planner:)). One school district that is highly rated has this selection criteria for G&T starting in 4th grade: Any student with an IQ of >110 or any student even with <110 IQ if recommended by a teacher. So, I am thinking it is basically 90% of the class as that district is inhabited by engineers, doctors and professors whose kids would most likely be above average IQ. So, what is the point? If this is the norm for most public school G&T programs, I can see how the average teacher is just tired to listening to the term "my gifted kid".

The thing is, these types of articles are written for the audience of MG and lower children/parents. The fact is that there are just too few HG+/PG kids to really dedicate an article to them in a general population magazine. For the gifted coordinators, the article rings true. Their job is really to educate those in the mid-upper ends, but not the extreme ends. No gifted program is, long term, really going to meet a PG child's needs. They will outgrow it, or at least need multiple skips.

But as to my own experience, DS6 has an average to MG friend. (Honestly I have no idea where he is, but parent's think he is bright. Seeing him through the comparative lense of my own son, I have a harder time seeing it...not that it isn't there.) Friend's grandma is a gifted-ed teacher. Friend's mom has made comments before about evening out in third grade, and other views she got from her mom, the grandmother. BUT, she also, of her own will (I wasn't arguing at all) said, "oh, but this obviously doesn't apply to your DS...he is on a different level." So it might be that a lot of people believe these statements, but only when applied to the median. They subconsciously lop off the end members, and just expect that we intuitively know we are NOT talking about the extremes. But for the kids who are really well served by the gifted programs, kids who are MG, there is more sense in these statements. It is probably harder to tell them apart from well prepped kids who have had three years of academic preschool. Those kids darn-well better be at the top of the K class, as they've had three years of the same curriculum over and over. Take a well prepped average kid who has had three years of academic pre-school and place them with an MG kid with no prep, and it very well could be hard for a teacher of 30 to be able to know them well enough to sort it out until third grade.

My point is that I don't think we need to take insult at this. We don't need to assume that every article written about gifted education is about profoundly gifted education. If schools had PG programs, they would be awfully lonely classrooms.

I agree with this.

I also will say this, though: I think there is a lot of gray area, all over the place, and I don't place a vast amount of faith in scores, anyway.

I thought two 40 year teaching veterans had not been convinced of my PG child's difference, they had, they even picked out the likely frequency, but they were just stalling us.

Apparently the pace of learning and the conceptual leaps are a dead giveaway.

Oh dear heavens, I cannot tell you how much I detest that phrase. Regardless of whether a child is gifted, shouldn’t it be a point of shame for a school that a student who enters kindergarten reading at a third grade level is still reading at a 3rd grade level (or even only a 4th grade level) 3 years later? That the child who was learning multiplication at 5 is still learning it at age 9?

Yes, I understand and am not arguing that an early reader or early mathematician is necessarily gifted.

However, even if not clinically gifted, some children are early learners who soak up information and knowledge and want to learn. Whether people consider them well prepared, houthoused, or some other term with which I am unfamiliar is really immaterial. These children have shown a propensity for learning, and in many cases a desire to do so.

Just as you can’t teach a child to be gifted, you really can’t teach a child to learn earlier than they are willing/ready. I know plenty of parents who wish it were otherwise, and their children have been some of the best prepared students in my son’s school. No matter how many flashcards they threw at little Sally, or how many Kumon sessions little Johnny attended, she didn’t start reading until grade 2 and he didn’t understand multiplication until grade 3.

So, even if the early learners are “only” well prepared, why is it a point of pride that schools simply allow them to stagnate for 2-4 years while the other students play catch up? Why shouldn’t those students also be given an appropriate education, based on their abilities and level of learning?

I support free, universal education, and I believe that teaching is one of the hardest jobs there is. I would never be able to deal with the parents, much less the administration. Not to mention the idiotic state and federal legislators who impose ridiculous requirements on educators without ever having spent one day as a teacher trying to corral 25-30 sugar-hyped 8 year olds.

Even so, I find it shameful that educators perpetuate the myth that everything does- and worse, that everything should- even out by 3rd grade. How this nasty little idea ever made its way into schools of pedagogy is beyond me, and I honestly do not understand how educators don’t see the subtext to those comments. How are they blind to the fact that this statement means that a child learned little to nothing on their watch? How do they not see the laziness implied in this statement? How do they not see the poor light in which it casts their own talents, the school at which they teach, and the system in general?

I admit I’ve never had the patience to discuss this with teachers, even those in my own family, but I’d love to know the answers.



And PS, the idea is rampant at private schools in our area as well, so I don’t think this is just a problem for the public school system.

MonetFan - As a member of the choir your speaking to, I say "Preach on!"

Absolutely!!

MonetFan, EXACTLY!!!

When I talk with my children's teachers (which doesn't happen much anymore), or when I talk with friends, parents, etc., I don't really use the word "gifted". I think every child deserves to learn what he/she is ready and is capable of learning, whether it's because the kid has no difficulty learning advanced contents, or because the kid is willing to put in five times the amount of time to learn the advanced contents.

But there is a huge amount of resistance from the teachers that I've met. I remember DS's 2nd grade teacher happily informed me that he was reading at "end-of-2nd-grade" level. Which was ridiculous because he finished reading the first four Harry Potter books (there were only four by then) in 1st grade. The teacher then told me that he didn't do further testing because he was not ready to teach beyond end-of-grade material anyways so further testing was not useful.

Math homework was a constant struggle for DS as long as I could remember, because DS felt insulted having to do work that he knew how to do even before starting elementary schools. He finally felt that he was learning something when we discovered The Art of Problem Solving. I remember there was an assignment in 4th grade (something about fractions) that he simply refused to do, and finally his four-year-old sister happily did it for him. Yet at a school-wide parent-teacher meeting where parents tried very hard to advocate math enrichment, some teachers came up with the defense that "we are teaching complex thinking skills, not just computation. Your kids might be good at computation but it doesn't mean that they are good at math". The parents were just shocked--we are a group of scientists, engineers, college professors, IT folks, etc., but we couldn't make the teachers see that holding kids back with extremely simple math work does not teach them complex thinking.

I can go on and on...