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    Joined: May 2013
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    Jen4103 Offline OP
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    We all know that the learning environment can greatly affect a child's ability to reach his or her maximum potential. Parents with access to money & means can reach out to find that environment. Yet the gifted community does not actively provide a solid support system for parents who do not have these resources. A child can be greatly limited by his/her parents, even when those parents are willing to be highly engaged. As a community we should embrace & mentor those parents. I think it would be a huge benefit to the gifted community as a whole if each of us actively mentored just 1 parent who needed it.

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    22B Offline
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    Our school district definitely tries to identify gifted students from underprivileged backgrounds and provides full time self contained gifted education.

    I prefer to pay taxes to help people in need. I definitely prefer that to going into a high crime neighborhood and risking being murdered.

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    22b, you know one can be poor and not live in a neighborhood where random passerby murder is likely, yes?

    I agree that these parents should be supported. The nuts and bolts seem a lot trickier. One thign I have thought about in my community is making it easier for all parents to learn about and understand their educational options.

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    Originally Posted by 22B
    Our school district definitely tries to identify gifted students from underprivileged backgrounds and provides full time self contained gifted education.

    I prefer to pay taxes to help people in need. I definitely prefer that to going into a high crime neighborhood and risking being murdered.
    It is simplistic to write as if these are the only two choices. Since the OP is from "Chicagoland", I will mention a tutoring program in Chicago (not targeting the gifted).

    http://online.wsj.com/articles/bob-greene-off-of-rough-streets-into-a-haven-for-learning-1412901562
    Off of Rough Streets, Into a Haven for Learning
    Fifty years and 6,000 students later, a Chicago church’s free-tutoring program carries on.
    By BOB GREENE
    Wall Street Journal
    Oct. 9, 2014 8:39 p.m. ET

    Quote
    On a crisp-as-an-apple-slice autumn afternoon in Chicago, a man named Tylus Allen looked around a softly lighted chapel and said, “When I first came here, it was because I heard this was where people were willing to help you.”

    He is 24 now, a clerk at a downtown hospital. When he began evening visits to the Fourth Presbyterian Church, he was a fifth-grader who lived many grim miles away. His father was in prison. He was a boy who yearned to learn, to better himself, but wasn’t sure how. “I was hoping to find people who wouldn’t give up on me,” he said.

    He came to the right place. The church, on a postcard-glamorous North Michigan Avenue corner, has, for 50 years, provided a tutoring program for children as young as first graders. Most of the boys and girls, often from the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, are African-American. Most of the volunteer tutors are white, many of them professional men and women.

    On this afternoon hundreds of them—former pupils like Mr. Allen, current pupils, present and past tutors—were gathering at the church to celebrate half a century of lives made better. The premise of what goes on there on weeknights is simple: The children seek one-on-one help with the basics of mathematics and reading and writing. They don’t always get that kind of individual attention in their public schools. There are successful men and women willing to sit down with them at the church and share what they have always taken for granted: the ability to add and subtract and divide, the ability to spell and to read with understanding.

    I first reported on the church’s tutoring program 25 years ago, and then, as now, I was most struck by the devotion on both sides. On the coldest Chicago winter nights, in drenching rain and biting winds, the children would arrive for their tutoring sessions right on time. So would the volunteer tutors. Attendance was typically 100%.

    “At first, the children don’t even know exactly what they’re hoping for,” said Stefani Turken, who is in her 22nd year of tutoring. “But little by little, they see that there is a different world available to them, that they can dream of something better. That if you want it to, life can change.”

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    Jen4103, I agree that it sounds like a good idea. How do you see this mentorship playing out? Are you suggesting this would take place through this forum or some similar online site, or would this be geographically based? I wonder about identifying these parents or how they would self-identify.

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    We are in NZ. There is no identification and no services unless you can pay. Our school has extension programmes but they are not aimed at gifted kids and only 2 kids from each class can attend. Since they put the 3 identified gifted kids in one class (we hoped for a cluster but they didn't even work together all year) that meant one of the gifted kids missed out and one far less gifted kid attended. Ds7 is the youngest, least confident, worst writer and I think highest IQ
    of the 3 and got nothing all year except what I could pay for.

    In fact between us a friend and I have 5 gifted kids at that school. Only one is doing OK. This is supposedly the best school in town for gifted kids.

    Last edited by puffin; 10/30/14 11:52 AM.
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    I think you are greatly over estimating the "resources" and the "support system" the "gifted community" (what exactly would that be?) have at their disposal, and greatly underestimating the actual limiting forces that exist.
    Whenever I have, gently, tried to encourage a parent (of all types of SES) who appeared to be unaware of the possibility or the implications of even considering the idea that their child might be gifted, I have received massive pushback, usually of the "I don't *want* my child to be gifted!" kind (subtext: even if those other, pushy, parents do, shame on them). One mother, whose kids elementary school teacher had brought up the possibility and who I gently encouraged to consider (free) testing for the (free) public gifted program, admittedly on the other side of town, exclaimed "but that might mean I would have to drive him places! I want him in the local school and play sports in the local club!". For people to merely contemplate that kids might be different from them, different from other kids, wanting or needing different things, is simply too much. Again, that goes for all types of SES and cuts both ways.
    I shudder at the thought what most people in the semi rural community in which I live would have to say at the thought that odd, dorky me might want to "mentor" them because I might have better understanding than them of what their child wanted or needed.

    Last edited by Tigerle; 10/30/14 12:45 PM.
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    22B Offline
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    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    It is simplistic to write as if these are the only two choices.
    "as if"?
    I just type a brief post. I couldn't be bothered typing out every conceivable nuance and caveat.

    Originally Posted by ultramarina
    22B, you know one can be poor and not live in a neighborhood where random passerby murder is likely, yes?
    I live in a place that does in fact have a very high murder rate (and other crime). If you look at a homicide map it is obvious that the murders are concentrated in areas of high poverty. There is a very real risk in going into these areas, and I am not prepared to take that risk. This is also one big reason why we do not put our kids into the gifted programs, since they are strategically located in bad parts of town.

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    I think you are very much overestimating the risk of being murdered to simply embarrassing yourself in *most* places this kind of mentoring might take place...there are a lot of reasons I prefer mostly being in the closet as opposed to putting myself as out there as That Parent who might want to mentor people into being That Parent, Too but I admit fearing to be murdered isn't one of them.

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    22B Offline
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    Originally Posted by Tigerle
    I think you are very much overestimating the risk of being murdered to simply embarrassing yourself in *most* places this kind of mentoring might take place...there are a lot of reasons I prefer mostly being in the closet as opposed to putting myself as out there as That Parent who might want to mentor people into being That Parent, Too but I admit fearing to be murdered isn't one of them.
    It is not difficult to look at statistics and quantify the risks. And you have to consider the cumulative risk of exposing yourself to a risk many times (e.g. going to a dangerous part of town every day all day for ten years, as opposed to going there once for five minutes). Even if the risk of being murdered is a fraction of 1%, why expose yourself unnecessarily to that risk. And there are other more common crimes such as (armed) robbery, assault, vehicle theft to also be worried about. The danger is very real.

    In any case, my family's personal experience is not with dangerous parts of town, but with a specific and unexpected dangerous individual, and we now most certainly know that trying to help people can be extremely dangerous.

    ETA: I have friends who have been robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight just walking into the wrong area. (The gifted program my kids could have gone to is in the same area.) It's real.

    Last edited by 22B; 10/30/14 02:03 PM.
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