Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy When do you take it to the Principal?

I completely agree and think this perspective helps enormously when dealing with schools. Once I realized that in 25 years of teaching, most teachers encounter something like 20 kids/year x 25 years = 500 kids. That means most will never encounter a kid with an IQ in the >1/1000 range. And if that's true, then I can read their actions as oblivious rather than hostile. There's lots of room to maneuver (or ?educate . . . or share some useful info with . . .) with oblivious but much less ability to negotiate with hostile. When one teacher who'd just seen HG IQ scores said she had 25% of her class just like my kid, I could see that comment as coming from a place of not understanding what a standard deviation means. While I was angry and annoyed at the time, once I got a little distance, I could see that she just didn't believe kids like mine existed. But that makes sense too -- if you've seen 500 kids and none of them were like my kid -- it's not an unreasonable place for her to be. She also kept asking me what method I'd used to teach reading and I could never convince her that it just appeared one day. Again, in her world, reading doesn't just appear . . . . so that doesn't make her mean or nasty, just learning from her own experience.

Along the same lines, school policies are usually for what schools encounter most, which is MG and/or bright but not gifted with parents who want their kids to be gifted. I agree that you need never take a policy as fact because your kid may require breaking the policy. We lived in a district that did *no* acceleration of any kind and no testing unless some pushy parent required it. When we became the pushy parent and got testing, we got a pull-out solution. When we said that would never work, we got quoted policy that it was the only thing available. And when we finally met with the principal over the heads of the obstructionists, we got quoted a bunch of stuff about how differentiation would happen (instead of adding 2+5, my kid could do 20+50). When I told the principal that my kid would have found that interesting 3 years ago but now it was way too late, we *finally* got someone who listened and actually decided to see what my kids knew. That led to many accommodations that are *not* done in my district and even a rapprochement that involved the major obstructionist agreeing with us that regular accommodations would never have worked. It can happen -- but it takes a lot of work and willingness to negotiate. I think realizing that the school had likely never seen this situation, let alone any individual teacher, allowed us to take a more charitable and less hostile approach to the school. And that helped us believe they might be willing to change when they had the right data and more time to figure out that these kids were really different.

One last example of being confused by "normal" -- one of my kids read just after his 2nd birthday and I can honestly say, I just never thought anything about it. Until it was time for K, it never occurred to me that we had any issues or that early reading indicated anything other than a kid who liked books. I never thought about the "g" word until I saw a K curriculum and realized my kids did that stuff at 2. In retrospect, and with reading these boards as well as seeing ND classmates and friends of my kids, I realize how totally warped I am. If I can have no sense of normal, it's hardly fair to blame a teacher who sees normal all day long for having no sense of HG+.

I find it very interesting how people react to sports/social issues. I didn't want grade skips for many reasons, but those are certainly in the mix.

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I spend a lot of time wondering if I'm trying to protect something that's just not possible to protect with way out there kids and if, no matter what I do, DS will be ready for college at 11. It's hard to protect "normal" in that situation. But I'm sympathetic to people like your DH who want that for their kids. My kids aren't old enough to know how this will work out -- I can see us managing in an age-grade curriculum all the way through (in an HG school), or managing until 9 or 10 and then homeschooling a year or two and doing online college and high school things quite young, or just getting radical acceleration in one or two subjects and holding the rest at age-grade. I don't know how it will turn out or what's best for my kids, but I do think that things like sports and social fit can matter a lot for specific kids.