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    Joined: Feb 2009
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    What do you think is the percentage of gifted kids who tolerate boredom v those that don't?

    I had an interesting talk yesterday with a child psychologist specializing in ADHD who said that kids have different tolerance levels for boredom. She said that not handling boredom was a sign of ADHD and a sign of immaturity. She then said that it was this immaturity that made early ADHD diagnosis shaky because many kids just grow up and out of their inability to tolerate boredom.

    Thoughts?

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    giftedticcyhyper -
    I have no idea on the percentage, but I will ditto the sentiment. DS saw a psychologist - he said that there would be no way to tell if DS was ADHD or just gifted because a bored gifted kid will act like a bored gifted kid with ADHD! He said that if we could get DS in a challenging environment and he still had the same signs, then ADHD would be more likely.

    Supposedly, you could always do a drug test (I don't think this is a good idea). A truly ADHD person is supposed to be depressed (read: calmed) by stimulants while others would be stimulated.


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    I think there's a difference between boredom from not being able to focus on something and boredom from not having new or engaging tasks for kids to get their hands on. I say this because DD has always had the propensity to be bored even as an infant. But give her a new toy, game or website and she'll play forever. Before I started looking into all this GT research, I wondered if DD was ADHD -- she sure bounced around the room a lot. Yet her ability to focus on new tasks can be quite impressive. I don't think DD has an ability or inability to handle boredom that makes her bounce off the walls -- she just needs something to stimulate her brain or senses to keep her occupied.

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    Originally Posted by momofgtboys
    giftedticcyhyper -
    I have no idea on the percentage, but I will ditto the sentiment. DS saw a psychologist - he said that there would be no way to tell if DS was ADHD or just gifted because a bored gifted kid will act like a bored gifted kid with ADHD! He said that if we could get DS in a challenging environment and he still had the same signs, then ADHD would be more likely.
    This seems totally reasonable to me, particularly in a kid who doesn't seem 'ADHD' at home.

    Quote
    Supposedly, you could always do a drug test (I don't think this is a good idea). A truly ADHD person is supposed to be depressed (read: calmed) by stimulants while others would be stimulated.

    This has been suggested to us, and I find it of great concern. After all - Stimulants are said to be a popular 'recreational drug' amoung driven high school students and college students. This suggests to me that a stimulant could help anyone 'settle in and hyperfocus' on a topic that they have no emotional connection to.


    One more thing to consider is 'Linear' v.'NonLinear' learning style. Although most schools teach to children with a 'linear' learnging style, slowly building up to complicated task by first teaching the simple tasks, many Gifties find it 'easier' to learn complicated systems, and are described as having a 'wholistic' learning style, or needing an emotional connection to a subject to really perform at their top level.

    HTH
    Grinity



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    Originally Posted by giftedticcyhyper
    I had an interesting talk yesterday with a child psychologist specializing in ADHD who said that kids have different tolerance levels for boredom.
    Thoughts?

    Kids are also asked to handle different quantities of boredom, based on their LOG and which readiness level is being taught to in that child's particular classroom. In 2nd grade everyone in the school was 'sure' that my DS had 'severe ADHD.' In 3rd grade he was a model student. the significant thing that changed was the teacher - both were wonderful, experienced teachers, but one differentiated in ways that stressed his weaknesses: handwriting, speed at looking up words in a dictionary, and providing detail in writing assignments, while the other differentiated to his strenghts: curiosity and abstract thought. Are you suprised that the children in the classrooms reacted to the ways that the two teachers felt about DS and that in 2nd grade there were a great many complaints about social problems and in 3rd grade he was quite popular?

    the scary moral here is that DH and I were so very close to accepting the school's version of 'blame the kid' by the end of 2nd grade, and DS had totally accepted that teacher's veiw of himself. Do you wonder why I keep hanging around here and telling my story over and over and over again? That is how convinsing the school was back then, and I had almost no one around who understood.

    Sweet Dreams,
    Grinity


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    Thought I would also pop into this conversation - hope it's not too much of a tangent, but Grinity's story about ADHD in year 2/model student in year 3 is really interesting to me...

    We're into week 2 at school where Miss 7 has grade-skipped. Already the teacher is talking to me about that ol' chestnut - focus, focus, focus. I immediately went into Drill Sergeant mode. I set up rewards and consequences if Miss 7 got a time-out at school (the day before she got somewhere between 3-5, but the exact details are a bit fuzzy). Then I had a coffee with an acquaintance who has 3 gifted daughters and a pile of research papers under her wings. And boy, did I feel some good mumma guilt!

    The main lessons that came out of the conversation for me were:

    * don't buy into the school's mindset that your child's learning style is bad, undesirable, problematic...

    * talk with your child constantly so as to combat any thoughts that they're coming away with from school feeling like THEY are bad, undesirable and problematic...

    * teach your child how to survive, operate and hopefully even thrive within the school system - but accept that thriving may be an outcome that's just not achievable. Operating in a structured classroom is not easy for highly gifted kids. Sitting, listening, focusing, working in a classroom with uncomfortable chairs, kids making noises, the air-con hissing, scratchy carpet, a spider web blowing in the breeze, doing worksheets that appear meaningless...

    * teach your own child to love learning, coz this may not happen at school.

    Part of our settling in to school phase is acknowledging that we did a real sales job on Miss 7 to grade skip into year 4. But her reality hasn't changed. The work is still boring. She's sitting next to 2 kids who are working light years below her. We promised that it would be exciting and new and interesting and challenging. And it's not. School work can be very mundane, repetitive and boring.

    And when you find out that the teacher is giving her a time-out because she got "lost in her book" - and was 3 minutes late for class after lunch - accept that the place she escaped to was most probably the most engaging thing she had done all day.

    This has really opened up a can of worms for me - discipline vs punishment. Hmm....

    I love to read stories like yours Grinity because it gives me hope that finding a good school fit will resolve lots of our issues. But the conversation yesterday has motivated me to re-think a very likely scenario - that I just don't find a good school fit. What then? How do I teach the girls to operate within the system we've got?

    *sigh* Anyway, thanks for asking the question giftedticcyhyper. When I start thinking that my girls have ADD/ADHD/problems... I know it's time for me to have a time-out!!!!!

    jojo






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    Grinity,
    You give me some hope. I just met with our principal today and was told that the school does not feel my son is gifted & he's not entitled to differentiated instruction. My son was tested & identified as gifted by a neuro-psychologist when he was four. Yet the school is relying on a single subjective checklist completed by his kindergarten teacher. In NJ they don't have to accept an outside provider's test results & our district does not test till 2nd grade. (And that's only for placement in a lousy one day a week pull-out program). I had my son's IQ retested at age 6 and it went up 11 points so it's not a fluke or my imagination.
    Now my son in 1st grade & bored. He's been saying he's bored. He says he feels stupid when the teacher makes him do stuff he already knows - like coloring, cutting and pasting vowel sounds onto a worksheet (when he reads fluently). To her credit his teacher is finally giving him some harder work and he's loving it. The harder work boosted his self-esteem, etc... Of course the school did not want to acknowledge this. According to the principal a gifted bored student does all of their assignments quickly and then just sits in class looking bored. And of course, my child is apparently unorganized, lacking social skills, unfocused, etc... At home he's fine. He's organized, does his homework without issue, can focus for hours on something of interest & can focus on less preferred things with the right motivation. In any case, they are dancing around the suggestion that he has ADHD or as his teacher put it "there's something wrong with him and it's not that he's gifted". Nice.
    Anyway, I did see the neuro-psychologist who tested my son just the other day and he said that a gifted child cannot be diagnosed with ADHD until they are placed in the proper learning environment & that symptoms must be present across settings. He went a step further to say that stimulant medication is not a good idea. He mentioned recent research that found at one time kids who were not medicated would outgrow their ADHD symptoms & with medication they were symptomatic into adulthood. On the bright side, the doctor is going to contact the school to see what he can accomplish for my son. I'm not overly optimistic and legally I have no recourse. So I'm now considering home-schooling as I will not medicate my son so he can sit in circle time and count to 100! I only hope we can make it till June without doing any damage to my son's self-esteem.
    Thanks for letting me vent.

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    Oh my jojo - you sound just like me! I do the same thing. Right now my poor son is earning the right to watch his favorite TV show on Friday night. What does he have to do? He has to complete all the meaningless worksheets they put in front of him at school. I feel completely conflicted about this. I'm ready to just give up on the whole trying to motivate him to do well in an environment that clearly does not meet his academic needs.
    Just tonight he was crying that he's been "bad". He feels terrible and I feel awful. It's just not right.
    I too have a briefcase full of wonderful articles detailing the needs of kids like ours. My problem is I can't get the school to read any of the information I have.
    I have researched private schools in our area and am pretty sure I will be faced with the same dilemma as they tend to focus on pacing the kids within the grade level curriculum. Grade skipping around here is unheard of - can't even go there. There are some alternative private school models - Sudbury, Waldorf & of course a true Montessori but we have NOTHING in our area. Home-schooling seems better & better all the time.

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    You know, this might be getting into some deep water but I'm beginning to realize that it's not about our kids operating in the system. It's about the system operating on our kids. Public school is an institution. It is designed to program our kids into functioning productively in our society. In that regard, it's just like prison or a mental health institution. That's what the pledge of allegiance is all about. That's why they break the child down by having them do what amounts to mental ditch digging. It almost seems as if it's designed to make the kids crack so they can weed out anyone who can think for themselves and order them drugged or out.

    Sadly, functioning productively in our society is defined as spending a lot of money on consumer goods! If that's not your cup of tea, you probably won't be digging the public school system.

    So, what I'm thinking is that being gifted isn't really about the child's IQ. It's about the parents' reticence to allow their kids to be another brick in the wall. There are parents out there who have high IQ kids but they don't see anything wrong with the handouts and the coloring. They just do what they're told. It's interesting that DS6's psychologist told me that half my son's behavior problems were the fact that I allowed him to "develop a personality." She said that letting him go see ducks, visit train stores and whatever else that he wanted to learn about was good for him as a person but that it worked against him learning to function in a public school.

    I hope this post doesn't make me seem like a raving lunatic

    Last edited by giftedticcyhyper; 02/11/09 08:52 PM.
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    mmmm..... both my husband DH43 and my son DS7 have adhd, and both do not tolerate boredom. I was trying tonight to sit on the couch and turn my brain into mush watching TV and they sat an rough housed, talked and played back and forth all night.

    I was like sitting with a pair of monkeys...... I don't think maturity has that much to do with it in there case... they just are very active.... always on the go, always moving.

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