Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Questioning assessment of kids based upon parents

Realizing that this was my own made up example, what I was trying to convey here was:

subject/verb disagreement ["me and his dad (i.e. "we") spends" - and - "teachers says"]
misuse of homophones ("there" for "they're")
spelling errors as you mentioned
using the wrong pronoun again as you noted ("me" for "I" as well as "her" for "she")

eta:

As I think about this more, it comes down to two things I need to think about. One: I need to reexamine my assumption that the likelihood of a child being gifted is lesser if the parent doesn't appear intelligent.

Two: I have, honestly, always assumed that intelligent people question and pick up on mistakes through reading or simple exposure in life. Thus, I figured that people who didn't pick up on things like proper usage of "she and I" vs. "me and her" through exposure to people who speak correctly (either in writing or just talking), were probably not unusually bright. It isn't about my feeling like education and intelligence are the same thing. It is more about assuming that intelligence and self-awareness are correlated and that intelligence tends to cause people to self-correct when exposed to 30 people responding to your post who use the same phrase you did but correctly.

I'll need to think about that more.

FWIW, my thesis adviser (who is a very intelligent man) STILL cannot spell my name correctly even though every email I sign my name on it and people have even mentioned it to him. He definitely knows me very well (and we get along well too) but he just never picks up on it. Honestly, some of the smartest people I know are significantly less observant about things like that. Then again I work with very math orientated people and I've even notice some who have very obvious difficulties when it comes to languages.

Even when you know which one is correct, constant exposure to people who use them incorrectly erodes your ability to use the correct one without conscious effort.

Particularly for words that most people think are homophones ("there" and "they're" do *not* sound the same when I say / read them; nor do "your" and "you're"), seeing other people use the wrong one (in which case I have to put the wrong sound with the spelling, in order to get the right meaning) means that I make far more errors now than I did as a younger person (in the pre-Internet era).

Plus you're assuming that the person in question has enough formal grammar training to know which one is correct, so recognizes that it's being correctly modeled, rather than thinking that the other people are wrong. "Between you and me" sounds wrong to people who learned the "you and I" rule by rote, rather than understanding the underlying logic.

I thought of all of you yesterday after I discovered that I sent an email to 50 homeschooling moms with a re: line about "Lego Leage." I almost sent a second email to clarify that I do know how to spell "league" and that it was a typo, but decided not to spam everyone with my dumb excuse! Still, I wonder how many now have a lesser opinion of me and think I can't spell!!!

Cricket, I know where you're coming from. I have the same tendency myself. I've been having discussions with someone at work about these assumptions, because I make snarky comments and laugh at silly mistakes that make the meaning entirely different from the intent. Working at a newspaper means that a great deal of my day goes into that endeavor! Anyway, I believe that Chris hit the nail on the head in saying that it indicates a lack of reading. For the same reason that I know how to spell a lot of words that I have no idea how to pronounce, many people know how to pronounce a lot of words that they have no idea how to spell; it comes down to whether you hear them or read them, and in both cases whether you hear or read them from an intelligent source. I still think it has something to do with education as well, in being able to discern whether what you are hearing or reading is correct. Yes, there is such a thing as a typo, but if it's consistent it's not a typo. Consistent misspellings or incorrect grammar are either lack of knowing or lack of caring.

We used to have a furniture store in town that had the word "furniture" misspelled three different ways on three different signs outside their store. I think that is an indication of sloppy business. If they can't be bothered to make sure their signs are correct in such a basic way, what else are they sloppy about? And if (undoubtedly) someone has told them it's wrong and they don't care enough to fix it, that's even worse. Yes, I'm judgmental.

On the other hand, does any of this mean that a person posting something basically illiterate does not truly have a gifted child? Not necessarily. I think that is something that might be determined over time, from the content of the discussion taken as a whole. But basically I think we (and when I say we, I mean mostly the lovely people who have been here far longer than I have and who take everything in stride) tend to just look at the surface and treat each post as if it were true, and over time I would suspect that anyone who "doesn't belong" fades off into the sunset.

So yes, I do notice and wonder about the (rare) illiterate posts sometimes, and yes, I probably should stop that, too. To paraphrase my co-worker, there are people we all know who can do fabulous things that we could never dream of doing and still can't spell cat without a dictionary, so it's all in what's important to you. Probably to my detriment, literacy is what's important to me.

I guess for me this thread ends up feeding in to the idea that gifted students only come from middle class families, when everything I have read suggests this is not the case (though obviously many gifted students do).

If you've got a working class family history, live in a working class area and attend working class schools you're not necessarily going to be exposed to the same ideas and resources that a middle class gifted child would be. Education may not be a priority, leaving school early might be necessary. You might get little exposure to good books. This is normal to you (as others have mentioned) and you don't know that you're wrong. Or you might know that you're wrong but you're not going to adopted the correct usage because it'll mark you as different to your peers.

There is a great book, Gift of the Gob by Australian linguist Kate Burridge that shows that there is a lot of language that we assume is incorrect when it is actually historically accurate. Between you and I/me is one of them (between you and I being historically non-standard, but now the accepted form)

In my own case, I can never get interested in grammar and I am a terrible speller. I know enough to get by, but only just enough to know the difference between and adjective and verb and how to use an apostrophe!

ITA.

Hmm...I don't see that anyone has said or even implied "middle class" here. Certainly I didn't mean anything like that. My family was nowhere near middle class, although I wasn't aware of that at the time. My parents valued education and the acquisition and use of knowledge above all else, despite their both having dropped out of high school. My mother spent her life fighting with school districts to try and get the best education she could for us and for the kids who followed after we had all graduated. I don't think many (if any) of either side of my family ever went to college, but my parents didn't see intelligence and knowledge as having a lot to do with going to school--they worked hard to make the schools teach as well as possible, but they believed you can get an education regardless of the school and irrespective of wealth if you put your mind to it. Luckily, since we had a lousy school and no money, but tons of books.

I think what Kvmum was saying (and what I agreed with) is that the idea that academic knowledge is valuable is not universal. Of course it is present among some working-class families, as it was in mine. But in some communities and cultures, it is simply less valued, and street smarts and fitting in are valued considerably more. A person who is highly intelligent growing up in poverty may see reading and proper grammar as a waste of time, something that is elitist or even embarrassing.

I know people who have contempt for proper grammar and sounding/being too smart. A gifted person who grows up around people like that isn't necessarily going to be immune from having that attitude just because he or she is gifted.

I mean, honestly, I don't hear middle class people saying things like "me and his dad spends" all that often. Yes, people talk like that. But the people who talk like that are, for the most part, people who were raised in, and never escaped, poverty. I don't see it as being a sign of low intelligence, for the most part. After all, subject/verb agreement is something a typical child masters well before middle school...so adults who are genuinely unable to figure it out must be far below the curve.

So, yeah, I do see this as a class/cultural issue. Of course I don't think that anyone is being biased deliberately, but that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.

No5no5 has summed up exactly what I had meant. Apologies if I have caused any offence, I didn't mean to imply that there aren't any working class and low income families who aren't passionate about education. I had just meant that if you don't come from a family or community where education is valued that it is just that much harder to pick up and use the skills the OP was referring to, regardless of your level of intellect.

It's interesting, this has got me thinking about my own lack of regard for education (well, interesting to me at least!) My family is very highly educated but had very little interest in my education (let�s say they were fairly bohemian and had had� complicated upbringings of their own�). However, while they might not have had the faintest idea what subjects I was being taught, let alone how well I was doing (or how badly, as was more often the case!) my family were passionate about the books I read, regularly discussed politics and current affairs and I was exposed to academics and intellectuals through their friendships and work. My mum has 5 degrees, but was barely making more than the basic wage and raised me on her own; no one in my family really cared (or even knew) if I passed or failed and I found a lot of my parent�s most educated friends incredibly pretentious. As far as I could see education wasn�t worth much (though now I know different � but it has honestly only been in the last 12 months I have seen how I have sold myself short).

The work various members of my family have been involved in has exposed me to the fact that functional literacy is something many lack and is much less prevalent than you would think. If I walked away from my formal education with only a basic understanding of and appreciation of the three Rs, despite my �extracurricular� exposure then I can only imagine what it must be like for people who don�t have a history of education in their families and/or where education is seen as elitist and something other people do. I imagine it is very hard to pull yourself out of that and, as others have said, would make it very hard to advocate for your kids.

I had no inkling about the possibility of my own giftedness until we had dd and for me learning about her has been, as it is for many, a revelatory experience for me too. Had I not made that discovery I suspect I would have continued my own �contempt for proper grammar and sounding/being too smart� (thanks no5no5), not realising I owed myself better. While I have no doubt that I am no where near the level of my pg dd � these kinds of threads send me down a path of thinking about my own experience in new ways, so thanks � though apologies if I have gone off on a somewhat self indulgent tangent!