Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Laziness

Dd feels pretty bad at this point. What I am gathering in trying to look at this through a lens of compassion is this:

Dd is already much younger than the other kids and this is her first year accelerating whereas the other kids have mostly been in accelerated placement for 1-2 years.

They are moving through the curriculum quickly. In the past five weeks, they have covered graphs (bar, circle, x/y axis), samples and biased samples, other aspects of probability and stats, scientific notation and converting btwn that & std notation, exponents, decimals (adding, subtracting, dividing, multiplying), and possibly some other items in those same general areas.

Some of this stuff I honestly think could have been taught in earlier grades, but Everyday Math doesn't teach division beyond the real basics prior to 6th grade, for instance.

So, there's a lot of new material and dd didn't expect not to know anything. She froze up and got scared when there were things she didn't know how to do and kind of stopped doing the work.

The lying entailed the teacher giving her work to do and bring back which she simply didn't do and then, obviously, didn't turn in and her hiding quiz and test scores from me that caused her grade to drop from an A to a C+.

She was embarrassed and didn't want to ask for help. We do seem to be seeing an attitude adjustment so I think that the game plan is to have her study for the next unit test (as opposed to not even telling me there is a test coming up) and see how she does on that. She's being pretty contrite which I hope continues.

I'm not going to come down too hard on her about lying at this point b/c I think that it was done out of fear and embarrassment moreso than being truly lazy. (and she feels bad enough as it is right now)

Hooray! I'm glad to hear that it's more of a learning opportunity than her unwillingness to work.

I guess this is exactly what you wanted with the placement. It's hard on her now, but she's going to have to learn some skills that most kids already have: asking questions, asking for help, studying, etc.

This will serve her well in the future.

Sounds like you've done a great job in communicating with her.

I do have another question if anyone is willing to stick with me a bit longer. I've been conversing w/ dd's math and reading teacher, who is the school GT coordinator, via email to follow up on this.

One reason she feels that some of dd's test scores have suffered, and I see this too, is that dd doesn't tend to see what the test creator is asking. She has very divergent ways of looking at things. The teacher's mention of this was that:

"For example, one of the questions asked for the lowest altitude. The table had a column of highest altitudes and a column of lowest altitudes, and [dd] gave the lowest of the highest altitudes. Then, for the question about the range for the state with the greatest difference in altitudes (Alaska), instead of giving the range for Alaska, [dd] gave the range of highest altitudes. [Dd] may be thinking of online quizzes or riddles, where the answer is tricky, but test questions in school (including MAP, CSAP, ACT, etc.) aren't trying to trick kids with plays on words."

I don't agree about the online quizzes or riddles in that I can't recall a time when dd did any riddles of that sort online or off. She just doesn't look at things in a traditional way.

Any ideas on how to help her see what the test creator is likely getting at? When I discuss with dd why she got these types of questions wrong after the fact, she always understands, but it just isn't the way that she reads them when she is trying to answer them the first time.

Secondly, she is making sloppy mistakes such as overlooking one number or adding in one number too many when calculating the mean or range, for instance. She really is not detail oriented. I don't know if that is something one can correct.

She is extremely creative, though, and she is the type of kid who sees the answer without seeing the intermediary steps that I have to go through. She has a math sense that I just don't have. What she doesn't have that dd12 and I do is detail orientation and an ability to think in a convergent manner (which isn't all good, of course).

Cricket,

Sounds like DD has really thought about what happened and feels poorly about the situation - a great lesson in learning from a mistake. And I suspect the teacher will now communicate with you a bit more as well.

Re: your last post. I think school can be very hard for out of the box thinkers, which your dd sounds like. this is great because she will be the type of person who makes some amazing discovery that needs a creative solution, but may be harder in the present. Maybe you can talk to her and help her practice finding the "right" answer and teacher can reassure her that there are no tricks on the test (although it sounds like that isn't the case here).

Cat

We work on detail orientedness by encouraging DS to slow down and check work. Sometimes being forced to read the problem aloud helps him see his own thinking mistake (obviously this is better for homework than for in-school testing).

Logic puzzles are good for practicing this, especially ones that require inference to understand the clues-- they do have to read the clues several times to find all the relevant information. This slows them down and forces them to consider all the information before coming to a conclusion.

There's also a perspective-taking component to this; how is her perspective-taking generally? If you find situations where she's misreading people's intent, she may need a reasonable explanation that helps her see what's in other people's heads ("Oh, when people ask X, they're generally wanting to know [this particular kind of information]") Can you get the questions and do an "autopsy" on where her perception goes astray, and practice with her understanding what's meant?

I do think both the detail-orientation and the perspective-taking are teachable skills, though it will probably require a lot of commitment to get these skills generalized to all situations.

DeeDee

I doubt if you can change the fact that she's not detail oriented, but what you can certainly do is to help her learn techniques that lower the chance that she misses a detail which is important. For maths questions involving calculation, I've had some success lately in getting my DS in the habit of doing a "reasonableness check" after he's done the calculation. E.g., if the "mean" of a set of numbers lands below them all, that would fail his reasonableness check and lead him to realise that he'd missed a number out if he'd made that mistake.

There is such a thing called gifted underachievement. Gifted underachievement has become a growing phenomenon. I wrote an article that provides strategies to parents to help their children who are gifted underachievers. Read my article at

http://www.suite101.com/content/the-child-who-is-the-gifted-underachiever-a282346

Hopefully, this helps.

Cricket, My dd also is an "out-of-the box" thinker and has struggled with standardized tests. In every case when I have had the opportunity to see the question and ask her why she answered the way that she did, her response is a legitimate interpretation just not the standard one. I've read that this is not uncommon with gifted kids. I don't have any words of wisdom but know that your dd is not alone.

Dd is definitely out of the box. This was drilled home to me when she came home with a math exercise in 3rd grade that said something like, "how many rectangles in the figure at the right." On the right side of the page there was a figure that showed a rectangle cut into fourths with a cross drawn down the center. Dd answered "three." I was at a loss as to how she'd come up with that in that there were a minimum of four rectangles if you only caught the four quadrants. She was looking at the right side of the figure (i.e. - the figure at the right) rather than the entire figure and counting the two quadrant rectangles as well as the one bigger rectangle that enclosed both of those quadrants.

Gosh. Tell me about it. We signed up for Noetic Challenge Math this week and there was this straightforward math question that should have been a piece of cake.

A wire is 80inches long. Sarah (or a name like that) cut some out to make an equilateral triangle, one side with a length of 12inches. Doug took the remainder and made a rectangle that had a length of 15inches. How long was the breadth?

In a flash, DS wrote down 8.5inches. It should be 7. And why?

He said he suddenly thought 12inches was 12 dots (there was a question about dots earlier in the paper). Since this is an equilateral triangle, the next side should have 11 dots, and the third side 10, giving a total of 33 dots. This magically transformed into inches again. And doing the math, his answer was 8.5 ...

Didn't know what to say. He looked so happy to have stumbled onto an "interesting" question!