Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Please Help. * Edited for more information

Ever since my 8 yr old gifted child entered this new school, his attitude about learning sucks, he already had D's in almost everything, he refuses to do homework and I am at my wits end! The teachers have called a meeting, suggested Damian be mentored by the gifted teacher as well as wanting to write up a behavioral contract, but I don't feel that this is a behavioral issue! He didn't do this last year! The teacher, in an attempt I think to change my mind, pulled his records from the previous school and pointed out to me that he had 2 conduct notices from last year...WOW two whole reports! Damian doesn't seem to care at all. Wants to learn only what he wants to learn. How do i deal with this!?

Okay. Monday morning I have a TAT meeting to see how the school can better meet Damian's needs. It is only October and already the problems are severe enough to get the schools attention. So I have a few things I need some outside input on.

First of all, does anyone know what I can expect at the Teachers Assistance Meeting? What should I bring with me? What do I say?

Secondly, What do I do with my son? Damian is 8 years old and I don't know how to reach him. He thinks, or appears to think, this whole situation is funny, but it really isn't. He isn't even trying. I don't want to say that he is bored, because I really think he will find plenty of challenges in his work if he gave it a shot, but I will say he is disinterested. He finds the monotonous reviews and stuff irrelevant, but that does not necessarily mean he knows the work. It simply means that he isn't intrigued by it, so he doesn't care to do it??? Do you understand what I am saying? I am so frustrated because I've tried so many things. He has a schedule, rules, consequences, encouragement and positive reinforcement, teachers that are at least trying to work with him, and a mom who desperately wants to make things better, but he will not meet me halfway. When I ask him what we can do to help him, he says I don't know. When I tell him that this process requires that he help us so we can help him, he smirks and walks away. When I asked him specifically what we could do to help him through math (an area where he is highly gifted but not achieving) he says, give me a calculator? He doesn't want to write unless he can do it in cursive. He seems to care only about learning about dinosaurs and science stuff and tosses everything else aside with a smug look on his face. I don't know what to do. Have any of you ever experienced this? I am beginning to think that perhaps the tests are wrong and my child is really just a smart ass? Please help!

Is the tat meeting a 'team' meeting? We have had a couple of those, do come prepared to speak about strengths and weakeneses your son has and strengths you see the program offering and where you think there are weaknesses.
I have always been asked to speak first at these meetings, so be prepared for that too. Have a simple 3-5 sentence statement worked out in your mind or on paper if you are more comfortable with that, stating pretty much the above - and what you hope to have happen for your ds.

Yes it is.

Damian has never been like this before. I did have him evaluated and the results were simply highly gifted. But in his other school he never worked for his grades. He came home an honor student all year long. He complained that he was bored, had no friends and was being bullied.

In this school, he has made some friends with other gifted students now, and the meltdowns after school have stopped, but he doesn't want to do the work. He says he wants to learn about medieval times, dinosaurs and division. He wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up. He read How to train your dragon in 2 hours and he also read Eragon in one day. He has been getting in trouble because he is getting caught reading during lessons. He forgets his homework in school, or pieces of it and he loses track of time a lot. More often than not, after spending 2 hours doing 45 minutes of homework (because he can't stay focused on it and keeps checking out the latter pages of his textbooks) he doesn't even turn it in. Homework is 50% of his grade and the teacher takes 10 points off his homework grade everyday that it is late so he is getting 50's on homework and it brings his grades down to a D.

I need to know how to help my child and I guess I am worried because so many people will be at this meeting, and I think we all share a common goal of wanting Damian to be successful but it seems the school system has a very different idea than I do on how to achieve that.

Oh, yeah. My DD is much the same, but is enough of a people-pleaser that she does the work, then complains at home, rather than not doing the work.

Any chance that, when faced with more-challenging work, your DS is choosing to fail by not trying, rather than risk trying and failing? ("I could have done it, if I'd wanted to" rather than actually doing it, when failure is an option? And "failure" could be a very high threshold - my DD considered an 80 on an AR quiz to be a failure, and picked a book 2+ levels lower as her next one.)

My DD is not always capable of figuring out what support she needs. She's done better when I've suggested possible supports, and she gets to choose from them. Praising any improvement helps, but she's very praise-motivated. (Let me tell you, though, it was hard for me to say "Hey, you finished that math worksheet in 34 minutes! That's nearly twice as fast as the 55 minutes it took you yesterday!" when the teacher-imposed goal was 10 minutes. Particularly when half of the time was spent gazing randomly about.)

Thanks so much! Your story has me shaking my head because I can relate. It took Damian 2 hours and 15 minutes to do 6 out of 8 math questions on Wednesday. It's possible that he doesn't want to take the risk I guess. He never has been much of a risk taker and tends to err on the side of caution.

Hopefully, everything will work out but in the meantime, both my son and the school are driving me nuts. I am afraid to pick him up from school because i just know the teacher is going to tell me that he was off task or didn't turn in his homework or as the case was today....apparently ended up in time out because he got "bored" in the middle of a lesson and started wandering around the classroom.

We have been dealing with some of this with ds, now 10. He will get a worksheet and it will take forever to complete although his abilities in math are very high. There is a boredom factor, and it is worse as time goes on.
Lately I have been working on info to send to school to have him assessed for gt in math and had to go through pre-algebra up to algebra work very quickly to keep him at all interested. As I said in another thread, I explain a concept and he already knows it or learns it so quickly it is as though he already knew it. The number of problems he wants to work on for that particular idea are in the single digits and then move on (and he does get them right). He is ok if the next set of problems incorporates older concepts, of course, so that is the way that we will have to build in practice on all levels, the easier stuff within the newer stuff.

This is gonna be hard to get them to buy at the school perhaps, because the number of problems he is doing is not huge (they will probably claim he has no passion for the work, for one thing) but his passion has been quashed for 5+ years now so it is going to take some figuring out to get him back into math. He said he would probably be interested in calculus, which I do not doubt, although definitely not yet ready.

I can not advise skipping the repetition, but it is my gut reaction to all this for my ds....however we are still a work in progress over here! Good luck to you and your ds!

These may already be in play/have been tried, but here are a couple of thoughts:

1) For worksheets, would he be willing to do four problems? I'm thinking about Weinbrenner's "most difficult first" strategy in which a student who can do the four most difficult problems on an assignment is then excused from the rest of the assignment (having thereby proved they have the concept and don't need the repetition).

2) I wonder about the idea of "not ready" when it comes to giftedness. If he is interested in taking on a much higher level of math, perhaps he would be able/willing to work on the pre-requisite skills as he needs them. I would think he would have to be pretty highly gifted in order to do that, but perhaps that is true of him?

3) Can the interests he has be harnessed in order to work on the areas of work he is resisting? For instance, if he works on an independent study related to his interest in medevial times, can he work on a project that involves mathematical calculation? Or can it be more fully integrated into the science topics/study he is interested in pursuing?

Obviously I don't know your child, but as I read your post, I started thinking about that Stephanie Tolan piece, "Is It A Cheetah?". Do you perhaps have a highly or profoundly gifted child who is with a group of moderately gifted children?

I think you mentioned that one option is to have the gifted teacher mentor him. Presumably this would be 1:1? Is there a reason that that would not be a good option?

I was also wondering about the writing in cursive piece. Is he not allowed to turn work in that is written in cursive? I think that it is not unusual for highly able children to resist writing. Their motor skills can't keep up with their intellectual speed, and it can make it pretty frustrating to share knowledge in written form.

Good luck--I'm sure that the smirking is frustrating for you and for his teachers. I wish I had some good advice for you there...
Tam

Your post reminded me of something I learned in another thread. �The other thread was about discipline and why kids often act better at school or a friends house and save their worst behavior for the parents, it's because at they feel comfortable so that's where they show their butt. �So I guess at least he feels at home there. �
Sorry, but are you above bribery, for now, at this point? �I haven't been there yet but I think that's what I would do there. �Gold Star chart that earns real money allowance. �Keep explaining the reality of working to keep his place in the good school with the kids he likes. �He's 8 yrs. old he's on a different internal timeframe than us.
I know there's some better way than "get an A, get an ice-cream", but from what I've seen you have to balance taking care of now with your long term goals. �You would just be helping him through the adjustment period since everybody's getting antsy. �Maybe adjustment's not the real problem, but for now it sounds to me like the most pressing.
�Don't know what to tell you about earning the teacher's goodwill. �I'm dreading looking forward to that myself. �Some of the stories make it sound like instead of helping sometimes the school staff's just got more needs you gotta figure out how to meet on top of meeting your own family's needs.

[quote=AlexsMomAny chance that, when faced with more-challenging work, your DS is choosing to fail by not trying, rather than risk trying and failing? ("I could have done it, if I'd wanted to" rather than actually doing it, when failure is an option? And "failure" could be a very high threshold - my DD considered an 80 on an AR quiz to be a failure, and picked a book 2+ levels lower as her next one.)[/quote]

This was my gut reaction. Didn't he switch from a regular school to a gifted school? If so, he may be feeling much more challenged (not by the work necessarily, or all of it, but by the environment and other kids) and using this as a defense mechanism. And a school that gives letter grades to 8 year olds kind of doesn't help in that regard.

You might need to "overparent" for a while to break the cycle? Make sure the homework is complete and turned in (maybe that means having the teachers adjust the homework load, maybe that means figuring out how to keep him on task, or making sure he knows there is nothing fun until it is done). If there has really been no hint of this sort of behavior before, could there be some classroom dynamics that encourage it (is he making friends by being the class clown at his new school)?

And being gifted is no excuse for crummy manners to adults or parents, rudeness, smugness, disruptiveness, etc. So that is an issue you will want to address in your own way, depending on how you parent such issues. I will be a mini-me Grinity and echo her suggestion for the Nurtured Heart approach, it worked for us.