My daughter's current teacher is a "Gifted Denier."
DD6 has been in a private school for a year and a half. First year the teacher was like "your kid is spacey", I think they're LD. I'm like, mmmhmmm, I mean the parent knows when their kid is gifted, but anyway we had her tested and she maxed out the WJ (-III?) test. So they said, ok she's GT and we're setting up some programs for that. I still need to follow up on that.
Anyway this year she's in 1st grade and they're doing differentiation they say. But somehow she's like 30th percentile on their color coded book levels, and in math section 3 of 4, not 1 or 2. I mean you don't find this out until 3 months into the year, and I was trying to hang back and not be "one of those parents". Well I got her bumped up to math section 2 and to maybe 50th percentile reading. Though really she is reading several years ahead, but it ain't no thing, they can't stop her from reading ahead at home.
Still, she is very slow on writing in the classroom. I'll get private family counseling for her and the family, but it seems to me she is what you call Underachieving Gifted, as described in Module Four of this excellent package
http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/scho...ion_professional_development_package.htm What set me off is when I emailed that to her teacher, he is like, "I can assure you I will never click that link or read it. I have 20 other students and I'm very busy." This, at a private school, and he has an assistant. He is like "IQ doesn't matter". And "Kids just have to do what I put in front of them. If they do that, they get the next task." Its not wrong, but its not right. Its turning into a bad mushroom trip. This teacher is what I call a "Gifted Denier". Frustrating. Maybe I can tell all the researchers that their studies over the last 50 years can be thrown out because this teacher knows better.
