Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Hostility toward GT

I know we've covered it before, but at this moment, we are experiencing open hostility toward the GT population. So, I went looking for the source of the hostility. How wide spread is it? What is it based on? I found the article below that references a study from Australia done a few years ago. And it helped me to understand some of what I'm seeing in our school.

http://www.ernweb.com/public/1114.cfm

From the article:

"The researchers designed a study to test their hypothesis that negative attitudes toward the intellectually gifted are rooted in fears that they have the potential to affect, manipulate, exploit and disrupt social relationships."

Well, that's certainly true.

I had assumed I was going to be reading an article about public perceptions or those in the school bureaucracy. I was not expecting this kind of thing to be about the teachers.

My personal experiences do not match with the findings. My relationships with my teachers were variable, naturally, but I almost never found myself convinced a teacher disliked me (though there were several I disliked), I often found teachers outright friendly to me, I often had successful relationships with teachers my friends considered difficult, and my friends were quick to mention how I seemed to be getting different treatment. My DD's teachers genuinely like her.

Did I speak much more during class discussions than my peers? Yep. But my teachers LIKED that, because in a classroom full of naive teens who were convinced everyone was basically good, my positions were an effective counterweight, and I relieved the teacher of having to prop up that side of the discussion entirely by himself. The end result being that, in some discussions where , my teachers would call on me whether I had my hand up or not.

The fact that my views were much closer to theirs than to my peers' didn't hurt, either.

I did have a teacher who was very opposed to the concept of gifted itself and was relatively vocal about it. Since I was effectively his superior, he couldn't do anything to me.

Apparently, he had some sort of breakdown due to a Vietnam flashack.

But yes, teachers like this do exist and they do hate the concept of giftedness itself.

The article you quoted came from Australia, which has a strong social stigma that enforces egalitarianism in all things, with the exception of sports.


Some people have attempted to formulate a form of pure egalitarianism. There is not much room in it for the high performing non-conformist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice


And we end up with something quite old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalization


But human nature is what it is. Hostility in the leadership then becomes embedded in the social structure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment


Fortunately this can be short circuited in many cases by standing up for others.


In today's society, if you are not satisfied, then another form of standing up, is a well-maintained negative review on a public website.

I recently had a conversation with an 11 year old gifted boy who lives in a neighboring town, but went to school for a few years in my small town. His dad, who was trying to help us with our extremely slow internet problems, is a single parent and takes him to work with him any time school is out.

It is obvious that this kid is gifted the minute he opens his mouth. This intelligent, personable kid told me what our internet problem was while his dad was working in another room and he knew what the internet company had been telling us, like it was our router or malware, etc. because they were telling everyone that instead of fixing the problem.

I told the boy that he reminded me so much of my son the way he was a few years ago and then he told me all kinds of things about our small town schools. Most of it was familiar, things I had heard from my son's gifted friends, like the fact that the football players are treated like royalty and smart kids are made fun of and bullied, especially the band kids. The boy said he was a band kid. I told him I thought it was maybe even a little worse for a boy living in this town who does musical theater like my son does. He agreed.

One of the things he told me was that he felt like his teachers didn't like him. They didn't like his questions. They wanted to teach straight from the book and didn't even try to make learning more interesting , then they spent way too much time answering really dumb questions asked by kids who had not been paying attention at all and then the class was over and he didn't get to learn anything. He said listening to the dumb questions made it really hard to get through the class because it was so slow. He said he thought he could skip a few grades and be able to do the work easily but he thought they would just give him more work to do that wasn't interesting. He said his dad, who is also very smart, told him the teachers might not like him because he is smart.

And then I read something on facebook that made me realize it isn't just a problem in our small towns. A person wrote about how she remembered taking high school classes in the city with a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who had just died. She said she remembered him passionately debating politics and then she said "most people who are that gifted and verbal come off as being obnoxious."

I think that really is the perception here, even with teachers--that verbally gifted kids are obnoxious. My husband said he hired a quiet young smart guy that had learned to be quiet, probably because of that perception. He didn't fit in until college. I feel sad that my son is becoming quieter the older he gets.

Dude-
I think that you were very lucky.

DD9 experienced a teacher who really did not like her. That was tough. She is verbally gifted, and the teacher, quite frankly, did not appreciate her verbal skills!

Her current teacher is a gifted specialist and absolutely loves her.

Unfortunately, I know that she won't have that every year

I can sum it up in these snippets of conversation

school pyschologist and principal "Your child is meeting the standards. What's the problem?"
Me "The low standards are holding my child back and when she gets bored she will act out."

Teacher (when I asked about grade advancement) "Yes your daughter seems bored often"
Me "So, can we talk about skipping her to the next grade?"
Teacher "But why?"

And I am often referred to as obnoxious and superior...usually behind my back though

more often what? Edit needed? Sympathy, btw :-(

uh, lol, that was supposed to be BORED. the teacher sees she is BORED but then called her defiant for not listening and wondered WHY I would want a grade skip