We live in a semi rural area and there are very few schools to choose from. I am currently homeschooling my HG+ 10yo who has expressed interest in attending school. My older son (2e/HG+) is attending the only private school in the area.

In discussing gifted issues with the head of my older son's school, she used the term "smarty pants" several times in a conversation about gifted issues.

Would this give you pause?

Yes, it would give me pause.

It's bad mojo.

YES!

It wouldn't give me pause; it would give me full stop.

Yes. Sorry...but it def. would. A teacher with the attitude I imagine someone who used that term would have had a devastating impact on my dh. Hopefully I am wrong.

Can you give specific examples of how she used the term?

It depends completely on tone and how it was used.

Some context:

I was having a meeting with her and the president of the board of trustees about school improvement. My job was to go through their 5 year old strategic planning document and identify places where the school might change/improve. They had something in the document about developing a system for dealing with kids with learning differences, so I asked if they had a policy for dealing with gifted kids. She used the term "gifted and talented" several times, but when referring to PG kids, meaning those who would require extreme accommodations to thrive at the school, she used the term "smarty pants kids" several times. At the time she didn't know we were thinking about the school for our younger son, who probably verges on her definition of a "smarty pants kid."

In her defense, she seems to get it about math acceleration and she doesn't have a problem with whole grade acceleration. If my younger son were to go there, he would need a grade skip on entry and then an additional one or two year acceleration in math.

I am usually pretty impervious to word choice, but for some reason, the "smarty pants" thing really bothered me. To me it means someone who is obnoxiously smart and showing off about it, a behavioral thing that can (and probably should) be changed, whereas we were discussing kids who needed extreme modification of their educational environment because of who they are--not something can (or should be) changed, but something to be cherished.

I live in a rural area with only one public school and no private schools. Kids like mine who are verbally gifted are seen as being obnoxious, smarty pants, scary smart, etc. just because they use a high level vocabulary and ask lots of questions. It is just the way things are here and we are supposed to learn to live with it.

The attitude toward my child was especially difficult to deal with at the small town church we went to for a while. I had asked that he be allowed to attend a class with his friend who was three years older. My son was about eight at the time. They didn't like it but they allowed it. I had an uncomfortable feeling about it so I listened outside the classroom for a little while. My son answered one of her questions that the other older kids didn't. I found out that he could read better than the other kids. I heard the teacher ask what kind of Bible he was using at home and he told her that it was a children's Bible. He liked it because it was kind of like an encyclopedia and had lots of extra information in it. The teacher, who sounded irritated, told him he should not be using it and that he should be using an adult Bible. In my opinion, she was the obnoxious one. We just don't fit in here.

I think I'd just ask her what she meant with an open-ended question. See what she says, and probe her a bit.