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Posted By: Cola officially joining the 2E club - 01/23/15 05:24 PM
Ds 9 in gifted 4th grade self contained class diagnosed highly gifted, ADHD inattentive, dysgraphia, and rote memorization disability. How difficult is this going to be in the public school system?


Thank you!
Posted By: bluemagic Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/23/15 05:51 PM
Depends entirely on the teachers, resources teachers and curriculum. It sounds like you have the first step and school that is willing to acknowledge that he is 2E. Now the tough part figuring out how to make it all work. The good thing is you have caught this early.

My DS15 was only diagnosed 2E this past summer. For him 4th and 5th grade in a self contained gifted class went well for him, but in 6th grade he crashed and burned. Part of the reason 4th & 5th went OK was because he could still compensate by being smart for his deficiencies. Some of the difference between the grades was the teacher and the teachers teaching/grading style. My son has lowish processing speed, this was rarely as issue in elementary school but it became a bigger and bigger problem as he got older and the assignments and homework got longer.

Good Luck
Posted By: indigo Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/23/15 06:14 PM
You may wish to become familiar with wrightslaw and the book From Emotions to Advocacy.
Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/23/15 09:01 PM
The thing we have issues with is that intellectuay he is at a sophomore in high score level, emotionally he is a 9 year old boy and with rote memorization he's at a kindergarten level. And we have no idea what we need to do at this point
Posted By: Platypus101 Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 01:20 AM
Cola - I am so glad for you that you now have a solid foundation to start helping your DS! I know for us, getting that diagnosis was a relief and a fright all mixed up together. If you're feeling elated, vindicated and horrified all at once, you are not alone.

Four months later, we are still collecting information from schools and teachers, reading specialist and audiologist, and the list just keeps growing, trying to turn our diagnosis into a practical understanding of what we actually need to DO to help our dyslexic, ADHD-I, and maybe CAPD, daughter. Some interventions are obvious and started immediately. Longer-term schooling is still a big question, but our options and key decision factors are starting to become a lot more clear. We can already see functional improvements in some areas, while we are uncovering new potential disabilities in others (while assessing auditory processing, visual processing issues were flagged.... another "-ist" to visit. sigh.)

It's a process, and you're working with a constantly moving target. The good advice we got from this board was to start with the easiest and most obvious thing, and work your way through to the more more challenging and longer-term issues. For us, for example, reading remediation was the jump-on first issue. From your posts, I would guess some immediate accommodations for the dysgraphia would go a long way towards reducing the misery and fights over schoolwork, and create a more positive atmosphere for starting to deal with the ADHD and other issues.

It's a daunting road sometimes, but remember: now you know you're on the right road, and you're moving forward and working with and for your son. I met with DDs teachers this week, and they talked a lot about her complete turn-around over the last few months: in attitude and cooperation, in her cheeriness and willingness to tackle stuff instead of being frustrated and shut down, and seeing actual "chirpiness" in lieu of alarm-bell-ringing levels of anxiety in the classroom. And all that not because we've changed or fixed all that much already, but mostly because her diagnosis has given her confidence that she is not stupid and she CAN learn, she just needs to do it in a different way. And she can already see that that different way is improving her reading. And her teachers' awareness of her diagnosis, with her technology accommodations, have reduced the stress of keeping up with output demands. We're working on it, and she can see it working.

So I guess what I am trying to say is that while you're not going to "fix" your DS any time soon, it can take remarkably little time to convince him that he is not actually *broken*. He simply needs to access his learning in a different way. It won't all happen overnight, but it can start today.

Goodness, I hope this isn't as preachy as it sounds! Don't mean it to be. Deep breath. You're doing great. You can do it, you're already doing it.
Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 01:42 AM
Well the school district does not have anything in place for 2E kids. Their core curriculum is based on1 year aadvancement so he is only given 5th grade work and some of the scores are based rote memorization which he obviously can't do. But we start with the dysgraphia and hope they accommodate him. Arizona was rated 5th worst state for education and 2nd worst for gifted education so this is going to be challenging but I'm ready to fight for my kid!
Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 02:01 AM
We came across a very highly recommended private school called New Horizons. The tuition is hella expensive but its probably worth it. They havesmaller classes and focus on ythe capability of the child not the test scores so he wouldn't be stuck doing just 5th grade. So its definitely something we are trying out. We haven't told kaden yet about his scores as he has karate tonight but we plan on it tonight.
Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 02:20 AM
What's the best way anyway to tell him about the results? Do you sugar coat or lay it out there? Does Bill Nye have a YouTube channel for this? I'm joking of course the kid has seen every Bill Nye video out there so he would have told me ;-)
Posted By: Platypus101 Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 03:51 AM
Probably not sugar-coating, but still positive. You're getting answers now, and with a diagnosis, you can treat. Here's kinda the sorta thing we said to DD - maybe this will spur some thoughts as to what would be appropriate for your son:

From all that assessment you did, we've got some great information about how your brain works, and how you need to work and be taught in order to learn, and to show what you know. You know how you find X really hard/ frustrating to do? Well, there's a good reason for that. Your brain is wired differently, and it doesn't get there the same way everyone else does. You can do X, it's just that to get there, we need to take a different route....

Over the next couple of days, you can start to talk about what that route might look like, and some of the pieces that might come in in the short and long term. Just knowing there's a real, concrete, biological reason why X is so hard for him and so easy for others can be a huge relief. Knowing that he can start reducing his hand-writing load and finding alternate forms and ways to create output might give him a really positive starting view on his diagnosis and accommodations. Just think how much fun it will be writing an IEP that says he doesn't need to (insert dramatic horror movie music here) "show his work" once he's demonstrated understanding of a math concept!

You also want to be honest - but calm, constructive, and matter of fact - about the negatives (not today, but over the next weeks and months). Don't overstate the problem, but don't duck his questions either. Focus on "we have this knowledge, so here's what we can do about it." There are things that will continue to be hard, where a Plan B is important (for us, that means lots of audiobooks, voice-to-text etc instead of expecting her to read everything herself; for you, that might be typing/ voice-recognition in lieu of hand-writing). Also, remediation might be required. Our reading program is, by definition, "explicit and repetitive", just like the psych report calls for. We've gone back to pre-K reading skills, and are slowly working our way up, not missing a single. microscopic. incremental. step. Gifted Hades. I try to make it as fun as possible, but when she says it's boring and repetitive, I agree, yes it is. But this is what we need to do to connect the part of your brain which you're currently using to read, with the part of your brain that we need to activate for reading.* Yup, it sucks to spend your free time doing this every day. But it works, and we're going to keep on doing it. And every bit of this we do makes your life at school easier. I don't pretend it's fun - but I do have an incredibly positive attitude about it. Short term pain indeed, but the long-term gain is huge.

Oops, more preaching. This is all very current for us, and I can't yet write in any kind of detached manner. MON has great advice above about how to life with these kinds of disabilities in the long-term, something we haven't experienced yet. I just wanted to share some thoughts about getting through the next few weeks, as well as let you know how much good you can also do, even in the short term.

Hope this helps. Sorry for length!

*Note: she LOVES the MRI pictures that show typical and before and after scans of dyslexic brains, demonstrating the new connections/ activations created with OG reading remediation. I swear some days we can both actually see the neurons channelling their new pathways and hooking everything up.
Posted By: polarbear Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 04:25 AM
Originally Posted by Cola
What's the best way anyway to tell him about the results? Do you sugar coat or lay it out there? Does Bill Nye have a YouTube channel for this? I'm joking of course the kid has seen every Bill Nye video out there so he would have told me ;-)

We didn't tell our ds about scores as a starting point - we told him what the results of his evaluation were in specific and practical terms that he could grasp. DS was extremely anxious due to his placement at school and not being able to write. It was such a relief to him for us (parents) to be able to tell him that now we understood why writing was such a struggle, and let him know that we (parents) were going to do everything we could to help him learn how to write. A lot depends upon the specific child, of course, but for our ds, *knowing* there was a reason helped relieve his anxiety and that was enough to honestly make him very happy for about a full year. (NOTE - we didn't not remediate or anything, but there was definitely a year's worth or so of "life feels better" for ds before the reality of living with a disability started sinking in for him again).

We did eventually talk to ds about his test scores, but that first came about more in the context of ds trying to figure out why other kids were taking such a long time to grasp concepts compared to him... hence we introduced the concept of bell curve wink Later on we explained how the tests he'd had, combined with the work he produced at school and developmental history etc helped explain what his LD was - but a lot of that explaining took place over time, little bits here and there as he had questions or was pondering things. He's recently had additional testing for college board accommodations documentation, and now that he's in high school he's all over the analyzing what everything means - he owns it now.

The thing to keep in mind is this info is sometimes much more emotional for us to digest as parents than it is for our kids who've already been living it there whole life. The tests, the results, the numbers, all of that - aren't the big deal for my ds, for instance. The big deal is the impact of his disability - the tests, the diagnoses, the numbers etc - those are all just explanations that help things make sense.

I'm glad you have some answers now - I hope that you'll be able to use the results to put together a plan for school and home for accommodations/remediation/etc.

Best wishes,

polarbear
Posted By: Polly Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 04:36 AM
You didn't ask for advice on this aspect so I apologize for throwing this out, but I can't help but notice all those difficulties can be symptoms of a sleep problem, or made worse by low quality sleep. Whether or not there are sleep red flags like snoring, an overnight sleep study can give a lot of great info about the quality of sleep.
Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 04:44 AM
OK so we kind of talked to him using the analogy of a car engine as his brain. We stated that there are parts of his brain that are so good at what it does it draws some of the energy from other parts of his brain like the part for memorizing or focusing or writing. So we are going to make his brain/engine stronger in those parts while keeping the strong part just as strong. He said "so like tune ups or rebuilding some of the parts to make the engine as a whole work really well? And we said yes. He seemed to understand that so I'm hoping it was the right way to explain it to him.
Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 04:46 AM
Polly he sleeps well but does have large tonsils so that's a great idea thank you
Posted By: KTPie Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 12:37 PM
Cola, I'm a fellow 2e mom and it's a wild ride. I enjoyed the books Academic Advocacy for Gifted Children: A Parent's Guide by Gillman and also A Nation Deceived (free download online). We ended up pulling our 6.5 year old to homeschool as there is no gifted programming in our state but before we did I found both books extremely helpful. Best wishes to you!
Posted By: Platypus101 Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 02:04 PM
Great analogy, Cola! I hope that first discussion went well; it sounds like you had a good conversation with your DS.

I realized by light of day I didn't even mention the gifted part, oops. As you did, I found it important to discuss DD's strengths, both as an important part of her, but also to acknowledge that she has a significant extra frustration in the classroom, from being able to understand and learn much faster than most, orally - yet not be able to keep up when reading and writing is involved. Her Ferrari has hay cart wheels, perhaps.

I think this aspect of the 2E combo has been the biggest source of anxiety for my kids: the work is both too easy to engage them and yet too hard for them to actually do. All at the same time. This is REALLY hard for some teachers to get. I've had a do a lot of fighting about "make-work": if the act of writing is that hard, it is unacceptable to require more of it than is actually needed to demonstrate mastery of the material. No gifty is going to like repetitive worksheets, but for some of these 2E kids, it's important to recognize that you're not simply trying to protect your "special snowflake" from boredom - you're actually trying to reduce an activity that can cause significant mental anguish. Needlessly.

Ah, my soapbox is still in full force this weekend, I see. Just trying to say, you really can't understand the impact of one E without looking at how they affect each other. Key concept for your DS - and even more so for his teachers! It sounds like you are off to a great start. Hugs and strength your way.
Posted By: DeeDee Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 02:25 PM
Originally Posted by Cola
Ds 9 in gifted 4th grade self contained class diagnosed highly gifted, ADHD inattentive, dysgraphia, and rote memorization disability. How difficult is this going to be in the public school system?

Depends.

There is so much the school can do to make an appropriate environment for your child. If they will do it, it won't be that hard. If they won't, it will be very hard. This may vary on a teacher-by-teacher basis, and teacher fit will be make-or-break, especially in the elementary and early middle years. Some things:

--Over time, teach your DS to let you and his teacher know when something is a struggle for him. Our DS had a rotten year, and we taught him that school at that time was like a poorly fitting shoe that hurts, and we were trying to make changes to make it better for him. He knew we were on his team, and he understands that it's not his fault. Very important that he know that it's not his fault if things are hard because of his disability.

--Be a positive communicator. Be ready to offer school information about what is hard for your child, and be ready with suggestions about how tasks could be made to fit him better. Always compliment them when they make special efforts on your child's behalf, and send those compliments right up the food chain to principal/superintendent/etc.

--Know that new challenges will pop up, and be prepared to problem-solve. Teach your child that problems can be solved, and that he can often find solutions in collaboration with his teachers.
Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 06:04 PM
Thank you everyone. So far the school hasn't been very helpful and we are a 2 income family so can't home school. Found a fantastic private school that works with the child's strengths but its $1690 a month for both kids so we are now trying to figure out if its even possible. It came recommended by the specialist but given the cost they are going to make a list of schools that may help but these schools are an hour away whereas this private school is literally 10 minutes away. Any preferences for 2E kids?
Posted By: DeeDee Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 06:48 PM
Personally, I wouldn't let my kids spend 2 hours a day commuting.

We have chosen to stay in public schools-- private schools have NO legal obligations regarding giftedness or disabilities, and it would have been impossible. In public school, your child is entitled to a Free, Appropriate Public Education (FAPE)-- which means that you should be able to work toward a reasonable solution. I am well aware that this can be difficult-- the tales one could tell-- but for us, staying and working through the issues has been the best of the options for our 2Es.

Posted By: Cola Re: officially joining the 2E club - 01/24/15 06:58 PM
If we went with the other school district far away...which we truly won't...we would move there.However, my kids already go to a public school in a ddifferent district and my mom drives them and picks them up. She absolutely loves having the kids and these are their only grand kids so needless to say my kids are spoiled and love their grandparents. I would never take that away from either party. Our current issue is that his current class is large with 25 kids mixed of 4th and 3rd grade. This private school has a 1:5 ratio. Bit the cost is absolutely high for our Arizona area. Man this is tough and stressful!
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