Originally Posted by Grinity
Good Mornnig AnneMarie,
It's too bad that your school is so into balancing! I have lots and lots of ideas, but the first one is to start thinking about LOG, level of giftedness. Think about the shape of the bell curve. It predicts that most kids will closer to the middle. Even at the tail, most of the kids in the tail with be on the side closest to the middle. So if you are lucky, your daughter is advanced, but advanced in a way that is somewhat 'normal and expected' and very often the teachers will be able to provide enrichment to met her needs, which combined with what you do at home, summers, afterschool, will give her 'enough' opportunities to work at her readiness level, so that she learns how to learn.

It's true that many school teachers are quite invested in 'not seeing' that kids of more unusual LOG exist and have special educational needs, so you do have a tough road ahead with your DH. Time to start asking questions about his childhood, and his relatives' experiences, and telling stories about your own. If he 'gets your jokes' then likely he is a similar LOG to you, even if he wasn't identified as a Gifted Child. But maybe he was the youngest by chance, or lived in a district that had a higher average than your current district. Also ask him about students from his past experience who didn't have a good work ethic, but were bright.

Bottom Line: It's a journey, go slow and expect it to take a while, for both of you. Figure out the best way for you to share book info with him - do you preread and share passages? do you give him books and say: "You're the expert - can you read this and give me some perspective on it." One of the sad things in this situation, is that if one parent (often Mom) gets concerned and goes into mama-lion, hyper-learning mode, and becomes convinsed of a perspective, the other parent can feel 'left behind.' Due to Sexism, it's really hard for many men to fully back the hard work that women do to 'figure all this out.' And of course we feel hurt by that. Plus we feel scared because we percieve our children as underattack. So the goal is to learn, and lead your family without leaving DH in the dust. In otherwords, Job One is to document the 'problem' in enough detail to make sure that DH is as emotionally upset about it as you are. That may mean having him spend time at the school and observe first hand, or setting up a playdate with some 'friends' that it's his turn to 'be in charge of' while you go get a pedicure, or something. Complaints of boredom can mean lots of different things. Document in as much detail as you can. Is she 'out of it' socially because she is younger? I was at that age, yet I needed to be where I was for the academics. ((shrug))

Well, that's enough for now, but you can get more of an insight into LOG through testing or you can try a more controversial 'home brew' approach - The checklists start about halfway down the page:
http://www.educationaloptions.com/levels_giftedness.htm

It's a bit tough to understand, but the book it's based on goes into much more detail - Losing our Minds, gifted children left behind, by Dr.Deb Ruf

Best Wishes
Grinity


Thank you for that link and book recommendation. I will share that with my husband, and I think I'll pick up the book and try to summarize it for him as well. My husband is pretty clearly not academically gifted. His gifts lay elsewhere. He's a really talented athlete and the sweetest man, but he is very normal academically. He has pretty much been a straight B student his whole life. He studied hard for his SATs and barely broke 1000. I studied for two weeks for the LSATs and got an almost perfect score. We joke all the time about it, but yeah, academically speaking, we are on totally different planes. We would probably not have even been friends in high school if we'd known each other. He actually teaches now in the district he grew up in. Mine was in another state, so it's hard for me to compare, but from his perspective, my district was a lot more academically challenging than his was/is.

I have not done a lot of research about this yet, but I really appreciate the pre-reading idea. I will definitely do that, as he does not have the patience to wade through stuff like this. He is open to talking to me about it, and I know he wants what is best for our daughter, but he's not sure what that is. And he has definitely been influenced by his education background, which says that children do best when kept with other children their own age. That policy applies to children who are behind the curve as well as those who are ahead of it. They frequently promote children who should not be promoted, because they want to keep them with their peers. So there is a "default mindset" of sorts, I think, that he's operating from, that says that children should stay with other children their own age.

Anyway, based on what I read on the link, my daughter falls right around Level 2/3, but I will be interested to read the book and learn more.