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.
