I pushed for him to be tested because I thought he was gifted, and the policy in our state is to get them identified as early as possible. I suppose I wanted confirmation of my own suspicions. He is a very quick learner, he's a bit young to be judging on homework, but if I go by how quickly he learns a computer game, plays other games, I see he can learn very quickly.
But now I'm worried that he's got some kind of learning difficulty. I've noticed before that the teachers are telling me things about his ability and knowledge that are incongruent with what I know of him from home.
As I said, I could maybe understand that he might just be bright, although he doesn't apply himself to anything unless it also captures his imagination, but reconciling what I know of my child to having average ability just doesn't compute.
A teacher told me when he was in his first term that he didn't know the phonetic alphabet, just the names of the letters, yet I know that he could say the sounds of the letters at home and had been able for a long time.
There have been other instances similar to this, and I am getting the feeling that he is either bored so he doesn't try to answer the teacher correctly, or maybe he is overwhelmed by being the focus of their attention so that he feels like he just wants to get away and can't concentrate on what they want. Maybe he also picks up on their expectations.
The woman who tested him is not experienced in giftedness testing, and to be honest here where I live there is a culture of cutting down tall poppies.
When he was at kindy, the kindy director told me that she thinks he does stand out from the others. This was a woman who my son had a particular bond with.
I think what I'll do is keep an eye on how things are going for him at school, and if there is real evidence to doubt his supposed averageness, then I'll consider retesting at a later date.
I myself know that low scores on IQ tests, especially when incongruent with other sources, can be unreliable. I'm not yet ready to believe that my perception of his ability is a product of my imagination.
I'm feeling very defensive at the moment that people who know about what's happened are just labelling me as someone who thinks her ordinary son is exceptional based on looking through rose-coloured spectacles.
This is making me seriously doubt myself, which is not a bad thing, but I also need to remember that if there's a chance that my child is underachieving, then I need to be taking steps to remedy that.
