The fact is that they are simply normal children, no different than their peers. While my son may have an aptitude for math/logic based skills, another child may have an aptitude for lightening quick thinking on a baseball field -- fielding a grounder, checking the runner at second and throwing to first to get the runner out. I am a software engineer, yet I am in awe of the man who raises my car up on a lift and is able to take the engine apart, fix it, put it back together, and have it running as good as new. In my view, that man is gifted. At least as much as you and I, or our children.
[steps down from soapbox...]
I agree with you 100% that the talents you listed--talent for fielding a grounder, putting a car together, etc.--are "gifts," and they are valuable!
Everyone has gifts. Everyone!
But these gifts are different from being "intellectually gifted," which is the way the term "gifted" is generally applied in the field of education to kids who score in the top 5% or above (sometime top 2%, sometimes top 10%, sometimes other %s...) on IQ and/or achievement tests.
Not everyone is intellectually gifted,
by definition.
You don't have to love the term, I guess--though I have to admit that resistance always puzzles me, since it's a word with a very specific educational meaning that has nothing whatsoever to do with being better than others, nor do any of us involved in GT education think that it makes the kids better--but you probably do have to accept that it applies to your child.
GT kids just think differently, they learn differently, they need differently. A child in the middle of the Bell Curve simply doesn't beg for word problems at bedtime. That's just a fact.
As a side note, I attribute the all-too-frequent discomfort with the word "gifted" to be part of the same anti-elitist backlash that mostly eliminated grouping in schools--grouping (which is different from tracking, BTW) that helped ALL parts of the Bell Curve, not just the high-scoring tail. The result of this shift has been a woeful lack of attention for GT kids in most of the educational system in our country. So personally, I wish everyone in this country would stop reading more into the term "gifted" than is there, get over whatever semantic issues they have with the word, and just deal with the problem that is posed by systemically undereducating these kids.
I don't care if we call the kids "berdofpid" (or any other random collection of letters), as long as we provide a decent education for them!
Stepping down from *my* soapbox now. Who's claiming it next?
