I was a child who SHOULD have been accelerated and wasn't. My mother (herself an educator, but definitely NOT gifted) bought into ever nasty (untrue) educator myth about it and refused, though I learned later that the school wanted to do so on THREE different occasions-- once in 3rd grade, again in 7th (different district, even) and again as a high school sophomore.
After the last time, my best friend (also HG+) LEFT high school (and left me behind) for community college. My mother insisted that I needed to slog through it and that I was not following the path blazed by that best friend. My grades slipped in a BIG way due to my perfectionism taking off into stratospheric task-avoidance without a tether to reality (previously provided by that HG+ friend). Oh, that and boys (well, much-much OLDER 'boys' lets just say). And drugs and alcohol. And truancy. Pretty much anything to escape and feel okay about myself for a while.
I thought that there was something horribly wrong with ME. I didn't understand that I was just stuck in a setting that had so little in common with meeting my needs that I couldn't possibly fit in. My trajectory had finally completely "broken" in my 10th grade year, my first in high school. I was done-- you could have stuck a fork in me.
It took me until my senior year in college to really recover from that, and heaven knows it cost me an elite graduate school, that undergrad GPA. Plus, you know, learning study skills. LOL. I am not much of a success story for gifted education-- and this was back in the day when it actually existed in my home state. Even my "gifted" classmates weren't really at the same LOG. It was a problem. It was horribly lonely.
Okay. Moving on to my DD, who is also HG+ (and probably much more PG than myself). We were reluctant to accelerate outside of what seemed readily accomplished in light of her weaknesses as a student. That meant three years was the outer limit, basically, if she was still to do "well" in terms of written work.
Unfortunately, this had the unintended consequence of making everything ELSE perfectionism-ripe. Yup, everything else was easy enough that it's pretty much 100%, 100%, 100%, 99%, 100%, 98%.
That has caused problems. In retrospect, we were right to be concerned about her maturity; particularly her executive function and her writing skills... but even so, a 3y acceleration was VERY conservative and it has resulted in some damage to our child.
I can't even begin to articulate such a thing elsewhere, it sounds so patently ridiculous on the face of it. But it's true. She has grown to LOATHE formal education because it is boring, repetitious, and basically only good for punishment-- never for intrinsic reward. Why? Because the ONLY authentic work she's ever had is in her areas of RELATIVE WEAKNESS, and the rest is ALL just busywork-- which eats up time she'd rather spend learning.
If I knew then what I know now? I'd have been "that parent" over SUBJECT acceleration ON TOP OF that 3y global acceleration. My DD should have been doing high school science and literature in early middle school. (9-10yo) I also think that we should have been VERY much more aggressive about math starting in 3rd grade. Heck, she'd already blazed through three years of Singapore in a year-- clearly standard pacing was a bad idea. I just don't know why that wasn't more obvious to us all at the time.
Maybe we just didn't really see the harm. {sigh}
