Good article. My college-professor sister-in-law should read this. Her kids are just plain gifted, not twice-exceptional, and while they might have the high IQ in common, there are differences in how her children learn best and how my child learns best. Big differences. It is one of the reasons we were told to homeschool by a public school teacher with gifted kids of her own.
I know from personal experience how difficult it is to learn when you are under stress. Since we were told that my son needed scoliosis surgery and doctors told us all the risks which include a slight risk of death or paralysis, I have not been able to focus on learning anything. I only kind of half hear things. My mind refuses to focus even though we have been waiting since November to get cleared for the surgery, which is scheduled for next month. The pre-op appointment was yesterday. They made sure that my son understood that the recovery would be painful and they can't take away all the pain, but they would do their best. They said anesthesia awareness is very rare. They said all those risks would be similar to the risk of having a bad car accident on the way home.
Luckily, my son told the last woman that he had heard enough and that he just wanted to leave, so we left. If we had stayed and asked questions we might not have gotten home safely. We did not listen to the weather on the radio even though we knew there was a risk for storms that afternoon. My son wanted to stop for lunch at a restaurant so we did. We wanted to do anything we could to make him feel better.
By the time we left the restaurant, the sky was dark and we knew we needed to get home. We saw a woman walking a child home from school and it wasn't quite time for school to be out but I didn't really think anything of it. Lucky child. We needed to get milk on the way home so my husband stopped at a Walmart and ran in. A minute later my daughter called and said she heard that a tornado was headed our way from a friend on facebook. My son called his dad and told him to hurry. On the way home we saw the scariest, most awful wall cloud and there was a huge area that was lowering and the tornado sirens were going off and this absolutely causes a lot of stress whether you are overexcitable or not. We are okay, but people we know were not so lucky. The area where we had lunch was wiped out. The old bridge we drove past on the way home was destroyed. The area behind the Walmart where we stopped was destroyed. My daughter's friend's child is missing. Pets missing. Horses injured or dead. Every time I look at facebook or listen to the news there are more horror stories.
If we had taken just a few minutes longer at the hospital or at the restaurant things might be different for us. My son said he was happy even after all the bad surgery news. Happy to be alive.
We are supposed to go to a piano lesson in a few hours and it is starting to storm again. He did not practice at all--again. Awful, stressful things keep happening regularly to us or people we care about and we are having a little trouble learning right now.
By the way, I remember one of the things I stressed about when I was a child was the tornados. I remember the tornado drills. They had us line up against the interior walls and cover our heads. I thought at the time, what good does that do? My children wondered the same thing. There were children at an elementary school who will never have the opportunity to wonder about that ever again.
