Never excuse his oppositional behavior or "getting in trouble" as gifted behavior. First, this will incense the teachers. It might seem to them that you are blaming the teacher for your son's behavior and giving him no responsibility for it.
Second, as a very intelligent child, he still needs to learn to behave. Yes, it is unfair to expect a child to sit in a class with nothing fun to do while watching everyone else have a good time learning. And yes, changes need to be made, but at the same time, he needs to start learning some coping skills--hopefully with the help of school. Help him to dream about what the ideal learning situation would be and then work on approximating it. Right now, he is just reacting to a poor fit, but if he can start thinking about what he actually wants, he can get some ideas about how to adjust school to make it a better fit in a way that honors his needs, and helps him learn that he has the power to do something good with a bad situation.
Thank you! It is nice to see this balance and I wholeheartely agree! I honestly think this is one reason why it had gotten as bad as it has. I strongly feel that kids should learn to behave and respect their teachers no matter what they have to do. I have never been the parent that thinks their child is perfect or that they can do no wrong. I know that he has been disruptive and I want to help him not be in any way I can. I started out with the belief that he is ahead so what he really needs to learn is the social and behavioral side. That while the other kids learn to read etc. he can learn to be a good student/classmate. I have sided with the teachers for the most part and talked with him daily about apropriate behavior and options he has for making better decisions (though at times I have wanted to throttle the teachers for some of their decisions but they are the athority figure at school and he needs to respect that). Despite that, we have experianced the teacher getting defensive and upstet anyway, because I mentioned that some of it - by no means all - may be because he was bored even if it didn't excuse it in any way at he is still responsible for his actions, just that if she challenged him a bit more it may get a bit better. Wrong path....
Overall I am just hoping that by testing I will have some "proof" that he is advanced and then have weight behind my case. Then it isn't mommy saying her baby is gifted and why arn't you treating him special? It is a test showing his strengths and weaknesses and how can we work with them?
Ask for examples of positive things he did at school so he sees himself as someone who does good things and isn't a "bad" boy.
This is the peice I think was missing the most last year, he would tell me the things that went wrong but no matter how I tried to pull them out he wouldn't tell me good things he did. He focused solely on the "bad" behaviors and internalized them rather than looking at the fact that he also did xyz that was good. We are going to have to work on that this year.
