So I have been hearing about this recently...how gifted kids will 'plateau' in their learning. For example, if there was a child that starts reading at 2, and has a reading level of, let's say, 2nd grade at 3...some people would say that in 3rd grade, the normal kids would catch up. Apply this to any topic really. Do you agree with this? I get that in the beginning, with a very young kid, there is less breadth of knowledge, and so where he/she would learn very deeply/quickly about say, math and reading early on...as he/she gets older and delves into other topics, science, computers, history, whatever, the knowledge would expand more horizontally vs vertically....and it might 'appear' to be a slow down or plateau. but, to be honest, i'm just not convinced that plateauing actually happens. If a child learns incredibly fast at 3, what magical thing happens at 6 that would slow down the acceleration, other than the aforementioned 'widening' of knowledge...which would only be a plateau in the most superficial sense of the word?
Has anyone's kid 'plateaued', or did the acceleration of learning more or less continue as they grew? I am curious to hear some feedback on this topic!
Everything mumof3 said, plus my 2cents, which is really the same as what she said...
There are hothoused kids and middling kids and kids whose parents avoid early academics. There are kids who will struggle with reading, there are middling kids and there are kids whose brains are hardwired to decode. There's no correlation between those two groups so some born decoders will have been reading since two because of coaching, some will start K not reading and all other permutations.
Teachers are most likely to see early readers who are heavily coached middling ability children, and they will even out because the not heavily coached children will, after four years of instruction, have reached their own natural skill level. The odds of any given teacher seeing more than a couple of kids in the 99.9th percentile is low. We had a 40 yr veteran teacher and ours was the third at that level she'd ever seen. They are not talking about our kids when they say this.
Hothousing is like buying and reading the textbook the week before class starts. You look smart on the first day, but as everyone else is taught the same stuff you fade into the pack.
That was pretty disjointed, apologies.
