I prefer the term "high cognitive needs" or "asynchronous" myself-- but yeah, sometimes you have to use terms that are clearly loaded in the vernacular, like "advanced," "high cognitive capacity," or yes, "academically gifted."
I also tend to talk about the RATE of learning being different and resulting in different needs as a student.
Because that seems to be the clearest consequence and the largest problem. It's not that she needs "advanced" material all the time-- just that she needs for the rate of instruction to be about 2.5 to 10 times what most of her classmates do. And truthfully, that includes some of the "identified" bright/GT ones.
No way can you hothouse that kind of rate. Luckily, that seems to be the "tell" for the real thing with most educators. I've yet to run into anyone that honestly believes that a 9year old can be "coached" into learning an entire year's worth of high school math, science, or social studies in a couple of weeks. They may think that I'm lying, but they don't think that it doesn't mean what I think it means.
