We got called in for a conference with the G/T teacher for DS7. Basically, he isn't doing any of the work in his pullout class. The most recent example was researching inventors. The inventions were on one side of the page and inventors on the other. He was to Google them all and draw a line from inventor to invention. He did one of them and quit. He, quite frankly, told the teacher he was playing instead of working. Most of their work follows this model: look something up and record it in some manner. They are learning to research.
When I first posted about this, I thought this was just about writing, but this activity wasn't really writing. The teacher showed me example after example of poor work. Her conclusion is that he's not creative and he's immature.
On one hand, she tells us that his entrance scores were "rare" for their population. On the other, he's doing the worst in the class. She isn't interested in finding the disconnect at all. I asked for her help with that and she said "I'd be a millionaire if I could figure that out."
She also told us that they won't do math or science in his gifted class, which are his strengths. We were dumbfounded.
Couple of questions:
-For those of you with kids in public school, have you ever removed your child from the gifted program?
-If the school won't help me sort out why he's under-performing, where do I go? DS hasn't had formal IQ testing but I'm concerned about spending the money and then the school not caring about them anyway.
It isn't a question of ability. His last MAP scores are 207 in math and 196 in reading. In addition, the school offers little differentiation and they have already said they won't subject accelerate.
