bluemagic and Notherben, I do think that the take-away message with kids like ours (mine is one, too) is that they DO need more scaffolding with skills that
other children tend to learn and take to heart when they are in early middle school.
The real problem is that at that point, note-taking and an assignment book seem so incredibly useless and redundant to kids with high cognitive ability. I really saw that with my DD. Honestly, she was able to ACE AP US History
without taking any notes. I left it alone, quite frankly, because with the virtual school, the assessments
were all that mattered, more or less, and she was acing those handily using her idiosyncratic method. Whatever works, yk?
She did the
exact same thing with geometry when she was in 8th grade, incidentally-- she overestimated her recall, tanked the first exam in the second semester (due to her procrastination, frankly) and then realized that it was weighted SO heavily that there was no way to earn an A in the class... and then she stopped TRYING. She resists doing enough practice in math for the material to truly STICK, and then struggles on assessments sometimes when she gets in over her head. It's maddening to watch.
I was pulling my hair out over that class for the rest of the year. It was awful.
On the other hand, she needed the supports of me being on top of when things were due, and helping her to put them on a calendar that she checked on each day, etc. I had to spot check her notebooks in every class to
make sure that she was taking adequate notes. I did that until she was a senior in high school.
My friends who have a pair of children (HG+) did this with their older son-- the one that we claim is my DD's Sith twin, btw...
until he was into his second semester
in college. He was just YOUNG. Their younger child is still in secondary, and they are also doing it with him, though he's less "difficult" this way than my DD or their older son.
All kids seem to need about two to three years of demand/load on some executive function-related academic skills, and until they get that, they NEED scaffolding.
It is a real bummer to me that schools don't understand that GT kids usually don't GET "load" placed on those things until high school. We ran into that ourselves; the school interpreted any concern on our part as "well then clearly she doesn't belong in ____ class/grade." To which I countered--
yeah-- but it's not the MATERIAL that is the problem. It's the work-output and expectations of independence/study skills.DD still needed the same supports that middle schoolers get in abundance, and so did her Sith Twin. I'm realizing that many HG kids seem to. It's that delayed executive development that comes as part of the package deal. We have every expectation that we'll be hounding her not to leave assignments to the last dying minute NEXT year (her first in college) as well. {sigh}
{hugs}
My advice?
INSIST that you be given complete transparency on any electronic messages, assignment websites, etc. I hold all of our DD's passwords, and I use them to check on this stuff. Regularly. It's the only way that I can casually ask after things that I know to be on the horizon, and for which I'm seeing no effort or attention at all on her part. It's not perfect, but it's better than it would be otherwise. I leave her alone about stuff that she DOES seem to be doing, and it is getting better over time.
All of that to note that this seems to be somewhat norrmal for HG kids, and that there IS hope.
