PS what IS it with schools feeling the need to disprove that these kids are what they've already proven themselves to be? It scares me that these are the people teaching kids in general, not even just the gifted kids they have such issues with...
I suspect some of it is jealousy and their own feelings of inferiority. Most of these teachers have their own children, and chances are very good that these children are not advanced or gifted. DS's teacher last year had 8 (!!!) of her own children (or maybe it was 6, but still), with the youngest being in preschool and the oldest being in college. Her Dh was staying home with the kids while she worked. If I had to make a wild guess, she was doing the job for the paycheck and the last thing she wanted to see were kids who were getting help at home to become more advanced and clearly doing better than her own. So I became (in her view) a pushy hot-housing mom, otherwise how could DS do so much better than her own kids? This is all speculation but I'm trying to look at things from their view and how they deal with the cognitive dissonance of teaching children that are more advanced than their own. They don't want to say "Oh, yeah, my kid really is average and despite being a teacher I'm not doing a great job with my own kid." They want to explain away the data or label the parent as a tiger parent. The most sympathetic teachers, that I've found, are those who have older children who were themselves advanced and now doing well. So there is no anxiety or jealousy related to it. It's no different than other people in general. I don't go running around saying how advanced my kid is to other random parents because of the evil eyes that I'd get and I doubt most teachers are any different. They want to teach kids that are similar to their own kids, or behind their own kids (in general! Obviously their are huge exceptions, like the spec. ed teacher who did the WJ on DS and said how amazing it was, even though he had average kids in the same school).
