The reason that I suspect that giftedness might play a part is because DS wasn't just crying not to go to school, that I would have considered a behavior issue we would have gotten to the bottom of, but ultimately dealt with it differently. He was begging me to make them teach him "real things", those were his exact words "Mom, please, make them teach me real things!". When we brought him home he was so desperate to learn that we had school for 3-4 hours a day because he would ask to keep going with a lesson or for me to keep talking to him and he finished a years worth of math in less than 2 months. It's slowed down some, but he still is scheduled to finish a semester's worth of Singapore math after a month and a half. He still finds science concepts and researches them exhaustively. If he continues like this, I really don't know how a school would accommodate it. He takes the introduction of a math concept, asks a couple of questions and suddenly he's just figured out the concept for the next 2 years worth of work. He is not a high achieving people pleaser, he doesn't sit down and shut up easily (I know I've been begging for the last 6 years, lol).
So, I guess what I mean by "never thriving in school" isn't so much how high his IQ is, but how he learns coupled with his personality. Occasional boredom he can handle, but the chronic lack of mental stimulation he had in Kindergarten was too much. He had done fine in preschool for 3 years, but he had expected school to be different. He had expected that he was going to learn something every day. And at 6 he's jaded and completely disenchanted with school, he regularly tells me he's not going back until he starts college. If this is a personality issue, I feel like at some point he'll mature out of it and we can work around it, if it's an issue of giftedness then he's never going to outgrow it and he'll have to learn how to manage it, but if it's a combination of the 2 (which is my guess), then I'm not sure I see a regular classroom with his age peers ever working.
My question (rhetorical) at this point is how much is gifted and how much is personality? Am I going to spend the next 12 years trying to play mediator between the world and him, sitting on this fence trying to explain the world to him and trying to explain him to the world? Or is there a light at the end of the tunnel, that I can hope one day he'll finally understand what I mean when I say "You can't change other people, you can only change yourself" and "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar"? Giftedness vs. personality.
I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but I've been editing it for a couple of hours now, so off it goes
