Originally Posted by peanutsmom
Platypus, now that I reread your post, I found one similarity. DS thought he is not good in math. His math grades are ok, better if we give him attention, just meeting expectations otherwise. How could this be with a kid who is in VS extended range and who understood complex patterns and geometry at age three.

Easy, if your math curriculum looks anything like ours. Ours is very verbal, and is far more a language exercise than a mathematical one (reflecting the strengths and interests of the math phobic teachers who run ours schools and set provincial curriculum, unfortunately). There's a whole lot of writing and very little math.

The other common problem with elementary school math is that in most curricula, there is very little content. It covers basic calculations, and spirals every year to do the same stuff all over again (with one more digit - yippee.) There's no depth, no problem solving. If your strength is conceptual, not calculation, there's not much there for you. And repetitive worksheets of basic arithmetic will shut down any gifted kid. Add in constant demands to "show your work" without providing any questions complex enough to involve actual work, and the kids have to write the answer and then invent and recount in detail a whole bunch of unhelpful steps they never actually used but pretend they did (which doesn't make them cynical at all). If your kid is super visual spatial and can see the problem in their head - and has crazy high working memory to boot - well, that just adds to the frustration and tuning out. In mine, this kind of meaningless task sets off his inattentive ADHD something fearsome, which battles with his slowness at all this writing, to challenge him ever finishing.

And that's how you can have a gold medal in a national math competition and Cs on your report card.