Thanks everyone for your input.
Edward: Thanks for the link. I don�t know what kind of tests the psychologist used to test my daughter�s Processing Speed. If writing is involved, my daughter does have some fine-motor skills problems. And in the trimester report, the teacher also mentioned that �she does tend to work at a slower pace.� I�m actually not asking the private school to divert resources for my daughter but rather hoping that they could be more tolerant of my daughter�s absent-mindedness and bad handwriting as long as she is not disrupting the classroom. What I am worried about is that getting them to accept that will require me to bring up the ADD/ADHD subject, which may very well cause the private school to simply ask us to transfer to a public school.
aeh: Thanks for the advice. Yes. I�m not looking for an ADD/ADHD diagnosis right now because my daughter is still happy at school with her friends and does OK as a new kindergartner (not to her full potential but still good). I was hoping that my daughter�s cognitive ability could carry her over until high school when she may be able to grow out of it. As for slow processing speed for GT individuals, I suspect that right-brained GT individuals tend to have slow processing speed while left-brained GT individuals tend to have high processing speed. Based on my observation, my daughter is a very visual person and definitely right-brained. She tends to overthink and easily gets distracted by fine details. She also has some problems in fine-motor skills so she works at a slower pace. I too have attention deficit problems (though never sought for diagnosis or treatment) but I am very sensitive to numbers and more left-brained. My problem is having too many ideas at the same times and struggling to get started. But once started, I work at a very fast pace as if there is map in my head with marks saying step 1/2/3/n. Many times I was going too fast that I missed fine details and made some careless errors. While for my daughter, she often writes the first couple of words to the questions like �Because� then starts thinking and thinking until time runs out. She also has a tendency to answer questions not in order, and to jump to the ones having cute pictures or familiar words. Many times she forgets to answer some questions.
Val: Thanks for the reply. My daughter does have problems keeping sitting still but if the teacher reminds her about that she is able to comply. I think the major problem with my daughter is that she is very easy to get distracted. I don�t have chance to observe a long period of time at school on how she does in the classroom but at her one-on-one violin lessons I always stay and watch from beginning to end. Her violin teacher needs to remind her many times to focus and to stand still during a 20-minute lesson. Just last week at the violin lesson, while in the middle of playing violin, my daughter suddenly stopped and asked the teacher why the small address plaque hanging from the ceiling outside the studio was lighted that day. The teacher had to tell her that it was due to Daylight Saving Time changes and that it now got darker earlier.
SaturnFan: Thanks for the reply. Glad to know that the private school your son is attending is willing to help him on ADHD issues. However, I really don�t want my daughter to take medications because of the side effects, like possible addiction, decreased appetite, and weight loss. My daughter is a picky eater and may have high gustatory sensitivity. I tested myself with couple of OTC supplements that claim to be Adderall/Ritalin alternatives, and found out that it did make me feel satisfied and calm for a short period of time. But I don�t want to let my daughter try that. I usually just let her play video games or watch TV for a long period of time until she gets very satisfied and kind of reaches a state of hallucinations. Then I ask my daughter to focus five to ten minutes to do some homework, e.g. vocabulary, reading comprehension test, math problems, and etc. So far it works OK.
ChasingTwo: Thanks for the reply. Yes. I really want my daughter to stay at this private school and haven�t thought about the possibility that she may need something different. All her friends since preschool are now at the private school and I can�t imagine how she could leave them and make friends in a new environment.
polarbear: Thanks for your detailed reply. Really appreciated. I feel that you really understand my concern. My daughter is very impulsive and easily gets upset. It is very hard for her to make new friends and to keep the friendship. Her good friends at the private school are those she has been friends with for over two years since preschool. So I am afraid to make changes and am afraid to break what currently seems working fine. I even think that it is OK for my daughter not to reach her full potential as long as she is happy. My wife and I overcame many difficulties to have our only daughter at a very late age. We just want her to be healthy and happy, and to live a simple life. It would be nice for her to excel at life but if there is too much risk involved, we probably wouldn�t encourage her to try. I know it may be unfair to her but I tend to prefer a minimax strategy in life to minimize the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario.
Platypus101: Thanks for your reply. I may be a little bit overreacting after reading my daughter�s trimester report. She is generally happy at school. She sometimes does complain about teachers being too bossy and math class being too boring but she rarely says that she doesn�t want to go to school. And she does like playing with her friends at school. So hopefully it is just me overreacting and things will get better next year.
Gus: Thanks for your reply. I didn�t know anything about Tourette Syndrome until last year when my daughter started to make throat-clearing sound, constantly blink eyes and touch face, and etc. Then I googled about it and also realized that I may have it too. Fortunately my daughter doesn�t do facial grimacing or utter inappropriate words (she probably doesn�t know any) like what I tend to do. So it is not a problem for her at school.
I also would like to add some of my thoughts on ADD/ADHD being pseudo-science, which may be a little off topic. I came from an engineering background, so I think I probably could understand why Edward thinks this way. As the physicist Richard Feynman once said, �Social science is an example of a science which is not a science. They follow the forms. but they don't get any laws.� Social science studies do tend to have more trouble in reproducing the results, as shown in the 2015 paper �Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science� published on the journal Science by UVA researchers. But I think as we realize that the universe is more and more like a stochastic system than a deterministic one, the laws are increasingly not just about true or false but more about probability. Furthermore, the observer effect probably is more obvious in social science studies thus the objectiveness is more likely to be questioned. However, �Nature does not know what you are looking at, and she behaves the way she is going to behave whether you bother to take down the data or not.� (ironically also by Richard Feynman) In summary, ADD/ADHD or not, I think my daughter does have many so-called symptoms so if I follow the methods other people have used on kids of similar symptoms, I probably will have a higher chance getting similar results on my daughter. That is why I am asking questions on this forum and that is also why I want to thank you all for your input. Thanks.
