Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments ISO Indicators for Harmful School Experience

This is a great thread. Very interesting. We were gone all day yesterday, but I'll throw in DS7's story for what it's worth.

DS7 went to full day kindergarten. He had a young, male teacher who absolutely got to know each kid inside and out. He seemed to have eyes out every side of his head. He had great classroom control, but also went with the flow. He know how to make things more open ended and fun. DS did well there until after the holiday break. He started having some stomach aches in the winter, but socially was loving it. DS was not very confident in his abilities and I had to push a little bit to make sure DS was getting all the extras. And I had to encourage DS to ask for more. It wasn't totally ideal, but it was ok. DS was still himself and had a nice peer group. I had no idea DS was actually GT until he hit a ceiling score on the NNAT (got the scores March of kindy year). I was just hoping he'd get identified (which 40%+ of the kids in the school do).

Fast forward to first grade. He has a teacher who just doesn't deal well with boys and chaos. He didn't have the peer group he had in kindy. The highest achieving kids in the class were girls. He had some kids that were very demanding in a class of 26.

The stomach aches started immediately. He verbalized "I am not learning anything there. I know everything she is teaching". I talked to the teacher about differentiation for him because the highest level for everything she had was still too low. She dropped the ball on this several times.

DS went from being curious to slowly just being bitter and not respectful to many adults. I really feel like his teacher last year in not respecting him and the other kids in the class made him not willing to trust. His focus became becoming the class clown. He still loved school socially, especially after he clicked with a few other boys. But that is all school was about for him.

I saw his papers at the beginning of the year were full of writing and hard work. By the end of the year they were short answers and drawings of video games. I got his journal back at the end of the year and the same thing. Paragraphs written at the beginning of the year down to drawings at the end. Everything he brought home was full of drawings. Volunteering in class, I watched him going from being an active participant at the beginning of the year. To basically drawing the day away and not even listening to the teacher. And she definitely knew he was doing it.

The teacher admitted she didn't know what to do with him. I requested a certain teacher for 2nd grade which was not honored. So homeschooling here we come.

Wow - it actually felt good to type that out! Whew. I see DS coming back slowly but surely. We were in a Newspaper museum at our state fair yesterday and DS had a long drawn out discussion with the man running an antique linotype machines and the mechanics of it. At the end DS said "Great machine! Can you show me how the press works?". It's just great to see that curiosity back!