Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Worried about accelerated classmate not doing well

Aww thanks @aeh, we are so proud and so grateful. I truly give thanks every day for every person in his life who is helping him succeed and be happy!

Little A’s mom had a part to play in this as well. I don’t forget these things. It would be easy if I could just look down on her as that over invested hothousing mom and on her child as “the child that shouldn’t be there”,

DS7 is there and little A is there and they’re both kids that someone else could assert “shouldn’t be there” but they are and they should be both successful and happy.

No Iowa acceleration scale, @indigo, since we are not in the US (I thought you’d remember, LOL), but with a birthday so late in the year a formal evaluation would have been mandatory where we live, too. However, a friend who’s a neurologist and psychiatrist and has entered a child with a May birthday herself tells me that she thought that the evaluation was a joke, the school psychologist clearly out of their depth and that an assertive parent (who, in little A”s case, happens to be an educational psychologist herself!) might easily sway the results. The system, as a rule, is so suspicious of acceleration, that it is usually much more likely to err on the side of no acceleration even though it would be appropriate. I do hate that the situation plays into the negative stereotypes people have about it.

@spaghetti, to clarify (yeah I know I wrote a novel, sorry) this little giftie doesn’t have an aide, my own DS7 does, as she’s (as far as I know) perfectly healthy and neurotypical. She’s just young. The teacher appears to think she rather needs one, though, so sort of borrows DS7’s aide for her.

I don’t really think it is a sustainable situation, but you all are right in pointing out that she may just need a little more time. Hopefully things click for her in the second semester. There will not be a split classroom available, so it’s success or retention, I’m afraid.

We had a slightly similar situation with DD9 entering middle school (fifth grade this fall. She struggled (still struggles, really) with executive function issues and I had to go meet a few teachers and explain that she was actually up to two years younger than her classmates and while she did her best and we tried to support her as best we could, it was our experience that some things are really a maturity issues and can’t be accelerated. But in her case, nobody had any doubt that intellectually and academically, she was right where she should be, because of how she blows tests and assignments out of the water.

I”ve got so much anecdata by now, with accelerated family, friends, kids of friends and friends of kids....there is so much social, emotional and executive function baggage, the academic bit’s just got to work.