Ooooo.. this presses a LOT of my personal buttons.
I definitely went a few rounds with a professional educator in my own family over this one.
It went hand-in-hand with "but it all seems to even out by late elementary anyway."
Ay yi yi. Well, sure it might... if, you know, you did the OPPOSITE of hot-housing, by effectively robbing such children of the learning environments that they crave and NEED. Of course, if you did that to an adult you'd imprisoned in an elementary school classroom you'd probably be violating the Geneva Conventions. Really, who would be cruel enough to put a child into a sensory-deprivation chamber to retard their natural development?
Oh. Right. Hidebound educators that don't believe that such children are truly different from most.
Or "deserve" anything different. They should just "enjoy" being at the top of the heap, I guess, and leave well enough alone. And because that works (sort of) for a certain personality type of moderately gifted children in regular classrooms, it's supposed to be just fine for all gifted children. I guess.
I was raised by one of those people. Trust me when I say that "the gift of time" often buys such children extremely maladaptive outlets for those very understandable frustrations. BTDT.
I make plenty of parenting mistakes with my child. No doubt. But I refuse to accept that this is one of them. We have made very careful decisions about her educational needs and weighed those options carefully with her emotional and physical needs related to her chronological age.
We have given her the change to
still be a child of her chronological age AND work academically at a much more appropriate level (high school), AND let her do this at HER pace. That is, she can do a full day of 'demanding' high school work in about three hours, and then she has
all of the rest of the day to do self-directed activities. How on earth is this "robbing" her of
anything?? I truly do not understand that. It puzzles me how placing her in a mind-numbingly BORING environment for seven-to-nine hours each school day would be
better for her or "give" her something that we've taken from her.
What really kills me about people who criticize along these lines is that it almost ALWAYS happens with those that
probe for information deliberately first. I mean, I
try to be subtly evasive about my child's extreme giftedness. I do. I'm not shouting about her grade placement, I'm not volunteering the information to other parents.
So what am I supposed to do when they persist in that line of questioning, though?? Lie to them?? WHY? If it makes them feel so defensive/inadequate/whatever, then they should have taken the hint and left it alone, you know?
Makes me crazy, it does.
