Our issue was that the school was not seeing my son as gifted, despite his test scores, and therefore was not willing to differentate for us. In fact, his teacher said to me that there are gifted taxi cab drivers - my guess is because of teachers like her who did not look into why someone's ability tests were so much higher than where they are performing and appropriately challenging them.
While I agree with the posts that there are definitely gifted (both identified and unidentified) in every walk of life, I think that in LMK's post, it was meant differently, although I could be wrong. I read this as LMK saying the teacher used the comment that there are gifted taxi cab drivers to argue that there was no need for differentiation for the child in question.
I would figure that a lot of people have heard such statements from educators/administration, used as their explanation of why the child requires nothing other than what is being currently offered. I recall a meeting where DH and I were expressing our worry about DS not learning how to overcome challenge. The teacher's reply was that "there are some people who just find everything easy all through life and never have to work at it." She was arguing DS needed no challenge in class -- no harm, no foul. Drove me nuts! I wanted to say, "How about we don't assume that DS will be one of those, and just try actually teaching him
something? Maybe just for yucks?" Of course, I held my tongue and tried to be a little more polite than that....
