Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion title nine catalog comments -- chap my buns

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@Bostonian -- not sure why that doesn't bother me as much, maybe because it's obviously meant to be absurd. And doesn't totally deny the existence of giftedness....
too funny.

I don't think I like #1 either. All the kids in town play baseball and against other towns and they keep score. Must be nice to sit far far away and Paint a whole town judged for something you have no part of. I like yoga, I think i'm the only one here that does. But the baseball field gets used heavily, from 4-5 yr old t/ball to the oilfield workers and housewives on Saturday. And with obesity and diabetes as real as they are, who's to say they're doing something wrong?

I think you're right, just a bunch of PC PR with any basis in the facts.

Me too!!!

This is why I'm a housewife instead of marketing:
1. everybody is equal = everybody the same.
2.�Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again? �~Winnie the Pooh
3."labels" are useless.
4.nobody likes a know-it-all.
5.you can't win them all.
6.I am rubber, you are glue;
Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.
7.NCLB & Race to the Top rather than teachers just teaching the kids they have: which I guess wasn't working.
8.don't judge a man 'till you walk a mile in his shoes.
9. More opportunities for failure just means you're being more active.

Hmm.. Guess I'm not irritated by that many things; I must REALLY not be paying attention.

Might be a regional thing, but when I read the word "competitive" in #1, I assumed it meant the sorts of leagues where you have to try out and pay lots of fees to participate, they have paid coaches and travel hours to play tournaments with the other "competitive" leagues. That's what we call them around here, anyway. And I think they're insane too. If we were talking about the kind of baseball where kids play on neighborhood teams on the weekends and keep score and one of the teams wins, etc. that's just Little League, which I whole-heartedly support.


But I don't really see much other way to interpret her comment about gifted kids. Other than to say, she clearly hasn't met my son. Because then she'd know how you know.

From my experience, people generally don't know. The evidence is all over this forum. Unfortunately, when they do finally know, they disappear from these gifted forums, stop seeing the gifted specialists and no longer show up at the groups they once attended. For this reason, people rarely get to know the long term story.

Brain development is not something that ends at birth or even an early age. The ability to perform well on simple questions on a test at an early age is not an indication of an ability to later perform well on more complex questions at a later age, even in the same subject. Having a large vocabulary or doing well on a spelling bee is not an indication of all around good communications skills.

All a person can really say is a person is gifted at a variety of very specific skills. This can be said about almost anyone. Some of these very specific skills lend themselves well to the academic world, yet may not really be an indication a person will be very skilled in the practice of their field of study.

I do believe labels are useful for the purpose of communications, but the label gifted is not one I particularly like. Most of the time, gifted assessments are based on very simple skill testing. Sure performing these skills at an earlier than normal age is interesting, but does not necessarily mean what a lot of people think it does. Getting too caught up in this gifted label can lead a person to make a lot of wrong future assumptions, expectations and possibly lead to denial when these expectations suddenly don't manifest themselves.

The 'spring' weather in Michigan! It snowed yesterday and today freezing rain

Exactly! If someone asks "how do you know", then you know they don't have a kid like ours!


At that point, it's ok, because you're a mile away and you have his shoes!

lol funny

I'm writing this in hopes that the Title 9 marketing people conntect to the link and read this...so geared more toward them. My experience of the word "gifted" in middle to upper middle class society...whom I'm sure that Title9 clothing is geared is:
People seem jaded toward the word. There seems to be a perception that every Mom thinks their kid is gifted. While it's true that every child has gifts...not every child is scholastically gifted. Some mothers seem competitive about this and seem to think it reflects poorly if their child is not deemed scholastically gifted. I think many in society do not know that there is a big difference between highly intelligent and gifted--the gifted child's brain will process things at a faster rate and be ready to move on to the next thing. The gifted child may also have different emotional needs than other kids their age. Those of us whose children are scholastically gifted realize that there are 2 sides to this issue. Yeah...it's great to have a child for whom traditional school appears to be a breeze...but it certainly has its downsides as well...some children are so far ahead of what is going on in their grade at public school-- that if the school is not willing to arrange something different we can have a whole host of issues...boredom...acting out in class...etc.