Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to deal with unresponsive teacher?

Remember I mentioned 'LOG or personality' as being reasons why some kids don't tolerate not getting their 'Daily health requirement' for learning?

Ok, so personality is sort of a polite coverall for things like 'Stubborn' and 'ADHD component' - so you are in a pickle! He's immature/ADHD/intense enough that he needs to learn to help him stay focused at school and increase his good behavior, but his '2Eishness' itself makes a skip (or 2 if needed) very scary. We were in your shoes, but it was easy because DS behaved in ways to get the teachers to complain enough that we 'had to do something.' Problem was that by the time we figured out DS's code, the public school wouldn't skip him because they saw him as 'so immature.' So we had to go to a private school, try and see that didn't do it, then a skip, etc. A lot of time was wasted.

Meanwhile I sat on the fence about the ADD - how much was boredom? How much immaturity? How much ADD? I felt that until we got the challenge level to be 'somewhere in the ballpark' that I 'just couldn't' do the trial of medication thing. Sadly, there is no blood test for ADD - science is at the primitive stage of 'try some medication, see if it helps, then pick a diagnosis.' This drove my fears and perfectionism into a log jam.

So advice time -
1) Hot house your child's behavior at home until you and he have ironclad security in his ability to control himself. This can be done kindly, but is time and energy consuming. Read 'Transforming the Difficult Child Workbook' by Lisa Bravo for explicit instructions. I will help any way I can to answer questions.

2) Take him to a local ADHD diagnoser and see what they say. Children know if they can't do what the other (less bright) kids can do, and it colors their self perception and closes many doors (musical instruments/academic confidence/developing work ethic) Don't diagnose him to make a teacher happy, do it so he can feel comfortable in his own skin and have the full benefit of his mind, instead of a constant feeling of 'something isn't right!!!' on the inside.

3) Demand that DH sit and observe the classroom. This will work if DH has any clue at all about what DS is doing at home. (My DS was hiding his abilities and 'learning needs' from DH at this stage - I worked on that too!) Once DH sees what DS is up against at school, he will change his tune about the skip.

4) Check out what community sports are still available by age group, so that DS still gets to hang out with his age-group peers.

5) Whatever they offer from the school, make sure that he gets to have learning peers. I'm just not impressed with the idea of a lone kid sitting in the back of the room with an upper level book or computer program. Fine for short sprints, but not a long term solution.

6) Remember that every step in the right direction makes such a large positive difference.

7) It's tough to negotiate between 'equal partners' - in some families there is a parent who takes on the majority of the childcare duties and gets more of the 'say.' I had the worst of both worlds. I 'believed' in equal decision making, but was doing all the work. Then I felt that I had to 'explain and persuade' as if doing the actual work (plus a 9-3 job) wasn't enough. But I had a picture in my head of what a 'proper' marriage was like and I was going to try my hardest to make it happen. (When said by an intense giftie, those are scary words, I know know.)

If one parent isn't willing/ or able to observe the school, read the books, go online, attend the meetings, then they get a big say, but not an equal say. They need to 'deputize' the involved parent to have the final say. If they don't see the need of this, then I recommend that the other parent 'self-deputize' because the job of figuring this education question out is too important and too big to turn into a relationship issue.


About the 'short issue.' It's entirely possible that you DH who grew up short blamed all of his normal emotional cuts and bruises on his height, while in fact the bumps were either a) normal and important steps on his path of development, or b) due to an IQ difference or c) due to an IQ difference plus a '2Eishness' such as some degree of ADHD. We are human, and it is a human tendency - particularly as children - to pick some visible difference and blame everything on that. I know boys who are very very small and well beloved because they have amazing social skills.

No doubt your DH was gifted also, and we gifted people have a tendency to view situations through a lens of 'how could that have been better?' instead of the lens of 'what do I have to be grateful for there?' And we often have such vivid imaginations that we 'live' in that pretend 'better' world. (See me and my ideal of 'proper' marriage above.)

Do you resemble these remarks?

Love and More Love,
Grinity

My son would have to be demoted from 6th grade to about 3rd grade to be considered average (I know what it is like to have a kid not even tall enough to be placed ON the chart). But get this his cousin is 2.5 years older and she is even shorter than him. Because we are not getting him shots of growth hormone, we just deal with being short at the beginning of every school year for about a month and then everyone is over it and move on. He doesn't get bullied for being short.

The cousin's dad is my brother and he was a profoundly gifted child who probably should have been grade skipped (but that would have meant he would have been in my grade or even placed a grade above me so it didn't happen) but he was short his entire life and still is. The school wanted him to wait another year to start because he was such a little first grader (K back then was done privately in a separate school)...my mom held her ground and said he will always be short, we could hold him back 3 years and he would be still be short.

I guess we have a long standing family tradition in short.

@mnmom: You hit the nail on the head. My husband has a chronic illness which impacted his height, so he was always the shortest. He was in his "age-appropriate" grade, in a 2x/wk pull-out gifted magnet, and there was a lot of "go at your own pace" material in the classroom. Intellectually, my very brilliant husband was just fine in elementary school, but when kids started being interested in boy-girl stuff that he wasn't ready for, it was difficult for him. Being short was tough too.

My experience is different. I started kindergarten at 4 1/2, but was still bored to the point that by 2nd grade I was reading books under my desk, not participating, etc. I didn't really study much after that until medical school. Socially, I didn't do well either. I always blamed it on the acceleration, but in retrospect, perhaps I should have been accelerated another year.

So we each have our own perspective on this. DH is very involved with DS, and certainly deserves an equal say. When I had DD5, we divided the work so that I had the baby and he had the toddler, and it's stayed that way to a large extent. DS and DH are very close.

So as far as grade skipping goes, perhaps the IAS would convince him, but I doubt it. He's not concerned about 3rd or 4th grade; he's concerned about what happens when the other 5th-6th graders get into boy-girl stuff, and the boys get all alpha-male, and DS would be about nine and out of the loop, not invited to boy-girl parties, etc. DH has said he'd rather homeschool than skip, but I can say affirmatively that DS would be dead in ten minutes if I'm the one homeschooling.

As far as the ADHD stuff -- Ginity, thanks for the phrase '2Eishness' -- love it! I'm a pediatrician, and very comfortable with the medications, which I write for every day. I am NOT my kids' pediatrician, and their pediatrician isn't convinced about DS's need for that -- plus, a major side effect of the stimulants is decreased appetite and growth slowdown, which would be of particular concern to us. I'd personally like to have a little ritalin around even to use "as needed" for tests, etc. Might get the Vanderbilt scales filled out and give that a try. Even just for standardized tests. Will get the workbook; have used 123 magic with a lot of success too; I'd recommend it highly.

To the sports issue, he's in gymnastics, which is ability-grouped (yay!). The gym coach understands my kid better than anyone, it goes well. Wish he could be his teacher.

Does anyone have experience with pull-out to a higher grade for one subject, like reading? The school doesn't have specialist teachers for science or anything like that.

Tht's great - So get DH into that classroom to observe.
I don't hear DH volunteering to homeschool, so he has to see first hand what your son has to deal with every day.
And when DS complains to you about school being frustrating, direct him to DH for lessons in the manly art of handling frustration in a calm controlled way. Continue to work behind the scenes, but if you aren't going to give him that skip, I would disengage from emotionally reinforcing the idea that your son has a right or need for educational experiencing at his level. There are a lot of kids - (like you) for whom it just isn't possible for one reason or another to start to learn to love the challenge of learning during elementary school. It's far from the worst thing that could happen to a child. If your child is willing to internalize a bit, he may respond well to the 'just suck it up' approach. Not my kid though. Some will and some won't.

Remind your DH that when the boys start changing you can always switch schools and reverse the skips, or do a few years of homeschooling. Try to use any shread of resource to use what might work right now, right now, and just accept that you have to take more of a 'Chinese Menu: One from column A and 2 from column B' approach to education than a 'walk down the road' approach.

Also go up a level medically from your kid's peditrician (or get your pediatrician to visit the school and observe DS there - it's really tricky to untangle PG (profoundly gifted) from ADHD, especially in a novel setting with 1-1 attention from an adult. Get the WISC IV done so that you can apply to Davidson YSP in the process, and your DH will be able to socialize with other families who have walked this road. It's weird to suddenly be 'normal' in this particular regard.

You might like to read Misdiagnosis and dual diagnosis of gifted children
www.sengifted.org/mis_diag.htm by JT Webb

Or if you want something more bricklike, try - Different Minds: Gifted Children With Ad/Hd, Asperger by Deirdre V. Lovecky

Best Wishes,
Grinity

I'm curious what you think of this bunch of data here:
IRPA - A Nation Deceived
www.nationdeceived.org/ - CachedSimilar
You +1'd this publicly. Undo
The Institute for Research and Policy on Acceleration (IRPA) is dedicated to the study of curricular acceleration for academically talented students

Remember that even if he has to skip 2 grades eventually, that doesn't mean that it has to happen all at once. He can skip one now, and then add some subject accelerations later in the year when he hits the wall again, and then go to the 2nd full skip the year after - etc. Over a period of years it's less of an emotional jolt. But it's suprising how little it takes to get your son excited and happy again. For at least a while.

Smiles,
Grinity

I whole heartedly agree with this. DS6 is doing work well above the grade he was accelerated to. But, just moving him up one grade has helped so much! The kids are closer to his level both socially and academically. I am pretty sure we will keep him on this track now, and possibly skip again from 5th to 7th.

I did read it, and it absolutely convinced me! I'll work on DH a bit more; it's a good point that we could always switch schools or homeschool rather than start middle school at age 9.

Great news...among parents of kids with scores high enough to by in the Young Scholars Program, if we can get a school situation to work well academically for even a full year we count that as a great victory. So go make some hey while the sun shines!

Smiles,
Grinity

My DYDS 7 (just turned) skipped 1st this year and is now in 2nd. He is small and immature and ADHD. We were all worried including DS about the skip. The first week he kept saying that he felt weird and that he was not ready to talk to anyone in his new class. He also felt weird because somehow some of the kids knew he skipped and kept asking him why he was is second grade. But he has adjusted very well, made new friends, and his behavior has even improved a lot. So now after all the worry he is happy that he got to skip. He had a bad experience over the summer being the youngest at science camp, and we were all wondering whether it was a good decision, but I have seen him grow so much in the last 5 weeks. It is still a bit slow and too much work but he is participating in class again and trying very hard to keep up his good behavior.
We are still trying to figure out how to deal with the ADHD and improve social skills.
It is scariest right before the skip as you second guess everything, but for now it was the right choice.
The one thing that will make it easier for him is that your son knows that he wants to skip.

Thank you thank you thank you! That's just the kind of thing I needed to hear about.

I brought up the idea of a single-year skip with DH, and he may be amenable to that.

DS's major complaint is the slow pace of subjects like math/science -- there's a great deal of review of the same topic over and over again, especially in math. Does that sentiment improve at all after the skip because the work is harder?

Guess it matters whether the skip was enough of a skip.