Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Gifted program

At our school, the teacher gives the homework worksheet per the schedule of the curriculum, which is selected by the district.

I have teachers in my family and I try very hard to see things from their perspective. All over the countries, some teachers are super, some are terrible some in between, most are doing their best given their many restrictions.

That being said, I think a parent of a 3rd grader should be able to expect that their child has moved past using colored pencils or crayons to color in shapes to show fractions if they've been doing the same thing for the third year in a row, continuously showing 100% proficiency. It's intellectually demoralizing.

I don't blame any individual teacher, it's "the system" that myself and so many other parents are disappointed in.

We love my son's third grade teacher. She is very kind and patient and an excellent teacher. At the start of the year, I asked her if he could do additional, more complex math sheets or math homework. (Apparently the parents of the 4 Asian kids in the class asked the same thing). She said she would try but nothing happened all year. She did give us the CTY application, which we did and our son qualified for but there is nothing to do in the classroom.
We are in a holding pattern until next year when the G/T program starts.

My DD is in second grade. An accelerated gifted program is available, but does not start until third grade.

In the meantime, she is clustered with other gifted kids in her regular second grade classroom and goes to an enrichment class one day a week. Her teacher has attempted to challenge the gifted kids with somewhat harder and more challenging applications of the second-grade math. She also gets challenging math puzzles in her enrichment class.

This is suitable for DD for now, but not enough to satisfy her very "mathy" gifted classmate. So in January the teacher started sending him to a third grade classroom for math time. This week, she started sending him to a FOURTH grade classroom for math time. (Guess he mastered third grade math in two months.)

It seems to me that math-time only acceleration might be a workable solution in lots of cases where there is not a desire to accelerate a student across the board, for whatever reason.

The main idea I get from these threads is that there is definitely a huge range of experiences for all kids (gifted, 2E, average and special needs...) depending upon many factors...the state they live in, whether they are in public or private school, the individual districts, principals and teachers, what type of support they get or don't get at home. It's a total hodge-podge!! So we all do what we can with what we've got. If it doesn't work to the child's advantage, it's nobody's fault individually, but it's the kids and the quality of our future workforce that suffers in the long run.

I had my education in 3rd world country in Asia. I did not remember all (so long ago). With my DDs in 3rd and 5th grade, I have renewed interest. When I visited back in October, I found that their curriculum is almost the same level as in Singapore Math which means we are behind 1 grade level (in Math). Their High school graduate at 10th grade and the students who graduated there did not have problem entering US colleges. (although those are selected few who excel academically).

I volunteered in elementary school and I know that some kids can't even do their grade level of current curriculum. Many schools do not have enough gifted kids to implement gifted program and some nuthead administration wouldn't recognize GT programs.

But the truth is that extra program cost more money (staffing, etc..) and many districts can't afford it especially in nowadays. After relentless advocation, our elementary school started Khan's academy for Mathy kids (who score 2 grades above level on SMI testing). It does not cost anything to the school and the kids go to the library and do Khan academy online when their class is doing Math.

The other solution should be each ISD create a school for gifted kids because there's no enough kids in each school zone.

Several years ago, I actually heard a presentation by the district math department espousing that students should NOT be accelerated more than one year. I seem to remember the justification being that the accelerated students didn't develop true "number sense" and tended to have math fall apart in college. He also said that they ran out of courses to take in high school. (?!)

At the same time, the district adopted the Investigations curriculum. The gt classes were allowed to accelerate the kids one full year. The district did not want any deviations from the curriculum so they could determine the effectiveness of the program. It was torture. Even with one year of acceleration, Investigations was/is painfully slow and repetitive, especially at the lower grades.

Mercifully, we've seen some movement away from the straight Investigations in the gt classes since last year. Teachers are allowed to pre-test at the beginning of the unit. If a student demonstrates mastery, then the teacher offers non-Investigations extensions on the same topic. Still, it varies somewhat from teacher to teacher. Overall, we've seen a significant improvement in pacing and content between DD12 and DD9's tenure.

DD started the GT pullout program for math and language arts in 1st grade. We were told it would be a one-year subject acceleration in there. In math, they started her right off by calculating change from monetary transactions, then moving to multiplication and division. And DW and I were angry, because that's not a one-year acceleration, that's two. DD was right at the point where she was doing multi-columned, multi-rowed addition and subtraction (though still on her fingers), which is what I recall doing in 2nd grade.

Every kid in GT was doing the same work, despite the fact that she was the only 1st grader in the room, and almost all the rest were 3rd graders. So while everyone else is working at grade level in an alleged GT class, the teacher was voicing concerns that DD seemed to be a bit more needy about getting help from the teacher. This left DD convinced she was too stupid for GT, but too smart for 1st, and generally lost and unhappy.

Happily, she's got a new GT teacher now, who is showing interest in identifying DD's level and differentiating.

Yes our district uses Investigations also, and they are very strict with it in part because they are also watching the effectiveness very closely. Hence the control with which homeworksheets go home and the pace, etc.

There was previously alot of noise from parents and the district had a couple of public sessions where they brought someone in from Investigations but it came off more like a strong sales pitch. Those that really had issues with it left...it's been very quiet this year.

I've tried to work with DD at home when she wants to move on, and have gotten grief from the school for doing this. I've asked DD to "shhh" about it and that has helped but it does make her feel like there is conflict between us and the school. And there is nothing big and bad going on this year and her teacher is a peach, but if a child wants to learn is it appropriate to withhold?

Because she loves the big concepts so much we've landed on talking about that, having some cool brainy sessions and talk about the math that is everywhere. Right now she's into geometry and the mathematical concepts of how buildings and bridges are designed and constructed.

We'll start doing alot of math in the summer to at least try and keep up with her peers elsewhere that are receiving a more appropriate education. The kids from families we know in the district who've gotten into the gifted math at higher levels all have parents working with them diligently at home.

It's only carving out a better future for a very specific bunch of kids though and it's too bad.

This subject is making me have existential depression ! lol... sort of

Our school is too small to have a dedicated gifted program, my daughter started seeing an enrichment teacher for reading in K, with a couple of kids joining in as the year progressed. There were more kids in the group in 1st, and now in 2nd she's in a math enrichment group too, along with some other 2nd graders. They're doing fractions in the regular classroom right now, and the enrichment group is doing more complicated fraction work.