Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Other drawbacks to being gifted in regular classes

There is a deeply compassionate girl in DS10's class who has genuinely enjoyed his company for years. She is a genuine friend to him, and he doesn't have that many-- he is pretty tough to be a friend with sometimes. She means the world to me. I regularly make sure her parents know that they are raising a truly amazing kid, because they are.

DeeDee

I think my biggest frustration is that lack of training provided for teachers do deal with kids outside the norm, so that often our kids are just considered extra achievers or, if there is a 2e issue, underachievers,

I agree that this sounds really great. But are they being explicitly assigned to do these things by a teacher? Are they being denied their own learning because this is the role they are expected to play, every day? Does the role suit them, or are they expected to do it even when it potentially makes them disliked and brings out negative aspects of their personality?

Also, I think it's important to keep in mind that academics are the primary purpose of school.

The founding fathers apparently wanted a public school system to create an educated citizenry-- i.e. not only that the citizens would know things, but that they would also be moved to use what they knew for the good of community and country. I won't argue with you that academics are a primary purpose of schooling, but I think they are not the only primary purpose. A lot goes on in an education, IMO.

Obviously, there is a lot of room to differ on this point.

DeeDee

I think if the class size is large or if you don't have a good teacher this year, it's not ideal to have your gifted child in a regular classroom. The teacher just won't have the time to notice.
My son's second grade class has 31 kids. I emailed her that he knows all 500 sight words she sent home at back to school night (they need to know that by the end of the year) and he knows all of his addition and subtraction math facts quickly. So we are starting multiplication math facts!
She emailed me that "is wonderful!" But frankly, there is nothing special she can do for him. Probably 1/4 to 1/3 of the class will be below grade level, and with NCLBI, she must focus on those kids.
My fourth grader is in our full-time, self-contained gifted program and loves it! They started with the fifth grade math book at least, and they are motoring on ahead.

Not in my house. Your mileage obviously varies, but the primary goal for my children in school is to learn socialization and become functional adults. Academics come effortlessly -- they can learn more academics with an hour of instruction from me every day. If all I wanted for them was academic growth they would be homeschooled. School is for the harder stuff: social awareness, cooperative learning, team building, and even, yes, learning how to do group activities they think are boring or beneath them with a good attitude.


Yes, they are often explicitly asked to do these things by a teacher. And you could certainly argue they are wasting valuable time they could be growing in the skills they are good at (or even the skills they are not so good at) by helping other children. I'm certainly glad they and their parents don't see it that way.

I am not saying that a child who is a really wrong fit for tutoring others should be doing it (nor should they ever be doing one task to the exclusion of all others). If your daughter is having difficulties managing that skill at this point in her life, then it's not right for her. My ds7 certainly couldn't tutor others. He doesn't have the social or communication skills. I wish he did -- we work constantly toward helping him develop the necessary social and communication skills that he could perform a task as valuable as being able to teach to someone else. I would say, in fact, that that skill is just as valuable, if not more, than how quickly he masters calculus.

EDIT: To be clear, I support differentiation and acceleration whenever possible, and the advocacy there of. But reality is what it is, and I think there are many soft skills that can be learned in the times when a child is still in a regular education setting. And intellectual capital is not the only commodity children are asked to give to each other, nor is it the only thing of value for them to learn from each other.

mgl, I agree. In principle, that is. We've actually embraced the notion of doing what is boring or repetitive or, well-- just 'mundane' for lack of a better term. Hermione, here, isn't going to get a letter from Hogwarts. More's the pity. She's almost over it now that she's 13, which is more than I am... and I'm 13 within an... (ahem) order of magnitude, let's just say.


What I do want to point out here, though, is that when academics come that "easy" for-- well, for basically "forever" up until the time when they... um... don't?

Well, that is NOT a good thing, either. Some PG kids can seem very hard on others-- but I can assure you that this is quite frequently NOTHING compared with how hard they are on themselves.

It does them no favors to clip their wings and prevent them from exercising them... if we ever expect them to stretch those amazing wings and actually fly.

Task-avoidant perfectionism. We now live with this and it is beastly. Nothing less than an easy 100% will do, and because it is a "given" that everything should be 100%... all there is is the avoidance of 'failure' (failure being something less than 100%). If failure seems possible, it is best to avoid that task/environment/activity entirely. Yes, the ultimate synthesis of those two factors is that there is no sense of 'success' at any time-- only the AVOIDANCE of failure. My DD is a textbook example of this phenomenon. She experiences no pride or sense of accomplishment from her (stunning) academic successes... only relief when she earns (yet another) A/A+ mark. She avoids assignments which intimidate her, and requires push-parenting to tackle challenges.

Entering a challenging collegiate course of study with such a mentality is toxic.

THAT is the hidden cost of all of those years in a regular, undifferentiated classroom. In short, that is also why-- whereas we used to truly believe that what mgl says about the purpose of education is complete and accurate-- we now know that it isn't the big picture.

The danger isn't in losing their edge. The danger is that they may decide that if it isn't going to result in perfection... it's better not to try in the first place.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that those soft skills aren't important, and that students shouldn't learn them. Far from it. Just that learned, inwardly directed perfectionism should be part of the risk-benefit analysis here.

Oh yes. This feeling. I know this feeling. I am a former GT student who chose oft-relocating wife and parent duties for awhile after college. And I'm now trying to do grad school full-time and manage all the balls in the air. Point: I was *thisclose* to dropping a class last night because I didn't know how to do the first problem on the homework assignment. School is actually hard this time, because my brain has rotted or something, and I'm not good at all at managing potential failure.

I'm not sure how not helping when you're stuck in a regular classroom setting (or even in a differentiated setting, which I often did) helps that though? In fact, I absolutely agree with accelerated learning and differentiated classrooms. But also teaching children to exercise their soft skills when they're in settings where they need to. School is for learning both, neglecting neither.

It's relevant that in my house the kiddos are autistic, and school is about social skills because they need to be able to live independently one day. And that forces me to have a much broader perspective on the skills learned in school.


Fair enough.

Yes. Teaching the whole kid-- including attitudes toward failure and learning and other people's faults and one's own faults and disagreement-- that's all part of a good education. Each child should be given opportunities to do the learning they need to do in all these ways.

What stuns me is that at the moment our public school appears to be doing this job quite well for my kids. The full package.

DeeDee

Quote: . School is for the harder stuff: social awareness, cooperative learning, team building, and even, yes, learning how to do group activities they think are boring or beneath them with a good attitude.

An advanced kid can participate in all of these activities  and they're not going to get out of all the awareness and co-operation that the other kids will.  The experience of an advanced child in a group activity is different.  In a group without your abilities you're not going to get the teamwork and cooperation experience that the other kids are getting from it.  You're asking young children to be mature enough not to be frustrated from having to work with people who can't do the work.  They're either going to be frustrated or they're going to do all of the work or they're going to do all the work as well as engage and include the other kids, if I recall correctly.

They would learn co-operation, team building, and social awareness by working with kids at a similar ability level.  That's why they make the talent searches and summer camps so gifted kids get a chance to live all these normal childhood experiences that most other kids get yearly in school.  

I hear ya, "the world's made up of all different folks, adjust".  I just sent my kid to school for fun.  I told him, "have fun & behave".   I think the school experience can give my kids more of something that I can. I think there's some things the other kids will get out of it that gifted kids won't.