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

Has anyone else identified drawbacks to being gifted in a regular class setting that are not so obvious but still very important? For us these two took a while to identify:

1. Because DD is socially adept, an outstanding citizen, and can do her work more easily, teachers intentionally sit her next to the kids that other children cannot handle being next to, probably because those kids cannot handle the conflict or distractions. This started happening in 2nd and we didn't catch on why it was happening until the end of 3rd.

2. Because DD often finishes her work first, teachers use her as a teacher's assistant. Rather than bother with differentiation, they have her do tasks like staple handouts. There have not been real TA's in our district's schools for years.

In a funny way, this is the "advantage" to being a more emotionally intense, less mature child like my DD. They tried having her "tutor" early on, but it was an abject failure. She lacks the patience to be a good teacher. To her, it's obvious why x + y is z, and why ISN'T it obvious to YOU?

Ultra-- yes, tutoring is not one of my DS's regularly assigned jobs, either. :-)

I see great advantages to his being mainstreamed with non-gifted kids for the greater part of his day. Most of his life he will spend communicating with non-gifted people, and working in workplaces with them. He needs to know and accept the pace at which most people do things, and be able to cope with that.

DeeDee

We had this one too. DD (now 12) was is a regular classroom in kindergarten. Her teacher had her sit next to a problem child on a regular basis. When DD found out that kid would be in her 1st grade class, she did not want to go back for first grade. I had to go to her first grade teacher and get assurances that she would not be seated near him for at least the first six weeks. The first grade teacher agreed and then commented that the kindergarten teacher had recommended keeping these two together since DD calmed him down. Ugh!

DD12 moved to a gt classroom in second grade. There still were kids who were hyper-talkative, angry, and couldn't sit still. The difference we found was that the teachers understood how much these kids drove the justice-police type (my kid) crazy. They worked with my perfectionist police officer to help her figure out ways to tolerate sitting next to kids whose behavior was less than perfect.

Our other big challenge in the regular class was that DD was a chameleon. The teacher thought that DD was a typical kid. She could blend in at will. The teacher never asked "more" of DD. If she sat there quietly doing her work, then life was good. Since she wasn't a problem, her teacher could ignore her. Her teacher didn't even think that DD should test for the district GT program. When her teacher saw DD's results, she was blown away.

This is my DD. sigh.

Yep, we had this problem too. DS didn't want to stand out, which meant he wouldn't speak up in class. In kindy conferences this came out as "I think your DS has delayed language development" and "I asked him questions I thought he would know, to differentiate during class time, and he didn't answer". DS has always been EXTREMELY verbal and his use of language was what blew people away -- outside of school, that is.

Because DS didn't want to stand out, he also didn't really like the occasional pullouts where he would get more appropriate curriculum. In 2nd grade, would also sneakily pick books below his level, so he could read quickly, flip the book over and pretend to read it, then spend his time watching the kids who liked to misbehave - he thought this was highly entertaining. He would tell us about this, so we were able to pass it along to the teacher, who never would have noticed.

Another problem is that, even though he was friendly with everyone, it took DS a long time to connect with the kids in the regular classroom, so he would do his own thing at recess much of the time until a couple of the kids finally became interested and joined him. When he switched to a FT GT program, he made friends very quickly.

I know you asked about less obvious issues, but the BIG issues were pace and level, which had the overall effect of making our kid dislike school. Even though DS skipped first, the material in 2nd wasn't enough, and the pace of everything in the regular classroom was much too slow.

This is our 6 year old dd. I go in to volunteer during math once a week and dd sits on the carpet, last row on the end, and is about 2 feet away from the class, daydreaming and in her own world. Since she's not outspoken or a behavioral problem I don't think the teacher even notices how 'out to lunch' dd is during the lesson.

At the beginning of the year, after our initial meeting with the teacher (and prior to having the results of the WISC testing) seemed all on board about making sure dd wasn't lost in the shuffle and that dd would be challenged. She even mentioned it the first few weeks of school, saying "don't worry, we will make sure she gets what she needs". But now I am hearing nothing. They did have a math assessment last week so I'm hoping this means they will be splitting in groups soon.

So because of dd's wallpaper personality I think it's hard for the teacher to see her for who she is. I'm wondering if differentiation doesn't seem to happen by the first conference if we should present the percentiles of her results to the teacher so she can have an idea how far out there dd is and what she is capable of if she were challenged.

Personally, I don't have an issue with the teacher's assistant aspect. Whether it was the teacher using me or just classmates seeking me out on their own, I did that all through school, and I've found it comes with these benefits:

1) Nothing exposes my ignorance of a subject as well as attempting to explain it to someone else.

2) Nothing helps me make wider connections with disparate information as hearing someone else's interpretation of a particular bit.

3) From this experience, the career-enhancing ability to take complicated technical issues and transform them into language that's commonly accessible has come fairly naturally.

I have zero tolerance for using the well-behaved child to influence the poorly-behaved child's behavior, though.

Yeah, me too. Right now my child is being used as an "example" to the low-level U.S. history students assigned to the same teacher. Nice. THAT was one completely wasted hour.

She was literally the ONLY student asking on-topic questions and providing intelligent responses to the teacher's presentation (on class policies, evaluating sources and using MLA citations).

I know this because I'm sitting here next to her, listening in and watching her disgusted/horrified expression. Like this--



This is NOT a class switch that I'm very pleased with. Administration is probably going to hear from me on this one. There is NO POINT in forcing the honors students to sit through an hour of the teacher struggling to maintain control of the "basic" course enrollees. Maybe AP is looking more viable. <>


DD's comments thus far:

a) "This is insulting."

b) "Uhhhh WOW. I get that there are freshman in this class... but in my opinion, this isn't even 'basic' level. This is-- '6th grade' level expectations."

c) "That was NOT a lot of information."

d) (Hands clasped on face) "Get. me. out. of here...." (This after yet another completely off-topic, irrelevent question)

It's funny how I think a lot of us wish we had the others' problems! DS could never, ever be a wall-flower. He cannot stand boredom, or mindless repetition - he'll just flat out refuse to do the work. He will speak up and ask for more difficult math work, he'll ask the teacher for more interesting books, etc, etc. He also has basically no sense of self-awareness, in terms of how his behavior looks to the other kids, so he doesn't really care about 'fitting in' or doing what the other kids are doing. He just wants to be doing something interesting! Thankfully, this year we appear to have teachers who are actually willing to respond to DS and give him something to do instead of asking him to sit and be bored all day.

I wish my DD was better about speaking up for herself. It seems that while she's in the classroom, her concerns about getting her name on the board trump her concerns for getting an appropriate education.

Should I start teaching her to misbehave??

Sure. I see how it's useful, in the broader scheme of things. But to expect an immature 5-year-old to be able to do this AND to see it as adequate "enrichment"? Pfffft. In any case, my kid comes to school to learn, not to serve as an unpaid assistant. (If everyone is being asked to teach each other, that's different.)

LOL

My DD9 is like yours. She whines to me at home about how she wants harder math but she won't say boo to the teacher. sigh. I think the chameleons need a class in self-advocacy.

Seriously, our DD9 is a saintly people-pleasing chameleon. When I hear about these gifted kids who won't tolerate boredom and who correct the teacher, I'm jealous. At least the parents get a fast track to know what's wrong.

For her entire 2nd grade year, DD never said a word about the fact that her "advanced" reading group was reading books she had already read. The only reason she "complained" that summer was I kept bugging her to tell me what what going on in school.

I'm coming at this from the perspective of a parent whose children excel in math and reading, but have large difficulties with social skills, repetitive behaviors, sensory avoidance, and motor coordination. I see the kids in school who are gifted at things like sports or art, or who have great success with building relationships or exhibiting compassionate behavior, and realize they are often used informally (or formally) to help other children in ways other than academic. I'm certainly glad the extremely athletically gifted 3rd grade boy is good natured about playing on teams with my boys and showing them how to do things, the queen bee 2nd grade girl was happy to hold my boy's hand and help him navigate social experiences, and that there are whole groups of non-GT (or even delayed) kids who look out for other kids in ways other than intellectually within a school environment.

EDIT: Word choice.

I did some teacher assigned tutoring in my day, and really didn't mind it. I wouldn't necessarily see my kids enjoying it or getting any benefit from it, but for me it was kind of cool to get to know the kid who was probably held back and therefore basically a GIANT dude in 8th grade. As I recall he was just a very quiet sweet guy, maybe dyslexic, for all I knew at the time.
It certainly helped me understand that some folks are not doing badly because they are not trying. And it wasn't something I was forced to do, or asked to do a LOT of; that might have gone badly.

WOW! GREAT school atmosphere, whoever is responsible for promoting that, excellent job. That makes me just about tear up...(probably just the early saturday afternoon beer.)

But to answer the original question, what else is bad but not obvious about having one's gt child in a largely nd classroom....her constant need to define things in great detail, including and especially rules about playing, etc., can make it difficult for her to connect with some of her fellow students. (that social one is sort of obvious, but still, my daughter is a serious social butterfly and still has issues overwhelming people).

I did as well, even once I was in gifted classrooms. I think it was very good for me. It helped me develop empathy and social responsibility, as well as keeping me occupied when I was done with my work.


It is a good school atmosphere, but I also think it happens everywhere to some extent. Math/history/science/reading are not the only areas where students are asked to help each other.

YES!! Oh, that's my boy, and this sweet, wonderful girl in his grade 2 class, who was always patient and kind with him. He ADORED her. I'm getting weepy as I type this... she's not in his grade 3 class and he was so sad when he found out.

SO, to all the "socially optimal gifteds" who helped the others, THANK YOU

2 years ago, I found out that when DS was in pre-K, he finished his work faster than anyone, and was always assigned to help out the kids who fell behind. He was a little teacher's assistant. At the time, I thought it was good for him in theory; to develop leadership skills, compassion, helpfulness, confidence. Halfway through Kindergarten I was informed that he started to get bored and frustrated with the kids he was helping out and the teachers noticed that he became very bossy and angry when the others did not "get it." So I presume that was the end of that role. Today in first grade, at drop off in the morning playground, I still see the beneficial effects of the pre-K days when he was a mini-teacher's assistant. The kids naturally come to him if there is a confusion of some sort. They seem follow his lead yet he is the second youngest in the class and to a certain extent, one of the "least mature" kids. But once in little while I see him bark orders and roll his eyes in frustration. Then I sometimes doubt whether being mini teacher's assistant then had its drawbacks to him and to his classmates.

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.

I don't have an education background and I'm not very good at teaching things (also, my kids are not PG). I don't really think I could teach them as much "in an hour" as they learn at school all day. Okay, maybe in K and 1.

I haven't given up on the idea that my children should actually be taught things at school. I don't consider it a daily social skills class that they attend for 12 years. I'm not sure that I learned how to be a functional, social human being at school, anyway. Junior high?

--ouch.

My kids have all been in schools where social awareness, being a good citizen, team building and cooperation are emphasized and I really appreciate it (and I've seen it impact them *very* positively). While I think that learning (academics) benefit highly gifted kids by pooling them together with other peers, I think it's also important (for at least my kids) to have the social experiences, team building, cooperation, etc - through working with and playing with kids of *all* ability levels. Our community, our world, is not a homogeneous society made up of high-IQ folks. There is also a lot to be learned from children who are naturally leaders when it comes to social skills - and those kids aren't always going to be automatically high-IQ kids.

So - no, I don't mind my children being asked to help other children with their schoolwork in the classroom.

OTOH, I also think that it's important to add that it's not fair to *always* ask a child to help their classmates as a way of filling up the extra time that child has in class because they finished their work early and already understand it in place of giving the child more challenging work. That happened in a big way to my youngest dd in her first grade class and she was miserable. It probably had the opposite effect of improving her social skills and empathy - she became very mad and resentful over it. What I've seen work well for my kids when they were in mixed-ability classrooms are teachers who switch seats for all the kids frequently - this allows the teachers to specifically pair students for strong/weak in whatever area, but doesn't keep the children in the same place with the same child more than a few weeks at a time, plus it forced socialization among some of the children who wouldn't otherwise have ever chosen to sit next to each other.

polarbear

I definitely agree with this. It's also not appropriate to have a child help out classmates if they're not socially or emotionally ready for it. Reasonable and appropriate is definitely the key. As with anything.

chris1234--I am not totally sure what your "ouch" comment meant, but what I meant by mine was that I didn't find junior high to be a period during which I was being taught how to be a socially functional person by my peer learning experiences at school. Obviously, it COULD happen. It didn't happen to me, though (and my jr. high experience was actually not too bad).

FWIW, my child is at a gifted magnet. So...I have obviously made the ideological decision to school her only with kids in her general ability range for the time being. I did give this quite a lot of thought before I did it, but we were in an unsatisfactory school and this was pretty much our only other option. I don't feel that she's being warped by it in any way or that she can no longer relate to nongifted kids or any such thing. I don't see any budding exceptionalism (if anything, her self esteem is low; no idea what, if anything, this has to do with school).

I believe school has something to offer my kid, that's why I'm sending him. Maybe I've just been reading too many of the gifted summer camp advertisements and testimonials. My son has come home from school, glowing, singing about "five little monkeys swinging from a tree, saying Mr. alligator you can't catch me.". Right now it's pure bliss and this is precious and beautiful.

I would say this. I absolutely value cooperation, team building, social skills, and all of those things. I do agree that these are part of school. But if a child were being used DAILY and explicitly as "social helper teacher's aides" as some bright children are used daily as academic helpers, I would find that objectionable and sad. These children are all there for their own academic gain. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

You can call me old-fashioned and conservative if you like. (It would be a somewhat new sensation for me!)


FTR, this was what was being tried with my DD in K. "Oh, she finishes early and she always knows everything, so we have her help the other children, but it isn't going very well."

Looking back, I think that the happiest times of my life were in junior high, with high school being second best.

I was much more functional, socially, in junior high than I was later in life, say college.

The best part of junior high was that your grades didn't count yet.

I was called on regularly to tutor others in elementary. I loved being asked and truly did my best but it was just a time filler. I learned so intuitively from reading that I really couldn't directly teach another kid in most instances. Other kids, in my experience, really don't WANT to be taught by a classmate. Some of them can be quite resentful.

I wouldn't say I learned to communicate better with others or learned anything in particular during my "tutoring," and the kids I "taught" learned not much more. It was simply a busywork task for bright kids. I could have more productively stapled papers or made copies. All the real lessons in communication and socializing happen at during unstructured time, at lunch and recess.

I agree with ultramarina that the principal goal for school should be to advance everyone academically. If some kids are not getting a chance to move forward regularly then they are not receiving an appropriate education.

I was sent to tune the school guitars. I enjoyed it because it was an escape from the torturous classroom full of the typical kids who were cruel to me... (ah, memories ) It always went too fast, though, even when I tried to tune them as slooooowly as I could... lol

Like fwtxmom, few of my classmates appreciated formal tutoring. Oh, sure-- they mostly enjoyed having me as a member of their GROUP for group work. More than a few wanted to sit close to me-- for a not-terribly popular kid, there sure was a lot of jostling for those five seats to the sides and behind me. (Not that I'm cynical or anything, but I still remember being chewed out by a total queen Bee in junior high for not being more accommodating during a quiz. Chutzpah, much?) Of course on the plus side, I became pretty convinced that those kids had little of any authenticity to offer me to begin with, and that I was actually better off WITHOUT them.

Having the teacher tell them to listen to me? No way, and it wouldn't have helped anyway since my learning style was so reading and writing intensive. (Again, like fwtxmom.) I do recall being sent to be a 'reading buddy' or some such thing to the Kindy classrooms as a 4th-6th grader, though.

Many of my K-12 teachers eyed me with avaricious, poorly-concealed GLEE once they figured out that I knew how to run a large-batch photocopier and replace both ink and toner in a hand-crank mimeograph before I was eight. (Teacher's kid, here.) I could also fix most problems with overhead projectors and reel-to-reel projectors and recorders.

Yeah. I spent a lot of time at the office making copies, collating (before run-of-the-mill copiers did that) and generally being actually useful. I similarly enjoyed being away from the classroom.

I was also a VERY fast grader with a key-- and accurate. So I graded papers for teachers starting in about fourth grade. I'd been doing my mom's since I was six.

My favorite of those jobs was filing for the high school band program, though-- LOVED doing that. Just me and all the sheet music in a big walk-in storage closet. What a lovely island of relative peace each morning.

Yeah.

Casting back through my memory, I do remember a positive tutoring experience. I formally tutored a friend in a foreign language. I'm very good with languages, and she was very bad (I think she had an LD, actually). It did strengthen my command of the skills to tutor her. But we were both quite mature and we liked each other. IIRC, we also giggled and chitchatted a fair bit.

I just think it's a lot to ask. I am not a natural teacher, even though I'm quite social. Maybe that's my bias here. I know I'm not good at it. I dislike helping with homework. I constantly feel like I'm either giving too much help or not enough. (DD would say not enough.)

Guess I had it good. I was allowed to use extra time to:
--go to the library to make stop-action animated films and slide shows
--diagram sentences
--do logic problems
--read a large novel I kept in my desk
--make elaborate maps

I was far too introverted and bully-bait to be asked to help other kids with their work. (Could have used the social-skills support and practice, really.) But there are plenty of productive things to give a child who is done with her work.

DeeDee

ETA: now that I think about it, the stop-action film was a collaborative project, one of the few joint efforts I remember enjoying.

Since the topic is some overlooked negatives:
- Gaining social acceptance by letting others copy
- Being held up as an example of a good student based on grades when you are really a bad example with poor academic skills and just smart
- Asking questions to expand one's understanding that waste other's in the class's time who have not a clue what you are talking about
- Coping by becoming more introverted and socially isolated
- Having poor expectations about others
- Moving backwards in moral development by the social pressure from kids still at punishment and selfish motivation stages

Dumbing down to fit into the class and be accepted is often an unrealized drawback of a GT child who is most often in the normal class setting.

I just read this two nights ago... how convenient. This says that at least one founding father (plus all the ones who approved this passage unanimously and unaltered, unanimously) found many reasons for education.


From the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, via the sub-sub-committee of one, aka John Adams

Dude, thanks. I would like to live in the place he's describing, and educate my children to all of those ends, social and intellectual.

DeeDee

All I did in my extra time was: talk too much, tutor others, read, or sleep.

Mostly I slept -- this was probably the worst habit I picked up in school. Boredom = nap. Because my grades were so good, no one ever called me on it. Because I talked too much and too loudly when I was awake, I think the teachers sort of liked it. By the time I was an undergraduate I estimated I slept through at least half of the class time in 90% of my classes.

I could just stay up until 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. with the knowledge that I could sleep through calculus and physics in the morning.

So, yeah. Those weren't the best life habits to develop.

I know, right?

The problem did not lie in being in regular classes either. By the time I was in secondary schools, I was in as differentiated a classroom setting as my city was able to provide. I think it was more of a problem like Zen Scanner said:
This!

My sleeping problem probably wasn't actually just a habit (though I often describe it as such). As an adult I see a neurologist and manage it with therapies I learned doing research for my children. My pet peeve is that the behavior was ignored or outright encouraged when I was in school because of my grades. What kind of difference would it have made if the behavior had been identified as potentially life altering and efforts had been made to curtail or deal with when it emerged after puberty? I see this too much with my ds8. He displays numerous behaviors that will eventually be life-limiting for him as he gets into adulthood. But because he's smart and he's not too disruptive when he does them, they're fine. No problems at all.

I went for the actual academic destruction approach rather than mere avoidance. Although it was more of a college GPA perfection issue more than anything else. After all, once you were no longer able to get a 4.0 did anything even matter anymore?

By the end of undergrad, I had basically given up on life.

Fortunately, I was able to get tons of loans for law school!

What I've seen with two of my kids when they are with their same-aged peers is that they tend to do this nurturing thing, as if they are dealing with much younger kids. For instance, gently directing them to where they need to be, explaining things in a more simplistic language, explaining something because they assume that the other kid doesn't know about it, etc. So far my kids haven't had any negative effects from doing this, but it drives me nuts to see them do it, and I could definitely see how it might bother some kids who feel that they are being talked down to, even though this is definitely not my kids' intent. I think they just get used to being the only ones who know something already in situations like school (prior to accelerations) and they just assume that things are the same outside of school. Does that make sense?

Makes complete sense to me, mnmom. Had a younger nephew visiting, and saw my DS6 doing that talking down thing all in a pseudo-correct way mimicing an adult. Found it pretty disturbing. I wonder if they find a stronger identification with the teacher in the class and riff from those behaviors.

I hope it isn't the seed that in adulthood turns into micromanagement and being "that" person who can't tolerate others' mistakes.

Exactly the same for my DD9. Her grades are fine and she's quiet, so they're "not going to worry" about the perfectionism, lack of focus, sloppy work, etc. Thank heavens my son's language issue red flagged him. DD9, however, is being swept under the rug because "she's fine."

(light bulb moment) oh my goodness... that's what I do to my poor husband, LOL

Not sure if this is common or uncommon, but when I was in the regular classroom, I always thought that I was missing something and didn't realize I was as smart as I was -- If the teacher asked a question, and I thought the answer was obvious but no one else raised their hand, I figured it must not be the obvious answer, and so I must be dumb, and so I didn't raise my hand. For some reason, I thought this a lot, even though the obvious answer ended up being the correct one. I did not quite get that everyone else didn't automatically come up with these answers. Even though I was in gifted pullouts, it never really occurred to me that my mind worked any differently than anyone else's; I thought I was just "good at tests".

I finally got over this in law school, when I got fed up when no one would raise their hands, so I just answered all the questions. Lo and behold, I got them right.

So if you have your kiddo in a regular classroom, and there's any chance they have this odd side effect of being gifted like I did, please explain to them how everyone's brains work differently.

St Pauli Girl, I had a similar experience. I think it led to imposter syndrome, but of course I don't know which came first. It's possible that I interpreted my circumstances that way because of some underlying disposition to low self-esteem and that may be the explanation for both phenomena.

YES. This is it exactly.

For my son, that first grade experience in helping the kid at his table who was a little slow on the uptake has panned out. He's the only freshman in pre-calc this year, and has a friend/classmate who is struggling a bit. Said friend is a senior, and feels a little weird about being tutored by a freshman, even with the stipulation that "well, okay, it's Frodo, but still...". If ds hadn't developed the ability to help gracefully, it could have ended badly. And since this friend is his section leader in band...

I chimed in earlier in the thread and haven't read through all of the replies so please forgive me if anyone has already mentioned the topic below.

My eldest being a first semester Freshman in college, I've noted a gifted issues that is perhaps not a disadvantage perhaps but at least a double edged sword.

DS took Algebra 1 in 6th grade...fast forward Calc II first semester of his Jr. year. He then decided to move to some other math classes like AP Stats and Discreet Math. After being admitted to the college of his choice the college required every student to take the ALEKS math placement test. It had been 4 years since he'd done much Algebra and 2 years since he'd done any Calc. Needless to say he was pretty rusty and ended up needing to do some heavy review and taking the ALEKS a second time.

A similar situation happened in Chem. which he took his Soph. year of HS, pretty rusty by the time he hit college. If he would have needed to take the ALEKS placement test for foreign language he likely would have been quite rusty with that too having completed his foreign language studies early as well.

You get the point, done with the HS curriculum early, forget some of it or get rusty in a subject, then needing to go back and relearn what you've already done in order to move forward again.