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.