Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Gifted class is "easy", regular class is "hard"!?

So finally this year in 3rd grade, DS has some somewhat meaningful enrichment. Gifted class (200 minutes a wk) plus accelerated math. It isn't challenging in the sense that he has to work hard to understand the material, but it is enough of a bump that he actually has to listen to the lesson and read the questions, which is actually a big step for him.

So in talking with DS about school, I asked if the work in his regular classroom is easy, hard or just right. He says, its hard. I ask about the gifted class, he says its easy. I asked him why its easy and he says because its fun! And the regular classwork isn't fun? No. So apparently, to him "easy" and "hard" have more to do with how interesting the work is to him than the level of challenge it provides!? And I think he means that the classroom work is hard because it is boring and harder for him to focus on.

Just wondering if any of your kids have similar perspectives? Also wondering if I should intervene with the teacher or just leave it alone? We have PT conferences coming up so I'm wondering how to address this.

ooooh, yes :-) I think it's just a language issue, isn't it? He means "easy to concentrate on/hard to concentrate on"; you mean "unchallenging/challenging". The situation seems natural enough - I think you just need to do some terminological clarification!

I would definitely mention it to the teacher, in the context of saying something positive about the enrichment and saying that your DS has made a comment about how much easier he finds it to focus on this work, and isn't that interesting?

I have that very same perspective myself. But my DS isn't skewed that way (yet.)

Sometimes it is literally true. Boring work is hard because the brain doesn't pump itself full of the exciting natural chemicals that makes more challenging stuff easy. Focus follows interest, learning follows focus.

Based on personal experience, I'd look out for things like poorly taught history where a bunch of facts with no context sounds easy to some but is really hard.

I can only imagine this is quite typical. I already see the beginnings of this idea in my Kindergartener.

That is my concern. He has actually been doing surprisingly well behaviorally this year, but his teacher did mention (in reply to my completely unrelated email about a spelling word that I posted in the bad homework thread) that he sometimes has trouble focusing and paying attention. The fact that she brought this up in a completely unrelated discussion concerns me a little. Oddly enough, I fear that the gifted program actually make the regular classwork seem more boring since he now has something to compare it to, kwim? And the way the teacher mentioned this "focus" problem also implied to me that she is not recognizing that the material is not challenging enough. However, I can see how it could be missed because he doesn't ace every assignment due to not reading the questions or trying to rush through it to get done first, both of which we are working on and making progress. He just brought home a math test with a 100% that he was proud of. I had a hard time getting him to understand that I was proud of his performance not because he got 100%, but because it was obvious from the test that he had actually carefully read the questions and put forth the necessary effort in explaining his answers, which he tends to resist. LOL, he sometimes "showed his work" by illustrating the word problems (literally drawing a map of the girl's trip to the zoo and the park, complete with animals and swings!) but the teacher seemed satisfied. Anyways, for my kid who is what I call a lazy perfectionist (usually thinks he should know the answer without ever paying attention to the lesson or reading the instructions) this is a huge step forward for him. So thus far 3rd grade has been good for him, but I worry that boring, underchallenging work in the regular classroom might ultimately undermine this. But then again, he's doing pretty well overall, not getting in trouble, so maybe I should just leave well enough alone. I mean, he does need to learn how to deal with boring assignments too, right?

BINGO.

YES. DD is having this problem-- and has in the past. When she gets a taste of what "real" appropriate instruction and pacing looks like? Yeah-- it just makes it all the more obvious how flat and awful the rest is. Like comparing filet mignon to Alpo. Right now, that's the difference between AP Lit (the real thing) and... well, almost everything else. DD can see how much more awesome US history, American Government, etc. COULD be with the same pacing and depth.

It can make it all the more painful to know how good it COULD be-- but isn't.

I do think that there is value in pushing the idea that sometimes we do things "just because" rather than for personal enjoyment/enrichment/benefit. But the percentage is a pretty tricky thing to get right.

Oh yes, definitely -- for the reasons listed above.

And I have this perspective, as well -- it is easy for me to read books I like (more advanced books than they would choose to read themselves) to my kids, but very, very difficult to sit through the "baby books" that DD wants over and over. I want to scream and pull my hair out when she reads some things, but more interesting books are fine. Same principle for gifted kids in regular classes.

I can say that there isn't always that level of volition to it. And maybe it's where the line between gifted and ADD gets fuzzy. Being computery, in college my dad had asked if I would like to help him enter some data into his Commodore-64. Lists and numbers, I sat down, happy to help, got maybe 10-15 rows typed in and literally fell asleep at the keyboard.

Though I agree, making the context richer helps, but for me trying to find a deeper take on it and imagine questions I might look up and speculate on, etc. are most engaging. I also remember in school trying to figure out who in class understands the material and who doesn't and contemplating ways it might be presented better. Anything to stay on topic and bring a more top-down perspective on things. Those are skills I've found quite useful professionally.

When I was in high school, I'd compare notes on my classroom experience in my AP classes with some of my non-AP friends, and I came to the conclusion that my classes were easier... except for math, I suppose, but I still viewed their work as an intolerably large amount of drudgery.

Their history/science/literature work consisted mostly of what I then termed "fun facts" and later came to refer to as "one-liners from Hell," useless and context-less facts that may have appeared only one time in the text and never in class discussion. Who cares what year Columbus was born in, or the precise year in which Longfellow pretended to live off the land in seclusion, or the exact atomic weight of Carbon-12?

And then my friends would say, "But... essays!", like it was a four-letter word. We each agreed that the other had the short end of the stick.

lol, oh wait, did you mean that to be funny? If there is only one atomic weight to remember, it is the atomic weight of Carbon-12 since that is the basis of all other atomic weights. And it's easy to remember, it's 12.

We don't do "funny" on this board.

Gifted issues are serious business that require the utmost focus on the underlying issues at hand.

It was unintentional comedy, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.

That particular "one-liner from Hell" has had no relevance to me in the last 22 years. I'm not sure it was even mentioned in my Chemistry class, which was sadly downgraded from AP due to lack of takers.