Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments What happens to gifted kids who ...

Evemomma--

Right with you.

The meeting with the principal was lame, by the way. I just don't think he "gets it" and he's seems to be so letter-of-the-law with the core standards and very anti-acceleration (in a very sweet, conciliatory way), that I'm thinking now that we just need to get out of the school district. We need to decide if we can move, and if we can, start interviewing districts. If not, there's a "school choice" district that does response-to-intervention pretty intensively, and I may look into that. I wish homeschooling was an option with my husband's and my work schedules.

ETA: I don't know that DD could skip, either, for the exact same reasons.

Staceychev-
Sorry the meeting with the principal didn't go well. Keep us posted!

Anecdotally, staceychev, I did not do so well. I was a very "bright" child and I received no help. I am from Australia, and I don't think giftedness was taken seriously in my state until this century! I think, individually, teachers could recognise something and would give me some extension work. It was until I moved to a state where they took it all seriously, the school gave me an aptitude test upon enrolling, and I was put up a year and given extension work in maths. I was happy, did very well (except for some distraction issues...) and I was dux at the end of both years I spent there.

However, I then had to move back to my original state- and was put back down a level. They said I was too young at 11 to start high school. Truly, the worst year of my school life. At the end of the year I was given an IQ test and it showed I am PG. But it was too late. My schooling suffered so badly, I never did well again, except on tests. I ended up leaving school at 15.

Not every child will do badly because of lack of support; but for me, having a combination of extreme lack of confidence, and a lazy mother, really ruined things for me. I believe that having a parent really encourage you to do homework and study and show you different ways of learning would have really helped. I am now studying a double major, and it is torturous to do: I can not get motivated, and I get so bored, despite the subjects being my favourite. I get frustrated and embarrassed because I know I am smart enough, but I just don't have the other necessary skills needed in life. I either don't end up handing in work, or I do and get High Distinctions.

The moral of this long, boring story is: you need to fight for your child's education. And if the school can't provide what he needs, then you have to.

Had to look up what dux meant. All hail google.

My mom was an unidentified giftie who responded by rejecting school and authority. As a result, she never had any idea that she had any noteworthy abilities whatsoever, and had very poor self-esteem. She spent her adult life in bad relationships and poverty, and drank herself to death by her mid 50s. It was only after she died, and my DD's school journey prompted DW and I to begin reading about the nature of giftedness, that I ever understood how much alike we really were.

So there's a worst-case scenario for you.

About the concern about not being able to skip due to lack of differentiation:

I understand this idea and used to worry about that myself, but with these kids who learn so fast, I wouldn't get discouraged yet.

With books like Spectrum that give you an idea of national standards for each grade, and different curriculum materials and websites (like ixl for math, which breaks down all the skills for each grade level) you can teach your child on the side either after school or on weekends if they'll have it (my problem eventually became my DD getting so discouraged you couldn't get through her wall to even try, or sometimes the child becomes convinced they can only learn what their age peers at school are learning etc.) If you can teach them, you could have them tested with an achievement test privately to show a potential new school they have the skills to be promoted. The new school might hiccup at the tests not being theirs, but in the case of our DD at least it prompted the two private schools we "interviewed" to test her themselves prior to admission decision.

If the school district/principal you're in now is so dead-set against skipping, as you've figured out you'll have to try elsewhere.

But my point is the child can get moved up a grade and even pop back given the right environment. My DD was barely grade level for math (they hardly taught her anything and I couldn't get anywhere with her) upon entering her new school but 3 months later she is doing work for the next grade up. The new school assumed she'd need tutoring for the foreign language but took a "wait and see" attitude but she's doing great. etc. She was just hovering, waiting to LEARN AT SCHOOL.

So don't give up on skipping or entering a more robust environment and thinking it won't work because they've fallen behind - they will eagerly catch up, given the opportunity. Of course, the longer they go with being sidelined and never learning anything at school, the worse it gets for their education and their self-concept.

I would say don't wait until after 3rd grade to do SOMETHING. That's just my personal idea/opinion.


Hope this helps!

p.s. in case I made this sound easy, it hasn't been at all-

first, she could probably go up a grade because she gets good grades just by absorbing in the classroom and we still struggle with study habits (but attitude is much better overall) but her writing challenges will hold her back from that being allowed (until we can sort out accommodations) and her nerves have suffered damage and she needs support in that area for the rest of the school year at least for her to feel more emotionally secure - in the upper elementary grades with the social scene pushing toward middle school stuff it's a little complicated.

But without this school change or homeschooling she'd be much worse off and it does feel like a step in the right direction.

I understand the lost year! Nothing against my son's teachers but I feel that K, 1st were both lost years for my DS9. Mid 1st grade year I just had enough of it and really just didn't want him to become lazy and not care. After 4 months of back and forth we were able to get him accelerated to 3rd grade math the beginning of his 2nd grade year. Then another change the following year. We accelerated him to 4th grade. So he skipped 3rd grade (except he had really had 3rd grade math). I can tell you that our principle was so opposed to it. She couldn't even look at the positives to it. After testing and so much back and forth and finally appealing the decision to the superintendent they decided to let him do it. 1/2 way through the year of 4th grade and it has been AWESOME!! He likes it, it is going well, frields are going well. Couldn't be happier. However, it was 3 months of very stressful back and forth with the principle and a couple other key people. I wish I could say that since this has gone so well the principle will be open to it the next time. But I believe she will never be. It's really unfortunate but somehow in the end it worked out.

Good luck! Acceleration isn't for everyone but after you do the research, you know your child the best! Fight for what will be best for them.

If you haven't read Nation Deceived yet please check it out it is a great book and helped me make some decisions.

I was a child who SHOULD have been accelerated and wasn't. My mother (herself an educator, but definitely NOT gifted) bought into ever nasty (untrue) educator myth about it and refused, though I learned later that the school wanted to do so on THREE different occasions-- once in 3rd grade, again in 7th (different district, even) and again as a high school sophomore.

After the last time, my best friend (also HG+) LEFT high school (and left me behind) for community college. My mother insisted that I needed to slog through it and that I was not following the path blazed by that best friend. My grades slipped in a BIG way due to my perfectionism taking off into stratospheric task-avoidance without a tether to reality (previously provided by that HG+ friend). Oh, that and boys (well, much-much OLDER 'boys' lets just say). And drugs and alcohol. And truancy. Pretty much anything to escape and feel okay about myself for a while.

I thought that there was something horribly wrong with ME. I didn't understand that I was just stuck in a setting that had so little in common with meeting my needs that I couldn't possibly fit in. My trajectory had finally completely "broken" in my 10th grade year, my first in high school. I was done-- you could have stuck a fork in me.

It took me until my senior year in college to really recover from that, and heaven knows it cost me an elite graduate school, that undergrad GPA. Plus, you know, learning study skills. LOL. I am not much of a success story for gifted education-- and this was back in the day when it actually existed in my home state. Even my "gifted" classmates weren't really at the same LOG. It was a problem. It was horribly lonely.


Okay. Moving on to my DD, who is also HG+ (and probably much more PG than myself). We were reluctant to accelerate outside of what seemed readily accomplished in light of her weaknesses as a student. That meant three years was the outer limit, basically, if she was still to do "well" in terms of written work.

Unfortunately, this had the unintended consequence of making everything ELSE perfectionism-ripe. Yup, everything else was easy enough that it's pretty much 100%, 100%, 100%, 99%, 100%, 98%.

That has caused problems. In retrospect, we were right to be concerned about her maturity; particularly her executive function and her writing skills... but even so, a 3y acceleration was VERY conservative and it has resulted in some damage to our child.

I can't even begin to articulate such a thing elsewhere, it sounds so patently ridiculous on the face of it. But it's true. She has grown to LOATHE formal education because it is boring, repetitious, and basically only good for punishment-- never for intrinsic reward. Why? Because the ONLY authentic work she's ever had is in her areas of RELATIVE WEAKNESS, and the rest is ALL just busywork-- which eats up time she'd rather spend learning.


If I knew then what I know now? I'd have been "that parent" over SUBJECT acceleration ON TOP OF that 3y global acceleration. My DD should have been doing high school science and literature in early middle school. (9-10yo) I also think that we should have been VERY much more aggressive about math starting in 3rd grade. Heck, she'd already blazed through three years of Singapore in a year-- clearly standard pacing was a bad idea. I just don't know why that wasn't more obvious to us all at the time.

Maybe we just didn't really see the harm. {sigh}

For myself, I absolutely agree with your first line. For my dd...ugh...she has only skipped one year, and her report card looks like 97%, 99%, 100%, 100%...thankfully I think she has a wonderful language arts teacher this year who loves Jane Austen like dd and is getting her phd in gifted education and was doing research on perfectionism...but what about next year. Esp. re: english/literature, I think it is really painful to not be challenged in the area you are passionate about. Crud. I don't think my dd is at the same LOG as HK's dd, but she is 99.9% in VCI. I should prob. be doing more.