Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy An interesting weekend discussion....

We could make one.

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Val

Ooooh! I have a feeling I'm going to like this...

Oh I had to laugh at the "unless it's actually true." Yep.

I remember hearing some say "oh my child's reading has really taken off" etc. Then come to find out, the child is reading the family members' names or a picture book which has been read nightly to him for the past 4years. When I hear comments like that, I just nod. Now I also ask "So what is your child reading" just to gauge where the child is at. The other is "My child knows all her ABCs at 2yrs old." Well then the child starts singing the ABC song. I didn't mention that my 19month old didn't know the ABC song but knows all the sounds the letters make and that C says both /s/ and /c/.

It really is difficult to have an open dialogue about this. I had a very frank discussion about this with a friend. I failed to de-gift the living room of my gifted books (currently reading "Re-forming Gifted Education" when she came over. She very shyly asked if I had DS tested and what clued me in to get him tested in the first place. We talked for the 2hrs lol. Her DS is entering K. She was told by the preK teacher that in all her 30yrs of teaching, she had never seen a child as advanced as he and is really pushing her NOT to send him to our public school. I have another friend who is very open about her son's ability so very quickly I knew she was someone i could talk to. My other best friend in town - not so much - I don't say a whole lot.

I hate the line "let's wait until 3rd grade b/c they all even out." I think that is partly as to not miss the late-bloomers. But why make the very high ability kids wait for instruction at their level so you don't miss the late bloomers? Why sacrifice one for the other? Why not assess yearly and give each child what he/she needs?

I have a good friend, a kindergarten teacher, who gave me the same advice. I tried following her advice and found it wasted too much time. It can take a teacher a whole semester to realize that a child is advanced, especially if there is nothing in the curriculum or in the classroom to allow the child to demonstrate his/her ability. If you have an HG+ child, it is important to realize that most teachers have never had a child at that level of giftedness so they have little or no experience from which to work. At this point, I try to get a teacher conference as early as possible in the year to talk to my dd's teacher and regularly offer suggestions for differentiation.

I can't thank you all enough for your perspectives on this. I have taken away so much food for thought from your responses...

Val, I admire your unabashed advocacy of your child. And you are so right. I need to give myself a free pass to do the math (yesterday he wanted me to write out 1 billion on the chalkboard so he could see what 1 and 9 zeros looked like) and reading stuff with Graham at home because he LOVES it, and as long as he does, I'll keep doing enrichment stuff at home. I have a feeling he's going to need it!

Cym, your comment on knowing what you want the end result to be is so dead on. Right now I feel like I am in the "gathering" stage. Gathering as much information, anecdotal evidence, etc. before Graham hits school. I have no idea what the end result for him should look like and I suppose that will become much clearer the older he gets. But I am looking to friends/relatives who are teachers for advice right now, and opinions are varied.

And Master of None's comments about the polite conversations are soooo true. I feel awkward talking about the full extent of Graham's abilities and so I tend not to. I have found just a couple of mothers in my circle of acquaintances who get it either because of their own children or their work roles, and it always feels like such a relief to talk openly about him.

Dottie, maybe Graham is one of those kids...bright but not truly GT. I suspect not, but testing in a couple of years will probably help clarify things. I hear what you are saying and I have absolutely no doubt that my 2 friends were not exaggerating their experience or their frustration at dealing with these types of parents.

But as gratified and so many of you wrote...a lot of teachers rarely if ever encounter a truly HG kid. So my friends' experience is the norm. I do believe that they can be right about students/parents in general and we (my husband and I) can be right about Graham. That helped.

Thanks.

The way I've put it before is that I can't blame others if they think I'm nuts, since I so often think it myself. HG is really really "out there" and even though we've got these kids around all the time, making them look pretty normal to us, no one else has that. It's not surprising that ours come across as somewhat unbelievable -- they really are tremendously unlikely!

I wanted to add one other thing about the polite conversation... maybe two... lol.... I generally don't talk about DS locally because I don't want him to be "open for discussion". Once you've raised the topic, it sort of becomes public property, and I don't want that. Gossip, however, gets the word around. I happen to be best friends with the one of the best gossipers in town, so I can "feed" the mill with what I want out there, without having to do the talking myself. It's a subtle difference, but it means that I can be perfectly civil to people that I know would be more than happy to argue about our schooling choices if I gave them an opening, and they don't bring it up because it would be admitting to knowing something they heard "under the table". But at the same time anyone who really needs a sympathetic ear knows where to find me. Yay for small towns....

Oh, Dottie, I know a child just like that ... he's still young but his mother keeps pulling the "overexcitabilities" card. I'm pulling the "naughty" card! I've watched this child/mother online for three years, and ... well, if this kid's GT I'll eat my pants. Really. So I know what you're saying here. Not that this is the situation the OP is in, but it's something that teachers could be thinking of.

Hear hear! This is one of those things that drives me nuts, and *so* many people seem to buy into it. I was just in a heated discussion on one of my other boards about evening out ... ugh. If the HG+ child entering K reading and multiplying started new instruction at that level instead of "learning" to count and spell cat, where would they be in three more years? Probably not third-grade level like the rest of the kids. If they actually received real instruction, probably higher than fifth grade, even.


Oh, how true *that* is. I've given up talking about anything KG is doing with friends who have children. It's not worth it. I love my single friends, though, because they don't feel the need to be competitive about it!


That's what I did. Didn't work. The K teacher never approached us, though ds was reading chapter books and doing math that was clearly above level -- if nothing else, she'd have had to know that he was adding double digits in his head because he does it *all* the time on random things. I wish we'd have had some test results in hand and approached the school before school had even started. Ah well ...

CatherineD -- I agree, hothouse away while he's young and enjoying it! Nothing wrong with following his interests. He sounds like a bright little cookie.

That conversation must have been awkward in the extreme -- but it's very telling and seems to be pretty indicative of the attitude toward "gifted" kids, whether they truly are HG+ or not. It's a giant bummer for the kids who really *are*!

Hmm. I suppose that 1:1000 or even 1:500 people are extremely rare in individual environments, but if you look at the population as a whole, there are a lot of them (~300,000 of the 1:1000 group in the United States alone).

From where I sit, that's a LOT of people, and schools of education should be addressing this group, not allowing their graduates to pretend they don't exist. These programs devote time to the severely disabled, who are the other side of the 1:1000 groups, right?

Val

Pud's 1st grade teacher had the extra 30 hours of gifted education training and it doesn't seem to have mattered for squat. She still doesn't get him. Although, as I think I posted elsewhere, in his 5th six week report card she wrote "Pud is doing above grade level math" and gave him "+"s, the highest you can get instead of the check marks she had been giving him. Wow, it took her 30 weeks of school to figure this out????

Stepping off high horse and going to bed.

Well I do think they "should" but I don't know that they will. If you consider that any one teacher with 25 kids in a class could teach for 40 years straight and end up with, on average, one 1:1000 kid... while at the same time having probably a kid every other year that the parents said was gifted.... First it's potentially a good long time between the Education degree and the eventual sighting of the one kid, and second she has people coming in regularly to tell her that their kid really is the one and time and again he isn't. Not that he isn't gifted, but that he isn't 1:1000. And she gets 24-25 kids every year who are all within a good solid middle band of average, reinforcing her image of what the range of possibilities is for that age of kid.

I'm not sure that we can really make a straight comparison between the 1:1000 at the top of the bell curve and the 1:1000 at the bottom just for the reason that the severely disabled kid will never be able to "pass" as average, where the HG kid very well might (and nevermind that he might be 2E, or might have other complications that affect how he presents himself). So now you have a teacher who might find one kid in her whole career, but with the twist that the one kid might not want to be found, or might look very different from any one model of "what HG kids look like" that the teacher might have been taught 20 years ago.

So I guess what I think would be reasonable is if schools of education taught our future teachers that HG/HG+ is a possibility, just as a bunch of other things are possibilities, but I don't actually hold out much hope that it will change things in general. Some teachers (no matter what they're taught at college) will be wonderful, adaptable and accepting. Some just won't. And as much as I'd like them to be required to accept that their model doesn't include my kid, it is the fact that he is unusual that makes it an issue to begin with... kwim? If they saw kids like him all the time they wouldn't be able to pretend they don't exist.