Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Does your child's academic enthusiasm fluctuate?

Before entering school, my son absolutely loved learning. He loved a challenge and took great pleasure in discussion and discovery.

By the end of second grade, it seemed all but snuffed out. He seems to enjoy being known as the smartest kid in the class, but he doesn't want to be too smart. For example, he was allowed to pretest in math and he had a packet of more advanced material to work on whenever the teacher was covering something he had already mastered - but he hated it. Right before the end of school he said he lost it; I suspect he threw it out because he hadn't completed much of it. I think he didn't like being the only kid who had a packet of any kind. There were other indications, too, that he was holding himself back so as not to appear too different.

I was hoping that, while staying with his grandparents for the summer weekdays, his enthusiasm would return. I designed several special projects in his interest areas, hoping to reignite the spark, but grandma was apparently intimidated and overwhelmed, and she didn't do a single one. Instead, she assigned pages from a second-grade workbook. Ah well, at least she accepted my request to start teaching him to type, and his typed summer journals have been better than the handwritten ones from school.

Now that school is two weeks away, he is excited, but (I think) only because he'll get to see the other kids again. I don't think he's even curious about what he might learn this year.

So, after all this long-windedness, we get to my question: those of you with older children, did you see fluctuations in this area? Is there some kind of cyclical nature to a person's love of learning or is this ebb the end of the line?

Is there still reason to hope?

There's always a reason to hope, but the school system did snuff your son's enthusiasm a lot.

If speaking with the new teacher and telling him/her of your son's experience with second grade, perhaps you can invite her to help you troubleshoot this year before too much time passes. If she's willing to listen to your concerns, you might get somewhere.

If not, is it possible for you to afterschool your son-do special projects with him after dinner or on weekends? I hope this doesn't prove to become more difficult as time goes on, but my daughter is going into second grade now and I always watch for signs that her enthusiasm will atrophy.

My daughter's first grade teacher was wonderful and did differentiate some of the instruction. But not enough. The higher reading group was working on 2nd grade level work, but she was reading at a 5th grade level and she was asking me for multiplication at home even though they were only working on simple addition at school. I asked dd if she wanted me to talk with the teacher about finding more challenging work for her to do, but she said no, she'd rather do more exciting work at home. So we did. We worked on multiplication, we did science experiments and she did online quizzes about her favorite book series Harry Potter.

I'm highly curious as to how this year will go for dd, and I will be looking for any drops in enthusiasm and try to remedy them as early as possible.

I was talking to my sister (one of those crazy-smart types) about our son's "challenges" and she relayed a story similar to yours.

When she was in her sr. year of HS, the school had pretty much run out of math -- not curriculum, just teachers. So she and her group of peers were given their high-level text book and stuck in the back of the class, expected to learn all this stuff on their own.

The frustration she felt was that because of her abilities, people assumed that she didn't need formal instruction; that she could just look at something and "get it." Meanwhile all the other students received all the live instructional time they needed.

If she had had a teacher to teach -- yeah, she would have probably whizzed through it like everything else. But she still needed someone to explain the stuff. She didn't wake up in the morning knowing how to do things -- she just learned 10x's faster than anyone else.

I see something similar with my son, who as I described earlier, has used ALEKS. After I showed ALEKS to his teachers, they were considering having him use that in the classroom to allow him to work at his own pace. But our son is in much the same boat as my sister. It frustrates him too much having to "teach himself." He's much happier when a human can explain things and respond one-on-one to questions.

Maybe some GT kids are autodidacts, but not my son -- at least not in every subject.

Just my two cents -- and it's worth every penny!

Thanks, Dandy, I think you're absolutely right about that. And, even worse than the teacher not offering any instruction, I think DS felt like he wasn't allowed to ask any questions. Either that or he felt like having a question meant he was dumb.



So much of this is speculation on my part, though. It's very difficult to get my son to articulate thoughts and feelings that might have any sort of negative "tinge."

Hmm. I wonder if it's something about second grade? My DD's experience was very similar. I had assumed it was due to specifics of the teacher/classroom (new teacher--will be wonderful in a couple of years I think, but was still very much into the "all children are gifted" phase). Maybe it was due to teacher/classroom, but I could have written your post that year. The two things I most clearly remember are:

1) I managed to get DD excused from spelling to do more of a vocabulary study (she had an uncanny knack for spelling early on). At first DD was excited, but soon she started misplacing it and finally admitted she didn't want to do anything different and have kids ask about it.

2) She was super excited to be researching penguins, and had this elaborate idea for displaying information about penguins with charts and graphs. About a month later (the project went v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y...) she was suddenly talking about doing her presentation with a stuffed penguin and a lot of jokes. When I asked her what happened to the charts and graphs, she said that if she did a serious presentation the other kids would say it was boring.

She has continued to be averse to any work that makes her look different (even a question like, "why don't you have to do spelling?" made her squirm and assume judgement from others), although this seems to be lessening to some extent. I'm hoping!

My DS9 was in 2nd grade last year and was very bored with all the review and info. he aready knew. It was hard and he tuned out alot.

One thing that helped is he was able to go ahead of class on his Math paper. He would get out one of the books I supplied. I got him some mindware.com books. They have some different stuff that different than the regular Math and he loved that. They have some sample pages you can print out and see if your son likes them.

I try to find different things at home that keeps the learning spark. YO YO tricks, origami, legos, paper pop ups, string games like jabocs ladder. Drawing Books from the library. My son goes for creative stuff. I try to get something new from the library frequently.

Hope this helps. I know it's hard.

Sciencemama - I'm intrigued by your username! Are you a scientist by training?

The psych I consulted with about DS said that at some point, DS may tune out to such an extent that he starts to miss assignments, directions, instructions etc...at that time, we'll have to address his lack of enthusiasm for learning etc. I felt that the time was now before all those things started happening. I sent an enthusiastic, energetic, fun kid to K and after 2nd grade had a whiney, stomach-ache ridden, no enthusiasm for anything boy. It would take about 2-3weeks over the summer to get my fun loving, ready to learn, enthusiastic, stomach-ache-free boy back. Now kids deal w/ the very same situation quite differently but if you're seening an extended loss of love of learning/enthusiasm, I think that needs to be addressed now. I got the advice of "he'll have AP classes in high school." He was in 2nd grade at the time. I got "middle school is more challenging" again that was 4 YEARS away. What bad habits would be ingrained by that time?

I did a good bit of ASing....we did chemistry, physics, biology, fun math (not arithmetic) w/ living books but as DS got more discontent, and homework started dragging to 2hrs, there was simply no time for afterschooling.

Thanks, everyone, for the ideas and commiseration. I'm hoping to sign him up for either a weekend enrichment class or an online course through Gifted Learning Links ($450, yikes!) - I think that's all we'll be able to do outside of school.

I think the best I can hope for is that his 3rd grade teacher "gets" him (and his GT classmates) and knows how to make them feel comfortable in their own skin.

Heh, that's kind of a tall order, isn't it?

Yikes - that makes me want to cry, and also makes me worried about dd's second grade. I've been having conversations to the effect of wanting to know if things get too hard (not likely) or if things are too easy (possibly). I don't want that light extinguished. She's so raring to go to school on Wednesday and hopefully she'll have a good experience. The good thing about it is that I know her teacher is one a neighbor boy had in second grade and he's now going into the gifted program. He is of similar temperament as dd1 so she might be okay. We'll see though.

Oh, as far as my username, yes, I was a former scientist - I was in medical genetics in clinical laboratory and then in forensic science (DNA analysis) before that. After 12 years in a full time career, when I had my first two daughters in 2.5 years, I quit my job when my then youngest was 9 months. I ended up pregnant again 3 months after I quit (unexpectedly) and so it has delayed my return to work and school. My youngest will be in kindy next fall so I'll either be looking for work, or back in school if I can't find a job.

My 11 year old son's academic enthusiasm only fluctuated when academics consisted of lots of coloring and worksheets in kindergarten. At home it never really fluctuated. Starting at about age 4 he played a lot of general knowledge trivia games so he read a lot and has never stopped. He loves to learn everything but physical things because he has motor dyspraxia.