Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Now this is a problem I NEVER thought I'd run into

DS7 was moody over the weekend. So I sat him down and asked if there is something going on at school or at home that I don't know about, that is putting him in a bad mood. After avoiding the subject for a while, he said his teacher thinks he's stupid. Apparently he thinks his teacher is deliberately giving him "baby work" because she thinks he can't handle harder stuff. He was even under the impression that the other kids in the class were getting harder work, because they take longer to finish it. Then on top of it all, he begged me not to email his teacher about it! (I did anyway, but asked her not to mention it to him). Anyway, we've known he was bored in school for a while - but I didn't realize how serious it was. I don't know that he even thinks of himself as gifted - and to be honest, I'm not sure if I should bring that up with him. Right now he thinks of himself as the same as all the other kids, and I'm afraid that if I explain to him why everything seems so easy to him, he'll kind of look down his nose at the other kids. Or just feel like he doesn't fit in. Either way is not good.
Who would have thought that being GOOD at your schoolwork would make a kid feel stupid? Sigh....I always thought it would make life easier if your kid found school to be easy.

My son had this problem. Of course kids hang on to the belief that we put them in the right classroom, and that the teacher must "know" what we are capable of and therefore they are deliberately 'dis-ing' our kids, for as long as they can. School is also a place where kids get praised, and the teacher is almost a diety at this stage - remember all that rivalry in the Bible? You liked his offering better - and kids who aren't part of the norm do get their offerings passed over for other offerings all the time.

Do not tell your kid he is gifted right now. That isn't the answer. This is one of those times in life were you have to move quietly behind the scenes and stop the teacher from giving the child baby work - because you want your child to grow in self esteem, and he can't grow unless he learns to overcome obsticals, which is current work isn't.

So my advice is to meet with the teacher in person, and come up with some work you can place in his folder so he has something reasonable to do during classtime. This can't be solved by talking, only by doing. Kids don't usually self-advocate well until age 10, and I don't think this is because of the kids themselves, just that it's too big of a jump for most adults to handle.

Smiles,
Grinity

I'm so glad to hear this is fairly typical! It totally took me by surprise, and I had a moment of panic, thinking that there was nothing to do to help him. I emailed his teacher to ask for a conference, and gave her a brief explanation of why. She wrote back and told me that she has seen this happen before, and she can give him some extra stuff to work on. The school requires a certain curriculum, so he still has to do the basic stuff that is way too easy for him - but she's going to help him work on some other things as well. I thought it was enough to supplement at home, but it didn't occur to me that he would go to school expecting to work on the same material we do at home!

Great story! Some females seem to know how to reach in and tear your heart out. Some males do to, but it's less common. My son was more of a 'Hey! WHY don't YOU LIKE ME?' at that age. Personality makes so much differenc!

Smiles,
Grinity

The same thing happened with my son when he was 4, the first and last year we had him in school. "But Mom, she's a *professional* teacher. It's her job to know what to teach children, and she must think that this is the right work for me. So I must be stupid, because you'd have to be stupid to have to practice this stuff."

Oh! When I think of readiness to learn level, I think of ranges. After all material can be 'too challenging' ' hard but possible' 'hard sometimes' 'easy but fun' - for my son, I articulated a level that is 'Shaming' - exactly what you son described. So far below readiness to learn level that it shames the learner.

It took a while for me as an adult female to understand that for some young males, there is a thing called 'Shame' - feeling bad for how I appear to others. I was fortunately listening to lectures about 'The Odyssey' by Homer at the time, and it went into great detail that 'standing in the eyes of the others' was directly translated into the internal state of the self. I was more of a 'I'd rather have a whole pumpkin to myself than have a teeny share of a grand chair' kind of kid. (I saw a poster of this in 7th grade English class and can remember being surprised by how well it described me.)

Hugs
Grinity

Yeah, personality goes a long way toward how they react to you. I was the sort who cried at the drop of the hat when the pressure got to be too much, then I started shouting an angry speech about why the school system was so messed up. Then I'd cry for hours when I got home and get aggressive with people who tried to touch me. That was in first grade, though, I calmed down a lot after that. I was still dysthymic to depressed for years, though.

A lot of it was because I thought they were purposefully lowering the bar for everyone (and while that's true for some components of education, it isn't the case for all). I thought most students who struggled were just not paying attention or didn't care (prevalent attitudes, but hardly the source of all academic difficulty, and a rather egocentric perspective for me to adopt), until in the first grade a substitute accidentally administered a seocnd grade spelling test to the class, reading words we'd never seen on a list, and I just wrote them down (I'd probably read them in short books before, but looking back, some people probably hadn't had exposure to at least some of those words in written format, a thought that just occurred to me). It didn't faze me at all that we'd never "heard" the words before, whereas the rest of the class was in uproar over the unfamiliar list.

I said, "So what if we haven't seen the word list; they're simple words!" I knew it was a rude thing to say, but just wanted them to stop complaining and get the darn thing over with so I could get back to watching the squirrels outside the window. The only thing I ever missed about first grade was that it was easy to look outside the windows all the time, and perhaps a little easier to get away with not doing any cut and paste projects. I hated having so many incomplete projects, but I really wanted to think about other, more important issues, namely the way the school system is run.

Why wouldn't a child think that everyone else's mind was basically the same as everyone else's? I hung on to this idea until my own child was bumping up against reality. The idea that everyone is equal is a lovely ideal - but it can nothing to do with 'readiness to learn.'

Love and More Love,
Grinity

The same thing happened to my son when he started school - after the first week of school he would come home almost daily in tears saying the teacher didn't like him and that he must be really stupid. We finally got it out of him that he was upset because he was SO exicted about finally getting to go to Kindergarten and he was so looking forward to learning "all kinds of cool, new stuff" that when the teacher forced him to sit there and circle the correct number of objects on his math worksheets or find the picture that began with the letter B, he thought the teacher must have thought he was really stupid to make him do such easy work. Then when he figured out that this was "new" work for most of the kids other than him - he said his teacher must really not like him at all because it wasn't fair that all the other kids got to learn new stuff and he wasn't allowed to. I tried talking to the teacher many times and she kept repeating that her hands were tied and that she had to teach all the kids the exact same thing with no changes allowed. The principal wouldn't budge either - so we took him out to homeschool. I hope that you are able to get your little ones needs met :-)