Hi all,

I have not been posting much lately but doing a lot of lurking. I am in a kind of contemplative mode these days letting a lot of thoughts and ideas "percolate" while we move through the holidays and winter weather. I don't necessarily have a specific thought or question but my thoughts lately have been stirred by a lot of posts on here about all those wonderful "mathy" kids...
It seems like those who are stronger in math are more likely to stand out. I am amazed at kids who discover or figure out math ahead of their years. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division I can see as those concepts surround us. DS is not mathy but I have yet to introduce him to a math topic and not had him able to master it almost immediately. However, if not shown the new concept first he most certainly has never acquired the skills on his own or showed any independent interest in math. For us this is good because it gives him an arena where he does not instantly know the answer and gives him the opportunity to feel the challenge of learning something new.
The other posts I am reading are in regards to applying to DYS. It seems that here too mathy kids are favored or am I misreading? DS is very strong in his verbal/reading/logic skills. He loves mind bending puzzles of all sorts and is really great at them. Reads and comprehends at a 12th grade level (he is 8) but somehow this does not seem as impressive to me as the mathy stuff. Is this just me? Just thinking...always thinking...:-) Would love to hear everyone else's thoughts.

Thanks!

My dd is more wordy than mathy, but her scores qualified for dys in both. I, too, wonder if dys will help with the reading - its still all new to us.

I do find that the school is constantly wowed by the math, but her reading scores are like your ds's at the end of high school. She is constantly told she is good at math because she is grade accelerated and so people see the work she is doing.

With the reading and language she is working independantly so its kind of a big secret. (Not that I want her to be shown off.)
I wonder a lot about how this could impact her future interests and career choices. I have a BS and an MFA so a lot of my worrying about this is my own baggage...

This is what people tend to notice about DS. A few teachers and the adjustment counselor said that after one conversation with DS they know he is different. Math just doesn't seem to excite him although I just found his old second grade report card (skipped first) and the teacher writes in the comments that DS "is eager to explore concepts he is already familiar with like division and negative numbers." Where did that kid go?

I hear what Dottie is saying though. The extremely advanced math kids are much more rare. Wonder why that is... Also wondering if DS renewed an interest in math if I would see big advancement there as well? Is this an American phenomenon? Are advanced math abilities as rare in other countries that we associate more with math excellence?

Still ruminating...thanks for thinking along with me! :-)

Ahhhhhhhhh now I see what you were saying. Thanks for clarifying!

Are you talking about the AR test (quiz) or AR STAR Reading test? My DS9 had GE score of 10.7 on the STAR Reading Test at the beginning of 4th grade, but he is only around 80% on Average % Correct on the AR quizzes.(His teacher said the goal is 85%.) He usually picks books with GL 4.0 to 5.5, but often gets only 60-70% correct.
I understand that STAR test mostly tests vocabulary. Do you think AR quizzes are good for measuring comprehension skills? It puzzles me that his WJ III Broad Reading is 142 with Passage Comprehension of 130 (GE 13.0), but he sometimes fails books with only 4.0 Grade level. Being a perfectionist, he has now developed "AR phobia"

Dottie, Thank you for posting the site.

It looks great with fun games and activities for kids and resources for parents. I just checked the sample quiz, and I think it looks pretty similar to actual AR quizzes. Those would be perfect practice for him.

Sometimes I think dd is so "mathy" because she has had to read so much non-fiction to meet her hunger for books. (Emotionally she is still so 7.) And then sometimes I think she appears so "wordy" because she has used her math to somehow decode language.

I've read accelerating in math is easier for a school to provide for younger PG because the content is not emotional/age appropriate issues. (I am not feeling eloquent tonight.) I can see that and it is certainly the route our school is taking. It is certainly hard to find reading material for PG young readers who are not emotionally ready for content intended for adults - plus why would they be interested in the same stuff teens and adults read?

I'm not convinced many "mathy" people end up teaching in elementary education. I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that many adults find elementary school math to be "hard." I suspect this rubs of on their kids and students.

I understand the stuff about the difference between the spread of scores on the math and reading tests. However, when I feel people are just stuffing \dd into the PG "math box" without addressing her reading, they are not really "seeing" her.

I'm glad that there are actually more than 2 boxes.

This has been an interesting discussion. We had always pegged our son, now 8, as a wordy fella. And he still is. He started reading 2nd Grade easy readers @ 3.25yrs. Has been a voracious reader ever since. Because of the way the schools let kids run at their own pace with reading, especially with AR, this was one area where he really stood out to all around him.

And then we opened the gates on math this past summer. Wow. He finished 4th - 6th by the end of November, and is currently using EPGY for a more in depth 6th grade curriculum. He's doing surprisingly well with the sets & logic stuff to which he'd not been previously exposed.

So in his case, he first "presented" as a verbal kid, and still is. The hidden "mathy," though, is starting to shine, now that he's been given a chance to run full-speed as in reading. (He even scored higher in math than verbal on his recent SCAT test.)

I agree with the skepticism surrounding the AR testing. He's got a great memory, which helps him to regurgitate the facts for AR quizzes, and this same memory has helped him to hit the top of the AR/STAR testing, which as someone else mentioned is really just a vocab test. His last few tests (they test a few times each year to track progress) have been right at the top (12+), but I sure wouldn't pull anything off that shelf for him to read. Certainly, he would be able to follow the text, but not truly comprehend. He got cocky at the beginning of the year and pulled a 10th grade Jules Verne off the shelf. Ha! That lasted about three days before he called "Uncle" and went back to the lower stuff. He's reading a variety between 6th & 8th and keeps his AR scores @ 90% +/-.

I think it might be related more to what you are used to rather than one being more exceptional than the other. You are used to your wordy child, and probably have grown to see him as more "normal" than he is. Until someone points out to me that it isn't normal for a 5 year old to be tallying everyone's Yahtzee scores, I forget that my son is working 2-3 years ahead. I am used to my mathy son, so what amazes me are the highly verbal, talkative bright children I meet!

Sometimes it takes others to remind any parent just how exceptional their child is!



And I agree with the poster who said that mathy kids can be just as wordy/talkative as others, but it's more likely to be in the comfort of her/his own home. My son talks non-stop among our family and friends, but often acts like he is mute in public.

Interesting thread. I think the experience we have had around here is that reading is given much less weight than math. Part of this is probably that it is more typical to have kids reading somewhat above grade level than it is to have them doing math somewhat above grade level. The greater numbers of kids who are "advanced" in reading vs. "advanced" in math creates the appearance of less rarity since many people seem unable to distinguish advanced from gifted, nevermind distinguish between levels of giftedness. "Advanced is advanced, is advanced...right?!"

I also think people find it easier to quantify a student's math ability than to quantify their reading ability. There are clearer benchmarks in mathematics.

What I find ironic, however, is that reading is often dismissed as "just decoding" even in cases where it is much more--whereas math often gets a wow from observers even in those cases when it actually *is* "just computation".

The DYS people told us that math is a bigger problem to accommodate. For reading, it doesn't matter so much what level you are. You can read what you like and expose yourself to the material you want, interpret more deeply, write more deeply, but for math, you have to have opportunity, so if you are held back on grade level, you are more likely to have problems.

Not sure how relevant, but wanted to chime in.

Yes! Very interesting wanderings. I am learning and enjoying!

I thought of my own two kids when I began reading this post. My oldest-- a 13 year old dd-- is "wordy". We homeschool and haven't had her formally assessed for giftedness, but she read well before 4, is extrememly articulate, is excelling in her 10th grade curriculum, and scored 99th percentiles on a cogat test, so we just assume she's gifted. I was in the gifted program growing up and she reminds me of myself, so I have never given her "giftedness" much thought.

But, I've given a *ton* of thought to my 8 year old "mathy" son. Parenting a mathy kid seems so much more confusing and overwhelming than parenting a wordy kid. With my wordy kid, I just make sure she has appropriate reading material and plenty of opportunities to write. Easy, IMHO. But, I'm at a loss for how to help an 8 year old son who is whizzing through highschool math and begging for more. It's not as easy as simply handing him a challenging math book to read. With my daughter, her reading abilities naturally matured as she grew older. With my son, however, he needs to actually be taught concepts and given practice problems and that sort of thing. This mathy challenge is what has driven me to seek out the Davidson Institute and forums such as this for guidance.

Math talents seem to have a bit more WOW! factor. When my 3rd grade daughter read on a 9th grade level, people might say "Hey, that's really impressive! She's a good reader!". When my 3rd grade son does math on a 9th grade level people the response is more like "OMG! He's a genius! That's amazing!!".

[quote=gratified3... Many mathematicians who made great contributions did so in young adulthood. That almost never happens in philosophy where life experience is almost required to think deeply about aesthetics or ethics. Many famous philosophers never wrote *anything* until 50 or so. I took math classes at university with math prodigies who were very young, but I never saw a 12 yo in my honors philosophy classes. [/quote]

Yes! And a math/science person can make 1 discovery early in life and then ride on that for their whole career. Or have 1 success and hundreds of failures and be considered a genius. For a writer or artist it usually takes a whole lifetime of work.

This discussion has inspired me to sign dd up for a weekend writing class. This is the area we have seen the most growth this year, so I hope she enjoys it. Plus its with a local resource we haven't taken advantage of yet.

BTW, my 7yo is reading the Tao Te Ching. Sounds like a philosphy class would be ideal!

Err... no. Maybe once, if the scientist in question were of independent means. These days, "you're only as good as your last paper, and when was that, anyway?"!

Introverted? In my "Mathy" childs case yes. He has his "Wordy" moments in the comfort of his home but even then I wouldn't call them frequent.



I agree CFK. This is also the case with my son. He has essentially been teaching himself maths for a number of years and he also has very high verbal abilities (99.9%).



Having teachers state that he is far beyond what they can teach him has never been an issue with Maths throughout school. Only one of his elementary school English teachers certainly didn't take well to his abilities, mind you it probably didn't help that he always said English was his least favourite subject. Once in high school though the teachers had no issue with it. I think we have been been fortunate in nearly all cases to have teachers willing to accept his abilities, that want to teach him and are actually excited about the challenge. The more "respectable" age does indeed make sense and as it has increased, DS is now 16, it has reached the point in the past couple of years that teachers now come to him for advice and help.

THis thread reminded me of this post at The More CHild blog. http://themorechild.com/2007/12/26/why-elementary-teachers-overlook-the-verbally-gifted-child/

I not only think of a highly verbal child as a great reader but also a great thinker. I remember just being puzzled by DS's VCI on the WISCIV and his verbal scores asking myself "What does it mean?" Does it mean he knows a lot of words? After reading here and other places, I came to think that it was more making connections, critical thinking. I recall that DSthen7-8, watching a NOVA show, making a connection with something else, then in the next segment, the narrator saying the exact same thing DS had said. I think in that sense, highly verbal kid can have issues that are more pervasive across the curriculum as suggested at the above link. I also read that highly verbal kids tend to do well in algebra. DS has gotten algebraic concepts at age 6 but we still must work on that pesky computation daily so I guess b/c of that, I don't see him as mathy. TO me, the computation wizard is more impressive. Probably b/c I'm not a computation wiz. Perhaps we're more impressed w/ skills/abilities we don't ourselves possess?

Dazey

Thanks for the link Dazey.



I don't exactly know how to word this, but do highly gifted introverted children generally have an "easier" time having their abilities recognised and respected and therefore acted upon?

Dottie - aren't these kids complicated little individuals? I recall a conversation with an archaeology professor about DS9. He went on and on about DS's abilities, about how if all the kids could think like DS, he could go sooo much faster with the class and much further but that DS was handling the pace well which will serve him well in the long run. i kept thinking...is he talking about my kid? I should add that DS was one of the younger kids in the group taking this course on Ancient Aztecs. As I was leaving, I said, "Thank you," and he replied, "No, thank you for (DS's name)." THis man talks so fast that next time I need to record our conversation so I can play it back and transcribe it. He stressed that I really need to stretch him and put him in situations like this course where he can have time to become comfortable and therefore make his learning more sociable. DS doesn't talk much. He will answer questions and even raise his hands but otherwise, he's pretty quiet but doesn't miss a thing.

A teacher friend explained the verbal ability this way. She said imagine being stuck in a 2nd grade classroom where directions are spoken 4x in a different way, written on the board etc when you'd be able to handle language of a 5-6th grade classroom.

I think this thread is coming across what was percolating for me when I started it. What exactly does verbally gifted mean beyond reading levels. G3 you touched on some things that ring true here. I can generally expect after DS has a field trip for a parent volunteer to say something along the lines of "Your son asked such great questions at the "fill in the blank." and at home he can be counted on to always have a suggestion or five on how anyone should do something better. And while socially he isn't a big hit his insights into people are very often dead on. The big vocabulary is in play as well. Just hope it doesn't get him beat up someday. :-)

I love the way this thread has woven so many ideas and paths together.

Oh my gosh, yes! I think this is what is missed so often in meeting the needs of gifted readers. The gifted reader so often has observations and connections that are completely beyond the rest of the group. The gifted reader shares a comment and....nothing. No response, no feedback, no one to take the idea and either run with it or challenge it. It's a very lonely place to be, and one that leaves the gifted reader feeling like the one who doesn't know anything.

I also think that there is a lack of thought put into "next steps" for gifted readers. At a certain point, "harder books" is not the next step. Thinking about high school english classes, for instance, the goal isn't to give students progressively harder books, it's to change the way in which students interpret and communicate about the books.

I'd add that sometimes because there is no obvious next step or specfic level of proficiency required for verbal kids, I think it can be harder for schools/teachers to get just how far ahead of the curriculum they are. Math curriculum is set up as much more "first this, then that"--which is not necessarily a good thing, mind you--but it leads to a much clearer trail of breadcrumbs through the curriculum. Mastery can be easier to demonstrate as a result.

Yes, absolutely. There may also be a question about which children we're talking about. I read somewhere that very early fluent reading is actually better correlated with later talent in maths than with later talent in English, and that makes sense, precisely because of the shift you're talking about. In the early years, English lessons are a mixture of symbol decoding (reading) and fine motor skills work (writing), mostly. So a program to identify, early, the children who most needed extension in English (most of you say "language arts" I think, which is a better term perhaps but not one I'm familiar with) would need to do something different from looking for children who shone at the age-typical curriculum.

Dottie- I was wondering about the perks... Was your son ok with all of it?

My ds9 wants no special attention to himself in class. I made a donation to his class and the teacher had all the students sign a thankyou note to me. He said never do that again. He wouldn't bring in a little pumpkin for his teacher for Happy Fall.

My dd6 loves to be a helper and bring in things for her class or teacher.

Dottie - thanks.

That reminds me of a book I read related to learning styles/dispositions. I was familiar with styles (e.g. modalities: auditory, visual, kinesthetic) but not with dispositions. What you're describing sounds a lot like either the inventing disposition or the thinking/creating disposition.

There's a brief synopsis of the dispositions here:

http://www.homeschoolmarketplace.com/choosing/learning.html

When I read the longer explanations, it seemed like producers were the kids/adults who people hold up as "ideal", but it seemed to me that the truly gifted were more likely to be amongst inventors and the thinkers/creators (certainly there are probably truly gifted amongst all of the categories, but maybe more false positives amongst producers and more false negatives amongst the other categories).

One of the big distinguishing factors between producers and other areas seemed to be an interest in actually finishing projects and assignments. As I recall, the thinkers/creators and inventors were less interested in final product, and were likely to leave a project behind and move on to a new interest once they had satisfied/explored the aspects of the project that were of interest. Hmmm. Does that sound familiar to anyone else? Of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that everyone in our family came out with extremely low scores (some negative number scores!) in the producer area, so perhaps my viewpoint is a bit skewed....

Love the info on the link. I have ideas about how DS learns, but am not always sure how to tune-in to it and just allow it to happen.

It saddens me, however, to note how many of those dispositions (half, maybe?) are potentially seen as having ADD/ADHD "in the classroom". There seems to be very little understanding and acceptance (in general, of course) of different and varying learning styles.

One thing that I will say re: the actual book. I thought the quizzes and the descriptions were very helpful, but the suggestions for educational strategies and materials I just skimmed over and didn't find applicable to my kiddos. Still, I was fascinated by the descriptions and how well they matched the outcomes each of us got when we took the disposition quiz. Also the book had the best breakdown of learning styles I've ever read. For the record, I don't necessarily buy into the idea that instruction should always be geared to learning style, but I do think it is empowering to get insight into what makes us tick.

As to the ADD references: I had the same reaction. However, I think that that is part of what I found empowering. The conversation changes when a child is described as distractable and we can counter with different vocabulary to describe the same behavior. Schools are definitely designed to reward the producer style. We talked about all the cool things in the areas where DD scored really high--and we pointed out that knowing that the producer area was a weakness for her didn't mean she couldn't learn to meet external deadlines, etc..., but rather that she was going to have to teach herself those skills because it wasn't going to come easily for her like it does for some other people. We still have a long way to go in that area, but she is able to articulate that she isn't a very linear kid and that she needs to keep working on that. Because the weak area was juxtaposed with the strength areas, she didn't see it as a criticism--more as the price for getting to be the cool thinker/creator that she is

My father was a mathematician -- well-known in his field (modular forms was one of his research fields). He was also "wordy" but approached it in a very logical way . He liked to watch TV, and if a word was used dubiously, liked to look up its precise meaning in a thesaurus. He also also wrote poetry, and loved Shakespeare.

However, I would have to say that math was his outstanding gift; I guess at a certain point you will want to concentrate on one subject or the other. I'm sure Noam Chomsky was very good at math, but after a while, he made the move into linguistics, and this is what he's known for.