innocently flipped open my dumb ol' title nine catalog this morning to look at some over-priced yoga shirts and the first thing I notice are comments from founder/owner listing out what she thinks is insane.
#6 -- Gifted kids "how do they know?"

I mean, really. I understand that the marketing team thought this would really resonate with most of the young women who must check out this catalog, but I really thought it was pretty irresponsible to add yet another brick to the monumental pile of misinformation out there on "what is a gifted kid".
How many of these women are already parents, or going to be parents? Most.
I already left my comment on the site, of course, score one for them, now I am registered on their dumb ol' website.

Arg.

Like my gifted three year old would say:
:p=pfth th<.

Ok. I need to work on a better raspberry spitting smilicon.
Here's a glare I snagged from the scratch forum.
&#3232;_&#3232;

Namaste.

.. //>.>\\'....

<�(>_<)�>

Well, #@!
it worked in the preview to the post.
Here's a screenshot of how it was 's'posed to look.
http://i945.photobucket.com/albums/ad296/Hablame_today/95eee4ff.jpg

Oh, foiled again. The screenshot's sideways. Drat.

chapped mine too, left a comment

9. Don't mess with a gifted kids mom should be on her list now

An essay that could annoy you even more (but maybe also draw a chuckle) is Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like #16 -- "gifted" children http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/22/17-gifted-children/ :

'White people love �gifted� children, do you know why? Because an astounding 100% of their kids are gifted! Isn�t that amazing?

I�m pretty sure the last non-gifted white child was born in 1962 in Reseda, CA. Since then, it�s been a pretty sweet run.

The way it works is that white kids that are actually smart are quickly identified as �gifted� and take special classes and eventually end up in college and then law school or med school.

But wait, aren�t there white people who aren�t doctors or lawyers, or even all that smart?

Well, here is another one of those awesome white person win-win situations.

Because if a white kid gets crappy grades and can�t seem to ever do anything right in school, they are still gifted! How you ask? They are just TOO smart for school. They are too creative, too advanced to care about the trivial minutiae of the day to day operations of school.

Eventually they will show their creativity in their elaborate constructions of bongs and intimate knowledge different kinds of mushrooms and hash.

This is important if you ever find yourself needing to gain white person acceptance. If you see their kid playing peacefully, you say �oh, he/she seems very focused, are they in a gifted program?� at which point the parent will say �yes.� Or if the kid is lighting a dog on fire while screaming at their mother, you say �my he/she is a creative one. Is he/she gifted?� To which the parent will reply �oh, yes, he�s too creative and smart for school. We just don�t know what to do.� Either situation will put a white person in a better mood and make them like you more.

But NEVER under any circumstance imply that their child is less than a genius. The idea that something could come from them and be less than greatness is too much for them to bear.'

I think the essay is a hoot.

I think it is ironic that a woman who is making her living off of "Title IX" ,the civil rights law which provided legislation so that women's sports and academics could no longer be belittled chose with her comments to belittle a different group of people.

Well, here's hoping for a better day tomorrow.

With only six words, that line could be taken in so many ways. Did anyone ask her more specifically what she meant by that line?

There are so many differing opinions on everything involving human behavior, IQ tests and anything involving the brain in general, I think it is good to question who we should believe. I could really see someone who realizes this saying it drives them insane.

I could also see someone saying Einstein's space/time stuff drives them insane, which does not necessarily mean they don't believe in it. It just might mean thinking about it can really give a person a headache.

What bothers me about this thread is the idea of making a judgement of a person and an internet site based on six words. I doubt I have made it through an entire day without saying words, which heard by the wrong person could be taken the wrong way.

Sorry for being on the other side of things, but I am really bothered by stereotypes where a person's entire character is judged based on a single characteristic, a single action, a single life style choice or anything which may represent such a small part of what makes a person who they are.

Here's the full posting:

It's the quotation marks around "gifted" that make me think it doesn't sound promising.

No problem! I think the whole thing is really silly, of her to post, and of me to get chapped over...but I just couldn't imagine a scenario where this could mean anything other than 'gifted kids don't exist'...

oh, and I really do think this might be less her comments and more a list that the marketing team came up with...so I can't say I'm judging her personally as irresponsible, just the entire organization.

__________________________

@Bostonian -- not sure why that doesn't bother me as much, maybe because it's obviously meant to be absurd. And doesn't totally deny the existence of giftedness....
too funny.

I don't think I like #1 either. All the kids in town play baseball and against other towns and they keep score. Must be nice to sit far far away and Paint a whole town judged for something you have no part of. I like yoga, I think i'm the only one here that does. But the baseball field gets used heavily, from 4-5 yr old t/ball to the oilfield workers and housewives on Saturday. And with obesity and diabetes as real as they are, who's to say they're doing something wrong?

I think you're right, just a bunch of PC PR with any basis in the facts.

Me too!!!

This is why I'm a housewife instead of marketing:
1. everybody is equal = everybody the same.
2.�Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again? �~Winnie the Pooh
3."labels" are useless.
4.nobody likes a know-it-all.
5.you can't win them all.
6.I am rubber, you are glue;
Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.
7.NCLB & Race to the Top rather than teachers just teaching the kids they have: which I guess wasn't working.
8.don't judge a man 'till you walk a mile in his shoes.
9. More opportunities for failure just means you're being more active.

Hmm.. Guess I'm not irritated by that many things; I must REALLY not be paying attention.

Might be a regional thing, but when I read the word "competitive" in #1, I assumed it meant the sorts of leagues where you have to try out and pay lots of fees to participate, they have paid coaches and travel hours to play tournaments with the other "competitive" leagues. That's what we call them around here, anyway. And I think they're insane too. If we were talking about the kind of baseball where kids play on neighborhood teams on the weekends and keep score and one of the teams wins, etc. that's just Little League, which I whole-heartedly support.


But I don't really see much other way to interpret her comment about gifted kids. Other than to say, she clearly hasn't met my son. Because then she'd know how you know.

From my experience, people generally don't know. The evidence is all over this forum. Unfortunately, when they do finally know, they disappear from these gifted forums, stop seeing the gifted specialists and no longer show up at the groups they once attended. For this reason, people rarely get to know the long term story.

Brain development is not something that ends at birth or even an early age. The ability to perform well on simple questions on a test at an early age is not an indication of an ability to later perform well on more complex questions at a later age, even in the same subject. Having a large vocabulary or doing well on a spelling bee is not an indication of all around good communications skills.

All a person can really say is a person is gifted at a variety of very specific skills. This can be said about almost anyone. Some of these very specific skills lend themselves well to the academic world, yet may not really be an indication a person will be very skilled in the practice of their field of study.

I do believe labels are useful for the purpose of communications, but the label gifted is not one I particularly like. Most of the time, gifted assessments are based on very simple skill testing. Sure performing these skills at an earlier than normal age is interesting, but does not necessarily mean what a lot of people think it does. Getting too caught up in this gifted label can lead a person to make a lot of wrong future assumptions, expectations and possibly lead to denial when these expectations suddenly don't manifest themselves.

The 'spring' weather in Michigan! It snowed yesterday and today freezing rain

Exactly! If someone asks "how do you know", then you know they don't have a kid like ours!


At that point, it's ok, because you're a mile away and you have his shoes!

lol funny

I'm writing this in hopes that the Title 9 marketing people conntect to the link and read this...so geared more toward them. My experience of the word "gifted" in middle to upper middle class society...whom I'm sure that Title9 clothing is geared is:
People seem jaded toward the word. There seems to be a perception that every Mom thinks their kid is gifted. While it's true that every child has gifts...not every child is scholastically gifted. Some mothers seem competitive about this and seem to think it reflects poorly if their child is not deemed scholastically gifted. I think many in society do not know that there is a big difference between highly intelligent and gifted--the gifted child's brain will process things at a faster rate and be ready to move on to the next thing. The gifted child may also have different emotional needs than other kids their age. Those of us whose children are scholastically gifted realize that there are 2 sides to this issue. Yeah...it's great to have a child for whom traditional school appears to be a breeze...but it certainly has its downsides as well...some children are so far ahead of what is going on in their grade at public school-- that if the school is not willing to arrange something different we can have a whole host of issues...boredom...acting out in class...etc.

See, and I don't view gifted as differing from highly intelligent in terms of a quantifiable thing. Traditional school may appear to be a breeze for a gifted child (it is for one of mine at least) but it also may be a breeze for a highly intelligent child. The gifted child probably is far ahead of what's going on in his/her grade at school, but a highly intelligent child may be as well. I don't differentiate btwn the two in terms of which child breezes along more easily or is further ahead of grade level.

I like Rosemary Cathcart's article that puts it in more qualitative terms: http://www.georgeparkyncentre.org/documents/high-achievers-pdf.pdf

I do suspect that the Title Nine list came from the place you mention -- higher income white families where all kids who perform above grade level are called gifted. I can see having a pet peeve about that. It reminds me of when we brought dd12's test scores (IQ & WJ-III) into her school when she was 7. The counselor at her school looked at them and then to me and said something like, "this really is a gifted kid, huh?" I imagine that people who live in communities where the word is overused grow weary and skeptical of the label.

The way she worded it makes it sound more like her pet peeve is regarding the idea that gifted exists at all, though.

The gifted/non-gifted classification is binary and thus less informative than an IQ. However, I do think defining intellectually gifted as IQ >= 130 is a reasonable definition. It's not worse than defining people age >= 18 as "adult" or age >= 65 as "old".


Although most such children will not be gifted, a much higher fraction of them will be "gifted" -- have IQ above 130 -- than will children from the inner cities.

The definition I've always like is, "Old is always at least 15 years older than me."


Similarly, "Smart is at least 15 IQ points higher than mine."



Val

Yes and no. Mine both have IQ scores that qualify them as gifted per your definition and I do think that high IQ is likely necessary to be gifted in my definition of the word. However, I recognize that most people/kids have not been IQ tested and are not likely to be IQ tested and that our schools and parents are identifying kids as gifted without the benefit of those numbers. What winds up standing in place of IQ is usually the kids being above grade level in reading or testing highly on NCLB tests, etc. I don't think that is as useful when trying to distinguish btwn gifted and bright high achiever.

Assuming that we're going to have to id without giving everyone an IQ test, I'd look for those qualitative things to tell which kid is likely truly gifted.

I can give the benefit of the doubt to that, but I suspect that the person who wrote that list lives somewhere where it isn't just a higher than avg proportion of kids being called "gifted." I'm not even in NYC and we're still looking at 25% of our kids being called gifted with parents with whom I've spoken all quite certain that this means that their kids are in the tail end of a bell curve. I can see that creating some degree of irritation or "how do you know?"

Like others have said, you know when you meet a kid who is truly on the tail end of the bell curve. Maybe the T9 lady has met a lot of kids who aren't there but who are portrayed as being there. Who knows!

Maybe she lives with a child on the tail end but has not found a way to know that.....Just another side, having a kid who "failed" the school tests (Cogat)for the gifted program at school and then years later when privately tested with someone knowledgeable about gifted, scored quite high...When I was dealing with the school system and watching my kid along side other "gifted" kids who passed the Cogat...I could imagine saying something like "how do you know" Having had the experience of really needing services with a child who was as I call it getting sick... She was in a bad way when we finally took a chance and left what was suppose to be the best school in town and branched out to a charter school.... I think being cynical about the situation does not mean she has not had some kind of experience. Personally I wish we could just give each child what s/he needs regardless of test scores and that experience would dictate what that child needed.... just my wish for us all.

Missy Parks posted a response and this is what she said (this was posted after moms of gifted kids made their comments):
"Here�s a little clarification to fill in the blanks:

Putting labels on children, whether it is �gifted� or �child prodigy� seems unnecessary. Who is the judge of one child�s ability over another? All children are special and �gifted� in their own right. All children have unlimited potential to do amazing things and these labels seem to be more for the benefit of adults rather than children."

Well, I'm glad she clarified. Now anyone who was giving her the benefit of the doubt knows exactly what she meant.

Unless we're all secretly torturing ourselves when we deal with schools just for our own benefit.

Val

I think a lot of the people posting on here are correctly identifying the special needs of their children and taking steps to deal with these needs.

But there are those who go through a great deal of effort and torture themselves in all sorts of ways for nothing more than status. This may not be the case for most on here, but there are people who do this to both themselves and their children.

I do however feel there is a need for labels to identify how best to deal with a child's special needs. But I do see how some people would find the term gifted as offensive as it seems to only be applied to a subset of gifted talents. Plus I feel it is far too broad a term for even this subset of talents.

There are some children who will have a combination of the recognized talents, yet also have more in common with children not typically recognized as gifted. There are cases where I feel some of these children will find a lot of problems with being placed in an environment of the more typical gifted children.

Missy sounds like a lost cause. Too danged PC for her own good.

A more descriptive term than "gifted" could be "intellectually gifted" or "highly intelligent", but I think the people offended by the "gifted" label would not be more accepting of those labels.

The discussion is heating up over at Title 9. Check it here.

Missy is getting an earful but seems to have put the plugs in tight.

Cool! I am checking it out!

Agreed, 'highly intelligent', 'highly able', etc. all sort of fall into the same bucket with 'smarter than you or your kid'. Unless you take a roundabout paragraphic route to describing a child every time you need to refer to their intellectual differences, you are going to come up (way) short of really describing them, end up offending somebody.

A label should only be viewed as short-hand, but it is simpler to get side tracked by the label itself and because it can have unintended connotations, condemn it.

I am pleased to see the flurry of really smart comments on the Title ix board, very impressive, possibly wonderful information for other parents who might be perusing it. Just very good stuff.