Really? To the point that the parent never once suspected there was a single thing different about them until a gifted teacher observed them for 5 minutes? My understanding is that most parents "have always known."????
My oldest is highly gifted and a very high achiever. She was one of the youngest in her grade when she started K and skipped 5th. She's still in the 99th percentile in many areas.
I knew that there was something different about her as a baby, toddler, younger kid, but I didn't know that it was "gifted" until near the end of her 1st grade year. She was six by that time.
My mother told me that she was "payback" b/c, apparently like me, she never slept as a baby, cried non-stop, and is extremely intense. She loved books to the point that she'd cry when I stopped reading to her when she was maybe 6 months old and start twirling her feet and hands in circles and make a little "o" with her mouth and her eyes would get big when I'd start to read again. I love to read too. I checked out stacks of books from the library when I was a kid and read a book every day. She was speaking at 6 months; so was I. The two things that struck me as advanced when she was little were her memory which is amazing (mine is not) and her small motor skills (again, mine are probably fairly normal). She could take caps on and off of ballpoint pnes by the time she was 6 or 7 months old.
Point being, she was a lot like me and I never knew what was wrong with me other than I was different and odd. I knew that I was in the accelerated/honors classes as a kid, but no one made a point that this indicated anything other being a good student or smart. The distinction that I now understand btwn smart and gifted is that gifted isn't just about being a good student; it is more encompassing in the way it impacts a lot of areas outside of school.
What made me suspect giftedness wasn't a teacher. Dd was having a horrible first grade year, missing recess daily to complete work she was doing slowly, crying constantly, telling me she wished she had never been born... I was scared. Dh, who is probably 2e, told me that she was probably just slow like him, wasn't finishing work b/c she was going to really struggle in school like him, etc. We met with the principal and the teacher b/c conversations with the teacher were getting us nowhere. We argued that dd was going to be a "C" student and they needed to stop putting so much pressure on her. If she didn't finish work, fine. Give her low grades, we didn't care. Nothing changed and dd was getting yelled at constantly at school (the teacher totally sucked; dd holds a grudge against her to this day!).
I posted a thread on Mothering asking if I was out of my mind to consider pulling a six year old out of first grade after spring break. People asked why and, as I expanded on the circumstances -- no she wasn't having trouble learning to read and, in fact, was reading Harry Potter books, no she wasn't having fine motor control issues, no it wasn't this, it wasn't that -- someone gently suggested that she was gifted and, if I was anything like her and remember what school was like for me, I might understand what was going on.
Dd and I have some significant differences. I am a very fast processor, she is not. However, we have enough in common that it was an "aha" moment for me. I read up on what gifted was and it was like someone was describing my dd to a T. So, no, I never knew that different meant gifted until someone else hit me over the head with it.
