LNEsMom: I'd definitely engage the teacher on it, because of the potential for this situation to be misinterpreted... and ESPECIALLY because this is the teacher who is trained in GT and will be evaluating your DS. You don't want her remembering this incident as a reason why he should not be in GT, you want her remembering it as a reason why he should.
leahchris: The best I can say here is that dealing with perfectionism can be a looooong process, with some wins and a lot of losses. This has been an issue for my DD7 for as long as she's been in this world. As a toddler she could have been classified as OCD... she panicked anytime she so much as spilled a drop of water on herself, and refused to step on the sand at the park. We helped her overcome those issues, and then she went to school, found herself unchallenged, and that became a brand-new source of perfectionism meltdowns.
We read a bit about giftedness and perfectionism, and we found a good kid's book on the same (
this book, though it may be more suitable for girls than boys). We've also got her involved in outside activities that require patience, practice, and are challenging enough that you're guaranteed to not be perfect. Those activities are gymnastics, soccer, and guitar.
I decided to teach myself guitar as well. This gives me an opportunity to model the desired behavior... I play awfully, keep a good attitude, keep working at it, and then play noticeably less awfully.
We're seeing progress. Many times she practices guitar and she's got just the right attitude, but occasionally she freaks out about making mistakes. If we investigate, we usually find out the perfectionism meltdown isn't really about the guitar... there's something else that happened earlier in the day that she's upset about. Based on that, I think it's not so much the things we've done at home to help her with perfectionism that has improved her... it's how her school situation has (after many a heated discussion) improved for her.
