Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to turn down publicity

Hmm. The way I see it, you have multiple things to deal with here.

1. DS did well on AMC8. The question here is, what do you do next? Forget the Math Olympiad. Think about the NEXT STEP, and if you and your son want to move toward it.

2. The school called a reporter in. The question here is, are you comfortable with sending your kid off to be interviewed about his math talent? It sounds to me like the answer is "no." Fine. There have been good suggestions here for politely declining.

3. The school may be afraid of losing funding for its gifted program. So maybe they called a reporter in to get some good publicity as an attempt to save the program. But you don't know this. Maybe the principal just got carried away. Personally, I'd figure out a way to learn what the principal really wants. If it's a reasonable goal, maybe you can help him find a way to reach it that doesn't involve unwelcome publicity for your son. For example, you might say, "It's great that you think so highly of Little Johnny, but we're very uncomfortable with giving away personal information about him without our consent." [pause; see what he says; he might not have thought of it that way] "Were you trying to highlight the overall quality of the gifted program at the school? If so, maybe we can figure out a way to do that without making my son feel uneasy." Something like that.

I like kcab's suggestion, too.

Also, when I wrote part 3, I assumed that your son got a lot of good math instruction at school. If he learned AMC8-related stuff at home and just did extra long division worksheets at school, I might just leave it at "We're uncomfortable with the media attention."

(Oh, and someone needs to tell the teacher to stop revealing private information about your son, whether or not it's true. She has no right to divulge personal information about a student, and besides, she also has no idea how the other kids will start reacting to your child as a result of her inappropriate (and made-up?) comments. I would phrase it just that way --- to her boss.)

ETA: There could be a bright side here. For example, the principal seems to be recognizing that there is such thing as a kid with a lot of math talent. This is actually a refreshing change from the usual lines like "All kids are gifted."

It also occurred to me that his teacher could be struggling with the idea of giftedness. Perhaps she told the kids that your son studies math for 5 hours a day because she wants to believe that any ten-year-old can score in the top 1% on an 8th grade test simply by studying a lot.