MonetFan, EXACTLY!!!
When I talk with my children's teachers (which doesn't happen much anymore), or when I talk with friends, parents, etc., I don't really use the word "gifted". I think every child deserves to learn what he/she is ready and is capable of learning, whether it's because the kid has no difficulty learning advanced contents, or because the kid is willing to put in five times the amount of time to learn the advanced contents.
But there is a huge amount of resistance from the teachers that I've met. I remember DS's 2nd grade teacher happily informed me that he was reading at "end-of-2nd-grade" level. Which was ridiculous because he finished reading the first four Harry Potter books (there were only four by then) in 1st grade. The teacher then told me that he didn't do further testing because he was not ready to teach beyond end-of-grade material anyways so further testing was not useful.
Math homework was a constant struggle for DS as long as I could remember, because DS felt insulted having to do work that he knew how to do even before starting elementary schools. He finally felt that he was learning something when we discovered The Art of Problem Solving. I remember there was an assignment in 4th grade (something about fractions) that he simply refused to do, and finally his four-year-old sister happily did it for him. Yet at a school-wide parent-teacher meeting where parents tried very hard to advocate math enrichment, some teachers came up with the defense that "we are teaching complex thinking skills, not just computation. Your kids might be good at computation but it doesn't mean that they are good at math". The parents were just shocked--we are a group of scientists, engineers, college professors, IT folks, etc., but we couldn't make the teachers see that holding kids back with extremely simple math work does not teach them complex thinking.
I can go on and on...
