The result is a skewed but accepted perception of what "gifted" means, and it can lead people to underestimate a child's abilities. For example, teachers not knowledgeable about giftedness can read this stuff and believe that "gifted" means that the kid wrote a symphony or a novel before starting kindergarten, and this (or something like it) is the true meaning of gifted. So if your kid is just reading, he's not really gifted, because they all even out by 3rd grade, except for the ones who write sym-pho-nies at 3, and we don't have any kids like that here. ETA: I'm not claiming that everyone thinks this way, just that I suspect it's likely that some people do.
Actually, I get that a lot whenever I dare use the g word.
Which is why I'd love to explain giftedness more in terms of what level a child is working at compared to an average child or grade level, and at what pace and what level of intellectual abstraction a child learns best at, to what degree a child perceives rule based systems and to what extent it needs to perceive them, as compared to a average/grade level child, or what a certain level of giftedness means in relation to classroom numbers. Because really that is what so called gifted services should be: the opportunity to learn at your level, at an appropriate pace and level of abstraction, complexity and depth, an with an appropriate peer group. Who cares about identification, labels, pull outs or enrichment projects if, in whatever fashion, at least for an appreciable amount of time, those needs are met.
Understanding intensity is, IMO, the icing on the cage and really not the job of curriculum planners.
Edited to add that understanding intensity of course van be a lifesaver for us parents, and of course some of us happen to be curriculum planners too. But offering appropriate learning to all learners, including gifted learners is what public schools should focus on, and advocacy with schools/districts/policy makers should focus on.
This is one of the reasons I like to just use HG+ here (another us the confusion about different cutoffs in different tests/using different norms as has been mentioned). Being this far off the "average" concerning learning needs, being one Ina 1000+ - it is a distance not bridge able with the "usual" measures,such as differentiation, makes our kids so much of an outlier that ordinary parental advice or methods must be dismissed. This is what we have all in common. Again, I am sure there can be huge differences between what may work for an HG or a PG kid, whatever that is, but the commonality is that the solution must be individual and this just doesn't happen to parents whose kids do not have exceptionalities, by definition.
