We accelerated to what her executive function and emotional maturity would bear-- and it wasn't enough, academically. She is paying the price for that now-- she has no idea how to memorize information, has no idea how to really study material that she doesn't know intuitively/ad nauseaum, and struggles to take tests which are memorization-based (because that IS how most people learn the low-level material, evidently). She did not NEED any of those skills to ace everything in high school, including "AP" and "dual enrollment" courses, and to smack a home-run on standardized tests, too. <-- that bit is important. She. did. not. NEED. to really learn to be a "student" in any meaningful way to do those things. Because she is what she is. She has enormous, but almost entirely untamed/undisciplined/untapped raw potential. And no way to deliberately ACCESS it, because nobody has ever asked her to, never mind insisted upon genuine effort in that direction. They THOUGHT that what they were offering was "challenge" for her-- but it most certainly was not.
That's the crystal ball for what happens to kids who aren't challenged sufficiently. "Wider and deeper" sounds awesome until you realize that what is actually being described is systematic stunting of a child's growth as a learner. Kids like my DD run the risk of graduating with top honors only to discover that they have been-- metaphorically, I mean-- raised BY WOLVES. DD is a "feral" student. Surrounded by very bright to bright students who KNOW all the things that she does not. Now, her raw potential is still what it is, and we're hopeful that it will turn right in the end, but this is a rough, rough road through adolescence and college, for sure.
My daughter has no idea how to LEARN that which she does not know. She has no idea how to work for understanding. Period.
I feel a little as though we thought we were walking a tightrope all those years-- thought we were so clever, we did-- and now I've woken up to the fact that we were actually walking on nothing but imagination.
Because she had such stellar academics and wasn't "acting out" or "underperforming" (from what they could see, anyhow-- WE saw that she was), nobody would listen to our concerns. Nobody.
I had just one completely open and utterly frank conversation with a school staffer in nine years. In that conversation, she heard me-- and was struck SPEECHLESS with horror. Her response?
A halting, astonished; "We have failed her. We have completely, utterly failed your daughter-- I am-- so-- so sorry {Howler}-- I don't know what to say to this, and I have no idea how to make this better for her within the mandates that we have to follow, but we-- and by "we" I mean not only us as a school, but the state's mandates, too-- have failed to do the one thing that is most fundamental for her-- she hasn't learned anything FROM us. Because she hasn't learned HOW to learn from us, we've harmed her."
That was four years ago now.
This is why I'm compelled to reply to people who say their kid is "doing fine". Because everyone else in the class is being taught soft skills that will stand them in better stead than IQ will for the rest of their lives. And the kids with the highest IQs are considered disposable and not worth teaching any of those skills. It really really annoys me.
