Thanks so much for the thoughts. I guess when I think hard about it I think that two real benefits, or possible benefits anyhow, are pragmatic: the scores themselves might help you to advocate and the way they are distributed might give you a better sense of what to advocate for. It sounds to me like both skylersmommy and Kriston have some version of these two points. I'm on board with both of those.
If I'm honest with myself, however, I wonder if my ambivalence has a different source. I feel completely certain that our kid is special - perhaps this is the kind of certainty that only a parent can have, but perhaps every parent has it, too. Despite this certainty, though, sometimes I wonder whether his is the kind of specialness that would be reflected in tests of the normal sort. In large part this is because of his range of behavior. Sometimes he does things that genuinely astonish me; if he were always that way I imagine he would do terrifically on any kind of test. But other times he is so off in his own world that simply getting him to recognize your existence is a Herculean task. His teachers have noticed it too. Whenever there is one kid missing from the line-up at the end of recess, they told us, they know immediately that DS has wandered off somewhere. Once they spent half an hour looking for him before they finally discovered him hiding in the inside of one of the big truck tires on the playground, happily singing to himself. He is in his own world quite a lot of the time. I have no doubt that it's a complicated and interesting world in there; and what peeks out of that world at times is part of what makes me think he's so special. But that kind of specialness seems like just the kind of thing a normal test is likely to miss.
When I said that my gut instinct is probably impervious to testing results, I guess what I was really thinking is that it's hard for me to imagine a test situation capturing what's special about our kid. Or maybe that's just another way of saying that GT isn't the relevant category. Oh dear, I'm so confused. Not knowing many other kids, the whole thing is so hard to understand.
BB
