A problem that many of our families run into is that while they would like to 'support all children' or 'support all gifted child' the reality of LOG means that there are none or few children that would really benifit from the kinds of accomidations that an HG or PG child really needs.
Grinty
I've always thought that a big problem undermining advocacy on behalf of gifted kids is the focus on the ones whose IQ scores are 2 or more standard deviations above the mean (2% of the population at most).
A better approach would be to focus on kids who are at least 1 standard deviation above the mean (16% of the population). On top of this group would be kids who don't meet this criteria but who clearly excel in one or more areas.
Most or all of the children in this larger group would benefit from acceleration to whatever degree would be appropriate. In light of accelerating many kids in one or more subjects, accelerating a very few by a whole grade or more would not seem so weird anymore.
We do this with athletes all the time when we accelerate them to the varsity team at a young age. No one thinks it's odd if some 13-year-old who can run 400 meters in 53 seconds races against (and beats) high school seniors. No one tells her to stop running while others catch up. We just cheer. And no one thinks it odd that she does math for 13-year-olds during the school day.
This is another way of saying that we respect an athlete's asynchronous development.Back in the 80s, advocates for disabled kids weren't restricted to parents of kids with IQs more than two standard deviations below the mean! If this had been the case, special needs groups never would have got out of the starting gates. IQ didn't even enter any of the discussions I heard. Rather, those parents took exactly the approach that I outlined above. They said, very bluntly "My kid isn't learning how to
read, and what are you going to do about it???" They focused on individual needs of a reasonably large group of kids who were
bright enough to do better and learn more. Sound familiar?
The parents of those kids got what the wanted, and the kids with very low IQs (more than 2 standard deviations...)
also reaped
huge benefits.
The same could happen with HG and PG kids if people start advocating for the bigger picture
en masse...getting the parents of the very large number of bright kids on board would force a change.
Just my 2c.
Val
