By the end of second grade, it seemed all but snuffed out. He seems to enjoy being known as the smartest kid in the class, but he doesn't want to be too smart. For example, he was allowed to pretest in math and he had a packet of more advanced material to work on whenever the teacher was covering something he had already mastered - but he hated it. Right before the end of school he said he lost it; I suspect he threw it out because he hadn't completed much of it. I think he didn't like being the only kid who had a packet of any kind.
Hmm. I wonder if it's something about second grade? My DD's experience was very similar. I had assumed it was due to specifics of the teacher/classroom (new teacher--will be wonderful in a couple of years I think, but was still very much into the "all children are gifted" phase). Maybe it was due to teacher/classroom, but I could have written your post that year. The two things I most clearly remember are:
1) I managed to get DD excused from spelling to do more of a vocabulary study (she had an uncanny knack for spelling early on). At first DD was excited, but soon she started misplacing it and finally admitted she didn't want to do anything different and have kids ask about it.
2) She was super excited to be researching penguins, and had this elaborate idea for displaying information about penguins with charts and graphs. About a month later (the project went v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y...) she was suddenly talking about doing her presentation with a stuffed penguin and a lot of jokes. When I asked her what happened to the charts and graphs, she said that if she did a serious presentation the other kids would say it was boring.
She has continued to be averse to any work that makes her look different (even a question like, "why don't you have to do spelling?" made her squirm and assume judgement from others), although this seems to be lessening to some extent. I'm hoping!
