What do you do with a gifted child who does not embrace that aspect of herself? I have two dds who turned 11 and 9 recently. The younger one was my earlier developer (speech, gross motor skills, etc.) and generally was the kid who made me think, "wow, this kid is really bright" before they started school. Dd#1, over time, proved herself to be very, very bright, has skipped one grade and is performing at the top of her current grade on national and state tests. She stands out as unusual even in gifted programs and I've had more than one GT teacher tell me that she is the most gifted child they can recall having taught in a long time or ever.
Dd#2, on the other hand, is much more concerned with fitting in socially. She is very erratic on achievement tests and has had more that one teacher who was insistent that she was not gifted at all. At the end of 2nd grade, she was tested on the WISC and rec'd a score of 148 (99.9th percentile). In 3rd grade, her teacher insisted that any high achievement scores from years past and the IQ score were due to good guessing. By the end of 3rd grade, dd was performing just at grade level and was pretty beaten down. We had her retested on the WISC and filled out a bunch of forms as did the teacher. The psychologist who tested her told us that the teacher made it pretty clear on her forms that dd was "nothing special." Her measured IQ had dropped by 20 points when retested although her achievement scores for math, reading, and writing on the WIAT were all significantly higher than expected if the new IQ scores were right. On the SB-5 she wasn't gifted at all -- around 119 if I recall correctly.
Dd wants to drop out of the TAG reading class she is in (was placed there b/c her IQ scores were still w/in the GT range for our district [95th%+] and her verbal score on the WISC was still in the 99th and her individual achievement scores for reading and writing were very high). She wants to be "normal" and has no friends who are in the advanced classes. She doesn't want to be viewed as a "geek," doesn't like to read, and is adopting the poor speech patterns of her peers such as constantly pairing "there's" with a plural noun.
I suppose that it is possible that she simply isn't gifted, but just bright/right on the cusp as the second set of testing would indicate and maybe I should just let her be an avg student who speaks poorly. However, the kids in that group who she chooses to hang out with don't seem to suit her well either. She complains constantly about how they drive her crazy, cheat off of her papers, insist on being in her group and then having her do all the work... She rolls over and does whatever they want in order to avoid having them get mad at her or cry.
