Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional new here, need advice

From my own experiences with my own son, who may be significantly different than yours, I don't think that "This is a great paper!" would be very reassuring to him in these circumstances. He knows that he made a mistake, and he is upset over it. Even though a 90% is still a "good" grade from your perspective, he doesn't have the same perspective you do, and it still emphasizes that the "goodness" comes from having right answers. For you to praise the work with the mistake anyway may be confusing and may make him wonder if he is really capable (since he is being praised for getting something wrong), or wonder why you are "lying" to him, both of which could increase his anxiety over this. No blame here, for sure - just a perspective that you might not have considered. I know that it took me a long time to even begin to get a grasp on how my son saw the world and figure out why he reacted to some things the way he did.

My son was only in school (K) for one year, but I still had to work fairly long and hard to get him past the idea that it was okay and not the absolute end of the world to miss answers on a "test" of any variety. In his mind, the point of the test was to be able to get all the answers right, and missing one was no different than missing a hundred. The intensity of the emotion associated with something like this can really be incredible - my son will still occasionally bring up things that he got "wrong" 9 or 10 years ago and complain that the question was worded badly or that the picture should have been larger so that he could see it better or that more than one of the choices was correct or...or...or...

...It took a while, and quite a bit of explicit discussion of the topic for him to get the idea that the point of tests, quizzes, and other evaluations was at least two-fold: first, to identify areas where you hadn't mastered everything yet and could still learn things, so the teacher would know what to teach you and what you could skip over, and second, to let the teacher know where he or she needed to improve their teaching of topics that had already been covered. .