Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion title nine catalog comments -- chap my buns

See, and I don't view gifted as differing from highly intelligent in terms of a quantifiable thing. Traditional school may appear to be a breeze for a gifted child (it is for one of mine at least) but it also may be a breeze for a highly intelligent child. The gifted child probably is far ahead of what's going on in his/her grade at school, but a highly intelligent child may be as well. I don't differentiate btwn the two in terms of which child breezes along more easily or is further ahead of grade level.

I like Rosemary Cathcart's article that puts it in more qualitative terms: http://www.georgeparkyncentre.org/documents/high-achievers-pdf.pdf

I do suspect that the Title Nine list came from the place you mention -- higher income white families where all kids who perform above grade level are called gifted. I can see having a pet peeve about that. It reminds me of when we brought dd12's test scores (IQ & WJ-III) into her school when she was 7. The counselor at her school looked at them and then to me and said something like, "this really is a gifted kid, huh?" I imagine that people who live in communities where the word is overused grow weary and skeptical of the label.

The way she worded it makes it sound more like her pet peeve is regarding the idea that gifted exists at all, though.

The gifted/non-gifted classification is binary and thus less informative than an IQ. However, I do think defining intellectually gifted as IQ >= 130 is a reasonable definition. It's not worse than defining people age >= 18 as "adult" or age >= 65 as "old".


Although most such children will not be gifted, a much higher fraction of them will be "gifted" -- have IQ above 130 -- than will children from the inner cities.

The definition I've always like is, "Old is always at least 15 years older than me."


Similarly, "Smart is at least 15 IQ points higher than mine."



Val

Yes and no. Mine both have IQ scores that qualify them as gifted per your definition and I do think that high IQ is likely necessary to be gifted in my definition of the word. However, I recognize that most people/kids have not been IQ tested and are not likely to be IQ tested and that our schools and parents are identifying kids as gifted without the benefit of those numbers. What winds up standing in place of IQ is usually the kids being above grade level in reading or testing highly on NCLB tests, etc. I don't think that is as useful when trying to distinguish btwn gifted and bright high achiever.

Assuming that we're going to have to id without giving everyone an IQ test, I'd look for those qualitative things to tell which kid is likely truly gifted.

I can give the benefit of the doubt to that, but I suspect that the person who wrote that list lives somewhere where it isn't just a higher than avg proportion of kids being called "gifted." I'm not even in NYC and we're still looking at 25% of our kids being called gifted with parents with whom I've spoken all quite certain that this means that their kids are in the tail end of a bell curve. I can see that creating some degree of irritation or "how do you know?"

Like others have said, you know when you meet a kid who is truly on the tail end of the bell curve. Maybe the T9 lady has met a lot of kids who aren't there but who are portrayed as being there. Who knows!

Maybe she lives with a child on the tail end but has not found a way to know that.....Just another side, having a kid who "failed" the school tests (Cogat)for the gifted program at school and then years later when privately tested with someone knowledgeable about gifted, scored quite high...When I was dealing with the school system and watching my kid along side other "gifted" kids who passed the Cogat...I could imagine saying something like "how do you know" Having had the experience of really needing services with a child who was as I call it getting sick... She was in a bad way when we finally took a chance and left what was suppose to be the best school in town and branched out to a charter school.... I think being cynical about the situation does not mean she has not had some kind of experience. Personally I wish we could just give each child what s/he needs regardless of test scores and that experience would dictate what that child needed.... just my wish for us all.

Missy Parks posted a response and this is what she said (this was posted after moms of gifted kids made their comments):
"Here�s a little clarification to fill in the blanks:

Putting labels on children, whether it is �gifted� or �child prodigy� seems unnecessary. Who is the judge of one child�s ability over another? All children are special and �gifted� in their own right. All children have unlimited potential to do amazing things and these labels seem to be more for the benefit of adults rather than children."

Well, I'm glad she clarified. Now anyone who was giving her the benefit of the doubt knows exactly what she meant.

Unless we're all secretly torturing ourselves when we deal with schools just for our own benefit.

Val

I think a lot of the people posting on here are correctly identifying the special needs of their children and taking steps to deal with these needs.

But there are those who go through a great deal of effort and torture themselves in all sorts of ways for nothing more than status. This may not be the case for most on here, but there are people who do this to both themselves and their children.

I do however feel there is a need for labels to identify how best to deal with a child's special needs. But I do see how some people would find the term gifted as offensive as it seems to only be applied to a subset of gifted talents. Plus I feel it is far too broad a term for even this subset of talents.

There are some children who will have a combination of the recognized talents, yet also have more in common with children not typically recognized as gifted. There are cases where I feel some of these children will find a lot of problems with being placed in an environment of the more typical gifted children.

Missy sounds like a lost cause. Too danged PC for her own good.