Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Don't laugh at me...but would you ever...

Jon -- my gifted child is my first -- so I had nothing and no one to compare her to, but now my younger daughter is clearly no where near where my older is, and I am 100% thrilled with that. I honestly think that being hopefully still bright but not gifted is probably the easier road to take in life. It is my understanding that in regular society (i.e. college admissions, etc) there is a dimenishing return and just just smart enough is usually enough.

I'm sure that I had heard of giftedness, but I guess that I imagined it to be much more rare than it is (like highly prominent individuals such as Einstein or Bill Gates and maybe one kid in my high school). I wasn't offended, btw .

As far as people commenting, I don't recall that much with dd either, honestly. Partially it was b/c there is a lot of that type of stuff in the family so to speak and it isn't atypical amongst family members. The other part was that I had a very limited social circle of other moms when dds were young and the other few kids we knew, I just assumed were slowish plus there have been some weird competitive parent issues where the response to dds was not, "wow, my kid can't do that," but rather to insist that their kid is doing more when that isn't the case.

Cricket -- I for sure had friends and family who didn't really believe it but I didn't have anyone who didn't really notice it. My friends would see her sit down to read at a party or a playdate and say "she's memorized, that, right!?" Or whatever...but her gifts were sort of "obvious" that way while I would assume some kids gifts are much more abstract and not as concrete as precarious reading or writing or talking, etc. Ya know?

My wife would agree with that. My children seem to be doing fine with life.

I think that being not me is probably an easier road to take in life, but I never know which of my problems are caused by external factors and which are internal factors and/or bad habits.

Yeah, I have to say it's amazing how many kids I know who are already reading at 2. Or perhaps "already reading."

I'm one of the _minority_ with an illiterate 2 yr old in some circles.

If that many of them really *are* reading, somethin' strange isa gonna happen to the statistics... and kindergarden curriculums.

Funny how in the circles where I percieve there to be a lot of smart kids, a higher proportion of the 2 yr olds are illiterate. Usually all of them. Even that kid I saw writing words on the sidewalk half a year ago...

In retrospect, the stuff that made me think DS was smarter than your average bear is not really very... well, I wouldn't find it impressive now. I still think he's pretty smart. But most of the time when he does something really interesting, no-one can even tell he did it. (Today he had a bit of trouble explaining a sand-dome versus sand-as-smoke issue. There was no sand-dome on the train. But there was pretend smoke made of sand. The ECE thought he didn't know what sand was & then started trying to explain that there either was or was not sand. It got... well... funny, really. I successfully swallowed my bad joke about ontology and two year olds. I really like that particular woman, largely becasue she underestimates the kids less often and less badly than most.)

Missing it? Easy. DS is more likly to be pegged as unusually slow than as smart by others, and if I believed all the other moms, I'd be sure they were right. The difference is that we spend a lot of time out in public with other kids, and I actually know a lot of kids his age.

I have a slightly other perspective on the IQ test thing: you _can_ study for an IQ test. Those tests have expected answers, and if the kid over-thinks the answer, they will sometimes fail to get the expected one. I once (I was about 6) took an IQ test where I was expected to put pictures in order. I consiously rejected info provided by a weather vane and priveledged info from atmospheric conditions (which were at odds). The examiner happened to be surprised, and asked me if I thought I had it backwards, and I told her, off-handedly, that I'd been confused by the weather vane at first, but thought I had it right now. I remember because I was so deeply shocked that neither the tester nor the test-designers knew anything about sunrises, and the tester reported to my parents that she couldn't give me the points for that and it had made a big difference. Cultural literacy is also required, and a vocabularly which matches the test (both language/dialect -issues, AND words-for-what-I-think-about issues). I remember a story about a young boy from a non-western farming background who identified that the elephant in the picture shown was missing his testicles, and only confirmed that he had also noticed the missing leg when asked about it specifically. He understood his intelligence was being tested, and felt that the gelding issue must be the target and the leg a distractor.

-Mich

Michaela, thank you for posting this - I thought this was just me! I always miss the obvious and find the obscure. It gets me in to trouble constantly. It used to upset me because I always felt stupid as a result (and based on the reactions of people who didn't know me, this is often how it came across). These days (thanks to trying to understand dd) I've come to accept I'm actually pretty smart, but I do think in an usual way. So I'll never ace a short answer test because I'll often just have to make my best guess at what they wanted the question to mean, but ask me to come up with an unusual solution and I'm your woman!

DD2 has a VCI of 142, FS 138 and yep I figured she was bright enough but no different to all the other bright kids I know. We only tested her because her older sister is 2e, so we took her to the OT at 4.5 to make sir we hadnt missed anything - and the OT said he only has that much fun testing kids when (paranoid) parents bring in perfectly normal younger sibs of kids with issues, that she was bordering on gifted, needed to be in school and should have an Ed psych eval.

She was an early talker, walker, deep thinker, but was not an early reader and didn't like to talk to most people so we didn't get comments and preschool were adamant she was nothing special even after testing. We figured we were bright but had no idea we were "gifted" and she's rather like us so we figured she was normal... Her most commented on behavior as a baby/toddler was the extreme baby proofing required due to her intense drive to explore. I can't count the number of time people's so called baby proofing failed to contain her in under 5 minutes, followed by "wow no kid's ever got into that before!" but this sort of thing is viewed as troublesome not gifted...

We've just found out she needs glasses (tracking and convergence not standard eyesight issues), which probably explains her not learning to read, given she's known the alphabet in and out of order by sound and name since 2.

So yes I have a 140ish kid who I thought was "normal", most of the kids i know well probably sit around 120+ though, skewed cohort...