Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Can coasting be just fine?

Hi,

I've seen so many times now posts and articles that say that the gifted child must be challenged or they will not acquire a work ethic, study skills, etc, that I feel the need to play devil's advocate.

I'm MG, maybe HG, but certainly not PG. I coasted all the way through school, a bit of challenge in later high school but it was not a hard high school, I was a big fish in a little pond. My parents thought it was important to do okay but they didn't care about a top grade, they didn't go to parent conferences, volunteer, etc. They didn't seem to think that my performance was something they could affect beyond asking me if my homework was done. They did themselves value learning highly, which showed in career choices, the games we played (trivial pursuit, complicated card games), trips we took, etc -- but they didn't expect school to provide or reinforce a work ethic.

Very selective college, I worked hard for sure but still crammed before exams. Post graduate got too hard for cramming to work and the first fall I got a D before I realized the amount of continuous effort required. A teacher asked me if I might have a learning disability. In response I joined some study groups, got organized, and did great after that.

In fact I think the coasting helped me. It let me see school as something apart from my self-identity. It minimized me feeling like I need someone else to instruct me. I did a lot of other things as a kid, played a lot, read a huge amount, built a lot of things, was pulled out of school regularly for trips or minor illness. In post graduate work I wasn't afraid to skip some of my school's class-time to take some outside classes, giving me a breadth that later served me well (it seemed to shock my classmates at the time, skip class, what if my gradepoint average dropped?)

I think one really has to look at the family's characteristics and child's temperament before deciding a child needs to work hard at formal schooling from the age of 5 in order to succeed in life.

It seems like sometimes a need for challenge to build character or study skills is used as an excuse to get appropriate level work. Which is fine as long as one realizes that at least occasionally this is just an excuse. For truly PG kids perhaps more often a necessity, as they might not encounter challenge any other way.

I'm trying to figure out what the specific characteristics are that let me coast without damaging my ability ramp up my effort when needed.

One thing may be an ability to deeply focus on something one is interested in. If I get interested in something I could do it for days straight (that's now, more for hours straight as a 5 year old). Another is perfectionism or self criticism, so that I'm very aware of the quality of what I'm doing and even if I start something the night before I don't settle for pretty good. (I have a teenage relative right now hitting a wall academically because he's so un-self-critical he doesn't care to turn in work that is excellent if he can get by with work that is so-so).

To other successful coasters out there... what was your family like or what about you made it fine to coast? Do all gifted 5 and 6 year olds need to be academically challenged by their classwork?

Polly

I coasted. My parents were working class, we lived in rural Appalachia, and I went to public school.

I remember refusing to do chalkboards full of arithmetic problems in first grade because I already knew how to do them. Over the next several years, I learned to keep my head down, hide my book under the desk, retain the last sentence spoken by the teacher in short-term memory without actually listening, stare at the teacher while daydreaming, do my homework during the roll call, and count to three before asking a question to give everyone else a chance to answer.

I never made the honor roll in high school. The closest I came was in sophomore year, when I made 5 As and a D in PE. My parents never hassled me about my grades. My dad would look at my report card and sign it without comment, whether my grades were good or bad.

I was the one who wanted to attend a selective college, 150 miles from home geographically, but light years away socially and philosophically. I remember coming home to an empty house from a field trip the day after I received my financial aid offer. I wondered briefly, as you always do if you're growing up in fundamental Christianity, if everybody else had been swept up in the Rapture.

But soon my mother came home and told me that I was going to that college I wanted, that a friend of the family had given us the security deposit instead of giving her tithe to the church that month. I didn't know about the friend, but I'd already decided I was going to find a way, somehow. I patted my mom on the arm and said, "I know."

Fast forward five years, and I'm sitting in the chapel, about to graduate. The choir is chanting a psalm, and I'm looking up into the chancel, where the faculty are sitting in pews that face each other. Some of the professors are craning their necks to look at...us! For the first time, it occurs to me that they are actually proud of us. I remember all the sloppy papers-- essentially first drafts--that I slid under their doors at midnight. And I start to cry for all the missed opportunities to do really good work.

Honestly, I've never been motivated by things like money and grades. When I did well in graduate school, it was because I enjoyed the subject. When I did poorly in graduate school, it's because I was also teaching children at the time, and I tended to prioritize their lessons over mine. And I have often chosen jobs that were interesting to me over jobs that pay well or offer steady employment.

The same 6th grade teacher who told my mother I was "sharp as a whip and lazy as a dog" recently told me to quit working so hard on the furlough days. My state decided they didn't have enough money to pay teachers for some of the days we prepare classrooms, lessons, and report card grades.

My adviser in graduate school said I didn't want to bother with things I didn't think were important, and he was right about that, too. When I got my MA just in time for the tech bubble to burst and the job market to tank in the last recession before this, my host wanted me to wear pantyhose to interviews. I remember thinking that any boss who cared whether I wore pantyhose wasn't a boss I wanted to work for. And that distaste for jumping through hoops, I developed while coasting in school.

When we talk about underachievement, we never seem to say that gifted kids often do not get good grades or good jobs because they do not recognize report card grades, GPA, or a high salary as a valid measure of achievement. And that's part of what coasting does to you, too.

My DD is only EIGHT and is ALREADY like this! Except she hasn't learned to keep her head down and the other kids notice her reading, so she gets in trouble for it, when she is probably turning to books to keep herself from acting out more *sigh*
We have tried SO MANY reward/consequence systems and nothing ever seems to make a difference. My DD seems to be completely INTERNALLY motivated, by what, I don't exactly know...but her current interest in "brain games" shows me that she enjoys challenging HERSELF and looks only to herself for that need to be filled, leaving her contemptuous and disrespectful of a person whose JOB IT IS to challenge her and TEACH her things. How is she supposed to react if she feels NO (or very little) new information is being presented? What a sad life my child is living right now, to not feel the joy of discovery, the excitmement of sharing something fascinating with peers...
Life shouldn't be a coast. It should be filled with highs and lows, excitement, sorrow, joy, disappointment. Even the painful things teach you something. The middle of the stream is safe, but boring. And if she goes to regular school, she spends the majority of time there, where is she supposed to fill herself with the other things that make her complete? If you are used to coasting, what do you do when you hit the rapids? I want my DD prepared for that. Olympic athletes don't coast...they challenge themselves and stretch and practice and grow. My child is getting NONE of that with these DISMAL standards and, what's more, is being held back, told to not work ahead or shine too hard academically because it might make others feel bad...

That's what coasting is doing to our family, right now

Partial or complete decompensation?

Becoming a danger to others?

So true Beckee!


Nothing was very interesting. Nothing.

Coasting is just making do. Waiting for ... nothing. Because year after year, school day after school day, what you can immediately grasp after the first 5 minutes the teacher introduces and then repeats for the rest of week shows you there will be nothing interesting.

Coasting at a school is waiting to be fed. And they feed new interesting things ... so.... ..... slow. If I was interested, I went off to the library and read it already. But then I still have to hear it again and write it out to "show" I know it on paper for the next week or two or three.

The non-coasting, the acceleration, the challenge, is a light. Invigorates. I am alive. I can think and not be invisible. (Haha, I can "not-"exist in class and be invisible, and daydream, and still do well in school. This is a sick laugh because I died then. There was no point in it. A slow torture.) The light -- I need it to live. Please challenge my brain.

Add to this, issues with perfectionism, underachievement, wanting to be normal. Imagine everyone reading at Gr. 1 level but you read books at the Gr.3-4 level. There is no one to talk to about the fascinating stories you've just read. The isolation. Aaagh.

But it depends on the child. In the OP's case, it seems to work out ok. But for others, it darkens their soul, ahem, because some would feel rather intensely about all this.

Someone showed me this article-- I'm not sure if you've seen it, but it's pretty interesting

What a Child Doesn't Learn

Hmm. I have to tell you that I am like this too, but I wouldn't say I did a LOT of coasting. Some, but not a lot--I was fortunate to have pretty good school experiences. I wonder if some of this attitude is personality more than anything. I am not a hoop-jumper and never have been. I also am not a praise junkie.

I want my daughter to be challenged in school because I remember what it was like for me K-6 with zero challenges, dying a little every day in school, and I'd like to spare her that, especially because we already see it happening.

Also, I see where she's at from an achievement perspective compared to where I was at that same age, with all the advantages she's already received, and I imagine how much further she can go if she's provided with the right opportunities... and don't we all want our children to end up in a better place than we did?

Dude et al, I fully agree... I remember being just so unhappy with boredom it was like physical pain. I want to spare my DS that if there's any way possible. Still, I don't think the coasting hurt me in the long run. Except perhaps to have an edge-need, a compulsion to never sit in the middle so as not to be trapped in boring movies/talks/etc, in this unexpectedly lucky adult life where one can simply go.

It seems like the specter of boredom is so attached to coasting that it's hard to talk about effects of coasting in isolation.

Polly

"I'm not way big into external validation," is the way I usually put it.

Apologies, I think I post this link on some discussion every couple of weeks, but yes. It is a matter of personality. FPs on the Myers Brigg are more likely to bug their parents about a lack of challenge. TPs are more likely to conclude their teachers are stupid and just coast.

http://www.educationaloptions.com/resources/resources_rufs_tips.php