Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion G&T teachers

Thank you everybody for sharing your thoughts with me regarding this. I guess I'm just overly worried after the horrible year we've had with her 1st grade teacher who basically told me my dd didn't seem gifted in comparison to the other kids in her class who will be going into the G&T class. Yet she would openly admit to me she didn't get my dd and couldn't engage her. Dd doesn't play with kids at school and sits by herself at lunch. Even after I requested the teacher move her to the front and center when they sit on the floor and learn (because dd would just turn away from the class and daydream when placed on the edge of the group) she still kept her at the edge of the group and my dd was completely disconnected from the group. I'm guessing it's b/c my dd is a quiet, well-behaved, introvert and doesn't cause problems and doesn't need to follow the lesson to understand what she needs to do so she puts her on the outside b/c she's not a trouble maker.

Dd is also shy, a perfectionist, a slow-processor, and won't answer unless she knows she has the right answer. She won't raise her hand, if called on she would take too long to answer for the teacher's liking, or dd would feel rushed and answer impulsively. Dd was miserably bored in school, math was her main complaint and would cry every morning she had to go to school. I just don't want to go through that again.

Another thing that worries me is that between the 2 first grade classes 7 kids will be going to the 2nd/3rd G&T class next year from our school. The G&T program is district wide and our school houses it for our city. So it's not just for G&T students in our school. So the fact that she is already struggling to fit in with such a high number of G&T students already in her class worries me.

I just want a teacher who will understand my dd and how her brain works. I need a teacher who is patient and will see my dd for who she is and not fit her into some sort of box of what a gifted student should look like... like someone mentioned in a previous post... a teacher that thinks that gifted means high achiever.


Please forgive me if this post seems discombobulated, the kids kept asking me questions as I was typing and it made it hard to organize my thoughts. LOL

Not to sound totally jaded here , but if your GT identification process looks anything like it does where I live, I'd say that the reason your dd isn't fitting in with the other GT kids in her class already is that she is either a lot more gifted than they are or they aren't actually gifted in the way I consider gifted to be defined: high IQ and different brain wiring not high achievement, group test scores, convergent thinking, and teacher pleasing. The input we've gotten over the years from gifted coordinators, teachers, and district personnel who actually got what gifted is has been: dd is one of the most gifted kids they've ever taught, most of the kids they have in GT with GT ids are not actually gifted but rather high achievers, that we should consider homeschooling b/c they don't have anything in place to meet the needs of HG+ kids, and a variety of other things along those lines.

Your post wasn't rambling at all. You are describing a child who sounds like a hybrid of my two dds so I really feel for you here. The one year that worked well for my older dd before she was given the chance to accelerate significantly was 2nd grade. I approached it without stressing dd's giftedness to her teacher although I was just starting to realize that this was the problem. I focused on the types of things you mentioned when talking to her teacher about her needs: slower processing, introversion, desire to really learn in depth, her areas of passion, etc. It very much helped that the teacher herself was quite intelligent.

Yeah if they have identified 7 out of 2 classes then it is statistically unlikely they are HG+ and may not even be MG. From what I have read there are two common types of gifted programmes.
1/ Programmes that cater to high achievers (mostly girls).
2/ Programmes used to warehouse bright kids with behavoiral problems (mostly boys).

I'm sure that is more jaundiced than it should be.

Yeah, I think this is what concerns me the most. I hate to judge but I do question the majority of the other students' LOG. I can't see how all 7 out of 50 kids are G&T, and how many of them could be HG like my dd? I think the fact that she has yet to truly connect to any of her classmates tells me that she is not in a group with her peers.

I did talk with a dad of one 1st grader who will be going into the G&T class and he said she was initially not selected for the program. He complained to the district about it and then they let her in. He also told me about how he tried to get his older dd in the G&T 2 years in a row and was denied.

The majority of the kids are screened with the COGAT. The district uses testing, parent reports, and teacher reports to determine eligibility for the program. The district doesn't list any minimum requirement on testing for admission.

Our local districts use the CogAT as well. Kids can be placed in GT programming with any of two of the following: 95th percentile score on any one part of the CogAT or OLSAT, achievement in the 95th percentile in any one subject or in the low advanced range or above an annual state test, high grades, parent or teacher recommendation, behavioral rating scales, and maybe some other things I am forgetting. The reality of it is that it is easier for a straight A student who is well regarded by teachers to get ided as gifted even without the high ability scores (or b/c s/he will be retested by teachers over and over until the group tests scores are there) than it is for a HG+ kid who doesn't fit in the box.

I, too, realize that I am probably coming off as judgmental here and hate to be that. However, the reality of it is that my dd has been deemed to be one of the most gifted kids a number of GT teachers have ever taught not b/c the kid is PG (she really isn't; she's HG+ and very directed), but rather b/c they are mostly teaching bright high achievers and run across gifted or HG so infrequently that it really stands out when they see it.

When I look back @ dd's kindergarten class, a full 20% of the kids in that class were later ided as gifted. It really wasn't that unusual of a class and dd was clearly a bit of an outlier in the class although at the time I didn't realize why she was having such a hard time. IMHO, when schools are iding something like 15% of their students as gifted (that's about avg here as well), you are either living in a planned community of Mensa members or the Silicon Valley or there is a problem with the identification procedures. In the latter instance, it often takes a lot more than GT programming to find a reasonable fit for a HG+ kid. In my older dd's instance, it has taken her bd making her the youngest in grade coupled with a grade skip, further subject acceleration, and the good luck to have a HG-PG girl in her grade who was 18 months older in middle school. In high school, she's wound up finding a good chunk of her friends in higher grades as well.

In my older son's school (middle school) there is one class (of 25 kids) per grade set aside. The total number of students is 1000-1100, it enrollment fluctuates. So 75 kids in the whole school are in a special academy. All of the teachers who teach these kids are either gifted endorsed or almost finished with gifted endorsement. The 25 kids travel from teacher to teacher together as a unit other than electives (other kids in the school don't travel together like that their classes are random). This is the class if you are identified gifted where you are served. Now some kids are accepted into this academy without the gifted testing by application and teacher rec. Some just haven't had the gifted testing yet but the kids they accept who aren't id-ed yet generally have the traits. The class has to be a full 25 kids so they do fill in a bit. This has been one of the best moves for my son and each teacher tries to do a lot of really good project based learning because they have the time to add that in on top of the basic stuff.

Thus our heartbreaking experiences with our own (Silicon Forest) district, which identifies fully 30% of its students as GT using a protocol very similar to the one that Cricket discusses. Statistically? Yeah-- NO. Ten percent I might believe to be MG. After all, it's high tech, medical, and Uni employment for about 85% of this town, but 30% stretches credibility beyond the breaking point. We know a number of kids in the district, and not all of those gifted kids are gifted. Most of them are bright and highly to moderately motivated. Some of them are genuinely MG.

We've heard the exact same wonderment/shock from educators from day one, which I can only conclude to mean that statistically, there's nothing really wrong with the Bell curve, and that DD really is that far to the right on it.

The district offers NOTHING more for kids who are what I call "the real deal." Oh, sure, occasionally they'll do a single acceleration, and maybe a subject accel. We know of one of the former (a friend of my DD's in fact), and a handful of the latter.

They simply GAPE at a child like my DD (who is certainly HG+, but only possibly truly PG, in our minds). Maybe she really is. I guess that would explain our sense of disconnect with kids that other people seem to think of as "brilliant" and we think of as "brighter-than-average."



DD has met so few HG/HG+ peers in her life... and largely, she's run into them via hanging out on the fringes of geeky activities, not by socializing with identified "gifted" kids in formal settings. Her virtual charter school draws them in disproportionate numbers-- small wonder, eh?-- and even so, there are only 2-5 of them per grade level, out of 275-400 students per grade.

Brick and mortar schools are horrible places to send HG/HG+ children in this state. There is no authentically differentiated curriculum for those students, and few placement options that are even remotely helpful. Assuming that the district even recognizes what they are seeing, I mean-- and sometimes they don't.

Aside from using this thread as a means for HowlerKarma and me to bemoan how badly our GT programs overidentify high achievers as gifted and underserve gifted kids, lol, I think that what you are needing to do is:

1) try to figure out if this program is going to be able to serve the needs of a HG kid or if it is just fluff for high achievers. I've recommended this article here before, but I think that it is important for the staff to understand the distinction: http://www.giftededucation.org.nz/documents/high-achievers-pdf.pdf
It might be worth doing a little feeling out of the teacher and other staff in the fall to see what definition of "gifted" they are operating off of. Do they understand the difference that Ms. Cathcart expounds on in that article or do they think that the A student/teacher pleasers are the most gifted?

2) try to figure out what the criteria for admission was and how many other kids fell at a similar point to your dd to see if there is any chance that she'll have true peers (perhaps from the other schools since the kids who are pulling from her current school don't seem to be peers).

3) see what other additional options exist if this program is not enough. Will they consider subject acceleration, grade skipping, or anything else?

4) look into extracurricular options for building a social base if it isn't to be had in the school GT program. We initially tried a summer camp through talent search and a summer program through a local school's STEM program for my oldest. We, honestly, found a lot of what we'd found in the public school GT program. There were some gifted kids, but by and large, the other campers were not at the same LOG and dd didn't find them to be any better of peers. We wound up finding the best fit at extracurricular activities that were geared toward kids who were much older than she and in the academic realm, but not in the area of her greatest passion so she wasn't going in with so much background knowledge that she found the material itself boring. This has worked better as dd has gotten older and doesn't stand out among older kids physically (they can't tell looking at her that she is younger and often accept her as a peer before they realize the age difference). It has also been easier since she grade skipped b/c a lot of academic programs admit by grade rather than age.

I agree with both points 3 and 4 above. This has become our strategy, too.