Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Parenting arms race article

This is exactly the problem I've had with my districts gifted program. It's more designed for the "highly motivated" child than the truly gifted ones. Even though they have more than average amount of HG & PG kids. They ignore the fact that gifted kids can have their quirks and aren't as self motivated in all subjects.

It's more profession with what I've seen in my family and others.

Engineering, medical school, oral surgeon, etc.

Achieve or fail.

These were also Germans who were most decidedly *not* into farming, but rather they were burghers, for lack of a better word.

One side of my family came from the plain people. There was *no* academic interest there. And the farm was just sold three years ago or so.

I keep trying to tell people that this is the new college prep track.

Gifted = College prep.

It has nothing to do with what "gifted" means on this board.

In fact, I'm trying to get my kids into the gifted program.

I don't even know what their I.Q.'s are.

Granted, I don't think I want to know.

I know a guy who has admitted out loud that he's trying to coach an extra ten points into his precious little snowflake so that the kid will meet the requirement for the local gifted program. This poor kid gets a lot of helicopter tigering from the parental units. But they are molding him into an Achiever (tm). There is definitely parental ego involved in this process.

Given that so few teachers have serious training in giftedness and LOGs, it's hardly surprising that they don't believe parents of HG+ kids when we tell them that differentiation isn't enough or that a single-grade acceleration in subject x isn't enough.

While it's reasonable for parents to want to help their kids do well, it isn't reasonable when their methods cause other children to be deprived of an appropriate education. This is precisely what happens when the uber-preppers in places like New York and elsewhere coach their kids so that they can stretch their toes onto the magic cutoff line. The result of this approach, as we all know, is that either 1) there are lotteries to get into these schools, and the students who get in aren't all gifted or 2) everyone who meets the minimum gets in, but the student body has a lot of kids who aren't truly gifted.

Yes-- and while I don't live in MacLean, one can quite readily find the same basic ethos at work in pretty much EVERY small college town in America these days.

Everyone in academia has seen faculty brats that have had this kind of thing done to them for at least the past generation-- it's truly a 'thing' for them.

And yeah, there's a LOT of parental ego at work.


Which ironically makes HG+ kids in that cohort even more extremely persona non grata when you get right down to it. We make the Tiger Cubs look bad. We should go away so that they can feel better about themselves.



At least that is the sense that we've always gotten from others living where we do. Parents BRAG about their kids getting into the "GT" program here. They admit (openly, as Val says) that they doctor shop for IQ points, or that they doctor shop for "accommodations" in order for snowflake to "achieve" at that higher level (since here, ID's are usually not IQ based, but achievement based).

Well, sheesh-- NO WONDER my DD's school identified her without ever even bothering to test her into the program. NO. WONDER. So I disagree that teachers and administrators don't know the real thing. They very clearly DO know it when they see it. They've just got a lot greater numbers of not-quite-there parents with torches and pitchforks and their egos in tow, pounding on the gates.

That reminds me of father. He was really bothered by the fact that my I.Q. was barely high enough to get into the gifted program at the time.

Parental ego is fun.

Because it's now considered "college prep".

Just like college is now really high school.

Sort of. I agree that college is the new high school, but the parental ego that I've seen surrounding squeezing out those extra IQ points and IVY LEAGUE ADMISSIONS!!! is astonishing and very depressing. They remind me of wide-mouthed frogs.

Gifted must have been absorbed into the entire WINNING! philosophy at some point in the last 10 years.

The obvious goal is for all children to get what they need in order to work as closely as possible to their potential while staying socially and emotionally healthy. Unfortunately, because of lack of public education on the matter, far too many think that a GT program is the answer to that whether their child is actually capable of being successful in such a program or not.

I'm a big fan of "levels" of service according to the needs of each child rather than them being in a GT program or not being in a GT program. Levels of elevated service seems to be an absent thought pattern. I think most of us who frequent this forum are aware of the wide variety of needs even among this end of the bell curve.