Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy giftedness and agreeable kids

This type of gifted child always makes everyone proud, has a strong inner sense of ethics and morals, but may have to make time up later in life figuring out what they really want.

Maybe it won't happen, but it is likely they will find that to follow their intuition they have to divert from what family and friends are saying to do.

When you are young it lines up to follow what family and friends are saying to do and it almost feels like an obligation to do so.

When you become an adult, have your own place, start a career, take a partner, have a child, whatever, then the gifted person realizes that their path comes from their intuition about things. (Yes, this might just be for those with strong Myers-Briggs intuition like INFP people in those studies.)

All of a sudden there are new obligations to spouses, bosses, children, society, etc. Their world really opens up, so spend time with them when they are young! They might be up in the air on an airplane once they are adults.

This perfectly captures what happened for DS' entire first grade year. In addition, these mistakes and non-compliance were held up as evidence that DS was unlikely to be gifted, since "we've had gifted children and they are always the ones finding something productive to do." (DS was finding his version of productivity, entertaining his classmates with his comedic routines. The teachers were not amused.) He later tested at the PG level.

And also something I fought against for years when I was on the gifted screening committee in my old district; teachers consistently referred kids with IQs in the 110s who were personable, compliant, and worked quickly, and routinely overlooked a few kids with CogAT and ITBS scores in the 130s across the board. Oh, and they underreferred students of color and linguistic minorities, too.

I think one of the problems is that a lot of teachers refer children who are like themselves, or an idealized picture of themselves at that age.

ConnectingDots could have been describing my DD's year with her math teacher (her Language Arts teacher seems to understand her, at least). The math teacher actually wanted to put her in the slow-moving group because she didn't comply with a lot of this teacher's requirements about type of paper, position of name, date, and staple, and so on. Refused to believe me when I tried to explain that DD is gifted.

Aeh, what you wrote is interesting. I stumbled across and old article in the NY Times about gifted programs in New York, and one of the commenters said the basically same thing: that gifted minority students get overlooked (have just tried and failed to find that comment in a field of 176 of them ). That's very disturbing.

DD7 made her very first complaint to her teacher today! I'm partly proud and surprised, partly apprehensive and not at all surprised. Very complex reactions as you can see, lol!
DD loves school, is happy to comply, loves following rules, loves the routines, the friendships, works hard, engages fully and is super polite - but if she's anything like her brother, this will start to go sour by about age 9-10. I can see it coming. Right now she's a teacher's dream. In a few years, very few of them will understand her. A couple of them will LOVE everything she says and is. The rest will think she's off-topic, odd-ball, unfocused, too difficult.
Her teacher this year (the year starts in February here) is awesome and completely took her complaint on board and is doing his best against the school policy of "if we give her xyz now, we'll run out of things to teach her." With a less-interested teacher things will go sour faster.
Luckily this time, fingers-crossed, we're forewarned and forearmed. Last time we had noooo idea what had hit us

Not all children react that way. Some, especially girls, just fade into the class. Think about it - the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the child with behavioural issues gets the testing. Those kids are malcontents because of their IQ, but having a high IQ does not always make you a malcontent.

Of course, these kids (often girls) don't ever learn to work or struggle or overcome adversity, which is a problem in later life, but in school they don't make themselves obvious. I can't tell you how many sweet, gentle calm high IQ kids I know who were tested because a sibling was having issues at school.

Yes, a thousand times. This is very true. And a very big problem later in life.

The Merriam-Webster definition of malcontent is "a person who is always or often unhappy or angry about something".

This definition may describe a person with a generally negative view who seeks to find fault with whatever is at hand in many circumstances. This may contrast sharply with a person frustrated with an issue, such as a poor fit with a learning environment: rebelliousness triggered by being steeped in repetition of material already mastered.

Lists of possible observable identifying characteristics of the gifted are only meant to help broaden one's thinking from the narrow, stereotypical, and historical view of "teacher's pet" as being gifted; Such lists were not intended to preclude "teacher's pet", compliant, or agreeable children from being identified as gifted.

There are differing cultural norms (and different adages such as "the nail that sticks out will get hammered down" and "tall poppy syndrome"). The wikipedia page about the adage "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" describes these briefly.

This was my DD. She tried very hard to conform to her teachers' expectations of her, even going so far as to pretend not to know things she'd mastered years before.

Luckily, she has very squeaky parents.

This is true. Many gifted kiddos, including identified kiddos, hide their gifts and talents. There are threads discussing this. It is not necessarily an identification issue. Rather, it may be students seeking social acceptance and inclusion. This may be an unfortunate side-effect of a society seeking ever greater educational, academic, and intellectual conformity/uniformity rather than valuing unique, creative, diverse intellectual positions.

Prior to lists of common behavioral characteristics of gifted children being created, misbehaving children may not have often been tested for giftedness. The lists raised awareness. Is it your observation and experience that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction... that only children with behavior issues are being tested?

When you say this, what definition of "malcontent" are you working with?