Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School My daughter

My daughter is exceptionally gifted. She's able to do Algebra, grade 13 reading level, everything is exceptional. But when I was telling her to get a dirty fork out of the sink and wash it, she just stupid there blankly starting at the sink. It wasn't gross, the forks had just been sprayed off. Again, I showed my 11 year old niece how to use a knitting loom. I showed my niece in 10 minutes how to use the loom. It took 40 for my daughter and she still couldn't get it right. Anyone know if this is a leavening disability? How do I get her father to see it? There are multiple times I have noticed her lack of ability to follow inductions. Even with me showing her how to hold the loom 3 times, she still didn't hold it right.

There is actually a pretty common pairing between high intelligence and a poor ability to be trained through mimicry. They may need actual teaching starting at a conceptual level before just being shown how to do something and expected to do it. Some people will learn ten times faster and better from a book or manual than from direct instruction. Some people can see an action once and repeat it exactly, that's a different sort of gifted.

Though I learned the right way to tie shoes in my thirties when I saw a diagram illustrating how the opposing strings worked, I don't think I have a learning disability.

When we taught my eight year old how to weave, the first thing was explaining how the warps alternated with the weft. Then the cause and effect of the treadles on the harness which alternates the warp yarns. He then extrapolated the role of the shuttle and sat down with confidence and passed the shuttle a few times. He was a bit clumsy, but knew what he needed to do.

He doesn't have instant physical competence, and time to mastery of physical tasks is on the other side of the spectrum from how he learns intellectual tasks almost instantly. A lot of it is because the brain tries to control things that other people take the automaticity of for gratned. We are lucky enough to completely understand where he is at due to shared experience. As an adult, I've learned to respond to "Here let me show you..." with "No thank you."

Or "low tolerance for being trained through mimicry". An expression "like a trained seal" comes to mind.

I don't know about the loom, but surely in the case of the fork it is an obvious case of "doesn't want to" rather than "isn't able to".

It's possible it's a learning disability, but I don't know enough about that area to discuss that. But it's also possible that it's not a disability, just a difference in learning styles between teacher and student. We tend to teach in the ways that work for us as learners, and the same methods don't work for everyone.

For example, my DD's learning style is primarily visual and conceptual, which happens to be a match for my own. I can speak to that in ways my DW does not comprehend. However, my DD's personal reactions to feedback are completely alien to me, and I have to step back and allow DW to address those, to whom they are quite familiar. From DD9's perspective, "Dad is an excellent teacher but kind of a jerk, Mom is nice but she confuses me."

It sounds like your go-to learning method is through visual information, and is therefore your go-to teaching method. What Zen Scanner describes is giving lots of audio messaging to accompany that, which would be helpful if that's your DD's default learning mode.

In addition, there's conceptual, or top-down learning, in which the student needs to know how the process works, and why, in order to begin to crystallize the details. Without those concepts, a series of sequential steps are robbed of meaning, and therefore don't get retained. It sounds like you may be starting with the details, in a bottom-up mode. If you can try it the other way, you may see different results.

"surely in the case of the fork it is an obvious case of 'doesn't want to' rather than 'isn't able to'"

I'm absolutely not trying to be confrontational (because i stink at that) - but not necessarily. If DD was stomping off in a huff, I'd say this was more likely correct. But standing and staring sounds sooooo familiar to me.

I've learned with my son that very, very often, the staring indicates my instruction has kicked off a chain reaction of thoughts that he is still working through. And as a PG kid with a 94 point spread between his highest WISC subsection score and his processing speed score, I've come to understand that the chain reaction may take a while to play out.

Here is a purely hypothetical example based on the fork in the sink and my DS's seemingly wacky responses to instructions in the past:

"Mom wants me to put the fork in the dish washer. But those forks were already rinsed. Are they clean enough to put away instead? We're in a drought. It's the worst one in a hundred years. I guess it won't use more water to wash the fork with the other dishes. But maybe we should be using disposable forks so we don't have to wash them at all. Of course, then there is the landfill problem. I guess plastic is never a good answer. Even the compostable stuff sticks around for a long time. On the radio, the environmental guy said that "compostable" was mostly just for marketing, and we shouldn't use disposables ever. [NOTE: potential tangent on misleading marketing strategies DS has heard about] But then we have to use water to wash stuff. And we don't have enough water. And THAT problem is definitely getting worse. Clearly we need to figure out better desalination. But then we have to be careful about mucking with the ocean's salinity. We don't want a huge Dead Sea where the Pacific Ocean used to be. [NOTE possible thought tangent on what caused the Dead Sea to die] But maybe we could cycle the water back into the ocean. I think I have a book about the water cycle under my bed. [walking away to get book]. 'Mom - why are you yelling at me? Oh - the fork. Sorry.'"

As I've wondered about in other threads - I'm not convinced that the lower measured processing speed for these PG kids is actually a function solely of SPEED. Rather, it's at least heavily influenced by VOLUME of what is being processed. To put it another way - an absent-minded professor isn't really absent. He's just present in many other places than where we want him AT THAT MOMENT.

On a more practical level - when I spot this happening with my DS, I feed him an appropriate verbal response. I'll say "Now you say to me, 'OK Mom, I'll put the fork in the dish washer.'" Very often, he will parrot the response, and then realize that means he was supposed to be doing something. I won't say he always does it (see stomping off in a huff comment above). But at least we are both on the same track at that point.

And on a slightly heartbreaking point - he has often sobbed about the fact that nobody believes him when he says he really wasn't ignoring instructions. He just couldn't get to them.

Hope you can find a strategy that helps with your daughter. But I really wouldn't start with the assumption that she's being willfully naughty. We learned the hard way that assumption - and the discipline strategies that flow from it - only make the problem worse. because the strategies aren't really addressing the problem. They're just punishing the kid for something they don't know how to change.

Sue

It *might* be a learning disability, but that should be answered by a specialist. How is her mood? (Stress/depression may cause difficulty to concentrate.)

It may not be a lack of ability to follow instructions, but a learned behaviour. A possible explanation is that your DD may have learnt to "space out" (think of something else) all the time while she is at school, to cope with extreme boredom, when everything around is very S-L-O-W and meaningless. (Disclaimer: I am not a specialist, and this is just one of the many possibilities.)

Do you see the same behaviour when she does something which she is very interested in?

And to actually address your question - in addition to his crazy VCI/processing speed difference, DS was diagnosed with dyslexia and dysgraphia. Based on what I've learned about dyslexia/dysgraphia - it's really a full-on difference in brain wiring. So maybe it's all of a piece.

Anyway - has your daughter had a neuropsych work-up that would look at these things? Having this data has given me some additional patience in dealing with these challenges, as well as providing better focus on which strategies are more likely to be effective.

I most definitely have one of those in my house -- if not two!

There can absolutely be a "disability" with physical things side by side with high intelligence. My son could read anything when he was two. He didn't learn to tie his shoes until he was seven or eight, and he didn't learn to ride a bike until he was almost eleven. I found out from this board that he probably has what's called "dyspraxia" or "apraxia", which I called "a lack of kinesthesia" -- his brain has a tenuous connection with his body. You can show him how to do something, where to place his fingers, how to put his hands just right, and when he tries it, even though his brain is thinking the right things, his hands do something else entirely. Even trying to place his fingers in the right positions meets with resistance from his muscles that are trying to do something different.

But you find yourself muttering, "the kid can do algebra, so why can't he manage to tie his shoes?" And the other thing, so aptly explained by suevv, leaves you muttering, "how can the kid skip two grades and still need help rinsing a fork?"

You're not crazy. It's just how it is.

Thank you, thank you suevv!! I'm framing your post for my wall.