Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion ohhh she's in trouble..anyone else's kid do this?

She is a funny kid. She gets pretty good grades at school (with the exception of spelling which she is HORRIBLE at) but they are not out of this world amazing. Some of the stuff she doesn't think she needs to do I think she does need the extra practice. It is a little late in the year for me to ask the teachers to change things around now and our school dist is going through a bad time and I fear a lot of changes are coming. We will see what next year brings. Thanks for all your feedback!

One of my earliest, and worst memories of school was exactly this. In first grade, at the end of the school year we had to clean out our desks and put all the papers we hadn't completed in a pile. I had done almost nothing (it was all "baby stuff") and had a huge pile of untouched papers and was absolutely mortified that the other kids could see how dumb i was!

Unfortunately, work continued to be easy all the way through high school (IF I cared to pay attention...) and i grew up thinking i was stupid and lazy. I never really learned what motivation and dedication meant. Never had to. DOn't ask me why i thought i was stupid. I had straight 'A's at least into HS.

So based on my experience you have two options. Force the Kid to do meaningless work which she will hate and fight through (but maybe learn a lesson from?) or forget the whole thing and establish a pattern for life that is tough to break.

Of course the real answer is to find a program that works the way we all know that it should, but good luck with that!

I think it is a good idea to talk to the school now about what has been going on, and to see if you can get a teacher for next year that is a little more aware of what your daughter's readiness level is. I would also write down a little description about what happened this year to share with next year's teacher early in the year, so that it won't happen again.

I've read some articles about cluster grouping, and they reccomends against grouping the highest academic group and the inclusion group together in the same classroom. You might want to sleuth around if they are going to try that again.

Love and More Love,
Grinity (who can't spell either - thankfully it's not highly related to general intelligence)

Your poor DD I have had a teacher tell me "too bad that is life" How sad. Who can blame these kids. Would we want to sit there reading cat in the hat all etc.

I know what you mean though about what is required. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They are forced to do busy work. I have not found a solution. Had to do a grade skip that helped a bit. At least he is not counting dots anymore.