Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Questioning assessment of kids based upon parents

Imo...sweet sentence!! Love the alliteration.

While double checking alliteration vs. consonance, I ran across this, a bit about being gt in language?
Lauryn Hill's lines from the Fugees 'Zealots' show consonance at work alongside rhyme:
Rap rejects my tape deck, ejects projectile
Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile,
Many styles, More powerful than gamma rays
My grammar pays, like Carlos Santana plays


More to the point...Yeah, I wouldn't put a whole lot of thought into whether a poster is being truthful based on how they spell GT. For their kid's sake they might just need some good honest advice
A lot of parents who are not gifted don't recognize it in their kids because they figure it couldn't be true based on their own intelligence level - so hurray to those folks who just go ahead and admit - their kid is smarter than them. And they need help, these are big admissions.
Despite being eg/hg myself, I definitely throw a few missing commas into each of my posts for 'flare'.

I think this most certainly is a result of less reading. Things like this come from hearing and knowing the meaning of certain catch phrases from conversational use, however never ever having read them, or very seldom anyway, one might not commit them to memory as almost sight words.
If they are spelling them according to phonics they probably possess decent spelling ability, but in addition to not having seen them in print too often, they are also not digging into the 'where did that phrase come from, anyway?' to make a deeper link with why it is spelled moot rather than mute. If I make a mute point, I am not making much of anything, am I?
(Musings about the why and 'from whence' of language might be a gt tendency that just doesn't rear it's head in the nd mind too often, not sure on that one.)

I had to smile at this post because if you ever met my mother or better put her writing you'd never guess that I was tested gifted as a kid (and even had an ACT score in middle school that passed the Davidson cut-off). My mother's writing is barely legible and she is probably one of the worse spellers I have ever met (including non-native English speakers that I have met!). It's also painfully slow for her to read a book. I've wondered at times if she has a learning disability but I think she might just be really, really visual spatial (she's very good at math/art). She also comes from a family of very high achieving mathematicians.

My dad, on the other hand, is a former English teacher who used to send articles back and forth with my grandma that they thought were so funny because of the typos in them.

I'm somewhere in between. A bad speller who ended up in a math related field but at least knows how to write a paper. However, I think if people just met my mom they would never think I was gifted.

I should also say, while my father is very smart (no clue if he's gifted or not but he would make and excellent contestant on jeopardy!), no matter how many times I explain my work to him he doesn't get it. But my mom, who only had a few basic college classes, gets it right away.

Because of that I really try and take what others say at face value. And even if they are overestimating their child's worth, what does it matter in the long run? Maybe some of the answers will help them or at least help someone else reading the post. DD's never been tested and, while she has the genes for it, it doesn't guarantee anything, but yet I've still have found numerous posts very useful for me here!

Newmom21C, I think that was probably a typo? I don't think it's possible for a parent to overestimate a child's worth (as opposed to their intelligence) and I'd be surprised if that's what you meant to say!

I was typing this why a toddler why jumping on me. I guess, I just meant overestimating their intelligence. I certainly didn't mean worth in the sense of how valuable having their child is!

Obviously a typo, but a funny one. At least it's funny how cliche phrases jump to mind so easily to slip in and mess up what we meant unnoticed. Ha ha, u got Mommy's brain. I read some forgotten article that says your iq drops when you have a baby, but comes back even higher after a few years.

Interesting. I never did well in school after about age 11, quit school at 16 with 8 'O'levels (this was in England, where leaving school at 16 was totally normal back in 1979), and didn't go to college. Dh moved around many many schools, as his dad was in the military. He spent alot of time in the principal's office, did actually start to apply himself in high school, got his diploma, and didn't go to college. Having said that, I do see spelling and grammatical errors in posts, and mostly my thought is that the writer was in a hurry and didn't go back and check what they had written. I don't think I have ever thought it was a marker of "lesser" intelligence.

I'm starting to feel like a really judgemental person here . I'm truly not judging spelling errors and lack of commas. I do that myself. I also throw in the wrong word, write run on sentences, etc.

Just to give an idea of what I am talking about (and so you all don't think that I am picking apart any typos in your posts or mine), the posts that have left me wondering about what the person was saying have looked something like this:

"My kid is PG. Me and his dad spends alot of time trying to get his teachers to acomodate him, but he is learning rediculous stuff. I know that he can read hard chapter books because he has been reading them since he was little, but his teachers says that he is only reading at grade level. That is rediculous! I know there wrong about what he can do, but me and her can't comunicate."

Either way, you are all right. It is better to respond as if the person is accurate in his/her assessment of the child b/c it doesn't really matter if the poster is off base. FWIW, I'm not rude to anyone; I just give more brief responses or none at all in instances of this sort. I should, however, consider some of the suggestions here regarding LDs, a disconnect btwn the child and parent's intelligence, and parents who have strengths in areas other than verbal intelligence.

The comments regarding these people perhaps not being high in the verbal IQ area, but high in perceptual reasoning is a good thought that I should have considered.

Thanks for the example. Reading that passage doesn't make me ponder if the child is gifted but more of a wow, this parent has a major uphill battle to get anyone in the school to take her seriously. If she was posting on this board I would expect some of our members to suggest ways to email the teacher and the administration with copy and paste examples to help her out. That is one reason I adore this community. We don't judge and we offer help.

Eh, I don't know. I think that using "me" as a nominative pronoun is reasonably common in some areas/cultures. Other than that, the only thing I really see here are spelling errors. It's at least readable, and the ideas are conveyed reasonably well; I've seen plenty of posts that are not even coherent.

Of course, there's an added issue of content. But that's another matter altogether.