I realize that's an odd subject title, but it's the best I could come up with. I post on some gifted discussion boards other than this one at times. I do realize that I make typos, misspell things, and am generally not perfect in my presentation.

However, I do find myself questioning the veracity of the claims of some posters (again on other boards) who present their kids as HG+ or PG when the parent makes regular errors in writing. Things such as "rediculous" and tons of other misspellings that are not likely due to typos, grammatical errors such as "me and him have...," misuse of homophones ("there" used over and over for "they're"), etc.

Am I the only one? I am feeling judgemental and realizing that I shouldn't be so quick to judge in that I probably live in a glass house myself.

FWIW, these aren't non-native English speakers. I'd be a lot more generous in that instance.

Well, I am PG, went to top schools, graduated with all the honors (departmental and summa cum laude), worked as a large firm attorney for several years, and used to edit the CEO's documents at a Fortune 500.... yet as a SAHM I now have "Mommy brain" and make all sorts of typos!! LOL DH is also HG/PG, holds an executive position, but can't spell or use a comma to save his life!! A lot of it comes from typing very fast in these casual posts/emails. In DH's case, he blames his high school gifted classes that focused on creative writing and missed the standard grammar instruction.

However, I have my share of judgments that I have to work on. For example, it drives me a little nuts when people claim their children "read at XX grade level" without any testing verifications just because they can read a sentence out of a higher level book. As most of us realize, true reading level/comp. is about MUCH more than the ability to read a sentence out loud. I suspect a lot of parents are going to be surprised when they get into school standards testing.

Well, my DH is HG+, the smartest person I've ever met, and dyslexic. He makes a lot of the kinds of mistakes you describe, and not due to carelessness. So no, I wouldn't judge based on that. I also wouldn't judge based on grammar, as I think it is perfectly possible to be very intelligent and yet grow up in/be a part of a culture in which grammar is very different from mainstream/academic grammar. I think to some extent you can judge based on content, but even so it only speaks to how well that person has communicated his or her thoughts on that one particular day (and how well you have read and understood).

I'll also point out that there are plenty of kids who are HG/PG whose parents are not. DH & I both have ND/MG parents, yet we are both on the very upper end of the curve.

Gratefulmom, the reading level thing bugs me too, though I'm sure I was once one of those people (and maybe I still am, since DD has not taken and is not likely to ever take a school reading test). But then, I often find that the things that bother me most about other people are the things I dislike in myself.

I will admit I am one of the people you talk about. It's not something that I'm proud of, but I can't spell for beans. I don't know why! I have an excellent memory, but I can not retain the spelling of a word. It's been a problem all my life.

I can not tell how painful(mentally)it is to try to write something. Knowing you're going to freeze up when you get to a word you're not sure about and the more you think about it, the harder it is.

Does it mean that I'm dumb, maybe. Does it mean I have a problem, yes. A problem that has never been able to correct itself. Could be I have huge gaps in my education. I went to 12 schools out of 12 grades. Different districts, different states, and different countries.

The main problem I see is, no one helped me when I was in school and it should have been identified and rectified.

I don't recall a case where I've seriously thought the parent was just lying, but I have seen cases where, based on the parent not coming across as particularly intelligent, I've wondered whether it's more a case of a child who is significantly brighter than the parent than of a child who is very unusual. It seems unsurprising if a parent in that situation overestimates how unusual their child is, in fact, and the parent may well need some of the same kind of support as parents of PG children, so that doesn't bother me (as lying would, of course).

Board culture and norms for how to judge children - tricky. My DS is one who's never done any standardised testing of reading (AFAIK) so any estimate I've ever made is based on what he's reading for pleasure and clearly understanding. I hope that wouldn't have irked gratefulmom! I do remember being annoyed - well, more bemused than annoyed, really, although with hindsight, it was indicative of the culture of the board which did end up annoying me - with one place where there was a tradition of testing young children's reading using word lists, like the Schonell test. Not only did that have the problems of judging reading based on a simplistic measure, but also, some posters were reusing the same word list very frequently, thereby invalidating the test; it seemed so pointless as to be rather weird. Still, some people don't like the way this place comes over, either.

These boards are not academic and we also have to consider that we live in the world of texting. I also consider that some people use smart phones to type their post and don't take the time to reread it before posting.

But, I have to confess I have sometimes read some posts by different people and wondered. I hate it when I do judge just because they have typos and grammar issues all over the place. In the end I believe in being nonjudgmental. It isn't my place to decide who is or isn't gifted and at what level. But I feel it is our place as a community to give support and to offer up opinions but in a positive way.

Katelyn's Mom, you made such great points! I'd like to think that we all really do believe this too. Sometimes it's fun just to share a silly thought, but everyone here is clearly looking for support.

Btw, my comment about the reading levels wasn't at all about people who are genuinely guessing where their children are. It's really just the seemingly-bragging posts that made me think of this. FWIW, I too didn't realize the difference until DS's testing for K. What he was able to read for pleasure and where his comp. tests scored, while both extremely high, were still multi-grade levels apart. Now that I've gone through that, that's what comes to mind when I see the pre-school brags.

I think grade levels are usually quoted as shorthand for not-a-little-ahead. Otherwise, I'm not sure how much meaning they have. It is possible, however, that a kid who seems to read everything at 4 or 5 really *does* understand it and tests at school as having mastery of higher levels, not just decoding at those levels.

I guess that I have been under the assumption (somewhat fed by the "experts") that PG kids don't have ND parents. I could see a MG/PG mix within a family or a ND/MG mix, but a Little Man Tate situation isn't something I've honestly expected to happen as frequently as I see being presented online.

Again, I am not at all talking about this board. I'm not a particularly great speller myself, but I do generally use simple words and phrases like "moot point" vs. "mute point" or "a lot" vs. "alot" or even "due to" vs. "do too" correctly. We all make typos and, like someone else pointed out, some gifted people are dyslexic so that it is good reminder to me. Do you all think that writing things like "mute point" or "persay" (per se) could be due to dyslexia or just being a bad speller if they happen over and over?

None of these people have struck me as intentionally lying. I am left scratching my head when people state that their kids are PG with no test results to back it up and there are some who I've wondered if they simply can't or don't understand what test scores mean or who have quoted impossible test scores (99.9th on a test that doesn't have that level of sensitivity, for example), but I've never detected malintent. I don't really even find myself irritated at the person so much as doubting what s/he is saying.

That doubt is making me feel like I am being unfair, though, b/c who I am to know given that we are all online. The kid could be brilliant and his/her parent isn't presenting things from the parent's end that make the best case for the child.

I would like to thank you for posting this thread. It gave me time to reflect on past and present problems, instead of pure avoidance. As I look at it face on, maybe I can find a place I'm comfortable with in me.

Thanks for allowing me, to see me.

It is possible that my parents and DH's parents are all MG, though my dad claims that he's been tested and is just about average. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if my mom was MG, but I very much doubt that either of DH's parents are anything other than ND. They seem pretty run-of-the-mill to me. But (and I hope this doesn't sound awful) perhaps I just really can't tell the difference between ND and MG people. At any rate, none of them have college degrees, and all are working-class.


With dyslexia you'd rather expect them to be spelled differently each time. But I also think that these words, though misspelled according to the dictionary, might not be misspelled according to the circles in which some highly intelligent but uneducated parents might travel.

Most people - even most very intelligent very well educated people! - have startlingly poor understanding of statistics. Something I've seen stated repeatedly even here is that siblings usually have IQs within 10 points of one another - nothing wrong with that as a statement, but it gets used with the implication that if you have one child who has tested with some IQ then if your next child tests more than 10 points below that then the test must be wrong. Frankly, this is statistical nonsense so many ways that I hardly know where to start. (If you think about it, we collectively have plenty of experience even of the very same child testing more than 10 points apart on different occasions, so why we should be surprised at a child's sibling testing more than 10 points away from them, I cannot imagine). I think the root cause is a strong cultural tendency in the US to believe in the entity theory of intelligence - almost everyone here appears to believe at core - even if they deny it when they think about it - that there is a fact of the matter about what a child's "real" IQ is and that that number tells you something permanent about the child. Everyone should read Dweck. (Can you tell I've been out to a congenial argumentative bookclub tonight and had several glasses of wine, lol?)

Yes. I'm thinking of a dyslexic person I know well who can make that kind of mistake. She wouldn't self-correct in the way that a non-dyslexic person might - e.g., noticing "per se" and realising that that's the same phrase as what they've been spelling "persay" - because the kind of attention she can pay to the written material isn't the kind of attention where she'd notice that kind of detail. It's as if all her attention goes on getting the gist of the text.

I can spell well, but I don't type well, so my posts on boards like this are full of errors. I'm not particularly pedantic about checking my posts before I hit submit as it just isn't that important to me that everything I write is perfect (I have better things to spend my time on). As long as my message is conveyed and readable I'm not concerned. Sometimes I'll go back and edit my post if I find something that bugs me a lot in the post, but otherwise I'm not bothered.
I think there are countless reasons why people make errors in their posts and not all of them are linked to intelligence. I'd hold back on the judgements personally.

An unsophistcated mother's reply: �
My conversational contributions are often contradictory or confusing coupled with inconsistencies and errors.�
My mother would come off sounding better through her hesitation and self-conscious self-censoring. �She's not gifted or if she is she's only barely so, the gifted genes are from my dad's side. �At some point when I was telling someone that as a child I sounded like an encyclopedia or a concordance with perfect grammar and excellent manners (what happened?!) �
What does this mean for my kids? �The midwife who delivers for me laughed and said after nine months of seeing my three year old lately "he's going to be a genius but not a nerd". � �Could I sound intelligent again? �Who knows. �People end up figuring it out anyway if they spend too much time with me. �As for advocacy "Persistence overcomes resistance". �

Yay! For the mommy brains and the compassionate intelligent posters who live on this forum. �

Also, I've said I'm sure my son is PG since slightly after he was born. �And not only have I not had him tested he doesn't match all the milestones online. �Like he's never done a jigsaw puzzle, he doesn't speak elegantly. �I'm still sure he's "way up there" and other people keep telling me so. �PG runs in my dad's family (unbeknownst to my single mom) �and I was id'd as a teenager (not just extremely smart, huh?). ��

Anyway I just read an article linked here from Psychology Today�that said the "gifted" label is all in how it affects the child. �Some children enjoy the label as praise, acknowledgement, and encouragement. �They go on and try a little harder and do a little more. �Some children get anxiety and self-image issues from the "gifted" label and are afraid they can't live up to it. �

That's why I love it here.
Grinnity says, "Genius is as genuis does". (sic lol)
Dottie says "The proof is in the data over time."
You can just look for the advice and for the solutions that work well right now.

I'm glad that something about this thread is beneficial to you although I don't know what -- lol! I did want to reiterate that none of this came up in relation to anything I've seen anyone posting on this board and that I am not at all questioning the assessments of children that parents post on this board. It does seem that the ambiance here attracts parents whose kids probably are HG+ or at least those of us whose kids aren't HG+ recognize that and are upfront about it.

I am working on self examination and making an effort to ascertain if I am being judgemental which is why I posted this.

I think it makes sense to take what you read on BBs at face value, but also not to swallow hook, line, and sinker. I've had some practice suspending judgment, because unfortunately that is also how I have to deal with every single thing my sister tells me. In the end, what difference does it really make if they're right or wrong or honest or dishonest? You just respond as though it's true.

It's because their kids learned Sesame Street Phonics.

I am most definitely not gifted, yet I have a much better vocabulary and command of the written word than my spouse who is brilliant. I have no idea what his IQ is, because it's never been officially tested. When I was practicing administering the Raven's test for my job, I practiced on him. He answered all the problems correctly and started making up his own. And yet his spelling is abysmal on a good day, and I've sold hundreds upon hundreds of articles to a plethora of publications.

Spelling and command of the written word is sometimes just a gift, not a sign of intelligence - at least on the gifted level.

Is comparing intelligence and education a fair thing?

I have met many very intelligent people who, for some reason or another, received limited education.

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.

Realizing that this was my own made up example, what I was trying to convey here was:

subject/verb disagreement ["me and his dad (i.e. "we") spends" - and - "teachers says"]
misuse of homophones ("there" for "they're")
spelling errors as you mentioned
using the wrong pronoun again as you noted ("me" for "I" as well as "her" for "she")

eta:

As I think about this more, it comes down to two things I need to think about. One: I need to reexamine my assumption that the likelihood of a child being gifted is lesser if the parent doesn't appear intelligent.

Two: I have, honestly, always assumed that intelligent people question and pick up on mistakes through reading or simple exposure in life. Thus, I figured that people who didn't pick up on things like proper usage of "she and I" vs. "me and her" through exposure to people who speak correctly (either in writing or just talking), were probably not unusually bright. It isn't about my feeling like education and intelligence are the same thing. It is more about assuming that intelligence and self-awareness are correlated and that intelligence tends to cause people to self-correct when exposed to 30 people responding to your post who use the same phrase you did but correctly.

I'll need to think about that more.

FWIW, my thesis adviser (who is a very intelligent man) STILL cannot spell my name correctly even though every email I sign my name on it and people have even mentioned it to him. He definitely knows me very well (and we get along well too) but he just never picks up on it. Honestly, some of the smartest people I know are significantly less observant about things like that. Then again I work with very math orientated people and I've even notice some who have very obvious difficulties when it comes to languages.

Even when you know which one is correct, constant exposure to people who use them incorrectly erodes your ability to use the correct one without conscious effort.

Particularly for words that most people think are homophones ("there" and "they're" do *not* sound the same when I say / read them; nor do "your" and "you're"), seeing other people use the wrong one (in which case I have to put the wrong sound with the spelling, in order to get the right meaning) means that I make far more errors now than I did as a younger person (in the pre-Internet era).

Plus you're assuming that the person in question has enough formal grammar training to know which one is correct, so recognizes that it's being correctly modeled, rather than thinking that the other people are wrong. "Between you and me" sounds wrong to people who learned the "you and I" rule by rote, rather than understanding the underlying logic.

I thought of all of you yesterday after I discovered that I sent an email to 50 homeschooling moms with a re: line about "Lego Leage." I almost sent a second email to clarify that I do know how to spell "league" and that it was a typo, but decided not to spam everyone with my dumb excuse! Still, I wonder how many now have a lesser opinion of me and think I can't spell!!!

Cricket, I know where you're coming from. I have the same tendency myself. I've been having discussions with someone at work about these assumptions, because I make snarky comments and laugh at silly mistakes that make the meaning entirely different from the intent. Working at a newspaper means that a great deal of my day goes into that endeavor! Anyway, I believe that Chris hit the nail on the head in saying that it indicates a lack of reading. For the same reason that I know how to spell a lot of words that I have no idea how to pronounce, many people know how to pronounce a lot of words that they have no idea how to spell; it comes down to whether you hear them or read them, and in both cases whether you hear or read them from an intelligent source. I still think it has something to do with education as well, in being able to discern whether what you are hearing or reading is correct. Yes, there is such a thing as a typo, but if it's consistent it's not a typo. Consistent misspellings or incorrect grammar are either lack of knowing or lack of caring.

We used to have a furniture store in town that had the word "furniture" misspelled three different ways on three different signs outside their store. I think that is an indication of sloppy business. If they can't be bothered to make sure their signs are correct in such a basic way, what else are they sloppy about? And if (undoubtedly) someone has told them it's wrong and they don't care enough to fix it, that's even worse. Yes, I'm judgmental.

On the other hand, does any of this mean that a person posting something basically illiterate does not truly have a gifted child? Not necessarily. I think that is something that might be determined over time, from the content of the discussion taken as a whole. But basically I think we (and when I say we, I mean mostly the lovely people who have been here far longer than I have and who take everything in stride) tend to just look at the surface and treat each post as if it were true, and over time I would suspect that anyone who "doesn't belong" fades off into the sunset.

So yes, I do notice and wonder about the (rare) illiterate posts sometimes, and yes, I probably should stop that, too. To paraphrase my co-worker, there are people we all know who can do fabulous things that we could never dream of doing and still can't spell cat without a dictionary, so it's all in what's important to you. Probably to my detriment, literacy is what's important to me.

I guess for me this thread ends up feeding in to the idea that gifted students only come from middle class families, when everything I have read suggests this is not the case (though obviously many gifted students do).

If you've got a working class family history, live in a working class area and attend working class schools you're not necessarily going to be exposed to the same ideas and resources that a middle class gifted child would be. Education may not be a priority, leaving school early might be necessary. You might get little exposure to good books. This is normal to you (as others have mentioned) and you don't know that you're wrong. Or you might know that you're wrong but you're not going to adopted the correct usage because it'll mark you as different to your peers.

There is a great book, Gift of the Gob by Australian linguist Kate Burridge that shows that there is a lot of language that we assume is incorrect when it is actually historically accurate. Between you and I/me is one of them (between you and I being historically non-standard, but now the accepted form)

In my own case, I can never get interested in grammar and I am a terrible speller. I know enough to get by, but only just enough to know the difference between and adjective and verb and how to use an apostrophe!

ITA.

Hmm...I don't see that anyone has said or even implied "middle class" here. Certainly I didn't mean anything like that. My family was nowhere near middle class, although I wasn't aware of that at the time. My parents valued education and the acquisition and use of knowledge above all else, despite their both having dropped out of high school. My mother spent her life fighting with school districts to try and get the best education she could for us and for the kids who followed after we had all graduated. I don't think many (if any) of either side of my family ever went to college, but my parents didn't see intelligence and knowledge as having a lot to do with going to school--they worked hard to make the schools teach as well as possible, but they believed you can get an education regardless of the school and irrespective of wealth if you put your mind to it. Luckily, since we had a lousy school and no money, but tons of books.

I think what Kvmum was saying (and what I agreed with) is that the idea that academic knowledge is valuable is not universal. Of course it is present among some working-class families, as it was in mine. But in some communities and cultures, it is simply less valued, and street smarts and fitting in are valued considerably more. A person who is highly intelligent growing up in poverty may see reading and proper grammar as a waste of time, something that is elitist or even embarrassing.

I know people who have contempt for proper grammar and sounding/being too smart. A gifted person who grows up around people like that isn't necessarily going to be immune from having that attitude just because he or she is gifted.

I mean, honestly, I don't hear middle class people saying things like "me and his dad spends" all that often. Yes, people talk like that. But the people who talk like that are, for the most part, people who were raised in, and never escaped, poverty. I don't see it as being a sign of low intelligence, for the most part. After all, subject/verb agreement is something a typical child masters well before middle school...so adults who are genuinely unable to figure it out must be far below the curve.

So, yeah, I do see this as a class/cultural issue. Of course I don't think that anyone is being biased deliberately, but that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.

No5no5 has summed up exactly what I had meant. Apologies if I have caused any offence, I didn't mean to imply that there aren't any working class and low income families who aren't passionate about education. I had just meant that if you don't come from a family or community where education is valued that it is just that much harder to pick up and use the skills the OP was referring to, regardless of your level of intellect.

It's interesting, this has got me thinking about my own lack of regard for education (well, interesting to me at least!) My family is very highly educated but had very little interest in my education (let�s say they were fairly bohemian and had had� complicated upbringings of their own�). However, while they might not have had the faintest idea what subjects I was being taught, let alone how well I was doing (or how badly, as was more often the case!) my family were passionate about the books I read, regularly discussed politics and current affairs and I was exposed to academics and intellectuals through their friendships and work. My mum has 5 degrees, but was barely making more than the basic wage and raised me on her own; no one in my family really cared (or even knew) if I passed or failed and I found a lot of my parent�s most educated friends incredibly pretentious. As far as I could see education wasn�t worth much (though now I know different � but it has honestly only been in the last 12 months I have seen how I have sold myself short).

The work various members of my family have been involved in has exposed me to the fact that functional literacy is something many lack and is much less prevalent than you would think. If I walked away from my formal education with only a basic understanding of and appreciation of the three Rs, despite my �extracurricular� exposure then I can only imagine what it must be like for people who don�t have a history of education in their families and/or where education is seen as elitist and something other people do. I imagine it is very hard to pull yourself out of that and, as others have said, would make it very hard to advocate for your kids.

I had no inkling about the possibility of my own giftedness until we had dd and for me learning about her has been, as it is for many, a revelatory experience for me too. Had I not made that discovery I suspect I would have continued my own �contempt for proper grammar and sounding/being too smart� (thanks no5no5), not realising I owed myself better. While I have no doubt that I am no where near the level of my pg dd � these kinds of threads send me down a path of thinking about my own experience in new ways, so thanks � though apologies if I have gone off on a somewhat self indulgent tangent!

I do want to apologize if I have offended anyone. I truly hope that I am not an elitist snob. I, too, was the first family member to finish college although I did come from a fairly middle class family. Education was definitely valued in my home as well.

I definitely don't think you were initially being offensive or elitist. You voiced what I'm sure many have thought but never discuss. It was good for you to post this thread because it opened the conversation and hopefully others who have commented or even just read this thread will come away from this topic with more compassion for others. Maybe they will stop and think that the person on the other side of that text just might have had a harder education/upbringing and instead of looking down on them (which we all do at some point or other) look beyond it and be supportive.

This is my goal and I hope others will take this stance as well.

Hi Cricket ,
I am one of those bad spellers. I recently had 2 grand mal seizures. I do have a Master's Degree in Social Research but after those seizures I just cannot spell. I forgot how to spell some simple words. It is crazy. It is embarrassing.
So, I guess I would say sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree and now my DS7 spells better than I do.
Just thought I would post because sometimes there are some unobvious explanations for things.

Hi Cricket2,
I bet you didn't expect this many responses. Your post is not offensive at all, just wanted to say that. I used to think the same thing. I am more open minded now because of what happened to me. It is ironic for me to now fear judgement when I was once that person who judged intellect based on spelling. What comes around goes around lol

Albs-
That was a very well-written response. I'm sorry you have felt ashamed of the spelling issue. Hopefully, in the era of spell-check, you will be free to express yourself without fear.

In a similar vein, I remember a conversation in college that has stuck with me for years. I went to an Ivy league school so presumably most people were by some measure "intelligent." My friends were discussing prejudice based on regional accents, i.e. if they talked in their native accent with colloquial grammar, people assumed that they were less intelligent. The people involved in the conversation had heavy accents and were from the South, NY/NJ and New England. They envied my "neutral" California accent.

Later, I visited the home of one of these friends. She lived on Long Island and came from a working class family. At college, she had been working on neutralizing her accent. When I was there, her mother yelled at her for "putting on airs" and thinking that she was better than the family. She really felt torn between two worlds and literally had to speak two different versions of English depending upon where she was.

To a certain extent, I treat online grammar as a regional accent. I also happen to be married to a gifted dyslexic. My DH can spell the same word three different ways that are phonetically correct in a single paragraph. They all seem correct to his brain. I recognize my own prejudice when I see things like "me and my husband said it was rediculous." I still cringe but I try to look for the content.