Invisibly Gifted – The Problem of Being Profoundly Gifted, But Not in Math
Switched-on-Mom’s post “There’s Gifted, and Then There’s Profoundly Gifted” got me thinking.
It’s frustrating.
If you’re a parent of a child like the profoundly gifted math whiz in the Jodie Foster film Little Man Tate, the world must seem full of options, not the least of which is that people tend to understand immediately that your child’s needs can’t be met in the usual way in the regular classroom, and that once-a-week pullouts where you sit in the GATE class and play logic games aren’t really going to cut it.
I mean, there’s the fabulous Illinois Math and Science Academy, a public (!!) residential school for qualifying gifted high schoolers — it’s like Hogwarts for the mathematically inclined, and somehow, it’s managed to escape the watering-down effect of NCLB, despite the fact that it’s state-funded, which surprises me, given that “gifted” and “state-funded” are usually like Bush and truth.
If you look on Hoagies, the Internet’s gold standard for gifted resources, for programs serving gifted kids, the number of academic programs catering to kids with high math ability jumps out at you, particularly when there are significant math bleed-overs into other areas such as robotics competitions, to say nothing of the Math Olympiad.
What do verbally gifted kids have? Well, yeah, there’s the Scripps Spelling Bee, which is cool — once a year, verbally gifted kids can go out there and, well, spell stuff. It makes for good geek TV on ESPN.
Other than that, though, there’s not much.
The problem is that when a verbally gifted kid begins to read, the ability (and often, the child) gets minimized, ignored, or outright dismissed. A lot. Kids who read, especially ones who read early, don’t “really read.” They’re “pretending to read.” They “just memorized” the book. They appear to be reading. They’re reading, but they’re not understanding what they read.
In some cases, this is probably true. Hey, we’ve all seen babies grab a board book, gnaw on the yummy, yummy cardboard edges for awhile, then flip it open, smack down her hand on a picture (“The letter ‘C’ means ‘Cookie!’”), and make a futile attempt to convince Mom that the book is some kind of device for communication…such as a menu one points to. Sure, that kid is learning valuable prereading skills, but she’s “reading” like what I do in the shower is “singing.”
But when you’re sitting there looking at a four-year-old who’s halfway through a novel and insisting the same things, that’s when you’ve got to wonder when you stepped through the looking-glass. If you’re a parent, basically all you feel like doing at some point is saying to these folks, “Yes. Yes, you caught us. He’s not really reading; you’re right. He MEMORIZED Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Our cheap attempt to deceive you is at an end.”
It wouldn’t even be a big deal were it not for the fact that in school, it’s immediately clear what to do with the Fred Tates of the world – get their tushies into Pre-Cal and forget about learning to “borrow and carry.” But what about that verbally gifted first grader who can comfortably read on the ninth-grade level? Do you put him in a class with other ninth graders? To read about (for example) the incestuous rape of the Ewell daughter in To Kill a Mockingbird when lots of kids that age aren’t even clear on how babies get made?
Again, as Switched-on-Mom correctly points out, the PG child — particularly if that child is a girl, or a child of either sex inclined to be a camouflager — may not get a meaningful intervention until about the beginning of third grade and if that intervention isn’t enough, school administrators and teachers tend to get defensive and resistant (e.g., “What, once-a-week logic games aren’t GOOD ENOUGH for you?”) because in their minds, they’ve already met the needs of your child. Switched-on-Mom couldn’t be more right.
One of my favorite Moments of Irony came when the director of an early childhood education program — whose focus was on reading — saw a precocious early reader who was about two years old reading out loud from a second-grade book, some weighty tome like Fluffy’s School Bus Adventures. She paused, looked at the child…looked at the text…looked at the child…then looked at the mom. The eyebrows went up. The Golden Arches made their appearance as another new mother is about to be among the billions and billions served. “Well,” she said somewhat acidly. “You must spend A LOT of time with her.”
Implication: You duct-tape your child to a chair in the closet, shove phonics workbooks under the door crack, and don’t let ‘em out till they can read Charles Dickens.
No wonder some kids camouflage themselves. It’s a heck of a lot easier to sit quietly in the corner of the kindergarten with a copy of Green Eggs and Ham cleverly concealing Animal Farm than it is to call attention to what’s often perceived as a problem. If it’s perceived at all.
Thanks for reading!
Adoosfmelk, you raise an important point, one that I haven’t quite gotten to yet as I blog the experience of raising a verbally PG child, namely that there is no “pipeline” for verbal talent comparable to that on the math/science side. In those disciplines there seems to be a tradition–if one can call it that–of identifying and fostering prodigious talent. Maybe it’s because young people in those disciplines have economic value…futures on Wall Street and tech start-ups. But writers? Philosophers? Diplomats? Lawyers? Linguists? No one is lining up to mentor my child. So yes, opportunities are *very* thin.
Sorry for misspelling your name in my post above
That’s okay – I thought your name had hypens!! You’re right — there’s no pipeline. My guess is that whereas most of us know how to read at the high school level (and many of us know how to read at the college level), far fewer of us know how to do math at the college level (or advanced high school). At the possible risk of offending elementary-school teachers, I’d say that many of them aren’t necessarily strong on advanced-level math courses like calculus and trigonometry and therefore the “problem” of a gifted math student demands intervention and direct instruction, whereas a gifted reader can basically just be put into a corner with a book (at least speaking for my own experience). Thanks for your post!! Very interesting stuff.
I never got challenged at school. My mother just challenged me at home. I was miserable until university. Also, I think that the public schools are too dumbed down and challenge few students. I hated teaching in the public schools because I thought the curriculum did not challenge the students enough. Once, when I was supposed to teach a unit on the dumbed down version of the Civil War, (North good, South evil and bad.) I expanded it to the Chechnyan conflict. The students were in 7th grade and a couple were considered special needs. We read from “grown up” magazines and articles from the internet. They loved the challenge, expended their vocabulary immensely and wrote good papers. I taught ESOL, but my students LOVED my class because I was one of the only teachers they had that challenged them. So, sometimes I think the teachers make school boring.
I say get rid of the unions and the Department of Education and schools might just get better for everyone rather than dumbing school down so the schools can pass the No Child Left Behind tests. I hope I don’t sound too opinionated! Sorry!
I think Glenn Doman and the whole flashcards “Teach Your Baby to Read” thing has done tremendous damage to the perception of verbally gifted kids. As if the Doman method could actually create a kid like mine who reads Narnia and Laura Ingalls Wilder books in less than a week at 5 years old.
Amber, I agree with you. A friend of mine who’s a teacher recently sat in on a meeting where the teachers pretty much universally agreed that a course in British literature would be too hard for sophomores.
I wonder if kids in the U.K. know that?
Crimson Wife, I agree — and on the pile of Doman, I’d like to add any product marketed to kids with the word “Genius” in the title. I’m probably going to rant about this later, no doubt, but when marketers give the impression that one can somehow “create” genius, craft a Baby Einstein, then parents whose children are gifted (and the more they are gifted, the more this is true) are seen as people who somehow *parented better* than the parents of nongeniuses…which of course makes about as much sense as saying the parents of tall children parented better than the parents of short children. Absurd. Thanks for your post!
[...] of Melk shares Invisibly Gifted: The Problem of Being Profoundly Gifted, but Not in Math on Lorem [...]
Life on the Road | The Carnival of Homeschooling - “Leaving a Legacy” said this on January 29, 2008 at 2:40 am |
When I was teaching gifted elementary children, a parent brought in a (barely) four year old who showed me where we were on his map of the city (he’d never been there before) and discussed his adventures reading the American Girl series. The pre-school told them that he was “pretending” to read, and that he was really quite delayed on his social skills. My reaction to the social skills bs was “Well, yeah. He doesn’t have anyone to talk to.” There are few early intervention programs in our state for PGK’s as I found, when my daughter was reading The Hobbit at age 3. And we have to do something about the pipeline for these verbal kids.
Good post.
Hey, I have friends that attended IMSA, and my mother-in-law worked at MASMC (Missouri)! How cool to see it mentioned.
Anyway, yes, you raise some interesting points.
[...] You see, there is very little that is comparable on the verbal side. Sure there’s the National Spelling Bee and now the Geography Bee…but those are more about prodigious memorization. There’s National History Day, which kicks in at middle school. High school has debate and quiz bowl competitions, the new kid on the block, the National Vocabulary Championship, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. But nothing on par with the Intel Science Awards in terms of prestige and publicity. And that’s about it. At the elementary level the only thing that I can think of that might appeal to a highly gifted verbal kid would be Destination Imagination. The American Bar Association or the American Library Association or the Modern Language Association aren’t falling over themselves to create programs to foster talent. Neither are others in the private sector. A budding writer can try to get published in Cricket, or New Moon. But again, opportunities are pretty sparse, as fellow blogger Adsoofmelk points out. [...]
Strangers in a Strange Land « The “More” Child said this on February 3, 2008 at 6:14 am |
I was nowhere near a gifted child, but I could comfortably read and comprehend Laura Ingalls Wilder level writing at 6 in the first half of first grade.
I could also easily finish seatwork in a very short time. I got in trouble from the teachers and teased by my classmates for finishing work quickly and settling into a book.
The school librarian would not allow me to check out anything other then picture books because I couldn’t “really” read harder material and that stuff was too old for me. The teacher used to give stickers for perfect spelling tests and stopped giving them to me because I always got perfects and it made my classmates who did not sad.
I would have hoped that in the 20 years that have past, children with abilities outside their expected age bracket(or gifted children) would be given tools and support to succeed. I am sad that it hasn’t seemed to change much. I also would like to believe that actual gifted children would be provided work at their level to a degree.
Thank you for your post, these are the kinds of stories that my husband and I are using to try and consider whether homeschooling from the start is what we want to do when we have kids. We don’t expect gifted children or anything, but the story says so much about the overall culture of the schools. We’ve been really disappointed and stunned at what the bulk of our research into schools has shown.
[...] I have this theory that parents of mathematically gifted children have it fairly easy for two main reasons: Math tends to be sequential and math has no sex scenes. If your child is one [...]
“AP Sounds Fun, But Can I Take My Doll?” « Lorem Ipsum said this on April 28, 2008 at 3:15 pm |
Oh, well try having a verbally gifted kid who doesn’t read when he’s 5. His vocabulary is amazing — I don’t think there’s a difference between his active and passive vocabulary. Once he hears a word once, he can use it in a sentence perfectly. But he doesn’t want to read. He can tell amazing stories, and remember what he did 2 years ago. He can retell stories. make up new ones, logical ones, with a plot! But he doesn’t read. Loves when we read to him though. He prefers pictures, however. And bad guys.
I sympathize with your frustration at the way the schools are dealing with your child, but you’re wrong to assume that kids who are gifted in math always have a better deal. Maybe they do in some schools, but where we are, it’s the other way around: our school board does everything it can to encourage the kids to read and write as much and at as advanced a level as possible, but they actually won’t ALLOW a child to work ahead of his level in math. The responses one gets are, “I could lose my job if I was caught letting your child do work beyond his grade level,” and “If we let him learn that now, he’ll just be bored later.” Even in the gifted program in this city, kids are required to stick to the extremely basic curriculum that everyone else is using–the teachers “enrich” the material by “asking the questions in a different way,” which of course does absolutely nothing to help a child who’s capable of working with material the schools won’t allow him to touch for six more years. So we’re seeing the opposite bias–the “enrichment” is actually all about reading and writing, rather than actual math.
I was never formally taught my alphabet,my parents just read to me a lot. I just started recognizing words when I was about two. By the time I started kindergarten, I was reading young adult fiction . I often tell my mother I may have never learned to read if I had waited for a school to teach me, since phonics never made any sense at all. I got into a school for the gifted in middle school because I was moderately gifted in math. There was just nothing for a verbally gifted student. Once I got into the program they gave me gifted level classes in all subjects but it wasn’t enough. It was frustrating that in this school accelerating in math or science could be done just by passing a final exam in the class you wished to skip, but there was no mechanism for accelerating in English or History once you were in the gifted track. Even though I had already read most of the books you read in high school before the age of 9 and my English teacher said my writing was so advanced it was “chilling”, they wouldn’t even consider accelerating me in English.So I got bored, and I stopped writing because it was too easy, every assignment I turned it just got 100 with no comments, no one even bothered to try to challenge me.
Unfortunately,one-size-fits all school fits no one well.
Kids who are profoundly gifted in math and science may receive some opportunities such as subject acceleration and a “pipeline” to competition recognition. Maybe. If he/she doesn’t cause too many problems due to boredom.
Students with strong verbal skills or giftedness in other domains such as creativity, leadership, or other academic strength might receive enrichment opportunities such as Odyssey of the Mind, Johns Hopkins programs, writing competitions, etc. Or, they might be one of many gifted underachievers who drop out of school.
A few years back, on a visit to southern California, I had the opportunity to visit a GATE program. Well, I came away wishing we could move there ASAP so that my creative daughter could fit in.
Alternatively, a very close friend with same-age children lives in Montgomery County, MD – the Shangri La of public education. I often wish we could move there.
Well, we can’t. And, after a full-term in the elementary PS in our area, I’ve pulled both kids out, one to homeschool, one to private. Not that the PS was so awful. It’s just that it didn’t fit my son. And, I doubt that the Shangri La or the start-in-4th Grade Gate program school would’ve been better.
The grass may look greener in the other school, or the opportunities may seem to shine for those other kids, but bottom-line as a parent you have to look to the specific needs of your child in the present.
Now, if you’re a child advocate, please, by all means, go forth to promote engaging opportunities for all children.
Hi, Sandra,
You said,
“Students with strong verbal skills or giftedness in other domains such as creativity, leadership, or other academic strength might receive enrichment opportunities such as Odyssey of the Mind, Johns Hopkins programs, writing competitions, etc. Or, they might be one of many gifted underachievers who drop out of school.”
***They might — I just see it as so much more difficult to get accommodation for verbally-gifted kids because verbal skills aren’t necessarily sequential, as math skills tend to be, so (unfortunately), teachers who aren’t interested in accelerating a verbally gifted child can always claim, “Well, s/he hasn’t read XYZ text *with me,* rather than presenting her or him with more complex texts or more challenging writing assignments.
You said, “…after a full-term in the elementary PS in our area, I’ve pulled both kids out, one to homeschool, one to private. Not that the PS was so awful. It’s just that it didn’t fit my son. And, I doubt that the Shangri La or the start-in-4th Grade Gate program school would’ve been better.”
***I find the “start-in-the-fourth (or third)-grade GATE” approach to be soooo consummately frustrating. Honestly, the first three years of school are crucial to a student’s success, and for a gifted student to sit there for three crucial years being bored silly is just a crime.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I learned to read at two-something, as did my husband and pretty much everyone in our families. Just the ordinary deal — my parents read to me, I caught on, eventually they noticed that I had. No absurd phonics or anything.
I have a seventeen-month-old, and in the last two weeks she’s started recognizing numbers and demanding that I identify letters. And it’s just the most astonishing thing. I know, intellectually, that if I was reading at two-something, I was identifying letters earlier, so I must have been showing interest even earlier than that, but…but she’s barely old enough to be human.
I’ve been terrified since long before she was born how I’d educate her appropriately. My husband and I both had some very good and very bad experiences. Luckily I live in an area with a lot of choices, and have a while yet before I need to make any.
Well, I realized I’m biased, Andromeda, but I’m very much in favor of homeschooling — especially for gifted girls, and extra-especially for verbally gifted girls. I honestly think that school works for many people, but the further you get from that middle, the less appropriate a choice it tends to be for many folks. Good luck with your little person!
I feel like I’ve gone through the looking glass. I am a teacher, studying gifted children, with a profoundly gifted son (verbal AND math). I was gifted verbally (I now realize), but because I didn’t excell in math, I have never considered myself fifted. (I was never tested.) The fact that I taught myself to read at 4, wrote a novel at eleven…well, I just liked to read.
Sometimes I wonder how my life might have been different if only…
Still, I am fascinated by others’ experiences.
I feel like I’ve gone through the looking glass. I am a teacher, studying gifted children, with a profoundly gifted son (verbal AND math). I was gifted verbally (I now realize), but because I didn’t excell in math, I have never considered myself gifted. (I was never tested.) The fact that I taught myself to read at 4, wrote a novel at eleven…well, I just liked to read.
Sometimes I wonder how my life might have been different if only…
Still, I am fascinated by others’ experiences.
Sandra, trust me, Montgomery County, MD is no Shangri La.
For the non-reading (or reading) verbally gifted, may I suggest children’s theater groups?
There are many more essay competitions and writing outlets than there are advanced math programs. The math programs get more press only because they are more newsworthy (i.e. rare).
[...] focus on writing would be in homeschooling, even when homeschooling a profoundly gifted child. As Adso of Melk and other bloggers have mentioned, it sometimes seems to those of us with kids who are really [...]
Thinking About Writing « Red Sea School said this on November 9, 2008 at 3:39 am |
I think that for the verbally gifted child, learning to ‘touch type’ or keyboard can open the door to written product at a speed the brain can handle.
For a verbal 5 year old who isn’t reading, get his eyes checked, with a regular optomitrist AND a ‘behavioral optomitrist.’ Even normal develoment of eye use can be a bottleneck for a precosious child.
I kind of disagree that there are no avenues for verbally precosious kids – Mythology contest, poetry contests, writing and debate summer camp. Making YOUTUBEs, blogging…and ‘The Phantom Tollbooth.’ DMing in Dungeons and Dragons. Writing, reading and talking are used in so many ways that it’s more widespread opportunities, but they are there. Odessy of the Mind and Destination Immagination. Religious Studies. It goes on and on.
Sure there is a hangover from Sexism that ‘Math is Smart; Things that girls are good at like reading and writing and speaking isn’t so special.’ It effects females and males who aren’t particularly interested in Math. But once you realize that it’s there, it doesn’t have to stop anyone.
Well then, there should be programs that provide development based on “multiple intelligences” as well as age mixing in these programs. Because there can be musically gifted kids, artistically gifted kids, skilled dancers, gymnasts – a multitude of things to be “gifted” or “profoundly gifted” in.
As a verbally gifted girl, I was actively barred from the VERY prestigious gifted, GATE style program at my elementary school (the main difference with most GATE programs was that this began in 1st grade at my school). At this school, the attitude was, if you aren’t good at math or logic, you aren’t really gifted. Who cares that I was reading and enjoying Jane Eyre the summer BEFORE third grade? Must just be a fluke…
Fast forward a few years and I was in middle school, still reading and performing significantly above grade level in all subjects but math and finally I was deemed worthy of gifted. This program, though, was effectively just a rubber stamp label on my transcripts and nothing else really.
I’m not saying I didn’t have a great education or teachers who challenged me, but never being recognized for my strengths like the other kids in my honors classes? That hurt. Until I was eight or so, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Yes, I was the precocious four year old telling the teacher that I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up…and knew exactly what that meant. Around eight or so, I switched to wanting to be a botanist or maybe a psychologist. Still, a girl who loves science? Wow. After all those years of being told I wasn’t “good” enough for the most advanced classes and, conversely, being denied help in math because I was an honors student so I must not need it, I lost all interest in math and science. I just gave up and gave into the stereotype of girls in math and science.
I don’t know how many girls (and boys) like me there are out there, but we NEED to be recognized before our strengths and dreams are squashed or go dormant. I did very well in school, and even began college a year early. But, if I had been given more encouragement? If the opportunities that did exist had been presented to me? Who knows what I would have achieved.
Thanks for your thoughts! I was very much the child you described. I didn’t care about math really. Only when I saw my dad playing poker and he told me I had to know math to play. So the next day I went to my teacher and asked, “Will you teach me math?? I want to play poker with my Dad!” I started reading at 3 years old. By 4-years-old I could read college-level anatomy words. In first grade when other kids were learning simple sentences like “The Dog Ran”, I was reading novels and writing poetry all day long. In fact I read some book about unicorns (“Into the land of the unicorns”), and the next time I was at my dad’s office, I got on his computer and proceeded to write my own children’s novel.
My reading and writing test scores were always highly above average, but since math was average they kept me in with the slow/average kids. I mean, I could UNDERSTAND college-level anatomy at 4 years old, and no one ever thought anything of it?? Confuses me.
I am 50 years old. When I was a child, there were no “special programs” and there were no “gifted” students.
I could read newspapers and basic books at age two. When I was asked in first grade to “bring a book from home that you are reading”, I was punished for proffering a copy of Les Trois Mousquetaires. Thus did I come to realize that French was indeed a different and “foreign”, and therefore assuredly “bad”, language. When I taught myself Spanish, I kept it secret from everyone but the Puerto Rican boys I met in the park. But I could read Ortega y Gasset in the original!
It was discovered in third grade that I could do a reasonable job with Euclidean geometry, algebra and basic trigonometry, while showing a strange aptitude for making radios from scrap electronic parts. This time, there was nothing but praise – and an gentle waring about not using a high power transmitter to jam a local radio station. There was no change in my educational program, but at least no punishment.
Eventually, by 9th grade, the crushing boredom of going to school was too much. I quit playing football in the afternoons and went a local college instead. My high school coach was not too happy, but the math and science professors did not mind at all. The humanities scholars were, perhaps oddly, less inclined to accept my somewhat precocious participation.
I graduated second in my undergraduate class, with majors in mathematics and econometrics, at the age of 18. I finished my masters in electronic engineering a few months later, my thesis covering then-novel cryptographic applications of digital circuits.
My career ? It turned out exactly as you predicted, after a start in defense electronics : “Wall Street and tech start-ups”.
I have continued my real studies, over the years, and perhaps some of my work on the political, military and economic history of early modern Europe has not been totally without merit. It has, however, been essentially without monetary compensation. So, I suppose that I should be glad that “Wall Street and tech start-ups” “have economic value”.
My wife, who is some years my junior, is expecting. I am not sure if I will be pleased or saddened if I were someday to learn that our child was “gifted”. Perhaps both.
I was surfing an came across your posts. I really feel for all of you, as my whole life has been one of elation and misery. Many of you, parents and gifted, are still relatively fortunate. I live in Africa and although your programmes are flawed/insufficient, here we have, in essence, nothing. I grew up in a rural school that did not even have a library. I am 42 now and work for myself consulting to businesses of various size – mostly I solve problems for them, whether engineering, manufacturing, human relations, productivity, financial – it does not really matter. Whatever the topic I can master it sufficiently in short time periods (often even a day or less, or even on an international flight). I know how ridiculous it may sound. But it is also great and some part of it is exhilirating. I spend virtually every day of my life, in any case, cramming in more information because I just cannot ever get enough of it (the topic does not matter – in fact, I have been reading mostly randomely since high school – normally between 8 and 15 books at any given time – 95% of it non-fiction). So, my mind has created a comfortbale living for me. BUT, I am also completely alone. Yes, I am married to a magnificent woman, I have great kids and relations and we all get along very well on a certain level. But I am still completely alone, because there are just so very very few people I could ever hope to share with. Most of my life is spent completely alone in my mind. What I can solve or do (mentally) in seconds often takes most others hours, weeks or more. This makes meaningful conversation (for me) impossible. I have joined various high iq clubs, but the problem persists. There exists a great divide between gifted (and even the highly gifted) and the truely profoundly gifted (in my opinion, especially when the person is verbally PG). To the parents: yes the programmes are important. Your love and acceptance of that which is immeasurably different form you (your PG child) is far more important. My heart really goes out to all the PG’s out there. It is the loneliest place in the world.
There are schools in America that are just as unfortunate, especially in urban minority communities.
I am the father of a gifted child. He has entered the second grade and we’re fed up. He began the year again fully capable of performing all of the year’s curricula on day one. He had library yeterday, chose a Goosebumps and finished this morning after about an hour. He pretty much taught himself to read by three, well on his way in his two’s. He’s got the math down too. Fortunately our G&T prgram started in kindergarten, where he was assessed at reading on the 4th grade (at least) level. The G&T is something, but it’s not cutting it. He told grandpa today (unsolicited) that 2nd grade is boring. He is losing interest in school at seven. That saddens me.
So, in order to get him in some real enrichment programs we are getting him IQ tested. I figure as long as he tests in that 130+ range my school can’t consider us as pains in the neck with a kid who just can’t keep his mouth shut in class.
When he was in kindergarten he faked not being able to read. When his teacher did a DRA at our insistance, she found he was reading at fourth grade levels as a just turned five kindergartener in October. He faked it in class to fit in.
I do not want rainman. I do not want little man Tate. I just want my kid to not lose interest in learning because it will hurt him for the rest of his life.
It seems I have a sympathetic psychologist on board, a supportive pediatrician who sees what we see (and has because on his 4 year physical he read his medical chart to the doctor), now I have to see if the school will be on board. I live in NJ, pay horrendous taxes to support these great schools that aren’t that concerned about my kid because they have to accept the mainstreamed autistic and challenged in his same classroom. That’s okay, because my kid doesn’t need so much attention. His rights aren’t as important as the other special ed kids. Gifted in our state is defined as a special case just as much as the lower end is, but they don’t fund the gifted program.
I am paying for the testing and will be paying the local university for enrichment so my boy can waste his week at school and get all of his real learning in on Saturday and Sunday.
I am venting, but hope to have a sympathetic ear. I would consider pulling him out and going private, but there is little that is close that offers anything better. He is very social and I do not think homeschooling would be right for him.
Arrgh!
Charlie, I feel you pain. I would suggest starting to look outside the public school sector for enrichment programs—Duke Talent Identification Program, local university programs, and private outlets like chess clubs, reading challenges, and the like.
I also urge you to keep advocating for your child. Yes, Gifted is often a part of a school system’s Special Education program, but, because the Feds do not require or fund Gifted, it get’s left to the wayside. More parents need to push their representatives to fight to change this fact.
I know what you mean even though I am gifted in math and verbal skills. I knew the word prcrastinate and could use it in a sentace at the age of 1. But I didn’t learn to read. I refused to because I thought my parents would stop reading to me. I was 2.
When I got to kindergarten about half the students in my gifted class knew how to read. Even though I did not I was 1 of only 2 people to get to chapter books by the end of the year. By partway through first grade (I was actually in a second grade class) i was reading on a sixth grade level. I was placed in second grade agian the next year because they felt i should be with my peers.
One of the biggest problems I faced was finding books on my reading level that were appropritate for me to read. The content of the books on a ninth grade level isn’t okay for a 1st or 2nd grader. And because kids who read so far above thier age are rare, books won’t be written.
In sixth grade I tested to be reading on at least a college level. I easily got straight a’s and never studied.
In ninth grade I took an ap class. I found it easy and set the curve on almost all of the tests without studying. Other kids began to dislike me because they had to work harder.
I am in11th grade now. I don’t know what level I read on because the testing only goes up to a certain level. I tested at the top level but that is a this and above level. Friends often don’t understand what I am saying and force me to dumb down my vocabulary. I enjoy writing convoluted sentaces with several semicolons and many commas. I am in 4 ap classes as many as I can take at my school and I am still often bored in class. AP english is easy as is ap calculs ap us history and ap biology.
I don’t see what I can do to academically challenge myself anymore. Books aren’t challenging even when my peers cannot understand them. I am one of few kids who understands calculus without trouble.
Even though I was in the gifted program, it wasn’t enough for me. I was bored in my gifted classes. I learned things the first time they were taught. I spent most of sixth grade teaching my class the math. they wouldn’t let me go ahead in math english or science even though my teachers suggested it.