Why Gifted Students Hate School

The ever-thoughtful and provocative Shaun over at Red Sea School, whose blogs about homeschooling her gifted daughter Violet are always entertaining to read, posted a compelling entry the other day about scary teacher stories .

If you have a gifted child, especially if you have a way gifted child, you probably have one of those scary teacher stories.  Shaun related several of hers and others’, so I’ll relate one of mine, or rather one of someone I know rather well.  This person — let’s call her Ginnie — was in the school system way back in the days when Jim Morrison was still alive, microwaves were just a form of interstellar radiation, and “personal stereos” meant those refrigerator-size behemoths in your living room that looked pretty much like this:

That said, though, I don’t think much has changed since then.

Ginnie came to school already knowing how to read — not just Dolch sight words, but fluently, probably on a third- or fourth-grade level, maybe more.  The teacher, which was the practice at the time, put her in a reading group, but Ginnie noticed that there was a somewhat unusual characteristic about the reading group: they were all doing it funny.  Like robots.

“Dick.  And.  Janee….  Wennnt. to. the. p–…to the p–… to the park.  Wit…h Sp…sp..ot.”

Perplexed, Ginnie couldn’t really figure out what the joke was supposed to be — was it Robot Day or something?  Whatever it was, it was stupid, and she would have no part in it.  “Dick threw the ball to Spot.  ‘Run, Spot, Run,’ said Dick,” she read, flipping to the next page, totally flummoxed when the other first graders at her table turned to her and angrily hissed at her to slow DOWN. 

“What’s going on over here?” the teacher demanded.  Her name was not Mrs. Hack, and she was the kind of person whose legs bulged out puffily over the tops of her black knee-high stockings.  When the kids filled her in, Mrs. Hack looked at Ginnie.  “Read it slower,” she said tersely.

Ginnie tried.  “Dick and Jane went to the park today…”

“Mrs. HAAAACK!” one kid called.  “She’s READING too FAST.”

For disobeying the teacher and causing a classroom disturbance, Ginnie was promptly paddled.  Back in the day, this happened a lot, and every teacher had a wooden paddle in her room that looked more or less like this:

The conversation that ensued between Ginnie’s mom and the principal resulted in Ginnie’s being taken out of Mrs. Hack’s class and put into the library for “independent study.”  All day.  Every day. 

Ginnie didn’t mind — didn’t even know that this measure was probably intended as some kind of punishment, or at the very least, a Pontius Pilate way of dealing with a classroom disturbance.  Ginnie wrote book reports that she now realizes were really never read, only checked off as evidence that she’d done something more worthwhile than nothing.  She read through most of what the library had during that year and learned virtually no math.  By second grade, Ginnie had become somewhat feral as far as classroom management was concerned, and the teacher learned, as had Mrs. Hack before her, that really the best thing to do with Ginnie was leave her on her own to read in a corner, puzzling out the mysterious French and Greek phrases in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and memorizing them, even though she knew no French (and Greek was beyond her).

Scary teacher stories abound — it’s one of the main currencies of gifted parent get-togethers.  Like WWII vets, parents bond over war stories that sound as if they came straight out of one of the best pages on Hoagies Gifted, “Ridiculous Things I Heard Today.”  You’ll hear how one mother’s kid who was doing precalculus was told that he’d have to do the fourth-grade math anyway “because I can’t teach him high school math — what would the high school math teacher teach him if I did?” 

Initially, I was puzzled by these stories, particularly when one element kept emerging time and again: the motif of teacher anger, of offense, as if the teachers in these parents’ stories had been personally offended by the fact of their student’s giftedness. 

We can all understand being pissed at a student who deliberately seeks to be rude or to blow off the work or to disrespect a teacher’s earned and deserved authority, sure.  What puzzled me — at least at first — was how disproportionate was the anger of some teachers to the actions of these kids, though.  Children who pointed out that yes, you can indeed subtract seven from five seemed to spark an unreasoning dislike in some teachers, a dislike for what they viewed as a disregard for authority  – and, in the case of someone like Mrs. Hack, a dislike manifesting itself in immediate punishment far out of proportion to the cause.

I have some theories as to why, but I’ll save them for next week.

~ by adsoofmelk on March 30, 2008.