<p>Wow… I actually agree with every point she made. That’s rare. I see most of those myths in action in our school and it frustrates me incredibly.</p>
<p>And to compmom… my tested gifted guy needed speech classes from age 4 to 7 and was in the lowest reading group into 2nd grade. Then it finally clicked and he never looked back. We homeschooled him from 7th - 12th as our school district just doesn’t have what it takes for top kids and makes no apologies for it since, “academically talented kids will do well no matter what.” (Myths #1 & 8 in action.) We took him in to be evaluated for learning disabilities (failure to speak even reasonably well) at 4 and came out of the testing learning he was extremely gifted - in everything except speech (+ later, reading - we were told the two were connected).</p>
<p>Fortunately, he is an extrovert and does very well with social skills + study skills, but certainly, in my experience (at school), not all do. He’d have been held back considerably if we’d left him in ps. He was leading groups (study groups) in his college level community college classes in his junior year.</p>
<p>I disagree that the majority of high school drop-outs are gifted. The majority of those don’t give a hoot about academics preferring either the trades or the drug/video game scene (could be one, two, or all three). Some simply can’t do the academics due to things like fetal alcohol syndrome or other physical issues. There are some who are gifted, but feel stifled by public school and don’t have parents who are willing to homeschool, but it’s not the majority by any stretch of the imagination.</p>
<p>Creekland, I have a child like yours…read late, but his first book was 350 pages! I think he had a gift for imaginative play as a young child and that is relevant to his adult career.</p>
<p>Many of the gifted kids I know hate academics/school. I wish I could remember where I read that about drop-outs. I just threw it out there, and, as I said, cannot back it up. Perhaps it even said “many” not “the majority.”</p>
<p>I brought it up because lately I have had a lot of contact with kids who dropped out of high school and are a bit lost, and they are uniformly too mature and too bright for the environment of high school. They also have trouble conforming.</p>
<p>I think you are right that they do, however, lack parental support which would have made all the difference.</p>
<p>Giftedness is definitely a special need and the human cost is tragic when giftedness is mishandled or misunderstood, as it is so often. </p>
<p>I would extend this to many types of gifts: intellectual, musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, etc… Yes, I like Howard Gardner and while I would not say “everyone is gifted,” I do like to think that if we put energy into getting to know kids, surprising gifts do reveal themselves in many or most.</p>
<p>After reading this article, I think that my parents didn’t exactly help me out when I was young although I have some characteristics of a gifted kid (not all), as would many students with autism.</p>
<p>And clearly myths #5 and #6 are false in my case. </p>
<p>However, I was academically humbled not in high school but in college. Then again, a nationally ranked undergraduate physics-mathematics program comparable in difficulty level to, or harder than, similar programs offered at American “reach-for-anyone” schools (my own school’s physics undergraduate comparables are like top-20 undergraduate physics programs in the US, better than some physics programs offered at “reach-for-anyone” schools, including Tufts, out of Tufts’ physics department own acknowledgement) can humble even the best and brightest, even if I did help other students on my own volition at times in both instances.</p>
<p>The high school program I went through was the closest thing to a gifted kids’ high school program I could find in my area. The teachers know how hard it is to teach us, because we ask a lot of questions that few regular students would ask. But the “best-and-brightest” are the most satisfying part of a teacher’s job, be it high school or college.</p>
<p>I admired my high school teacher who admitted that he was the dumbest guy in our classroom. He still had our respect as a teacher because he knew a lot about his subject.</p>
<p>I’m not sure about the majority, but a surprisingly large number based on how many I’ve encountered in college/life who upon being admitted to college with a GED or even without, thrived as shown by undergrad GPA, academic awards, grad schools admitted, careers, etc. </p>
<p>All of them have said they dropped out because their local high schools were “boring them out of their minds” with their LCD teaching paradigm and teachers/students were actually bullying them for being gifted/highly intelligent.</p>
<p>The article, while certainly not in-depth, is a good intro into the subject for parents and readers who are not familiar with giftedness and all that entails. It’s a complex and emotional issue for many. Misinformation and anger swirls around this subject and I applaud the writer for even attempting to broach the subject.</p>
<p>There appears to be widespread hostility towards giftedness, from teachers to other parents. I did read a study recently – can’t find it at the moment, I think it was on the Hoagie’s Gifted Site – that showed teacher hostility dropped dramatically following gifted training. Once educators understand that no one is claiming these children are better, just different with different needs, there are significant attitude changes. </p>
<p>Both kids experienced hostility and it did negatively impact their education. They attended an amazing school, but that memory will be forever marred by the hostile actions of one teacher. </p>
<p>I’ve had to advocate for my children since Kindergarten and have since some change but not enough. DD’14 is in private high school 38 miles from our home and we hope DS '17 will join her next year. For those of you who aren’t raising gifted children, I recommend educating yourself on the trials and tribulations involved. Have some empathy for those of us who are. </p>
<p>As far as assisting other students? Both my children are helpful to other classmates. Was that their job in grade school to teach the other students? Absolutely not.</p>
<p>We knew a very precocious gifted young lady who went to college at age 14, a nationally ranked top 25 school running a program for such young kids, and she graduated with a double major. At 18 she went to law school and to a conservatory. Now 30, she blends in fully. Has a degree from the same school as my son who went years later (they are of the same age) They both play in the same community orchesra and the both make about the same salary. </p>
<p>I have a dear friend who did the same sort of things many years ago, and yes, she too, now blends in. No one cares that you were a precocious child and how old you were when you got your degree. Her regret in raising her kids is her lack of experience in the high school years that she missed. She told me that she feels like she is an immigrant mom for all she knows of those years as she was in college at that time. Ages 14-18, commuting to college and doing the work at home with parents hovering over you is a whole other thing than the high school scene and then going off to college on one’s own at age 18. Y</p>
<p>Working with less talented kids is good for a talented person. I can think of three basic ways it was important for me.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It helps you phrase things you may understand but can’t communicate and that makes them more understandable to you. It’s very easy to get caught up in what your own mind produces and forget that it needs to be translated out of you to others. This is true in math, music, writing, painting, you name it. Can’t say it clearly then you aren’t saying it. Working with kids in groups where I had to say things so they could get what I meant really helped me find words and thus the connections in my head that lead to deeper level understandings where things become simple. It is, in brief, a way to get to the fundamentals. The same with tutoring but that gets to …</p></li>
<li><p>People have stuff inside them. For example, there was a kid in my grade school who was kind of a bully and most kids thought he was kind of stupid. I had to spend some time with him and, maybe because I wanted him to be nicer to me, I made an effort to communicate with him and discovered that he was actually pretty darn smart but that he had issues. I realized through that and other experiences that many, well most people are pretty smart - at least while young and not closed off - but have issues. Some are learning problems, like reading or math symbols, and some are emotional control issues and some, I now see, are acting out bad situations at home. </p></li>
<li><p>You learn what you want. I remember tutoring this one kid in my class who had a terrible time learning basic math. It was really boring for me but I saw he couldn’t get it so I kept trying different ways to reach him. When he’d get stuff, he was really happy and that made me feel good. I learned a lot from him. We were friends because we spent hours together, though we weren’t friends in the larger school world. I didn’t mind not hanging out because we didn’t fit together that way. But he shared with me his problems, his inabilities, which is a kind of nakedness in this world. I learned you can relate to people in this way or that way, in this place or that place, and that has enabled me to be a happier person. I don’t spend all my time with a small group of really close friends because I don’t fit well that way but I can spend this time with that person and that time with this person. Terry was run over by a car in 8th grade. I think of him. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>In this context, I think that talented and gifted education could be improved by better training of the teachers about how to communicated with their kids about what they can get from this or that exercise.</p>
<p>Lergnom – you sound like a kind and compassionate soul. Teaching others is a gift some have and others do not. And certainly interacting with all types of peers can be rewarding in many ways.</p>
<p>However, learning in an environment that is substantially below one’s academic level is pure hell.</p>
<p>Asking a gifted student to function in a classroom with students who are at grade level is similar to asking a third grader to go back to Kindergarten. We’d never do that, yet we insist that students stay together based on age or perceived social constructs.</p>
<p>It’s not an easy road for these kids, especially those who experience severe asynchronous learning – some kids are profoundly gifted in a subject but may be lacking in another. Add in a learning disability (dsylexia, autism, speech impediment, ADHD) and it can be a very difficult path to growing, learning and socializing.</p>
<p>I never thought much about the “gifted” program when my kids were growing up. The initial criteria for getting in was if their parents thought their child was gifted. It was more of a status symbol for the parents. They later started testing and it was rumored that over half the kids in the program tested below the criteria. </p>
<p>We never considered our kids for the gifted program and declined the latter testing. Instead, we picked the better teachers who would challenge them and later made sure they took classes that would keep them on track for college.</p>
<p>The next county over offers gifted education. I really was disappointed that our county did not until I found out that 40+ percent of kids in that county have taken at least one class through gifted education. </p>
<p>And I beg to differ about number one; I know my daughter’s brilliance came directly from me. ;)</p>
<p>My gifted kid would have benefitted greatly from an all-gifted classroom in elementary school. Unchallenged, bored minds will find something to do, and gifted kids can get very creative… leading to discipline problems. She and two classmates were sent out into the hall during reading class in first grade, and told to read independently (they were reading chapter books and the classroom was at the “see Spot run” level). Principals do not appreciate first graders who create protest signs and march through hallways demanding appropriate classroom activities!</p>
<p>Gifted kids know they are the smartest kids in the room - and sometimes smarter than the teachers. Appropriate education for them is as important, if not more important, than for learning disabled kids. While some parents might find bragging rights in getting kids into the gifted programs, others of us see it as the only way to keep our kids at all interested in the education system. They are hungry to learn. Why should all of their education come from outside activities while kept doing what amounts to busy work in school? My kid was taught that her IQ and place in the gifted program was no more cause for bragging than her blue eyes - both were a matter of which sperm and egg came together.</p>
<p>By the way, the top 3 graduates in her high school class did not meet the criteria for gifted education in our district (IQ over 143 plus subjective evaluations on creativity). They were normal IQ kids who worked harder.</p>
<p>“Gifted kids know they are the smartest kids in the room - and sometimes smarter than the teacher.”</p>
<p>And I would like to chime in and say being smarter than the teacher can really be a problem. My daughter’s second grade teacher, who had more than 30 years in the classroom, told me at the November conference that my DD asked her a lot of questions that she did not know the answers to. Student teachers were really awful and at least one was abusive. </p>
<p>Then she was a really poor teacher. Even really smart kids don’t expect the adults around them to know everything. The proper response would be to say, “That’s a really interesting question that no one has ever asked me. I’ll look into it and get back to you in a day or two.” </p>
<p>A bigger issue is that really smart kids cannot help themselves but to correct the teacher – and frequently. For them, the facts are important and deference to authority is a distant concept. One day it might be a calculation in progress on the blackboard, on another it might be a commonly told fact that isn’t actually true, on another day it would be a typo or other error on a test question, making it impossible to give a definitive right answer. </p>
<p>My personal favorite was when my son would patiently sit through a 15-minute long 7- or 8-step math problem, then raise his hand and say, “Why don’t you do it this way instead?” and offer a much simpler 2-minute solution on-the-fly. In grammar school, the teachers would often get irate; curiously, his AP teachers and dual-credit college professors loved him for it.</p>
<p>In kindergarten, my son’s teacher tried telling us that he was ADD- he was bored and couldn’t sit still during class…they were going over the sounds that letters make… she wasn’t aware that he was already reading.</p>
<p>In high school he was selected for the district’s gifted program. Boy what a change! He was finally in a class where everyone was at the same intellectual level. I still remember him coming home from school complaining that he wasn’t able to read as much as he used to. When he was in regular classes and another kid had questions in class, my son was able to read a book while waiting to start again. The first time that happened in the gifted program, it only took a minute for the student to ‘get it’. His reading time was drastically reduced…</p>
<p>I’ve always wondered if kids might do better if they were taught according to their intellectual level. Put like kids to like levels. It might reduce the extremes. The smart kids don’t get bored and the average kids don’t feel like they’re holding people back.</p>
<p>There’s enough garbage that goes along with being academically “gifted” that one should assume that the gifted kids probably were presented with significant obstacles (and the more extreme the talent, the bigger the obstacles.)</p>
<p>For this reason, it always bugs me that people assume that the kids who really stand out were “born on 3rd base.” Regardless of socioeconomic status, it is usually the opposite.</p>
<p>Myth #1 is partially correct. Intelligence is inherited as much as hair and eye color, which explains why there are gifted children in every socioeconomic level and in every race.</p>
<p>What is a myth is that special services are not needed to foster that gift. She also doesn’t touch on the other issues that often come with giftedness: anxiety, OCD & learning disabilities.</p>
<p>the real issue, and I don’t think this can be solved with “gifted” programs, is that the teachers are not as intelligent as the kids. So, the kid will come up with an amazing idea and the teacher won’t even understand how amazing it is. My daughter was blessed with a couple of truly insightful science teachers, one of whom told us, and her, that she would encounter problems since the questions she was asking were the “right” questions for a PhD program, but not 7th grade science.</p>
<p>I think a truly effective gifted program would require testing for the teachers admission as well as the kids. Just a completely unpracticle observation.</p>
<p>Full disclosure, I also have one who is not “gifted” in the academic sense, and boy did she have an easier time of it all, just in general.</p>