<p>thumper, you’re right about finding enrichment outside school, but trying to change schools certainly isn’t something only whiny jerks do. It may be idealistic and difficult, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea. Just dealing with things is good in the short-term, but trying to change things is obviously the entire basis of progress. I certainly don’t think you can say it would be a negative change if children’s various abilitiy were uniquely fostered in school.</p>
<p>I am a strong proponent of gifted education, and I don’t mean those 1 hour a day/week pullout things. We were fortunate to be a part of an excellent full time self contained GT program for grades K - 5. The system underwent a giant upheaval at that point which resulted in our decision to put our kids in a Catholic school. D2 spent sixth grade math class reading Anne of Green Gables books. She never once looked at her math book and got 100 on every test. The teacher saw D2 blatantly reading novels in class and never punished her. The teacher was a former GT teacher from a different public school district, so she understood the problem, but was powerless to alter it.</p>
<p>My D had lots of extracurricular activities after school and spent many, many hours on them. But that doesn’t compensate for losing an entire year of math instruction. Her alternative would have been to go to the GT middle school her best friend went to. There you had to deal with the occasional outbreak of overage students bringing weapons to campus, during one of which episodes, the friend’s class was swept into the gym locker room by the teacher and spent an hour hiding under benches while the SWAT team locked down the campus and arrested people. You shouldn’t have to choose such an environment just to get the proper academics for your child. But a public school system that doesn’t value gifted kids often assigns the classes to such places in an effort to force you out.</p>
<p>As for the method of giving gifted kids extra work to do that is still not of the quality they require, one of the GT teachers in the K5 school my kids attended called this STOM…Same Thing Only More.</p>
<p>mercymom–yikes, how scary is that scenario at the middle school (not even HS!)!</p>
<p>I think a parent has to be proactive on all fronts, challenging the school and seeking other alternatives. My two children bumped along through various pull-out programs in two different elementary school, one with a school board member who actually said “everyone is gifted in their own way”. In middle school my son tried out a gifted class, my daughter opted out, but by then we discovered CTY, where they both accelerated in math, among other things. I am convinced that CTY saved my kids. They both realized that there was a community they fit into and even though it was only 3 weeks a year, it gave them a sense of what life would be like after high school.</p>
<p>bugmom–we did a distance learning CTY w/my son after 5th grade. Found that although he advanced in math, it was the ‘same old same old’ when he returned to school in the fall (he was in the highest math in his grade, still unchallenged).</p>
<p>Just wondered how you handled the summer acceleration/fall return-to-earth w/your kids? (if they had that experience…)</p>
<p>I took several courses in science and writing that allowed me to place into a higher level course. My parents talked with our school principal BEFORE I started ensuring that there would be something for me afterwards, even if it was independent study. Fortunately, I was in a private school that was K-12 with a few university classes offered there as well. I think the absolute key is presenting the principal or curriculum head with information well before hand.</p>
<p>My son had accelerated in math via EPGY. (One year he had a teacher who sent him up two grades, but subsequent teachers weren’t interested and eventually we ran out of grades anyway.) In 4th and 5th grade the classroom math was a little more interesting (lots of projects), but in 6th grade I insisted on subject acceleration. The school was reluctant since he’d manage not to ace the end of the year standardized test for the first time, but eventually we persuaded the school to give him a 7th grade final exam. When he did very well on it they were willing to concede that perhaps I knew what I was talking about. Even more so when he got the second highest grade in school on the AMC-8 as a 6th grader. </p>
<p>I agree that you have to work both on changing things within the schools and providing outside enrichment. Eventually my kid provided his own enrichment when he started teaching himself computer programming.</p>
<p>Even with his best teachers he read a lot in school. He read so fast it was hard to keep up. He read a 400 page book in two days in 3rd grade and that was with one of his best teachers for meeting his needs. I remember another teacher commenting at a conference that she knew he was reading under his desk a lot, but he always seemed to be able to multitask as he always seemed to know where the discussion was when addressed directly. Even in AP bio his teacher remarked that rather than do extra credit (if you are already getting an A who needs it?) he would have a book with him.</p>
<p>I struggle with this topic. To read CC one would think that extreme giftedness is an every day phenomena. The reality is that, statistically speaking, we are talking about a very tiny segment of the population needing an extraordinarily specialised educational approach- and the fact is that for many of those the best answer is acceleration within an established school curriculum. (this is true for the population with IQ greater than 150 or so). </p>
<p>The statistics for those who wonder:
IQ: 125 to 132 3%
IQ: 132 to 137 1%<br>
137 to 150 0.9%<br>
150 to 160 0.1%
160 to 174 0.01%
174 to 200 0.0099% </p>
<p>In the pre-gifted era (IE, when we were all youngsters) those of us with aptitude just below the top 3 tiers- i.e., with IQ from 135-150 coped pretty darn well within a vigorous and high-expectation educational system.</p>
<p>WHile I agree that the top 3 tiers likely need something ‘specialized’ in nature,those in the next 2 tiers (132-149) might actually find ‘pull out’ approaches completely adequate, assuming the academic program in general is meaningful and engaging. </p>
<p>I think the answer is to enrich education for everyone- have higher expectations across the board- not micro define the tiers of who needs something tweaked differently.</p>
<p>My kids- IQ’s in that range both, have attended high quality schools where there is no gifted education. Being in a diverse learning environment, not feeling they need to be globally gifted and comfortable with what they are great at, and what they are not great at has been very, very positive for them. </p>
<p>For most kids, hot housing is not the answer. I think for the truly (even on CC) remarkable few something different is needed.</p>
<p>Read Maureen Neihart.</p>
<p>Gifted programs vary greatly from state to state, as shown here:
[url=<a href=“http://www.gt-cybersource.org/StatePolicy.aspx?NavID=4_0]GT-CyberSource”>http://www.gt-cybersource.org/StatePolicy.aspx?NavID=4_0]GT-CyberSource</a> ~ GT-CyberSource State Policy ~ View Your State</p>
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<p>I am sure you are accurately relaying a statement you have found in some book of good reputation. Nevertheless those figures are wrong. Going into detail about how they are wrong would take us far off-topic, but I’ll note for the record that NO currently normed, properly validated IQ test even yields scores above 160, and one of the former, now obsolete, tests that did showed a higher frequency of those scores.</p>
<p>Most public school educations actually hold many gifted students back.
Correct me if I’m wrong but a too-high proportion of gifted students are actually high-school dropouts.</p>
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<p>Where did I just see an article about that? Oh, yeah: </p>
<p>[Gifted</a> Exchange: Are 20% of high school drop-outs gifted?](<a href=“http://giftedexchange.blogspot.com/2008/09/are-20-of-high-school-drop-outs-gifted.html]Gifted”>Gifted Exchange: Are 20% of high school drop-outs gifted?) </p>
<p>The conclusion is that there is insufficient evidence to say with confidence that gifted students are overrepresented, or even proportionally represented, among high school dropouts. (I knew high school dropouts among my smartest friends from high school. They all finished college degrees without ever going back to get high school diplomas.)</p>
<p>Those are interesting statistics (re: the percentages at various IQs). However, in the IQ test my son took to qualify for the gifted program in 3rd grade, he topped out (highest score possible) in numerous categories. So, there was no way that he could have been assessed via that (widely-used, I believe) instrument (WISK?) at anything above around a 150 or so.</p>
<p>I’m no expert, but the neuropsychologist who tests my son told me, I think, that the tests are set with a maximum score and the scores at the top are thus very sensitive to missing one or two questions. [We’ve noticed variance over the years and so I asked].</p>
<p>We live in Massachusetts, which doesn’t believe in gifted education because everyone is special. My son is both gifted and has learning disabilities – which meant that we couldn’t ask the teacher just to let him read something, because he was/is really dyslexic.</p>
<p>We found that with an IEP, the school system could be guided to trying to help the learning disabilities, but except for the personal interest of the Special Ed staff (they had never seen these extremes of giftedness and disability together) and the assistant superintendent of the school district, there was no interest in helping nor any institutional capacity to help on the gifted side. To compensate, my wife and I read thousands of books to him over the years. Starting at an early age, I introduced him to conceptually advanced areas wherever I could. </p>
<p>It may not have been a good choice, but we concentrated on helping him learn to read and write rather than really play to the areas in which he had gifts (which really involved abstract conceptualization, strategic reasoning and ability to make art and thus it was hard to focus). The improvement in reading and writing has been staggering. </p>
<p>By high school, we really had to take things into our own hands. He came to me during freshman year and said, “Dad, these people are wasting my time. In honors math, they explain the idea on Monday. I get it on Monday. We’re still doing it on Friday.” But, because reading and writing was fatiguing for him, doing the busywork homework really exhausted him. So, we worked out an arrangement where he did partial homeschooling. Some subjects (like lab science, art, and social studies) were done in school. Math and English typically were done outside. He did EPGY freshman year and I hired a Harvard grad student to work with him in sophomore/junior years. He completed the junior year curriculum in half a year and then worked on advanced subjects. In English, I wanted him to focus on learning to write well, especially to write expository essays and to use assistive technologies like speech recognition. We also let him work on creative writing and he was/is co-authoring a novel. Math worked pretty well (other than EPGY), because he could work at his own pace) but he really needed to work on the writing. By luck, his really hard work and some good choices, his writing has dramatically improved. The in-school part was mixed. He found AP Chemistry trivial. He was sick for a significant part of his senior year and basically taught himself AP Physics. But, it turned out the the biggest contributor to his writing and to his intellectual stimulation over the last couple of years was his decision (to parental trepidation) to sign up for Moot Court and take Constitutional Law with a gifted teacher. Her high school Con Law course was taught at a serious college level and he soared. </p>
<p>So, I think we did OK with a gifted kid with challenges, but I don’t think that there is any easy path. There may be a very few private schools (Andover, Commonwealth) that can handle gifted kids. There is a boarding school called the Davidson Institute (I think, in Nevada?), which is aimed at kids with IQ’s over 145 (or something like that?). But I don’t think private schools in general are a panacea. My daughter goes to a relatively prestigious private high school in the Boston area which admits for the most part very bright kids, but I don’t think the school is prepared to handle truly gifted kids. My son went to a private middle school, where they refused to a) pull out; b) accelerate; or c) create group projects for the few really strong kids in math. They didn’t believe in individualized curricula. And, many private schools wouldn’t necessarily have the teacher resources to do much even if they did want to use individualized curricula.</p>
<p>I will say that our public high school eventually offered us real flexibility when we approached the very supportive assistant superintendent of the district. My son would have preferred full to partial homeschooling, but my wife did not want that. I’m not sure what set of choices would have produced a better result.</p>
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<p>I did not realize until last school year, that gifted/taleneted fall under the special ed umbrella. At least in my state. So there is money available, parents must get informed and empowered to seek it.</p>
<p>No need to patronize Token.
The Stanford Binet LM measured that high. It is outdated, no longer used…but it measured that high. Furthermore, just because a test does not measure it does not mean it does not exist.</p>
<p>My point was that the reality is that <<1% of children are profoundly gifted and that I think we are all so into the specialness of our children that we have lost sight of how few really truly are so unique. </p>
<p>Many kids who end up in self contained programs in places which have them are ‘twice exceptional’- very bright and with specific LD.</p>
<p>Very bright and ‘average’ gifted kids need stimulation, extension and acceleration sometimes. The <<<1% need something truly different.</p>
<p>I’m sorry you took that as patronizing, which it was not intended to be. The frequencies are incorrect, and anyway refer to a test that is not a currently normed test. I agree that gifted children are rare–however they are defined–and that is the public policy problem, because usually mass education is designed with the masses in mind. Flexibility is a key policy issue for children who aren’t just like most children, whatever their educational situation.</p>
<p>With a personal anecdote, I was considered to be gifted as a child.
I don’t even remember what school was like up to fourth grade when I was in a public elementary school.
My parents decided to put in the extra money to have me attend a gifted school (135+ IQ required) in my area.
I quickly noticed the differences.
We were ten years old and already learning algebra and writing 3-4 page essays and doing research papers. The work was much more advanced and I wasn’t so bored with school anymore. In my public elementary school, I think we were spending a whole year on fractions or something… there were no gifted programs where I was attending- my only option was putting in $3000 a year to attend a school that is a twenty minute drive from where I live.
Despite the fact that I don’t come from a rich family at all, my parents thought it was for the best that I attended the gifted school- I think it helped in the long run.</p>
<p>Overall, we need to do a much better service for highly intelligent people of lower and middle classes.
It is arrogant to assume that IQ tests solely favor the rich…
It is a fact that those in the upper classes are able to receive the widest scope of academic opportunities.</p>
<p>Jolynne, My S did Algebra I at CTY the summer after 7th grade and was able to skip it in 8th grade and go straight to Honors Geometry at the HS. It was a bit of a hassle for the school, since they had to provide a bus, he was not allowed to walk across the street to the HS. Later on in HS he realized he could give up his lunch/study hall and take an independent study. He created a course for APMicro/Macroeconomics. Again it was a bit of a hassle, but the school was willing to work with him. He had to find an advisor, got a place in the Library to work, we bought the books and a DVD set from the Teaching Company (great outfit for enrichment courses, BTW, <a href=“http://www.Teach12.com)%5B/url%5D”>www.Teach12.com)</a>. His S, followed after him, gave up lunch Soph year to take AP Stat (offered by the school) and now as a Jr. is doing AP Computer Sci independent study. I think doing self-paced math at CTY made them both comfortable working on their own through material, with just consulting help from the teacher. I think having just this amount of independence and control over something they were interested in made the rest of school bearable. But they both definitely struggled with public school re-entry after each of the 4 years of CTY summers.</p>
<p>Wow, that’s a creative response, bugmom (to advanced math); as was shawbridge’s and other parents who’ve discussed their plans, here.</p>
<p>I guess I just never thought of other options for son, apart from summer enrichment and an occasional tutor (w/other parents, in Greek/Roman culture and physics since they weren’t getting that in middle school). Plus, I was busy going to grad school/working/then having a new baby…wish I’d had some creative ideas back then.</p>