Gifted and Talented - underachiever

[sleepyhead79]

I have learned this week that my ds is an underachieving gifted child.

I have been in touch with the NAGC and they have been very helpful but I feel a little unsure as to what this means.

I was about to go into a rant about the milestones that my ds achieved as a baby and toddler but they tell me that it isn't relevant now. Although you want your child to be bright you are never prepared to hear this. I hate using the term gifted because it sounds I like am being up myself.

On Monday I approached the school and they told me that they don't feel ds is because of a drop in assessment results and the failure to meet the predicted levels this year. Eventually they agreed to look into the situation with a view to getting an assessment by aeducational psychologist.

Has anybody been in this position? Help!!!!!

I am lost in all the information and feel like I am drowning very rapidly.

I agree with some of the old posts that rather than displaying great giftedness, doing nothing in class because it's "boring" actually demonstrates great arrogance.

Or, let me qualify that, it shows that a child doesn't understand the lesson. Or, sometimes things are boring but an intelligent child could just suck that up once in a while and do some creative daydreaming!

Hi
Nobody ever tells you what 'gifted' means. my dd is in y4 she is working at y6 level. My sis who is a teacher told me years ago that dd was highly intelligent i think from things she did and said. I didn't take much notice as i thought she was going over the top! When she got to school she learned very quickly and read what ever she could get hold of. in y1 i went to see the teacher as she was reading much harder books than they were giving her. They did nothing. maybe she wasn't showing them at school what she was showing us at home y2 she came home and not only said she was bored but the work was too easy. Trip to see the teacher and again nothing was done. repeated in y3. didn't bother this year but they told me she was very intelligent. I was so chuffed. If she is 'gifted' it will show eventually.

I apparently have a gifted underachieving ds!

At primary he was put on the G & T register due to his "problem solving abilities/lateral thinking skills"-pretty vague and abstract if you ask me.

When he went to secondary nothing was mentioned about him being on the G & T register, so I assumed that there were others who met the criteria more than him, and that the it was all relative to who else was at the school.

Anyway, he has had massive problems in secondary behaviour wise- various detentions/ suspensions/ always on report etc- mainly due to not doing what the teacher has asked of him in the way she/he wants. He is very individualistic in the way he wants to learn, and it is often at odds with the school system.
He often does the bare minimum to get by.

Anyway, to cut a long story short at the last meeting with the school I had they said that he is massively underachieving in that the grades he gets do not correspond at all to his potential (based partly on year 6 sats results and CAT test results ). He is 13, in year 9.

However, despite his underachievemnet, they have still identified him as G & T and have a legal requirement to do something about it.
So he has been put on a G & T Science Programme- along with others who have been similarly identified as G & T to try to make sure they all get A*s in their GCSE (which apparently they are potentially capable of if they put their mind to it)

I think that you can easily be an under achieving Gifted pupil- high natural intelligence (that is the ability to learn new things quickly, process info fast, challenge ideas intelligently etc) is not in itself enough to do well if, like my ds you are an unmotivated lazy so and so!

We shall see how he finally does in a couple of years, time I guess.

I should think there most definitely are underachieving gifted children, however it must be a bugger for the teachers to sift them out from the other DC whose MC parents endlessly claim to be gifted.

I mean, if a kid doesn't show their giftedness how is a teacher to know?

To be fair I never said to the teachers that dd was gifted. I never did and still don't think she is gifted. (though it has crossed my mind) I just wanted the teachers to give her harder books to read and some more challenging work to try. They should've at least tried her with harder books. I would've been happy with that.

Erix

I teach/extend/support at home and use school for the social and sports side. They are also happy to float along with everyone else at school and not stand out, but happily motivated and extend themselves at home so they are still learning.

Until now the school has never pushed either of my DC for them to show their capabilities, but I believe there has been a bit of a catch 22, because I dont know how much my kids have actually shown the teachers what they are capable of. The teacher can only work on and develop what she physically sees.

Mine are bright, but not truely gifted under the definitations of the G&T organisations.

I agree that a child can be gifted but underachieve, but I would say that if they seriously underachieve in relation to children of the same age, they are probably not really gifted. If they underachieve compared to their potential, that's different.

The whole area is a minefield of problems really. My ds is on the G&T register for maths. But at the start of year 6 he went through a phase where he just didn't want to do the work. He said it was boring, and too easy, but his teacher, quite rightly said that unless he could prove that he could do the work, he couldn't give him harder work that he would enjoy more. It took being held in for a few breaktimes before my ds finally decided to pull his finger out.

He is a fantastic reader, I can remember his pre school teachers telling me in amazement that he had read stories to the other children when he was four and asking me if I had spent time teaching him. I hadn't, I just used to read to him alot and follow the words with my finger. His reception and year one class teachers used to get concerned that they didn't have enough books of a high enough level for him, and would quiz me about what books we had at home. Nowadays he is still a good reader and would be capable of reading books that are written for older children, but he would rather read the same kind of thing as his brother who is two years younger than him just because he enjoys the stories more. It drove me nuts for a while, then I decided that just because I'm capable of reading War and Peace doesn't mean I want to, and it is surely better to just let him read what he enjoys.

We had an Ed Psych report done, DS has aspergers, we were told that it is 95% a certainty that his IQ was in the top 5%, but that his processing speed was relatively slow. So he could end up getting exactly the same results in an exam as a child who is not as bright but has the ability to work much quicker. In which case his high IQ, and us knowing his IQ really doesn't offer him much benefit, other than it being quite interesting for us to know.

The G&T register really doesn't mean that much tbh, it's all relative to the other children in the year group and their abilities really. Since I was told that ds was on the register, it's been mentioned in passing a couple of times since then and that's about it. I really have no idea what difference it makes. Perhaps that makes me a bad Mummy though and I should try to find out!

Thats a good idea RoadArt - I guess it doesn't really matter what his current teachers think - so long as I'm supporting my DS at home.

I'm about to get him a tutor (as I've been told the majority of his class has one!) so that he gets in to the correct stream at secondary school.

and other than that we'll continue supporting him with his interests...next project is making a radio, and making an iTunes app.