gifted and talented-help

[Karma169]

My 14 year old daughter is frustrated (as am I ) with the education system. Having been identified and placed on the gifted and talented register and despite repeatedly asking teachers for 'harder work' to do, the teachers still aim the lessons at the the middle ability of the class, leaving the more able students bored, unhappy and frustrated.

Having had meetings with the deputy head, the head of year and my daughters tutor a year ago, things had initially improved but deteriorated over a few months.

The last straw was when my daughter came home with instructions from her ICT teacher to build a pc, keyboard and screen out of cardboard for homework!!!!!ahhhhhh

Needless to say I have requested meetings again and have written to the ICT teacher explaining why the homework has not been completed.

It seems that when an 'able student', is meeting 'targets' and ticking all the box's for the school OFSTED inspections, that the child's educational needs are so easily ignored?

Please, if there are any mums out there having a similar problem, let me know, I can't be the only one?

This problem is prevelent across the education system. I do 5 AS Levels at a Grammar School and still find the pace sluggish, so it must be horrible at lower years in comprehensives. What you really should be asking is what can be done about it.

English language not being one of them, Pythianlegumes?

I think if your daughter showed some imagination she could make the ICT homework a very challenging project. Cardboard computers do actually exist and have for several years (e.g. recompute) and were marketed as a green alternative to traditional technology. There is absolutely nothing stopping your daughter from taking such a project and running with it. She could also look to something like the recent 'mystery sculptor' in Edinburgh who has been leaving the most beautiful pieces of art work sculpted from newspaper at galleries and museums around the city, to see if she cannot be inspired to produce something original and beautiful.
Whilst it is entirely possible your daughter has been given an ill thought out, intellectually insulting piece of busy work, it is also equally possible she has been presented with the opportunity to work on an open ended, creative and stimulating task. I guess it simply depends how you want to view it. Yes she could get some stickers, string and a couple of shoe boxes and hand in nothing special, or she could show some independent thought, complex problem solving skills, ingenuity and creativity and produce something which will be the talk of the staff room! Glass half empty V Glass half full. Her choice I guess.
Yes it can be frustrating for any child to find him or herself bored and unchallenged at school. But sometimes the answer lies within themself - it is not always about the teachers simply providing something 'harder'.

TOTALLY agree with adoptmama - v well put. Also, is your DD g&t in ict?

oh, god, i know it's juvenile, but mwaaaaaaaaaah, haaaaaaa, haaaaaaa!

with [heart] for adoptmama, and . that recompute is awesometastic. i had literally no idea that such a thing existed. i am in awe.

i saw the sculptor thing on the bbc international channel t'other day - it gave me pangs of homesickness for a country so chock full of culture and art, and the whimsicality of the people. i suspect i will be booking a wee trip home in the near future.

it does remind me of a ancient greek project i had to do in secondary (the usual 'pick one of the following subjects and research it'). i did, but to spice it up (i think it was about clothing and artefacts) i wrote it in ancient greek. well, not really ancient greek, but i wrote it using the ancient greek letters, anyway. i had great fun and it amused me for a good week or two. two projects for the price of one. the teacher just ticked it and asked for a translation, i think. it just seemed like a fun thing to do.

i might suggest some newspaper sculpture round here... they are beautiful.

a ancient? ha!

Fantastic answer adoptmama

I think the later years in secondary can be constraining because exam content has to be covered. But I think by this age kids can start taking a bit more responsibility for their own learning and go further than the syllabus.

DS(15) is a very creative thinker and he is always asking teachers can be do things in a different way. He has made documentaries for several of his subjects and is currently making some sort of french film that his teacher has agreed to (he seems to be spending more time choosing the music than writing the script though!). He always manages to go off at a tangent and uses things he's done in school as a spark for his own interests (usually something to do with film making). His school seem to be managing to keep him on the straight and narrow with regards to actually getting the grades he's capable of but his teachers always seem happy to indulge whatever he's come up with. I'm sure that DS finds some lessons dull and not every homework is exciting but he has enough interesting stuff going on that it doesn't matter.

Like for adoptamama, just what I was thinking, too, but doubtless better said :).
I think what makes them "gifted" should be the ability to take an ordinary assignment & creatively do something extra, even spectacular with it.

I think you have missed the point completely as my daughter is very creative. The point is that having identified her a gifted in I.T and Maths, the school were failing to differentiate the level of work in the class room as they have admitted they should. The boredom and frustration my daughter was feeling was making her really unhappy at school.
As a result of meetings with the school, they have now given my daughter and other more able students, GCSE level work to complete. My daughter is now much happier in school as she feels challenged.

Why not keep her off school for boring lessons as a protest at time wasting?

What, more challenged than building her own entire working computer out of cardboard? They don't get anywhere near that for gcse, your dd could have taken that project as far as she wanted to.

But I'm glad she's being stimulated by being spoon fed a slightly higher level of ict, anyway.

Moomin, the op likes boring lessons. The sheer imagination and openness of unschooling would be way too much, even for an hour or two.

On the one hand yes schools should differentiate and I am glad to hear your daughter's school are now doing this.

On the other hand, your daughter is 14, not 4: is it not time she took some kind of responsibility for her own life? There are hundreds of ways in which a seemingly dull homework can be made interesting by a student who takes charge of their life. She is too old to expect the grown-ups to do all the work for her: it is not many years before she has to go into the adult world and take full responsibility for her own creativity.

As a teacher at a RG university I see students every year who are exactly like your daughter: undeniably gifted but expecting to be able to sit passively on a chair and have a tutor spoon-feed them, students who are incpaable of forcing themselves through anything they perceive as boring and who would never take a project and run with it. Sadly, these students tend not to do well at university, because they do not reach up to the standards we expect of independent thinking and they do not have the stamina to cope with the occasional stretches of boredom that form part of most intellectual work.

But I also see students who have clearly taken every opportunity to go the extra mile: getting more books out of the library for a history homework, reading magazines or joining internet forums in their foreign languages, writing their own plays and getting them produced, making films and finding sponsors, set up their own bands, doing chemical experiments at home, even started businesses. Ime even most secondary teachers love such students. They are the ones who tend to end up with Firsts.