The people giving the descriptions are the mother or father of a gifted child who volunteered to work with me as I wrote about their experiences. These are all pseudonyms from my longitudinal study work. And no, things never seem to change in schools for very long and with great exceptions.
Different Reasons and Possibilities for Why Gifted Children Don’t Always Thrive in School
Poor Fit Between Some Teachers and Gifted Children
Phil Burns — On parents’ visiting day, I watched Phil’s preschool teacher asking the children various questions. When Phil didn’t raise his hand, I asked him why he didn’t. After continued prodding, he finally raised his hand, and when the teacher didn’t call on him, he got upset, tried to hide his head under the table behind him, and then pulled on and rocked the table. The teacher told Phil that if he couldn’t get control of himself, he would need to go out into the hall. She didn’t ask what the problem was. I took him out into the hall myself so as not to interrupt the other parents and found out that he had raised his hand often at the beginning of the school year, but he didn’t anymore. He thought that if the teacher didn’t call on him, it meant she didn’t like him. When she didn’t call on him in front of his mother, he was hurt and embarrassed.
Author note: Highly intelligent children have the answers so frequently that the teacher often has to ignore them in order to give other children an opportunity to participate. But the gifted child enjoys attention as much as any other child. The intelligence of the gifted child does not translate into maturity, patience, or discernment when it comes to interpreting the big picture or the teacher’s motives. If Phil were in a classroom with more children near his age who were very bright, his teacher would not have to selectively ignore and become impatient with him. This issue is so common and so emotionally important to the mental health of our highly gifted children that it is imperative that districts make changes. Magnet schools are one solution; they provide opportunities for grouping, instruction, and social interactions with other bright children who can understand and accept them. Magnet schools can answer many needs and cost little to organize and run.
Ross Oliver — Some teachers looked at Ross’s unwillingness to do certain things over and over again as laziness or as him thinking that he was better than everyone else in his class. One said, “Let’s color in the letter ‘J’ so you can learn it, Ross,” yet he read at a sixth-grade reading level. When he was in third grade, he got in trouble frequently and was given lunch detentions for reading when he shouldn’t and for asking too many questions.
Author note: These qualities in Ross should be nurtured, not punished. If he had been grouped with others of his intellectual ability, he would have been more normal among his classmates — most of whom would read and ask lots of questions every chance they got.
Rebecca Resnick — During middle school, Rebecca got to attend some special seminars for high achieving students. She complained that some of the teachers simply wasted her time, she didn’t learn anything new, and they weren’t very good at what they did. In a tenth-grade Enriched Biology course, the teacher did a broad overview of the different disciplines that encompass the field of biology. Rebecca asked some in-depth questions. He told her to look them up on the Internet or gave her answers that barely scratched the surface. I asked him about this, and he said that biology wasn’t his area of expertise and that he couldn’t spend class time going into a more thorough study of one sub-specialty area.
Emily Newton — Our “experiment” of grade-level advancing Emily in the private school for several subjects didn’t go very well. A contributing factor was that her second-grade teacher was never enthusiastic about the plan to begin with. Emily decided to return to her old public school near our home.
Author note: Many teachers disagree with any grade skipping or subject acceleration and actively undermine the process. Often, the child herself will ask to give up on the plan rather than experience obvious lack of support or even open hostility from the teacher. The original Templeton Report and an updated 2008 report [1] cite research of the 70 years before its publication to show that subject acceleration and grade skipping work very well for highly intelligent children [2].
Gifted Students Learn Poor Study Habits
When gifted children don’t develop good study skills and habits, parents and teachers fear that they will underachieve as a result. Underachievement is very different, however, from not doing what is expected. When children score well on achievement tests but don’t finish and turn in high quality assignments, they are not exhibiting underachievement; they are displaying noncompliance. Teacher and parent complaints related to underachievement or noncompliance include the following:
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(1) not doing or turning in homework,
(2) doing the bare minimum rather than selecting challenging projects,
(3) being disorganized,
(4) not paying attention in class, and
(5) distracting others.
Whenever any of these issues are present, there is a strong likelihood that the academic environment is wrong for the child. Children whose work is either too easy or too difficult will often exhibit these kinds of behaviors.
Mixed-ability classrooms, also known as age-level grouping, are poor venues for the development of good study skills. Slow learners are not interested in material they cannot understand, and faster learners are not interested in material they learned — or figured out for themselves — years ago.
The point of studying is to teach or reinforce new learning. It is impossible to develop good study skills if no studying is needed.
Teachers and parents alike frequently lose sight of this point. When the pace and curriculum are at an appropriate level for students, paying attention and completing assignments becomes meaningful and truly allows them to develop study skills.
Not Completing or Turning in Homework
Nothing seems to bother teachers and parents more than having a bright child who will not complete assignments. In Level Two to Level Five students, this refusal is often interpreted as arrogance, passive-aggressiveness, or even oppositional behavior. Some personality types are more prone to exhibit these behaviors, which is why families should consider temperament and personality when they try to determine the best course of action for their child in school.
Parents who try to get the schools to make lessons and assignments more relevant and meaningful for their children often run into road-blocks. What they find, among other things, is that teachers award grades based on assignment completion rather than on subject mastery. Thus, many parents worry that their children are “failing,” when what the children are actually doing is refusing to comply with teacher demands.
Other than taking the child out of the school, one remedy for parents is to remove themselves from the situation and allow the student to earn poor grades for a while. The homework problem usually corrects itself by the time the gifted child reaches high school, because the courses are more intellectually challenging (and more often grouped by readiness for the subject matter which draws in more like-minded students) and the student can see a connection between assignments, learning, mastery, and grades, as well as a correlation to future goals such as college and career.
Some highly intelligent children will do their homework — but not the way that the teacher has instructed. When gifted students protest showing their work or giving detail (such as with math problems), adults need to explain why these things matter. If these children are given sensible reasons why it is important to show their work, they are much more likely to do it.
Teachers can explain that as you get older, you get to work on progressively longer and more detailed problems. If you don’t get the answer that you expect, or if the answer is wrong, you need to be able to go back through your steps to see where you made an error. If you need help from anyone else, then they need to be able to follow your process in order to know where you made an error because only then can they help you. Finally — and this works well with Level Four and Five high school kids (exceptionally and profoundly gifted) — teachers can pose this question: What if one day you are a famous researcher and you are very close to a cure or an elusive solution to a problem that has troubled humankind for centuries, but you die before you can get the patent or get it published? You would certainly want someone to be able to read through your work and put it to good use. These are the reasons why it is important to learn how to organize and show your work.
Samantha Forrest — From the time Samantha started school, we had trouble getting her to do homework. Even in kindergarten, she told us that she was not learning enough and that the assignments were pointless.
Gary Lundquist — Gary’s second-grade teacher wrote that he worked slowly. He read 153 books independently that year, and she didn’t understand why he didn’t bring the same level of motivation to all of his school assignments.
Greg Cooper — We finally persuaded the teacher to agree to send all of Greg’s unfinished assignments home and not keep him from recess, music, or gym anymore when he didn’t finish his work.
Author note: Young children need a physical outlet. For many gifted children, it is lunch, recess, and special subjects like art, music, and gym class which make their days tolerable.
Tyler Lundquist — Once Tyler was exposed to a topic and thought he understood it, he tended to lose interest. He earned low grades on his homework due to lack of organization and logical progression in his solutions. There was no doubt that he had the capability of being an excellent student; he just needed to work harder on his homework. By the time he finally had access to instruction at a level that was appropriate for him, he’d already developed bad habits that made it hard for him to transition to more difficult material.