what happened with my friend and her daughter from the push or not post?
after we went round and round about it for a while, she let her daughter get tested and she made it into the program and is apparently doing very very well, and is really excited. She said her daughter told her “Its exactly what I need to get ready for college!”
the kid is like 10 or something!
I didn’t even say I told you so.
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Thanks for coming by my blog.
MK
I was in a couple of gifted programs while I was in public school, and I LOVED them.
They are very good for smart kids who are procrastinators or just generally have a hard time doing busywork, because the class sizes are smaller, the material is more interesting, the learning is often more hands-on (like making origami while you learn about Japan, or cutting up pizza to study fractions) and you get a lot more attention from the teachers involved than you would during a normal school day.
Really, though, I think ALL kids should have access to the kind of experience “gifted” kids get in a gifted program, all of the time. I think they would all do better with smaller class sizes and more engaged teachers. Not sure why the schools only target the kids higher IQ scores for this treatment. I mean, other than the fact that most of the public schools are pretty much broke.
I wish my parents had pushed me in a different way than they did when I was little. They were all gung ho about getting my IQ tested and putting me in gifted programs, as long as that didn’t require any extra commitments on their time. It was great for me to be in music or spanish or computer classes as long as the school bus would take me there, during the normal school day, and my parents never had to go out of their way. And they loved to brag about how their genius kid was in the gifted program.
But when it came to putting me in classes outside of school, even free ones, they were not interested. They were not interested in making sure I studied for tests, or in helping me do my homework. They were not interested in getting me supplies so I could make a science project for the science fair. Hell, they weren’t even really that interested in keeping me supplied with pencils and notebook paper (my mother couldn’t always afford to, but my father just didn’t think to care).
They never pushed me to do any WORK to get better at school– they only went around telling everyone about my “natural” (i.e. inherited from them) talents.
I wish very much that my parents had helped to teach me good study habits when I was younger, and I wish they had taught me to put more value on hard work and discipline than innate ability. It’s hard for an elementary school kid to work all those things out on her own.