Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
This simply isn't true. Special needs covers both the upper and lower bounds of kids intellectual and educational needs.
For kids that are highly gifted, they need something different than what is provided in the general classroom. If they chose to do away with the centers, I'd be fine with that as long as the base schools have teachers and curriculums to support kids that are truly gifted.
The problem IMO is that they don't have enough kids in each school to support having them pulled out for every academic class for special instruction. This would isolate them even more socially.
Having these kids together provides an opportunity to see that there are other kids like them which provides a social acceptance and acknowledgement of their abilities that they don't receive otherwise. They have plenty of other time in their day to socialize with kids of different abilities outside of the academic instruction time.
If you have a kid that excels in a sport and plays on a travel team, do you feel the same way about the travel team as you do AAP? If my kid isn't as good as your kid why should your kid get higher level instruction and mine does not. My kid could learn more skills by being around you kid - that's not fair. Your kid should be forced to play that sport with kids of much lower ability during the whole season and never be allowed to play on a team with kids of their high skill level because you'll make my kid feel bad.
If my kid excels intellectually (very high IQ; 1:10,000 kids) why don't they need a different curriculum outside of the gen ed curriculum? Your highly skilled sports kid would get bored and quit their sport if forced to play with kids that were of average skill.
Please have some sympathy for parents with kids like mine (which I know are not ALL kids in APP). The truly gifted kids know who the other highly gifted kids are and who the high achiever kids are in AAP right away, but this doesn't mean they don't want to play or work with any other kids. They just know who to go to when they want to talk about subjects that their other classmates won't be interested in or understand. Adults are the same way, so you can't judge gifted kids for this behavior.
+1
Thank you, you did a wonderful job explaining some concept that I have trouble put into words.
The gifted children aren't simple as being smart.
If your being honest with yourself, you know that very few of those kids in AAP are "highly gifted".
We're also talking about public/government school, not private sports leagues where parents pay thousands of $$$$ more than rec parents for their child to play on a travel team. A travel team on which they must try out every single year to qualify.
For children like your kid, I would say definitely treat the giftedness as a special need. The Sp.Ed. Kids are mainstreamed as much as possible and provided with pull out lessons as well as the Sp.Ed. Teacher coming into the main classroom and working with small groups or one on one.
There is no need to quarantine the extremely gifted from the rest of the school, the same way we would not quarantine any other Sp.Ed child from the classroom.
I am being completely honest with myself, hence the statement (which I know are not ALL kids in APP) in reference to highly gifted kids.
I acknowledged the differences, but again, it's the closest comparison I can think of to put it all into perspective that a parent of a non-highly-gifted kid might be able to relate to.
I would agree IF the teachers had some understanding and education on how to integrate kids like mine into a regular classroom. I don't see this at our base school. Some teachers were okay at it, another was a disaster.
My DD's AAP class has specials (music, PE, lunch, etc) with gen ed classes. IMO the AAP-only classes are what they would teach as the pull-outs at her base school, but in this case she gets to be with kids that are more like her. So, essentially, I feel like she is getting "pull-outs" for the academic courses and is integrated during non-academic courses. By doing this at a center school, she gets to meet and work with more kids at her level or closer to her level academically but also socialize with non-AAP kids during the rest of the day. She also has plenty of non-AAP friends outside of school, but I just talking about the school day here.
I think kids need to learn to deal with teasing and understand that friendships mostly happen in groups of kids/people that have some common interests. However, it was really hard on her to be called all kinds of names by many of her classmates, to feel ostracized by many of her classmates, and not understood by several of her teachers. One of the first things she said after going to AAP was - Mom, there are kids that are just as weird as I am ("weird" being the most commonly used name among her base school peers). She was weird because she wanted to talk about subjects in great detail when the other kids got bored or because she was reading at a level and playing games with the 5th/6th graders when she was in K.
So, quarantining my kid from the rest of the school is not what I think is best, I do think her having time with other kids similar to her during part of her academic day is healthy. Having teachers that understand her is also a godsend. However that is accomplished is mostly irrelevant to me though.
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}