Reply to Who thinks it is ridiculous when someone says his/her child is bored in school?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Who thinks it is ridiculous when someone says his/her child is bored in school?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think so many parents are doing their children a great disservice with this insistence on "my child is so gifted and isn't challenged enough."

I know some truly gifted adults, and some of them haven't been very successful at holding down a job.  The reason is that no job is "challenging" enough and their belief in their own intellectual superiority has been a huge roadblock in making progress in their lives and being a functional adult in the world with all of the nongifted people.

It's great if your kid is reading early and doing well in school.  But I see all of these parents so convinced their children are so gifted and so far ahead of all of the other kids that I fear those children will grow into some really ego-centric, arrogant and possibly dysfunctional adults.
[/quote]

The bigger concern, for parents of gifted children, is that they will grow into unsuccessful and dysfunctional adults because they will be stymied from a young age by a system and culture that prevents them from advocating for themselves ("excellent students are never troublemakers" "only boring people get bored" "truly smart kids can find ways to amuse themselves in class") and jumps on their parents ("you're just bragging!" "You're over-invested in your kids performance!" ) for raising the issues. How is a smart child supposed to interpret these messages? You have to go to X school and you have to be in Y grade, but if you are different from the rest of the kids in class you need to keep that to yourself and keep yourself occupied without drawing any attention to yourself lest the teacher become annoyed or the other kids notice and pick on you. That is a lot for a kid to deal with!

God forbid the adults in this situation (parents, teachers) intervene to make sure that a child who has mastered the material is still given the opportunity to learn something. I can't believe the posters who disparage the concept of providing additional material to children who learn quickly as "entertaining" kids. I would call it "teaching" or "doing their jobs." And if a child requires so much differentiation that a teacher can't provide it (which is reasonable in some cases--most would agree that we shouldn't expect teachers to be able to provide sufficient differentiation to children far on the other end of the spectrum), he or she may say that school is "boring." Parents and teachers should be able to figure out if a kid says school is boring because they don't like doing something necessary but tedious (in which case, suck it up kid, that's life), or if its because they aren't being challenged, and other parents should MTOB and not take it as a personal insult.

http://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm[/quote]

This is hilarious - gifted children (like cheetahs) are considered endangered?  Not on DCUM they aren't.  I feel like every child mentioned on DCUM is gifted![/quote]

LOL.  No one said that kids need to keep being "different" to themselves.  It seems hilarious that this lady doesn't get that most people are saying that often, the parents are being melodramatic and most certainly have an exaggerated sense of their child's giftedness.  But her posts, if anything, prove our point ;)[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics