Reply to APS is failing my gifted child

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[quote=Anonymous]Meeting your profoundly gifted child is more than just challenging them in spelling or math. It's also socializing them, giving them the opportunity to find solutions to being bored, teaching them to exist with others who may be different from them. It's about PE, and recess, and music, and art class. Not just math and reading. It's all the things.

You should ask the teachers how your student is doing socially, if they are in the third week and truly hate school that young. What is the teacher's answer when your student has already mastered something and needs more? Is it to sit bored or reach for a book, talk to a friend, open a doodle book? What is your student's answer to the same question? Is it the same as the teacher's answer? If the teachers are truly not allowing reading or doodling...then it's time to talk about an administrative transfer.

Is the school willing to discuss regrading your student?

What is your student doing outside of class? Math club, Odyssey of the Mind, chess, their own book club with friends? After school enrichment? What are you doing at home to supplement? How often are you going to the library? Reading a book together and discussing it? Visiting local museums?

I agree that differentiated learning is not robust in Arlington, but it's hard to believe that your student isn't surrounded with other gifted learners. Their peers just may be generally gifted and not profoundly gifted, and that's okay. If your student is truly profoundly gifted, then it's safe to assume you are also looking at a therapist for them to navigate their responses to their environment when they are very different from their peers -- therapy may help you too. Your student will only feel and appear more different as time goes on, and you'll only feel worse about that if you haven't found a community, support, coping skills...

Moreover, sometimes it's worth asking ourselves as parents, what are we showing our children before they go to school? Is it excitement that they may be learning more than math or spelling? Or is it frustration that they are not being celebrated for being bright? In other words, look at your experience holistically and truly examine how your attitude influences your child's experience. I promise it will help.

If you truly feel your student needs more, then yes, public school anywhere may not be a good fit. Even in Fairfax, your student may still have to work along side students who are not profoundly gifted. Nysmith, Edlin, Basis, maybe Flint Hill...may be worth looking at. [/quote]

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