Reply to how to prep a preschooler to get into a MoCo gifted program

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't think you can teach giftedness.  It just is.

Those nice little lists people are making?
I didn't go to preschool at all, my mother was a lousy cook, she worked so I taught myself to read, and she was also abusive (I don't remember any hugs and kisses except when she was sorry she beat me).

Somehow, despite all of that, I still managed to be highly gifted.  That wasn't necessarily a good thing.  The kind of sick status that comes with the gifted label and the weird things it can do to a kid's head are the key reasons why I do not have my kids in public school.  [b]When you teach kids that somehow by being gifted they have "arrived"[/b], it can sometimes mean (i) they think they do not have to work hard at anything, and (ii) when they do succeed, they cannot enjoy it because they are gifted so of course they are supposed to get all As or 100s or 99.9% on the standardized tests and so on.  That is not a risk I am willing to take.  Take a deep breath OP before you really mess up your kid with your "gifted or bust" attitude.[/quote]

No one I know with gifted children teaches their kids this.  Not a single person.

My kids both went through the Highly Gifted Centers in MoCo and none of their teachers took this approach either.  On the contrary, the program is all about hard work.[/quote]

+1 I totally agree.  One of the reasons I love the HGC.  DC is with tons of kids who are just as smart or smarter, has to work to do well and the expectations are high.  When dc was in our home school, I worried that the As came too easily and now that we are headed to middle school, I have the same concerns.  I just hope that the lessons dc learned in HGC - the value of working hard, and aiming high will not be forgotten over the next three years.  
I also agree that there is a difference between being gifted (40% plus in much of MCPS) and being in the top 2-3% which is the case in HGCs.  I am not convinced you can 'prep' a kid to be in that latter group - which was the OP's query.  [/quote]

07:38 here.  If anything I would say that the regular classroom taught my high-performing kids that they had "arrived" - they both got straight As effortlessly, which I think they interpreted to mean that showing up was enough.  Which of course, it isn't, for anyone.

Once they got to the HGC, they learned that showing up is nowhere near enough, that they had to work hard for those As (and Bs).  My son got a C in math one quarter while at the HGC, and was devastated.  I OTOH was thrilled - it was a terrific lesson for him in that he learned the pain of feeling he had not worked for a good grade, and the lesson of having to apply himself to bring it back up.[/quote]

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