Thanks for the story!

Boredom leads to finding stimulation subconsciously. My mind just wouldn't stop trying to find stimulus, leading to excessive stress. I couldn't sleep at night. my mind would race. I just wasn't and am still not intellectually stimulated, I'm really busy, yet bored at the same time.

Our gifted program ended when we hit high school at grade 9. I got devoured by sports, and veered to physical stimulus, still aced my classes but, didn't know what direction was right, I was good at it all.

I got bored at university. Too much theory. I need to do stuff! Hands on.

I've always been afraid of failing…at anything. That would be traumatic.

I've succeeded at every job I ever had. But have never come close to reaching my potential. Leaving me depressed…I guess.

I want to go back to school, maybe this year. Architecture, that would be good for me I think. But a huge commitment now that I'm well into my 30's.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that gifted children need to be guided to find their own strengths and passions. To help them to not get lost, or scared. I would have done anything to have Mr. Morton's guidance through high school. I'm starved now. Sometimes you just try to live a normal life, but as hard as you try to BE normal, SEEM normal, you just get frustrated.

I don't know what the answers are. I know these programs are important. I haven't thought about my "giftedness" in years, I've been trying to be normal, and I guess I forgot, and just thought I was just stressed out all the time. This article really hit home and I answered a lot of my own questions about where I am in life.

Thank you to Bill Morton.

A gift isn't really a gift unless you unwrap it.

Our son now takes courses online from the John Hopkins University CTY program. He loves it! The main issue that we now have is the cost. It costs about $1200.00 per course. We live in a rural community, and our school division does not provide any advanced placement type courses.

I am wondering if anyone knows of scholarships that might be available for talented students in the public school system?

My sympathies – such a similar story to my own son’s who is now in grade 8. The first meeting with his kindergarten teacher literally started with the words “Are you taking him to the doctor to see about medication?” We had never had issues or problems in nursery school. He was well adjusted with many friends. He entered public school and the boredom started, followed by the “ADHD like behaviour” and being ostracized by everyone. Our son did get into a gifted contained class in grade 4. My opinion on that, based on his experiences, is that they can make friends within the class, but within the school at large, they are just one big group to be ostracized and bullied and made fun of – and depending on the school administration not just by the students! Like so many others private school is not an option and in our case neither is home schooling – first and foremost I don’t feel qualified. The things my son enjoys learning and doing on his own are too far beyond my own comprehension and I’m certainly not trained as a teacher. I wish I could tell you that it gets better as they get older, but it doesn’t. I will never understand why acceleration is no longer a viable option.

Gifted children are bored in the regular classroom. Try taking a beginners typing lesson 5 days a week for 6 weeks, you’ll see what I mean. You’ll likey dropout before the course is over.

Honestly, if you wouldn’t ask that of a parent with a learning disabled child, don’t ask it of a parent who happens to have a gifted child.

The whole discussion about ISA funding is not generally a part of the knowledge base of the everyday parent. There was a freeze of sorts on psychoeducational testing about 7 years ago regarding the whole ISA mess and I can agree that boards who were over identifiying LD or behaviour were massively rewarded for it. And then – those false figures were used as a base for future funding, if I remember correctly.

Gifted receives next to no funding, therefore there was no reward to identify gifted and gifted psychoeducational testing was practically non-existent.

Speaking again from a Peel perspective, Peel used to have a gifted program that was envied and studied by experts from other countries because it was so well run. (Same program that spawned the Peel Summer Academy). Now the program is as marginalized as the kids are. There is very little support, infrequent professional development opportunities and no defineable program. The joke of the so called ’3 year Gifted Review’ which started in 2005 and was sceduled to be presented in spring 2008, has yet to be revealed. Maybe the review exposes more in support of actual gifted education than the Peel Board is willing to implement? Kids and parents were surveyed – I filled it out and so did my son – I asked for a copy of the review when it was completed.

Where is it?

I think it is shameful that public education takes a one-size fits-all approach. Only average students benefit from this. Students with abilities that differ from the average are not well-served.

Why is it that the “average” students get an education taylored to their abilities and the rest of the students must settle with less? How is this equality in the slightest?

In Ontario we no longer have to guess which bright children were labelled by Ontario’s diagnosis for dollars Special Ed C$billion ISA scandal as the Toronto District school board just published EQAO test results by race. It is immigrant minorities that have been targeted and most of their brightest children diagnosed as LD or LD/gifted by the bogus ISA definition (2- standard deviations of IQ in one area versus an academic score in one unrelated subject). Total nonsense of course – but it did bring in Billions of dollars in extra funding and school boards evaded most of the ex Premier Mike Harris education cuts by mis-diagnosing immigrant children especially in Toronto.

In addition billions of dollars were claimed under the behavioural profiles for ISA (Intensive Support Amount) that made unruly children worth up to $27,000 per year. This had the perverse incentive of rewarding schools for bad behaviour; is it any wonder that the schools in Toronto are now so violent?

All this is well documented on the internet.
The US and UK have recognised their mistakes in labelling kids LD and ADHD etc and have put in extensive reforms to stop the irreparable damage to children.
When will Ontario and Canada follow the rest of the world?

My son has suffered – often along with class mates as being in the “nerd” or “geek” class – made fun of and bullied – and not just bye the other students, but often by the adults in the school. He has had teachers and administrators make comments lke “you’re not so special, just wait until you get out into the real world” etc.. Teachers have turned the other way when he has been picked on in the school playground at recess. I could go on and on. His experiences in the gifted contained class have varied in accordance with the support of the school administration. When a prinicpal wants the gifted class in his/her school and supports it, we have a better year. When the administrator doesn’t want or believe in gifted education it has been a disaster. Similarly when the teacher wants to be in the class with these students they do much better, but that is also hit and miss.

All this and my son is often still bored in his class. Why? All this money is spent to bus him to a different school for his gifted contained class where he learns the same ciriculum as everyone else in his grade – but he does get to do his own independent research project every semester. When I contacted Peel Board about acceleration I was laughingly told by our school supperintendent that acceleration is not emotionally good for gifted children. It sets them apart and makes them appear different. Here’s a news flash they are different – they know it and so does everyone else. My son has trouble relating to people his own age but gets along well with older kids or younger kids. But we wouldn’t want to “emotionally scar” him by moving him to a grade level where he might be challenged and where he might be able to make friends and where the cost would be minimal. Instead he is left to the hit and miss of his gifted contained class.

And by the way to the person who commented on how it is also the parents’ responsibility to shoulder some of this burden – gifted kids don’t just end up in the homes of people with high incomes. We’re lucky that we’ve been able to afford two rounds of private testing (one more to go in grade 12 for university) at $2,000 each, not to mention gifted summer camp at $1600 for two weeks, not to mention Kumon at $100 per month because the school system never taught our son basic mathematics, not to mention membership costs to things like the ROM and Science Centre to keep him interested, etc., etc., etc.

I often say the label “gifted” is so inappropriate…

I looked at putting my eldest child in public school but, at Kindergarten age, I had a child who could read encyclopedias and do multiplication. The school would have put him in grade one where the kids (a year further ahead of where my child was at the time) were doing single digit adding and sounding out letters. It would have been a recipe for disaster!

They would not consider acceleration, and the only gifted assessments begin in grade 4. I cannot understand why the schools don’t do gifted assessments earlier. As any parent of a gifted child knows, it is very clear by toddlerhood that your child is different. By the time you get to the 4th grade, a child who has been forced to sit through years of mind-numbing “education” will likely have tuned out, had their innate love of learning permanently squelched, been labled as a trouble-maker and/or medicated into compliance.

I refused to put my kids through this, and have given up a professional career to homeschool them. Sometimes, if you want a job done right, you simply have to do it yourself.

To all those who can’t homeschool their gifted kids for whatever reason, or don’t have adequate gifted programming elsewhere, my heart goes out to you. It’s time people stopped thinking of gifted education as “elitist” and started putting some effort toward making the most of these brains!

That is the thing Mike – there have been very few additonal social problems for radically accelerated kids, – check out A Nation Deceived and read up on the Iowa Acceleration Scale – if done properly, acceleration works very well.

You have to take into account that a kid who is 5 years ahead in Math for example ALREADY sticks out in the regular class. Being in a class of older kids might make him stick out, but at least people can understand *why* a bit better. Older kids tend to be more mature than the grade-mates anyway, just because they are older. They could be more accepting of someone so different.

A friend of mine, for instance, is incapable of visualizing things. I may not have a “learning disability” but I definitely process the spoken word more slowly than most people. Both of us have done well by finding strategies to get around our shortcomings (I insert prefaces to everything I say, but am secretly figuring out what the other person said). Of course it is difficult when teachers teach things in very specific ways.

P Walsh, I definitely emphathize with your son’s situation. In grade 3 I was put on the “dumb table” (the ordering of the tables in class was fairly obvious), and tested for a learning disability because I was disengaged from school. Based on the test it was recommended I go to gifted classes, and there I went (in spite of the specific objection of my grade 3 teacher, who still thought I was dumb as a rock).

That is just not true though – if you meet the minmium AGE and ACADEMIC requirements – you get to go on. This is my biggest problem – you don’t really have acceleration options in Ontario anymore. It is the cheapest, and possibly most appropriate method of meeting these kids needs. If it was done routinely, both subject based (by holding all math classes at the same time and allowing kids to move to the most appropriate level class, same for English, and Science) and full grade – where appropriate by proper analysis using a tool like the Iowa Acceleration Scale, you would see happier kids all around!