What Parents Want Teachers (and Professionals) to Know

Compiled by Sarah Sheard

Many parents of highly or profoundly gifted children talk about teachers or other adults who either “get my child” or “don’t get my child”.  The purpose of this list is to describe what is the “it” that they need to “get”.  This is a compilation of several parent’s comments. In general,  “Getting it” means that they really believe and understand that the testing levels and the information I give them about my child are true and that their preconceived ideas about children and what they need to learn may not apply in this situation.  

• My child really is that way!   
  
  •  It’s not me “pushing” him
  • She’s not trying to show off
• He’s not trying to be better than anyone else. 

• He’s processing at a very rapid pace and understands oodles more than he looks like he should understand.
  • If you go to a gathering of profoundly gifted children, you will be struck by how normal they look. You can’t tell them from average children, despite any expectations you may have had to the contrary.  Looks are deceiving.
  • My child needs challenge.  Some kids without the tolerance to do the same thing over and over and over will shut down if not challenged, others will find other outlets for their mental energies and end up in trouble.  And for those who will wait quietly while the other kids catch on, then they are both losing the opportunity to really learn something and they are also not being taught how to handle a challenge when it does eventually present itself.  We are potentially losing a valuable resource if we don’t teach them at their level and pace. 
    

• She needs different work, not more.
  • Sitting in that class with the other second graders, listening to them figure out what multiplication means when she’s thinking coordinate systems, powers of ten, algebra, or calculus, is extremely painful for her.
    
  •  It’s as if you were forced to sit six hours a day listening to people drill in beginning reading.  You wouldn’t want to turn in any worksheets either!
  • And if the child also has learning disabilities, it’s like doing the above and being asked to do all the worksheets and note-taking with your non-dominant hand in a foreign alphabet: Excruciating boredom combined with excruciating difficulty!

• He’s very, very unusual. A child of his IQ is one in ten thousand. An elementary school of 500 children would see one child like this every twenty years. (No, you don’t have five or six others like him in his class!)

• Being really, really bright doesn’t mean she is more likely to be neat, or talkative, or a leader, or happy, or a straight-A student.
  • His mind goes in many places, very few of which are orderly.
  • Many very gifted kids are introverted.
  • Being really, really bright certainly does not guarantee the student gets straight A’s.  Many of these children often are not the slightest bit interested in projects and worksheets that have no learning value for them. Since teachers rarely give them appropriate (highly advanced) projects and worksheets, there is no way for the children to demonstrate what they can do, and the children often “underachieve” as a result.
  • Beyond a certain IQ, additional smarts can be detrimental to happiness. You don’t have peers, no one understands you, you feel weird, nothing is at an appropriate pace for you. Your life is often very painful.  Many of these children think there must be something very wrong with them, that they can’t think like the other children they know.  Sometimes their teachers agree.

• She needs to socialize with people other than her age mates.
  • Children his age don’t understand his language, his interests, his humor. Many adults do. That’s why he’d rather make friends with them.  He’s not trying to monopolize your time.
  • Trying to make her socialize with her age group will not work, for the above reason, and will only frustrate her and the other children. Let her choose older friends.

• He has oversensitivities.
  
  • Very often, being overly sensitive to noises, feelings, food textures, emotional distress in others, and other sensations comes with the territory of being very gifted.
  • She’s not trying to be trouble – things like that bother her a great deal more than most people. She needs accommodations such as a quiet place to work, soft clothing, and understanding. And don’t tell her that “it doesn't hurt” or “you can't smell that” – it does and she can. 
    

• The nature of very high levels of giftedness is asynchrony. The children act very mature one instant, and very immature (like their chronological age, or even younger), the next. Being intellectually advanced does not make him an adult.
  • She can discuss nuclear physics and then argue about who got to the car first.
  • He wants a bedtime story, but make it Stephen Hawking.
  • She reads college level literature, but has the handwriting of a first grader. (Don’t try to keep him back intellectually until his handwriting catches up – you’ll destroy him.) 

2. The Parents

For the teachers, school administrators and other professionals, here is a list of what you need to "get" about us, the parents of the highly or profoundly gifted child.  We recognize our child isn’t "easy” for you any more than he is for us...but he still deserves an appropriate education. Try to recognize our frustration in the following list, and please work with us to find ways to meet the unique needs of our child. 

• We accept our child the way she is.
  • We won't conspire with anyone who tries to make her “normal,” or make her extroverted.  It won’t work, and it will make her (and us) miserable.
  • We won't tell our child not to worry about the ozone layer or to stop crying for the beggars in Spain.  This would only push him into desolate silence.
  • We won't try to take her imagination away from her, or punish her for daydreaming.
  • We won't allow him to be defined by his intellect.  

• We've been here before.
  • If you have negative feelings toward our child, they will be clear to us (and him), even if you try to mask them with professional rationalizations.  You might as well own up to them, and together we can work out a plan.
  • We see arbitrary "rules are rules" policies as the discrimination they are, and we’ll react as any parents would to anything that hurts their child.
  • We know as much about the prevailing educational wisdom as most teachers and administrators.  We've had to do a lot of homework because the prevailing wisdom doesn't stretch to our child.
  • We don't automatically trust you.  Many a trained professional has wrought damage and you will have to prove yourself by continually trying to understand and work with us, not against us.
    

• We care about our child's happiness...
  • ...more than we care about her grades, her acceptance into an Ivy League college, her earning potential, or how competitive her generation will be with the overseas competition (the Russians, the Japanese, the Indians) of the moment.
  •  Although we recognize that you have classroom management concerns, and risk the wrath of other parents, we can’t let this destroy our child.  How you would handle it “if every fifth grader suddenly wants to do eighth grade level math” is up to you.
  • We also care about his happiness more than we care about our own image.  If necessary, we're willing to have you cringe every time we call, and to be referred to as "those pushy parents."

• We’ve lived with our child all his life.
  • We know that she's a person in her own right and needs to be treated with respect.  He's not a trophy “star pupil” or a parlor game (‘Quick -- how do you spell ‘mendacious’ ?”); she’s not an assistant teacher to you or a peer liaison to her classmates.
  • He's a real kid, with all the orneriness, quirks, and needs of any child his age, and more.  Whether you thought she was watching or not, she knows where we hide the cookies, how to get your password, and how to use an electric screwdriver.  Leave him bored, resentful, or unsupervised at your peril.
  • We are the experts on him. We recognize your professional credentials, but we know that your studies and experience have dealt with the typical student and are highly unlikely to include the one-in-ten-thousand child.  We may not always know what is best for him, but he will always be our primary concern. When in doubt we will listen to our intuitions and we will listen to him.
  • We love her unconditionally.  We will do whatever is necessary to see that her needs are met and that she grows to be the person she was meant to be.

• We will not let you hurt her.
  

   

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  Sarah Sheard has been a systems engineer for 25 years, working in satellites, software, and software-intensive systems. She is an independent consultant at Third Millennium Systems, also dabbling in pursuits from folk dancing and sewing to violin.  She lives outside of Washington DC with her two challenging teenagers. Sarah can be reached at sheardsheard@cox.net.