Parents of bright children often want to have their child in programs for the gifted and talented. Parents of gifted children want their child to make more friends and spend less time in the principle’s office.
Why?
Gifted children of any age are rarely the teacher’s pet. Here are a few reasons:
- Bright kids are a joy to teach. Gifted kids are usually the children that disrupt and challenge teachers. Bright children learn quickly and can answer all the questions. A gifted child learns amazingly quickly and asks more questions than the teacher raises. They can grasp a concept or an action after 1-2 repetitions. And then they are done with that topic. Really done. Bored stiff or wanting to drill deeper. This makes them out of step with their peers in a typical classroom. Teachers have to work harder to make their lessons effective for the gifted child while staying on the lesson plan and managing the kids who struggle to keep up.
- Gifted kids are passionate: passionately opposed to rigidity, passionate about fairness, and addicted to logic. They are not fond of following baseless rules, or sometimes any rules. In fact, pointless rules are like poison to a gifted child. Bright kids know these rules are pointless, but they care more about the consequences of disobeying, so they go along. Gifted kids find the illogical and often capricious nature of these rules offensive to their very spirit, and will even bait teachers to get them to admit that their rules make no sense. This won’t endear a gifted kid to educational staff, even the teachers that initially liked the challenge of teaching an intensely inquisitive child.
- Bright kids learn the correct answers and rattle them off as requested. Gifted kids believe that there are no correct answers. The gifted child sees all the gray areas and can see the many sides of a situation. They can even see that math questions could have more than one answer. For teachers that are linear thinkers, this can be maddening. For gifted kids, it is how they see…everything!
I love working with gifted children. They can be the most fun I have in a day! I love helping them handle their sensitivities and helping their parents understand their needs.
For more ideas, read How To Help Your Gifted Child Handle Frustration and Gifted Child? Try “How Does Your Engine Run” For Sensory Processing .
Looking for more ways to help your gifted child?
If you are the parent of a gifted child and would like to learn more about how to approach everyday issues with confidence and compassion, visit my website Tranquil Babies and purchase a consultation session under Happiest Toddler on the Block. Even if your gifted child isn’t a toddler, that will be OK. You will get a 30-minute session focused on you and your child!
