The e-mail list for our state gifted and talented council linked to a couple of blog posts on the Teacher Leaders Network about gifted ed.

Some "intriguing" quotations:

. . . and also ...

. . . and even this . . .

At first I reacted really strongly and started composing a response about how sloppy this 30-year teaching veteran -- and gifted specialist with a Masters in Gifted Ed -- was with her terminology and definitions. Then I was too busy and I dropped it. Then I started thinking about how poorly served my daughter had been by this type of thinking -- basically that giftedness is so nebulous and so parent-driven that no one should have to change what's "worked" (heavy sarcasm there) for every other student for the past 20 years -- and I got even madder.

And that's when something in me clicked, and now I say again:

I am So over school.

I was headed in this direction from the day I realized we had to pull Violet out of school -- the day that my conversation with a very nice and well-meaning teacher had me repeating the phrase "at home she . . . " and "well at home she . . .," "but you see at home she . . ." and -- ding ding ding ding ding -- popping lightbulbs -- oh, I get it! She's happier and learns much better At Home!

But now, well, let me just say that my thoughts are still a little raw, and I have a strong inclination to express my "over-ness" with some deliberately chosen expletives, something along the lines of "Forget school," but a little rougher!

Forgive me if I'm not interested in the advocacy route: I know so many wonderful parents and educators who give hours and hours of their time to advocating for better institutional education. I just . . well . . . you can't get blood from a turnip, you know? No matter how great your advocacy skills are, no matter how justified your requests.

Besides, and I hope this doesn't sound too sanctimonious, but the rewards of giving my hours and hours to my girls instead have just been so huge. Violet and I talked for an hour last night about Harry Potter, lines of symmetry, finding the volume of cuboids, and the nature of the 4th dimension. Meanwhile, it's been nearly a year since I've sat and agonized over a letter to a teacher or principal or prepped for yet another meeting or sat with my husband as we both cried about how unhappy our daughter was.

No, you can't get blood from a turnip, but I sure have gotten a lot from bringing my Violet home.

Sayonara, school! I'm just not that into you. It's not you, it's me. I'm just not ready for the level of commitment you want. I want to start seeing other people. It's just not meant to be between us. There's plenty of fish in the sea—you'll find someone else. I know I have!

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Posted by My4LittleWomen

They certainly can be bored in school, especially if their time is filled up doing meaningless and stupid worksheets, that they've known how to do since kindergarten.

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Posted by Mariposa

If you don't mind me asking, did your daughter complete the year in traditional school or did you take her out before?

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Posted by shaunms

We pulled Violet out at the end of Feb. or early March last year. Her teacher, well, I have to say that from what I could tell her teacher just flat out had something against her because of our push to accelerate. I was torn about pulling her out midyear, but my husband felt strongly that she was in a very negative situation with the teacher saying hurtful things, and she needed to get out right away. I think he was right. It worked out nicely because we had two sets of grandparents planning to visit at various points during March, so hey, why not be home?!

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Posted by Sarah

I can understand where that teacher you quoted is coming from. I really can. When you have as small a mind as she obviously has, it must be impossible to conceive the experiences of those with broader intelligence ;-)

Loved your post.

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Posted by Mariposa

If you don't mind me asking were you seeing behavior changes at home? I noticed we had no issues over Christmas or the last 5 days when she was away from school. I don't think that is a coincidence.

We made the decision for next year but we are in a quagmire regarding the rest of the year. It is not like she is not learning there because it is a program for highly gifted on the other hand she has 2e issues and issues with their math program.

Are you clickable? There does not seem to be a way on my blogger for people to e-mail me privately. I trust giving you my e-mail address but I don't know who else reads besides our mutual friends.

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Posted by shaunms

I think if you click on "e-mail me" in the links section on the right side of the page it will go right to me.
V. was a bit of a powder keg in the last few months of school--I feel sad when I think back on it, but sometimes it seems that within 4 months of putting her into preschool at age 3 she became much more volatile! (That was when the whole "I wish I didn't know how to read" started.)
Grandparents do comment on how much happier she seems since starting homeschool, and I think she is more easygoing. She's kind of an intense kid no matter what, but we surely have fewer explosions over little things.
Also, although V. had some friends at school, by the end she was also getting into regular battles with other kids. (Though everyone was so sweet when she left; all the class members wrote postcards and many professed to be her "best friend"!)
I did feel a bit guilty when we left, because we had been spending so many hours with various teachers, a gifted specialist from the district, and the principal trying to put various forms of acceleration into place. In some ways, though, the acceleration just accelerated the problems, because the one-grade skip made such a minor difference -- I think V. was even more frustrated when the "big fix" didn't really change anything.

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Posted by Eggmaster

You forgot one: Let's be friends.

And, oh yeah, how about "I think maybe our relationship shouldn't include sex anymore!"

Oh, wait, I'm not sure that one is from my experience with the school...

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Posted by Anonymous

I am sure you know of the works of that gifted and inspired champion of HomeEd, John Caldwell Holt (there is a good Wiki page about him, under Homeschooling, and his books are well worth seeking out) but I thought these quotes were worth posting for anyone who does not:

"I want to make it clear that I don’t see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were."

"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."

"Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves."

Does that not say it all, beautifully?

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Posted by quietcajun

My amazing, unique... Asperger's child who is brilliant, but has multiple learning challenges tried public school for four months last year... and we learned from that four months to love homeschooling all the more... here he can actually be who God created Him to be and he can learn and laugh and live and love and .... much, much more!

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Posted by SusannahCox

"Boredom in the classroom is a function of lack of curiosity, creativity, and initiative, things that the gifted have in abundance."

The issue is the "in the classrom" part. A person who's bored with the world at large is just destined to be bored. But it's pretty easy to get bored in a typical p.s. classroom.

I seem to recall a few posters on cinderblock walls, a globe, maybe a few books, about 30 min. in the fresh air daily on the playground. Not a lot to feed the soul there, much less the mind.

And honestly, I don't think teachers like kids who show "initiative" beyond the usual scope & sequence. I had one teacher in p.s. who kindly let me study birds on my own. But I was still stuck inside a cinder-block classroom studying birds. I remember drawing pictures of birds and that's about it...was not outside birdwatching, or anything close to a real nature study. Think a p.s. teacher is going to allow real initiative? The constraints are too many.

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Posted by shaunms

When I have a kid at home who tells me she's bored, I know she's telling me either, 1) I want you to pay attention to me or 2) I am being really lazy. In either case an invitation to help clean seems to clear up the problem right quick!
But bored in a classroom? Geez, stuck in a desk, not allowed to talk about what interests you, not allowed to share your ideas except in a rigid format -- I mean, you don't have to be "gifted" to find that difficult!
I'm gifted, and I can tell you that no amount of creativity, ingenuity, peer interaction, and even entertainment devices can keep me from getting bored on a 6-hour plane flight!

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Posted by Anonymous

I hear ya!

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