Learning About Giftedness

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I wish I had started blogging long ago, keeping better track of the things I thought were odd. I wish I'd kept tabs on that moment I had the OMG, GIFTED epiphany. It seemed at the time like something I'd remember forever, but now we're three years down the road, and it's all so blurry looking back.

Makin' It Work!

In the course of talking about gifted education, we often criticize pull-out programs, because you know, gifted children aren't only gifted one hour per day, or one day per week. But the thing that gets less attention is a continuation of that same fact – gifted people aren't only gifted when they're children, and they aren't only gifted when they're in an academic setting.  So, how do three gifted people with varying overexcitabilities, needs, and degrees of introversion manage to live in a house together – without killing each other?

The Value of Free Time

I never quite seem to appreciate what we have when we have it. I'm not sure why that is, but it's the case regardless.  Every fall Mad Natter goes into hockey, and I whine and complain about being out of the house at the crack of dawn (literally) on Saturdays and Sundays from September to March. Then the summer comes, and I revel in the not-early mornings. This year, though, I let a few voices get to me.

A Very Quirky Life

It's been hectic. No end of hectic here. We now have activities five days per week, and my being a moderately introverted homebody means I'm up to my eyeballs, and not particularly digging it. But, it's just for the summer. I can manage for the summer.  Anyway! Blogs may be a little sporadic as I try to keep my sanity as best as I can. One of these seasons I'll remember to not overschedule the blazes out of us, but it seems this is not the season. It does, however, bring me rather neatly to my point for today: the quirks of the gifted. How does this fit? Easy - one of my own quirks is the driving need to DO ALL THE THINGS!

Twice Exceptional Hatters

I've written before about what having a twice-exceptional child looks like here in our Mooselandia home. Of course, by now that snapshot is two years old, and as with everything else, changed with time, experience, and the work and care of people we can trust. Let me bring you up to speed.  If you've never heard the term "2E" before, it means "twice exceptional." This is commonly a child who is gifted with some form of learning disability - ADHD, SPD, ASD, really anything. These kids are often overlooked in the school system, as either their increased ability masks their disability, or the school's penchant for treating the disability first means the ability is never recognized. But, being homeschoolers means that I get to see the full spectrum of my child - his good moments, his bad ones, and what is more "normal" for him than not.

Ages and Stages of Being Gifted

We see so much about giftedness through our own lenses. But for this hop, I wanted to branch out a little, and get some perspective from other people - even those who don't necessarily feel connected or part of the Gifted Community. Since there are so many different ages and stages this could cover, I wanted to hit on as many as possible. As such, I took to interviewing, and today I get to share my results with you.

When the Worry Gets Overwhelming

A lot of people talk about gifted children having anxiety. And, truth be told, I see some elements of this in Mad Natter as well.  But the place I see it most?  In myself. I'm raising this outlier, and I'm the sole person responsible for his education. As a result, this more often than not brings about a huge volume of anxiety.

A Day In The Life

One of the first things I learned as I grew up was that there are as many different ways to do things as there are people doing them. People stop and wonder "homeschooling? how does that work?" and each person the question is posed to will have a different answer. Even within the same nuclear family. Crazy, right? Well, Gifted Homeschoolers' Forum has come to the rescue on that one! This month, get a look into how many different families homeschool, and how they answer the question of "What's a day in the life of a gifted homeschooler like?"

I spent several years before Mad Natter was born on a forum. We used to do occasional DITL (Day In The Life) posts, and in keeping with how I've always done, below the jump will be an extremely picture heavy look at a day in our lives - lucky you, it happened to be tax return day!

On Acceleration

When we first began this whole homeschooling gig, Mad Natter was three. He had asked me earlier that week to teach him how to read, and we kind of took off from there. Naturally, being me, the first thing I did was research all the various and sundry programs across subjects for the things I'd want to use going forward, and all the interesting things there were to do in a homeschool setting. The notion of not teaching him because he was too young didn't even occur to me. Unsurprisingly, that philosophy hasn't changed as Mad Natter has gotten older.

How do YOU say "Gifted"?

This week, Mad Natter had a visit to the doctor. Our regular GP had been on maternity leave the last time we were in for his checkup, so we did a whole evaluation - which inevitably brings about the question, "so, how's school?" Homeschooling helps a bunch of that, as it's really easy to report on his progress, but when the doctor asks things like "why are you homeschooling? Do you just like it?" you have a choice. You can give a non-committal answer and hope for the best, or you can choose to tell the care provider the whole truth about your child. Naturally, you want the doctor to have the most complete information about your child as possible, but what do you do then?

Testing: How?

One of the first things you learn about giftedness is that it comes with A Number. Usually, also with a designation - HG, EG, PG - as well. Mercifully, there are groups of people who will talk with you without those numbers, but many of them require The Number for admission, and that presents a problem.

When you're sitting well below "middle class," testing becomes a big issue. In looking for anywhere to do the testing we'd need, we found that we were, quite neatly, excluded from any sort of testing. Not only are there no practitioners within 100 miles of us that are familiar with gifted children, the only practitioners we could find in the local-ish area were those who either seemed to purport all children having some fashion of LD (be it ADHD, ODD, or something else) or who believe that there are not such things as ADHD or childhood anxiety. Needless to say, neither of these are suitable for testing for giftedness, given the intensity of OE's we have. However, going farther afield doesn't help much either.

Looking outward from our home, we find testing - and recommended testers! It's wonderful!  Right up until the point we get to the cost. The testing itself would need to be done over several days, requiring hotel stays. That also means meals, gas, and traveling time. On top of that, though, the average cost of these tests is over $1500. Adding those things all together, you find that one round of testing would work out to well over $2500, plus the days Skeeve would need to take off work for us all to be present for this testing.

There is exactly one time per year we can afford this sort of expense - at tax return time.  Unfortunately, that would eat up the entirety of our tax return, and leave us with no money to even try to save, much less to purchase curricula for Mad Natter's next school year, or enroll him in any of the various classes he enjoys, or to take trips to visit our family in the US. Where does this leave us? We're able to use Deborah Ruf's parental survey to get an idea of Mad Natter's level of giftedness, and we're able to use our anecdotes to try to sort out where he seems to struggle or sees nigh immediate success. We don't get to do the "real" testing, once again because poor people aren't gifted.

We have been on our local children's hospital's waiting list for a psychoeducational assessment for almost two years. We've been "next" on that list since September. We still have no testing, no hope of getting any testing, and most of the programs that would challenge a boy like Mad Natter as he gets older all require that testing just for membership... and more money still to enroll in the programming.  The world of the gifted, as the testing conundrum implies, is rather hostile toward the economically disadvantaged, and much as we might wish it were not the case, there is little sympathy from anyone anywhere for that problem. The outside world assumes we're only poor because we won't work, or because we're not really gifted. The inside world has their own problems, and they've already had to pay those same fees.

What I wish, I really wish, there was? Some sort of scholarship fund - somewhere we could apply for a means to defray the costs attached to the testing so we had a hope of someday being able to have the testing run. It's hard to know where strengths and weaknesses are, if there are comorbid issues, or what The Number is when the very thing designed to tell you these things is, by nature of the level of specialization needed, is prohibitively expensive.  And so I read a great many posts on testing, the whys, the logistics, the benefits and risks, and I wonder: testing? How?


This post has been part of Hoagies' Gifted Education's February blog hop: Testing - Why? How?

Gifted in "Reel" Life!

When I was small, before I knew - and long before I understood - words like "undiagnosed" and "gifted" and how they applied to me, I loved to read.  I still do.  Back then, I was reading Encyclopedia Brown, The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, A Wrinkle in Time, and my favorite, so much so that I'm suddenly astounded I neither own, nor have read these books in ages, was a series called "The Great Brain." The first book of the series being published in 1967, there are the usual issues with stereotyping, but when you're looking back at something you loved, you don't really realize how awful it was - kind of like the Hunt For Tiger Lily scene from Peter Pan.

Parenting Reality in the Land of Willful Ignorance.

Every so often we run into folks who just don't get what life is like at our house. They have an image of what a "gifted child" is in their head, and when our life doesn't match that image, obviously it is because none of us are gifted. I wish, fairly frequently, that our lives matched that image, but they just don't.  However, the fact that we aren't all bookworms who enjoy studying, who raise their hands first, or who don't have parties, but instead have Socratic Conversations over weekends, while engaged in high-profile careers which allow us to have a housekeeper, and incredibly flexible hours so we're mostly paid to just think...  Well, people seem to not realize that no, that's not what gifted (much less 2E!) is. At least, not by and large (I can't speak for people I don't know!).

At our house, gifted means three computers running while the television plays a video, and Spotify plays music. Half the time, there is someone either running through the house, or falling over, and the rest of the time we're all sitting down. There is no "mildly emotional" area, it's either fine or end-of-the-world.

Hand-Made Holidays

One of the things we've taken to in the last several years has been handmade holiday gifts. Granted, a large portion of that is because we're not exactly the most well-off of families, but it's also because a lot of times the holidays are a time when we all accumulate... stuff.  The state of the toybox is usually the listed culprit, but it happens to all of us.  So what do you do?

Finding Community

Sitting on the verge of pneumonia, it's pretty easy to see where community would be really handy. Someone to keep an eye on Mad Natter for a couple hours so I could sleep would have been a dream come true, but it shook out that Skeeve had to work, and our physical community... Well, either they were working too, or they were five hundred miles away wishing they could help, even though we all knew it just wasn't possible. It's one of those rare times that online community just doesn't help - about six hours before I finally fell incredibly ill, my brains started dribbling out my ears and I couldn't understand what my usually wonderfully adroit friends and comrades were saying, and worse, they couldn't understand me anymore either.