Intersections

The recent kerfuffle about bullying gifted children in the mainstream media has a lot of people talking. And some of what they're saying is reasonable and level-headed - things like

@TODAYshow highly gifted and profoundly gifted are not jokes they are actual psychological terms for people in the top 2% of IQ #Gifted

— Becky Lichucki (@rlichucki) May 24, 2015

and

There's no way to defend mocking #gifted kids. Mocking Parents of Gifted Kids Isn’t Funny http://t.co/qJv9hn2iHO @TODAYshow @SWilderTaylor

— Celi Trépanier (@CeliCeliC) May 24, 2015

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.

Labels Without Testing

Everyone has an opinion on labels. Whether pro or anti, both sides have to admit that labels, at their heart, describe a specific set of characteristics, which make them useful in specific settings. The question becomes whether or not one can, or even should, use those labels in their appropriate settings without the testing to back them up.

Learning Something New

I do love learning new things. It's a wonderful feeling, and I get to feel like I'm doing something to help Mad Natter, even if all I'm doing is thinking up new things to bring up to his doctor when we go in for his med review. This week, though, learning has created a bit of an issue for me. I learned some new things about Mad Natter, and I learned a few things about how his care has been horribly wrong despite best efforts, and while I do love learning new things, it's made me stop and think and try to reconcile.

Finding our Joy

A quick bit of history for those not in the know: Mad Natter started preschool at 3. It was about three weeks in (at two days per week) that we started hearing rumblings about perhaps ADHD. Skeeve and I knew there was something amiss, but we didn't know precisely what. All we knew was that our child, from the age of 2.5, no longer seemed to meet a certain subset of developmental milestones - anything doing with delayed gratification, impulse control of any kind. Once he got into preschool, and things needed to be done on a schedule that wasn't 100% his own making, we learned that he had a distinct inability to follow directions on top of the impulse control.