Gifted Child Underachievement in School?

Some Reasons Why.

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Poor Fit Between Some Teachers and Gifted Children

The people giving the descriptions are the mother or father of a gifted child who volunteered to work with me as I wrote about their experiences. These are all pseudonyms from my longitudinal study work. And no, things never seem to change in schools for very long and with great exceptions.

Phil Burns — On parents’ visiting day, I watched Phil’s preschool teacher asking the children various questions. When Phil didn’t raise his hand, I asked him why he didn’t. After continued prodding, he finally raised his hand, and when the teacher didn’t call on him, he got upset, tried to hide his head under the table behind him, and then pulled on and rocked the table. The teacher told Phil that if he couldn’t get control of himself, he would need to go out into the hall. She didn’t ask what the problem was. I took him out into the hall myself so as not to interrupt the other parents and found out that he had raised his hand often at the beginning of the school year, but he didn’t anymore. He thought that if the teacher didn’t call on him, it meant she didn’t like him. When she didn’t call on him in front of his mother, he was hurt and embarrassed.

Author note: Highly intelligent children have the answers so frequently that the teacher often has to ignore them in order to give other children an opportunity to participate. But the gifted child enjoys attention as much as any other child. The intelligence of the gifted child does not translate into maturity, patience, or discernment when it comes to interpreting the big picture or the teacher’s motives. If Phil were in a classroom with more children near his age who were very bright, his teacher would not have to selectively ignore and become impatient with him. This issue is so common and so emotionally important to the mental health of our highly gifted children that it is imperative that districts make changes. Magnet schools are one solution; they provide opportunities for grouping, instruction, and social interactions with other bright children who can understand and accept them. Magnet schools can answer many needs and cost little to organize and run.

Ross Oliver — Some teachers looked at Ross’s unwillingness to do certain things over and over again as laziness or as him thinking that he was better than everyone else in his class. One said, “Let’s color in the letter ‘J’ so you can learn it, Ross,” yet he read at a sixth-grade reading level. When he was in third grade, he got in trouble frequently and was given lunch detentions for reading when he shouldn’t and for asking too many questions.

Author note: These qualities in Ross should be nurtured, not punished. If he had been grouped with others of his intellectual ability, he would have been more normal among his classmates — most of whom would read and ask lots of questions every chance they got.

Rebecca Resnick — During middle school, Rebecca got to attend some special seminars for high achieving students. She complained that some of the teachers simply wasted her time, she didn’t learn anything new, and they weren’t very good at what they did. In a tenth-grade Enriched Biology course, the teacher did a broad overview of the different disciplines that encompass the field of biology. Rebecca asked some in-depth questions. He told her to look them up on the Internet or gave her answers that barely scratched the surface. I asked him about this, and he said that biology wasn’t his area of expertise and that he couldn’t spend class time going into a more thorough study of one sub-specialty area.

Emily Newton — Our “experiment” of grade-level advancing Emily in the private school for several subjects didn’t go very well. A contributing factor was that her second-grade teacher was never enthusiastic about the plan to begin with. Emily decided to return to her old public school near our home.

Author note: Many teachers disagree with any grade skipping or subject acceleration and actively undermine the process. Often, the child herself will ask to give up on the plan rather than experience obvious lack of support or even open hostility from the teacher. The original Templeton Report and an updated 2008 report [1] cite research of the 70 years before its publication to show that subject acceleration and grade skipping work very well for highly intelligent children [2].

Gifted Students Learn Poor Study Habits

When gifted children don’t develop good study skills and habits, parents and teachers fear that they will underachieve as a result. Underachievement is very different, however, from not doing what is expected. When children score well on achievement tests but don’t finish and turn in high quality assignments, they are not exhibiting underachievement; they are displaying noncompliance. Teacher and parent complaints related to underachievement or noncompliance include the following: