Loneliness, Feeling Different, and Other School Issues for Gifted Children

Advanced learners are not okay in a mixed-ability classroom

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As said in the previous post, teachers may believe that advanced learners are okay in the mixed-ability classroom because they continue to do well on achievement tests and because so many of them appear to adapt well. But much of the damage is hidden or camouflaged. Gifted children can develop common emotional patterns — including loneliness — when they are in the wrong educational environment.

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Loneliness and Feeling Different

When children are the only ones like them in their classes, it’s hard to find friends and comfortable companions. It is important for adults to understand that children will sometimes resist appropriate instructional opportunities, such as going to another classroom, because it makes them appear very different from their classmates.

The descriptions of each child are completely from their parents as part of their participation in the book study on giftedness. All are anonymous.

Debra Sund — Debra was still in second grade, but she was in the third-grade reading program and was learning at her own pace in many areas. Even though she’d been told that she was welcome to join in other third-grade lessons such as in math, she was shy about it. She worried that she wouldn’t fit in.

Janet Lewis — After receiving Janet’s evaluation, I took on a very resistant principal and teaching staff to skip her from second grade into middle school (sixth grade) and eighth-grade general math. They were converted to the merits of the plan after witnessing her intellectual capability, but she did feel very lonely. She was regarded as a curiosity, not as a potential friend. She liked her coursework but felt like a social pariah. It didn’t help that she was much smaller than even kids her own age, not to mention far less physically developed, of course, than the other middle school girls.

Author note: If school systems grouped children according to what they were ready to learn, issues of being too young or too small would not exist. Many different ages and sizes would be represented within such classrooms.

Brennan Ahlers — Brennan struggled with friends. His best friend, a girl named Hope, decided that she would rather spend time with her girlfriends, which made him sad. He became frustrated during group projects when he could see a better or faster way of doing things but had to work at the pace of the group, and this behavior didn’t win him friends, either.

Frank Price — We wondered if getting no special treatment at school was damaging Frank. However, this was his preference; he was embarrassed when I talked with his teacher about getting something more challenging for him in math. She developed a more interesting assignment for him, but he responded with tears because it was different from his friends’ assignments.

Author note: Many parents mentioned that their children didn’t want to do things — or be separated from their classmates — for activities or classes that the other children couldn’t attend. The reason why, most likely, was that children who resist doing anything different than their age peers are almost always extroverts.

Carol Johnston — Carol was early entranced to kindergarten when she was not quite five, and she began to notice that she was different. The other kids couldn’t do the things that she could do, and she began having trouble finding friends. We found that she tried more and more to blend in with the other children and was afraid of being singled out or of being different.

Michael Cortez — At age 5½, when Michael began spending most of his time with his age-mates during the second half of the school year, we noticed that his speech became very simple and that he started making grammatical errors. Even his voice articulation changed to one that rose at the end of a sentence. He started using the word “like” a lot. He wanted to fit in.