That’s one of the reasons I kept my kids out of the Gifted & Talented program when they were still in middle school.
At age 12-13 every kid is gifted & talented at something and IMHO telling them they’re special at that age gives them an unrealistic sense of their abilities.
It’s like a little league pitcher who physically matures a little faster than his peers.
He may be hot stuff at 12-13 but if he starts thinking that he’s gifted then he can be in for a real shock at 18-19 when the rest of his age group have caught up with him physically.
I don’t think you do a kid any favors by telling them that they’re any more gifted or any more special than anybody else.
my kids are all in top classes with honor rolls since they started school and yet there is a family we know who put their kids into another school for the so called gifted program. Trust me this kid is not gifted at all, but it sounds good.
Took my kids to a trailer park and then to a place with million dollar houses.
I asked them after when we got home where they would like to live and of course they chose the nice homes.
I told them and still do every day if they want that they have to work hard . They do
I don’t know about other areas of the country, but where we live, at least when my kids were in school, they had to test into the gifted/talented program (called GT here). There were both school-based GT programs and GT centers for exceptional students.
At the school based programs, a kid could be in the math GT but not English, or vice versa. His/her GT enrollment tied into the areas where s/he was more advanced.
The GT center programs had the exceptionally intellectually gifted students. The minimum IQ score was 140. The advantage of placing all the exceptionally bright kids together was that they were able to accelerate together at the same speed. There wasn’t a class with one or two 140+ IQ kids being held back to accommodate the kids with an IQ of 100 +/- .
An advantage of having all the kids in the class being roughly equally gifted is that none of them felt all that bright compared to his/her peers. The GT programs were actually an equalizer. Another was that by high school they were ready for the AP classes, and were really well qualified for any college in the country. Their academic skills had been well honed.
When you’re dealing with kids at that intellectual level, the others just aren’t going to catch up with them intellectually. It’s not comparable to some kids growing faster or achieving athletic prowess sooner than others.
It’s not for everyone, but I think it’s as important for exceptionally bright kids to have a proper learning environment that encourages them to move higher, faster as it is for an intellectually challenged youngster to have accommodations to his/her needs. They’re just opposite ends of the spectrum with specialized learning environment needs.