by Vicki Phipps

Created on: April 20, 2008

Spotting a gifted child is not something a teacher does by glancing through her classroom. Although parents might try to point out their gifted child, what a parent thinks isn't necessarily what gifted truly means. It's not as easy as one may think to spot a gifted child for three reasons.

1. It might not be the child who makes good grades.

2. It might be the child who misbehaves.

3. It could even be the child who has a learning disability.

Another problem which blocks us from spotting a gifted child is that society tends to dismiss kids from economically disadvantaged homes where no one sees the gifted ability although it's there. If a child's predominant language is something other than English, his or her gift might be hidden behind a language barrier. Other children have disabilities that hide the gifted ability from our society which doesn't tend to appreciate diversity.

CASE IN POINT:

I once had a student with a gifted ability and he was a gang member. Actually, I had more than a few, but I'll stick with the one that fits the examples above. I taught what gave a student credit for high school English, but the truth was that my class was actually a literacy class for illiterate teens who couldn't read a thing at the age of sixteen.

This young man was Hispanic and had been placed in special education long before he came into my classroom. His family were migrant workers who traveled back and forth from Mexico to the USA every six months or so. The boy was obviously intelligent as far as I was concerned. I personally believed that he had been misplaced long ago and did not qualify as learning disabled, but there he was with an IEP in my special education classroom and according to the law, I was legally bound to uphold the IEP which seemed to me to be far below his capabilities. To get around it, once he mastered each and every goal and I documented the mastery for legal purposes, I allowed him to shine by assigning him what he was gifted in.

The boy was an amazing artist who used his ability to paint graffiti on public property. He'd been, "doodling," in his classrooms since kindergarten, so teachers had complained to the ARD committee that he was, "lazy, a delinquent, didn't care and never tried." All he ever did was to draw on whatever canvas he could find.

To make a long story short, the boy was a gifted artist, but he displayed the signs of this by doodling on his desk. He couldn't read or communicate effectively. He didn't like to write, because wiring involved

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