Sunday, November 13, 2016

The Gifted Student

Something that truly surprised me was the fact that a student can be considered gifted and still have some kind of learning disability. When we think of a learning disability, we often think of students who are struggling in school, not those who are at or above grade level. The fact that an "average student" could still be gifted also surprised me. I had never thought of that before. When you think about it though it makes sense. You meet people and think "man they must be a genius", and then you find out they were an average student.

It did not surprise me to hear that gifted students generally only have a few friends and prefer to work alone. Generally does not mean all.This made me think about one of my students who I know is gifted. She doesn't fit the general mold of a gifted student. She does interact more with a few students but she has no problem working or talking with other people. If she had a choice, I think she would prefer to work in a group because she is always moving her seat to go work with someone when we allow the students to do some individual/group work. I would say she is one of the exceptions to the rule.

I can use what I have learned in my future classroom. Instead of forcing students to work in groups, I will always give them the option to work individually. That is currently what we do in my classroom and I will continue to do that as I move forward. Technology could play a part in the math classroom because there are plenty of online challenge problems out there. Mathwire.com is a great site that has a lot of good challenging problems for gifted students to work on if they get ahead of the class. It also has links to a lot of other math problem solving sites.

2 comments:

  1. I agree that it was interesting to find that students can be gifted and not disabled. You mentioned this in a comment on my blog and I think it is something that needs to be talked about more in teacher training. If college students like us don't know about it, there's a good chance that most professionals know about it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I also agree with distinguishing gifted and not disabled. We are learning about an entirely new thing and I feel that all of us will benefit from these readings. I also liked that you shared some personal experience in this post. This shows that you are already implementing what you have learned.

    ReplyDelete