The problem here is that once a kid is in, it is going to be hard to get him out, especially of the parents are going to cry bloody murder. It is also much easier to get a kid in at the time they are identifying everyone and not later. (I have experience with this.) So, I don’t blame the mother at all. I do blame the school district for doing identification way too early. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was partially due to pressure from parents who can’t stand to have their kids labeled “normal” even for a year of three of school.
For gifted kids it does make a difference. My school system was heavily tracked, and my high school experience was pretty good because I was with other kids like me. I can imagine that a kid into sports and not into reading, debate and math would have had an awful time in our classes.
Gifted programs give extra resources to the kids that are labeled “gifted” (whatever that means) so parents want that for their children. Plain and simple. One of my kids went through the gifted program. Extra individual attention, smaller groups, more interesting material, the “best” teachers (whatever that means.) I want that for all my kids and I would send a 4 year old to a prep program to get it. Not because I want to take from some minority or because I think my kid is so much more special than everyone else’s (although he is.)
The same applies to magnet schools. Here in Virginia they have the Thomas Jefferson school of science and technology, something like that. A magnet public high school that you have to apply to. They get tons more resources than the other schools in the area. Do I think my kids are in the top 5% of students? No. Do I think they should get the same resources as the top 5% of students? Yes. In order to get that for them, I would have to get them into that school.
As long as the school systems give extras to certain students, parents are going to want those extras.
Voyager, the kid who is in honors math and is flunking, heck, even getting Cs, will usually have his/her parents banging at the door to get him/her out. The parent whose second grader is crying to sleep each night and gets headaches and stomach aches before and during school also is not fighting to keep the kid inappropriately placed. At least not usually. Some parents are a bit dense I admit.
Having honors classes, even two levels of honors classes, is not gifted ed. My kids have all taken honors and AP but I can assure you, they aint gifted. Yes, the truely gifted child needs special services - I completely agree.
I both blame the school and the mother. Yes, more the school, because as the professionals they should know better.
There is so much a 4 year old needs to know about the world, naming off bird species is very low on the list. Every parent thinks their child is sharp, but at this age they have no idea what particular skills their child has much less how best to enhance their learning.
Maybe. But there was a scandal in our district where one girl, who was one of 12 or 15 valedictorians at her high pressure, public, high school, admitted that she had cheated in high school, and that a lot of her friends did also. The kind of parents who spends a fortune to advance their kindergarten kid is not going to meekly let a child having problems out of an advanced class. I give you the famous for five minutes Tiger Mom as an example.
I collated the membership forms for our organization. We wanted to have activities which would help parents understand their kids a bit better, and help kids socialize, but this type of parent was only interested in more academic stuff.
Our AP classes are open to all, but parents are warned that the level of work is higher than that of a regular class. Honors classes are not, but there is some degree of pressure to fill them. My HS graduating class had 1600 people, so there were plenty of people to fill these classes. The secret is differentiation, which is giving each student what he or she needs. That is a lot easier to demand than to accomplish. However, it can happen. In my AP history class I think we had one test, at the beginning of a two year sequence. Our teacher figured out that we were going to read the material ourselves, so we debated issues, discussed things in depth, and we all got 4s and 5s on the AP test with no hassle. You can’t do that if you have an honors class 50% full of kids who belong there and 50% full of kids with pushy parents.
It is quite true that truly gifted kids are very different from regular gifted kids, and the introductory material covers this. I forget what the IQ cutoff is for this, well over 140 I think. There will never be enough to fill a class with, though.
I don’t know about your district, but in ours GATE kids got a trivial amount of extra money - under $100 a year, at best. In schools with a lot of GATE kids there might be pullout classes, but in a lot of schools there were too few. I think there is a much bigger component of living through your children and/or wanting the best for them.
Magnet schools are good for parents who think their local high school is bad. In New York we had Bronx High School of Science. Though a bunch of people from my high school could have gone there, no one did, partly because it would be a very long commute and partly because our high school had very high test scores, and thus parents felt there was no need.
I have talked to people who have taught in poor black ghetto schools. They have said that the students do not try, and that their parents - usually their unmarried mothers - do not care. That is unfortunate.
It is also unfortunate when middle class parents try to squeeze their children into advanced placement classes when the children lack the ability to perform adequately. Gifted is something one is. Too many parents want their children to succeed where the parents failed. Parents should expect diligence from their children, but they should not expect excellence, and they should love their children without condition.
I’m not an American, and can only speak to my own experience in a Ontario “gifted” program. The only prep course I have taken for anything in my life was a prep course for first year economics in university, and my LSAT prep course.
My kindergarten teacher told my mum that I was reading far above my level at age four, which she thought was neither here nor there. It was expected by her. I was tested at age seven and started the “gifted program” at age eight. They sent us to a different school one day a week, and we did little Mensa mind puzzles, and learned how to use the Internet before any of my classmates did (1994; AFAIK no other fourth graders used the Internet as part of their curriculum). It was basically our day off from school, because although we got a “report card” from the gifted program, it had no real teeth and could do nothing to impact our grades.
By the time we got to middle school (AKA grade 7), we had our own separate class of gifted kids from all the feeder schools, and those were the kids I studied with all the way through high school. Some of them are still my best friends today. But quite honestly? As an anecdotal rebuttal to the OP’s point #3, a lot of us amounted to sweet fuck all. The majority, I would even say. Oh sure, there was that “halo effect,” as you describe, but I don’t think it propelled us to reach higher and achieve greater things. Years of being told to “find our own paths,” and “think outside the box” led to a bunch of kids who were so self-sure of themselves that they never set themselves out clearcut career path. Enough of my buddies joined the army, a few dropped out of university. We’ve become dismayed at the quarter-century mark at how many of us have been eclipsed and outdone by our non-gifted peers.
There’s enough of them that are working in the civil service or who have nice office jobs, sure. But between my friends in the gifted program and those among the general population of our high school, no comparable difference, whatsoever. Well, except for one thing. When they got to university, the gifted kids were the ones who always fought the professor at every corner for an A, on every assignment, because they had been told their complete lives how great they were, how they could do no wrong. I’m part of that too, I admit it took a lot for Antonio to get over Antonio and his infaliability. It’s still a challenge from time to time. But when the other kids read Julius Caesar, we read Merchant of Venice, because “We could handle it a bit better than the Arab kids.” (a direct quote from my grade 11 gifted English teacher). When they had page after page of math problems in 8th grade, we got to play Rollercoaster Tycoon for reasons I STILL don’t understand. I’m sure me and my peers would have been better off being big fish in a little pond.
The most important part of the GATE program in our schools is that you are not in class with the 10% of seven year olds who can’t read. They end up soaking up all the teacher’s time. It is not so much a matter of the extra money. If you are in a class of twenty five kids who can all read at least at the grade level, you can cover a lot more material and make a lot more progress with exactly the same resources.
Our local school district just disclosed that we are spending over $2m on seven kids. These were just thsee for which the identified costs were over $200k per student. There are twenty other kids for whom costs are over $50k per year. The total school system budget is about $40m for about 4,000 students. There are numerous kids who have a full-time or half-time aide assigned to them. It seems like a good chunk of the $40m goes to the out of pocket costs to serve fewer than 100 kids! And then the next group up from there soaks up most of the remaining resources (teacher’s time and attention in the classroom, the most valuable resource there is in the school). So the kids who arrive at school ready to learn seem to be the lowest priority kids in the regular classroom. Of course their parents want them to get “tracked” into a GATE program. Even if the GATE kids are only in a special classroom for five hours a week, they make more progress in that time than they do in the remaining 25 hours they are in school.
Most, if not all parents, would agree with this. The only thing is that they never think you’re talking about THEIR child, but someone else’s.
I think a lot of parents think that kindergarten–hell, maybe even preschool–is when the rat race begins. If you don’t get Junior into the gifted elementary school as a kindergartener, he’ll be stuck in a bad school with dumb kids. They’ll rub off on him and then he won’t be able to get into honors classes in middle school, or take AP classes in high school. Which will mean he won’t be able to go to a name-brand college and we might as well buy him the paper hat he’ll be wearing in adulthood now because OMG HE’S GONNA BE FLIPPING BURGERS FOR A LIVING!!!
If we don’t put Junior in the gifted program when he’s five, then all the slots will be taken later. So we need to get him prepped so he’s guaranteed a slot!
It is sad to say, but their fears are not TOTALLY ungrounded. Tracking still occurs and it can be devastating if no one is paying attention. Despite my grades and high test scores (but not high enough, apparently), I was placed in remedial programs in middle school. I was removed quickly when this would happen (it happened during both my seventh and eighth grades) because my mother knew enough to actually look at the curriculum I had been assigned. But I know there were other kids like me that were not saved. You move from a remedial program into high school and there’s almost no way you can move into more advanced curriculum. Because chances are you haven’t been prepared for it, even if you would have been if you had been assigned to the appropriate track based on your abilities. That’s a tragedy and it still happens.
So I can understand some antics that parents go through. Not the prepping the kids for giftedness tests, but making sure their kids aren’t just being randomly assigned to classes.
Giftedness has always been a nebulous concept to me, just like the idea of “intelligence.” The extreme examples of the “ability” distribution–the four-year- old who can do algebra, for instance, or the four-year-old who still drinks from a bottle and isn’t potty-trained–are easy to identify. But identifying giftedness based on a single test seems oversimplistic to me. And should a kid who is gifted in mathematics and science be grouped with the linguistic genius who hates numbers? Of course not. But we do it anyway.
The kids who were pulled out for my school’s gifted program sure didn’t seem gifted to me, and I’m not saying this from a position of sourgrapes. They might have achieved some arbitrary cut-off on the Iowa Basic Skills test (the measure the school system used to determine “giftedness”), but their performance in class was all over the place. As someone who was not labeled as gifted, I achieved better on average than they did–not only in the regular curriculum, but also when presented with their material. I don’t think I’m a genius and school was rarely boring to me (probably because I was too busy doodling and creating fantasies in my head), but I just wasn’t impressed by our resident gifted students. So I do not see the validity in the rubric the school used, especially since it seemed like there were so many kids being identified as gifted. When half the class is “gifted”, it makes you wonder.
Maybe if the parents are caring, they will. But this did not happen at all in the schools I attended. In middle school, anyone labeled as gifted was automatically placed in an honors class. You could get into an honors class without this label, as I was, but you had to be recommended for it. The gifted kids were not always the best students. Sometimes they were the worse. But year after year, they would be in the honors class. But they were gifted. It was assumed that if their grades were poor, they must be bored. Poor them! I never saw any gifted kid kicked out of the program for bad grades. I never saw any good students inducted into the gifted program in middle school. If you were not identified as gifted in elementary school, it was too late for you.
I have one memory that will forever be etched into my mind. AP history, eleventh grade. Two boys were kidding around in class. One boy was an “outsider” to our elite group–having always been in low-performing classes. I suppose his mother decided he should give an AP history class a shot. I won’t say the guy was smart, but he wasn’t a bad student either. Just average, as you would expect from someone who had always been treated as average.
Everyone “knew” the other boy was smart. His grades always sucked, but he was witty and charming (looked kind of like William Defoe) and so he always slid by.
Anyway, the two boys were kidding around during lecture, and the teacher yelled at them to stop. He chastised the first boy in a very humiliating way, saying that he wasn’t as smart as the other kid and couldn’t afford to be goofing off. Later in the year, after the boy failed a test that most of the class failed (that’s just how it is in AP classes sometimes), the teacher called him up to the front of the room, called his mama on the phone (a landline phone…the only teacher to have one), and told his mother–in front of EVERYONE–how horrible a student her boy was. Ever see a sixteen-year-old boy break down in tears in front of his peers? It’s not pretty.
Unsurprisingly, he dropped out of the class shortly afterwards.
That’s what I mean by the “halo” effect. Yeah, Gifted Boy probably was smart because he was loaded, good with computers and gadgets, and had all the cultural capital I was telling you about. And Not Gifted Boy probably did not belong in the AP class…not necessarily because he didn’t have the potential to do well, but because he had not been prepped during the previous years. His mediocre curriculum had destined him to a life of mediocrity. I’m wondering what would have happened to both boys if they not been tracked the way they were.
I don’t have much to add other than a desire to acknowledge the very cogent points made by both monstro and Voyager. Especially about the influence of peer grouping. (I was thrilled to get into the med school I got into, a fairly big name one, not because the teaching was great. It wasn’t; it sucked. But because I got to study with some of the people who would be the best and the brightest. I still don’t know how I got in, but I am grateful that I test well and that schools pay attention to that. I learned much more from my fellow students than from my teachers.)
Also one anecdote - when my eldest was in his last year in our elementary school the school had representatives of the Junior High come in to talk about the program there - a school in which all the area’s schools fed into two bigger schools, mixing up the upper SES part of town that this school was (with its high test scores) and the other schools that have a bigger lower middle class demographic (and still good but not as high test scores). Many parents got up to ask about ifgifted little Johnnie and Amy were going to adequately challenged in the bigger school. I got up and asked: “As the parent of a child who ISN’T gifted, and who could use a bit of organizational help, what do you have for us?” The looks I got were priceless! Of course of all those kids only one was one who I would actually peg as gifted. The others just had parents who did their igloo projects for them. Ah **** School, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking and all the children are gifted!
That brings up a similar memory from childhood. Parents and their eighth graders were huddled around a representative from the high school we were to attend the following year. A woman’s kid was NOT in the gifted program asked how the gifted kids were treated at this school. Maybe she wanted the other parents to think her girl had been labeled as gifted? I don’t know, but I wanted to shout, “ALLISON ISN’T GIFTED AND WE ALL KNOW IT!” But my mother was there.
Here’s a real radical thought. Treat all kids as though they are gifted to start with. Provide them with all the enriching activities that the gifted kids routinely get. Challenge them with assignments that stretch their brains. Give them projects that allow them to be creative and clever. Immerse them with diverse cultural experiences. Expose them to art, foreign language, and museum field trips. Do this until they are in the second or third grade.
When the “non-gifted” shake out to the bottom performance-wise, adjust their curriculum accordingly. Give them the teaching environment we give the non-gifted now. Then let the high overcheiving ones who thrive in the default classroom stay put.
The advantage of this approach is that qualifying for the gifted curriculum isn’t left up to a single test score; it’s based on 3 or 4 years of grades and teacher observation within the very environment under question. It also allows all kids to be enriched from the start, not just the special snowflakes whose boredom in class is assumed to be caused by genius rather than laziness just as long as their parents are vocal PTA members and earn above a certain income.
But this plan would never be accepted. Why? Because everyone’s kid would start off receiving the perks of the gifted label–a prospect which would upset those who want social pigeon-holing to begin as soon as the kid can hold their head up unassisted. Also, the slacker kids who currently are labeled gifted due to good test taking abilities but who prefer goofing off in class over learning would run the risk of being tracked into “non-gifted” class due to mediocre grades and apathy. The parents of these slacker kids–many of whom unintentionally encourage their kid’s behavior by overpraising smarts and underpraising studiousness and hard work–would find this objectionable. And why wouldn’t they? the status quo allows their slacker kids to stay slackers while still reaping the social and educational rewards of the “gifted” label. In contrast, the A and B student who routinely does just-okay on standardized tests, who lacks the powerful parents or high SES, gets placed on the average track.
Perhaps our educational system is craptastic because we assume that only a special fraction of students deserves extra enrichment. We assume that the “average” kid can’t juggle math and science and learn Latin or Shakespeare at the same time, like we assume a “gifted” kid can. Why? Is there evidence to support this? Is there any science to support the way we track students and slap labels on them? I doubt it, based on personal experience.
There is also some consequence to a child who is not gifted when the parents feel (s)he is. I for one know how little tests actually mean while at the same time having benefited from having whatever that splinter skill is that correlates with testing well. Apparently in second grade there was some testing done that I scored well on, well enough that my parents were given the (quite false) impression that I was gifted. (I have no idea what the test or the score was and have no interest in finding out.) The impact of that was much resentment of me and how my parents then subsequently treated me by my four older sibs, and my older brother internalizing the message that he was not so smart and only achieved by dint of working so hard, whereas I achieved because I was smart. (“Excuse me, working hard here! Not coasting!”) More so, I knew the truth. I hung out with the smart kids (we had no gifted ed program but did have some tracking) but I was an ubernerd wannabee, a hanger on to the likes of Steve B., Rob V., and Steve M. … they were gifted and we all knew it, and I was not in that inner circle. (And we all knew that too. If my Mom, or more likely my Dad, said something at school others would have shouted about me what you wanted to about Allison.) There was a part of me that lived in fear that my parents would realize that I was not really that smart and another part that resented that they thought I was when I knew I wasn’t.
Sure, there can be a halo effect, and there is no excuse for the humiliation that teacher heaped upon that “not gifted” child in your story. But the “gifted kid” was hurt by that behavior too. Probably resented by the other kid and feeling somewhat to blame. And a kid who is labeled as gifted who is just smart enough to realize he is not, has a whole host of conflicts to deal with.
I happened to have once, while in kindergarten, deliver a 6th grade-level speech regarding an article I’d read in a newspaper that brought up the issue of capital punishment. I automatically singled myself out as THAT nerd, you know the one, the one that f7u12.com calls “the Melvin”. I mean, what kind of kid wants to talk about adult matters like the death penalty, right? Man, I shit you not when I tell you that, all the way up until 7th grade, I was that one kid who while not unintelligent, was soft of flesh and the butt of thousands of jokes. I was an excellent student, to be sure, but my social skills were, and in some ways are still lacking. It was because of this that I was sent to a state-sponsored alternative school, where the focus of my education was more on honing my social skills and taming my anger issues. I happen to have ADHD, which, as medical science has recently shown, falls under the “autism” umbrella of mental handicaps. It’s suppose to be one level above Asperger’s. Let me make one thing clear; I was and am not in any way mentally retarded or developmentally disabled. I guess there is a fine line between genius and insanity.
HA! This is hilarious! All kids are not gifted. We know that. So, forget this ever happening. Even if you’d like to show Debbie Dimwit and Isaac Idiot some of the cultural offerings, that costs money. And no one is going to cough up good money to send a moron to the symphony.
To be serious for a moment, this is the same kind of thinking that has the “no children left behind” policy dumbing down our children. Because, heaven forbid, we allow kids with intellect to shine. That will upset the parents of the not so bright children. So, that won’t do. So instead of giving some bright children recognition, we give no recognition. Making everyone feel the same. What a joke. I imagine soon there will be no grading system left, because of the blow to a child’s self-esteem if they are stupid. Let’s bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
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How in the world are the “non-gifted” going to shake out to the bottom? How do you grade performance at a play, symphony, or other cultural event? Better yet, how do you think you are going to strip a kid of being labeled “gifted”? I think parents would lynch you in the parking lot.
This is a very strange statement, seemingly driven by class envy. I think it is pretty evident early on in school who the kids are that are truly “gifted” and those that are in need of special help. The vast majority of kids fall into that glorious middle. Bored kids that disrupt the class, but have their work done and are sitting there waiting for something to do are different than the kid sitting there not doing his work but trying to put an M-80 up a frog’s butt.
3 or 4 years? Are you serious? There is no way you can put lipstick on a pig. Kids move at different paces. So a slow 4th grader is going to drag down the truly gifted 4th grader and the class down to the pace of the slowest student. How does that benefit anyone? The gifted kids are slowed, and the non-gifted are frustrated because they can’t keep up, are overwhelmed, and have been limping through classes for 3 years now. What a waste of money and time this would be.
Look, I’m sorry that some kids are dumb. But they are. The smart children should not be punished by the refusal of some people to understand this, by dragging the dumb with the smart for 3-4 years to make sure that everyone is satisfied. I think this would only increase the problem of parental acceptance. “My kid’s been gifted for his entire academic career! How can he all of a sudden not be?” Lawsuit ensues. Programs get cancelled to pay the legal fees. Everyone loses.
Kids that do well on tests or have good test taking abilities are rarely stupid. Something is sinking into that gray matter when they are goofing off. I agree that the labeling might start too soon, but IME, most children who I’d consider “gifted” (whatever that means) are challenging themselves academically before the first grade. The problem of wealthy, noisy, or powerful parents is another issue, and is something that requires a solution. Right now, I’m not sure I have one that would realistically hold up.
There is evidence to support this. There are kids that study on their own… read on their own… and then there are kids that come home from school, don’t bring a book, jump on the computer or go outside, and that’s that. The cumulative effect of this behavior is that student A is probably going to be further advanced academically than student B after a year or two. Apathy runs in two directions. Those that are truly bored by the lesson and those that don’t care. The bored ones usually don’t fail the tests, while the ones that don’t care struggle to answer questions about something they didn’t put any time into. Not a surprise.
Could some of the “slower” kids be smarter than they show? Absolutely. But then the question of why his performance is lacking is asked, and that can lead to a number of places, including home life. Even if the reason is discovered, there isn’t much a school can do about how a parent is raising their child, especially when no abuse is involved. Maybe both parents are working their butts off to maintain a standard of living and put in serious hours to keep their jobs in this economy. Are the parents to blame? What about the community? Who fixes this problem? Who determines if this is truly the reason?
Like it or not, people get placed in their boxes very early on in life. It moves things along. No solution is perfect, but having all children considered gifted for the first 3-4 years of their academic lives does not seem to be a good solution if it retards the intellectual growth of the children that truly ARE gifted.
Personal anecdote: My nephew has been marked as “gifted”. And by my measurement, he really is. He was reading at 3, and surfing the computer by his 4th birthday. He is a geography buff, and knows not only every country in the world, but the capital of that country, the official languages, their chief imports and exports, and a billion other facts about them. He can even identify each country by the shape of the country on a piece of paper. No other info is needed. The size of the country is irrelevant. No other geographic clues are given when you show him the outline of a country. He just knows it.
No one forced him to learn this stuff. He’s a sponge who loves to read and seems to have a photographic memory. All the info he knows about the countries he knows about each state in the US, and he’s now breaking down each state into their counties. I am amazed at his ability to not only learn this stuff, but to understand it when put in context.
Is he just an egghead? No. His parents have decided to put him in athletic programs as well as intellectual ones, to make sure he understands that fun is as important as academic excellence. So he plays hockey, baseball, soccer, and all the other standard sports things they can sign him up for. He also takes piano lessons. To me, he’s gifted like very few kids are. But his parents have opted to not put him in gifted classes for now because they want him to be exposed to all sorts of people, as people of all intelligence levels will be a part of life no matter what.
I don’t know if I agree with this approach, but I understand what they are trying to do. But in school, he’s bored out of his mind. hes in first grade and reads at a six grade level. He understands multiplication and division and is swamped with addition and subtraction homework. So, his parents are beginning to realize that keeping him in the mainstream isn’t doing him any good and they must find another approach for him. We’ll see.
I will say this, though. He was smart right out of the box, which most very smart children are. Most kids don’t bloom in the fourth grade… there is something about these gifted kids that drives them to learn for the sake of learning, without prodding from a teacher or parent. These kids are out there. They shouldn’t be weighed down by children who cannot and will not ever compete on an academic level with these kids.
With that said, does that fix the loud, powerful, or well connected parent who cannot bear to think Johnny/Janie isn’t gifted? No. But my experience has also shown me that children that are in over their head usually “drown” long before too much time passes. These kids complain loudly to their parents who eventually see the writing on the wall and get their children put back into an academic environment that won’t overwhelm them and make them hate academia for the rest of their lives.
One final note: I really don’t know what to say regarding the prep testing and coaching that is going on before the first big test to weed out the first crop. That just seems so strange to me, but if a buck can be made, I think we all know that someone will make it. Who cares if it’s fair? The company making the money sure doesn’t, just as long as they are permitted to continue to sell their services. If the state has to kick in cash to test more children, these prep companies will be delighted! More money is what drives everything anyway.
I know a girl that was “interviewed” to get into a pre-school. This kid could hardly be considered gifted, and she was not even potty trained yet. She has bigger things to contend with, IMHO, than to be accepted into a pre=school. But apparently her “answers” were on the mark, and her finger painting skills were outstanding so she got it. Whoopie! :rolleyes: This type of crap is more a product of a parent’s ability to pay, not the ability of a kid to pass a pre-school screening.
Let’s face it, though. This is how it works in the real world. As a white male, your odds of getting into Harvard or Yale, for example, are impacted greatly by who your parents are, not who you are. I know this for a fact. So if your last name is “Bush”, even if you were a colossal fuck-up in your prep school, you are getting into the school of your choice, no doubt at the expense at someone who deserves it more. I can’t imagine this would be much different at the kindergarten stage.
Alright, I looked for something to give you, and to my surprise I found nothing useful, it doesn’t mean the proof’s not out there, it just means that I can’t find it. I can give you links to some of the useless websites I found if that makes you feel better.
For anyone else ignorant like me who did not already know this abbreviation: tl;dr
Not calling anyone anything, certainly not calling humanafterall a troll, just providing a public service so others need not do the same search.
No, ADHD is not part of the autistic spectrum. Some individuals do have both, some autistic individuals have a hard time focusing on what others think is important not because of an attention control issue but because other information is more salient to them than what others would want them to focus on, and some autistic individuals hyperfocus. Literature cites available upon request. A large number of autistic spectrum individuals have some anomalous attention regulation, and that may be where you got that idea from, but very few of those labelled as ADHD fit any point of, or have much else in common with, the autistic spectrum. Both grade into the normal population without a clear demarcation between normal and abnormal.
In terms of the gifted issue - some with Asperger Syndrome may indeed be very very good at naming fish and bird species, have a huge database of facts, and be very good at math. They may have very strong interests that others do not have, focus inordinately on those interests and insist on talking about them to those who do not share those interests. They will have social difficulties, by definition. In some very specific ways they may be gifted … or not.
