Thursday, October 05, 2006

I hate to brag ...

My kid is smart.
Yeah, I know that I've said that kind of stuff before on this blog and on this one, too. But now it's not just me saying so.

The gifted and talented teacher at Margaret's school also works part-time here at the paper for which I work. She told me today that she has begun working with Margaret in one of the first-grade groups of kids that have been flagged as potentially gifted.

They did a bunch of testing at the beginning of the year and she was found to be advanced, especially with her reading (she's at about a third-grade level). Margaret and two other boys are in the top group with another three kids in a secondary group — yep, six kids total out of all the first-graders.


We've always known that she's a bright kid, but this is just confirmation that our punk-rock lifestyle hasn't completely hosed her up ... yet.

She won't be formally categorized as gifted until second grade. There's more testing and stuff to be done, but I'm very hopeful — not because having a smart kid is better than having an average kid, but she goes to a school that is always at or near the bottom in the rankings based on the state-standarized testing scores.

There are a lot of non-English speaking children, migrant children and sadly, kids who come from homes with ... let's see what euphemism I can come up with for "tweaker parents" ... I'll just say, not the most attentive parental units. So, it's nice to know that she has the potential to get the extra-attention she needs to achieve to her fullest potential.

I considered writing about this on the Haute Mamas blog for tomorrow's entry, but I actually don't like to be all "my kid's smarter than yours" in a forum dedicated to parenting. It just seems crass ... yeah, but I'll totally do it here.

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