*Edit: I checked some of the stuff more out in detail. While some concepts on this are valid and backed up by sience, others like RSD are not. Use this as a springboard for learning, not as a valid source in itself. Yes it says so in the corner already. But spelling it out might help.
People are more complicated then a diagram from the internet. Never forget that.
My 6yo was watching Avatar 2 for the first time and the scene where the humans are burning down the forests, and he immediately asks me “how can there so much fire if people have to wear masks to breathe?”
Last year we saw a pickup merging on the highway with a balloon arch in the back and he immediately realized what was about to happen.
He’s very empathetic (he is vegetarian and can’t fathom eating meat. He literally cries over the meat section of a supermarket, though he’s a bit dramatic). And he’s always asking me about complex things like black holes and gravity and inertia and tectonics.
Is he…gifted? How do we find out?
In Ontario, Canada, if they still do it the same way as they did in the 80s/90s, they do a test in grade 3 which can determine giftedness. After the test I was sent to do a psycho-educational assessment, then sent off to another school with a gifted program. I was in gifted classes until the end of grade 10. I definitely made some great friends in that program, but I think I would have been better off being taught how to survive in the real world, compared to the experience of having your own special class. There is no “special class” in the workplace. Or, you can probably just go directly to a psychologist for a psycho-educational assessment, but there is usually a cost involved.
Schools don’t teach how to live anyway, so you missed nothing
I mean instead of the effort spent on a gifted program, they could have put effort into helping neurodivergent kids to develop strategies to exist and thrive within a class (world) designed for neurotypicals.
If you made friends, it taught you social skills.
The problem with gifted students is that they can struggle connecting with those who don’t enjoy abstract thinking, theory, etc, but at the same time it was one period of your school day, you had all the others including recess and lunch to learn that.
Not talking about social skills, and when I went to school, gifted classes were full time, from grades 4-8.
That seems like a really bad idea unless you had a very large school or that was just what they called honors classes. My class was pretty average at 200 students and there were only 5 kids in the gifted program.
That’s a good question to ask your local pediatrician.