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Motivation - how do they get it if they don't already have it?
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<blockquote data-quote="susiestar" data-source="post: 419164" data-attributes="member: 1233"><p>There are so many factors that impact motivation, esp to do school work and extra esp for a difficult child. It is my very strong opinion that our school system profligately wastes the talent and abilities of our smarter or gifted students. If I EVER in this lifetime or the next six lifetimes hear a teacher or educator say that they don't "need" to do anything extra for a smart child because they will "get it on their own" and figure out their own way of handling their abilities I will stand up on a table and scream loud enough that it will make ears ring in Asia. </p><p> </p><p>Our school system seems to be DESIGNED to help those who are on the lower end of the ability spectrum and somewhat help those with emotional or learning disabilities and other "mental health" related diagnosis's. But the really smart kid who is bored? Is left to his own devices.</p><p> </p><p>Do ANY of them comprehend that if you leave a smart child bored long enough you will have problems in a MAJOR way?? It seems like such a logical, rational observation but it just isn't part of the overall system of education in the US. I do NOT mean to slam all teachers/professionals in the educational system. There are a LOT of good ones who do all they can to help keep kids challenged and interested on whatever their level of ability is. It is the overall SYSTEM that I rail against, plus of course those teachers who refuse to even consider making modifications for smart kids.</p><p> </p><p>in my opinion this is a MAJOR reason that for at least a decade one of the population segments with the fastest growing rate of substance/alcohol abuse problems is gifted teens. There simply isn't much out there for a gifted child to get interested in. By 13 or 14 it is assumed that they can stay home alone while parents work even during the entire work week in the summer. There are jobs, some library programs etc... but they are few and far between and they do NOTHING for kids who cannot get there, get hired, or don't want to do these things. in my opinion the old adage "Idle hands are the Devil's playground" is excruciatingly true for gifted teens. Personally the ONLY reasons I stayed away from drugs/alcohol as a teen were the certainty that I would be caught AND that my older gfgbro loved them. I wanted to be as far opposite him as possible so I refused to even try them as a teen. Most teens don't have those beliefs. </p><p> </p><p>Another part of the problem of bored smart kids is that those who do the identifying of who is and isn't gifted are those who are LEAST likely to accurately guage it. Several studies have shown that children are correct about 90% of the time if asked to identify who the "smart" or gifted kids are; parents are right about 75% of the time; and teachers are correct less than 50% of the time. A major reason for teachers being far less accurate at identifying this is because they tend to say that the well behaved child who does the work and gets A's on everything is gifted. Reality is that the gifted child is highly likely to get poor grades because they don't want to do boring things and most assignments are boring to them. Either the gifted child doesn't do the work at all or they scribble down the first thing that comes to mind without putting thought into it and often without even fully reading the problem or question. </p><p> </p><p>If you were able to do algebra problems without much problem, would you be willing to complete a worksheet with 50 addition problems? How accurate do you think your answers would be? I know that I could get all the right answers but would be likely to write down any old answer just to get it over. I would say that this is a pretty typical and understandable reaction - and something that few adults will actually be faced wtih. We may face addition and subtraction while managing our finances, but those problems represent our money and that adds its own motivation to get the right answers. We are very rarely faced with the task of doing a bunch of problems for basically no reason and where the numbers represent nothing real in our lives. So why would our kids who are gifted/smart/capable be willing to put more effort into this? </p><p> </p><p>Did you know that many math textbooks have the problems arranged so that the first problems are easier and the last problems in a section are the hardest? Those of us who have kids with 504 plans and/or IEPs have a chance that parents of gifted kids without those plans do not. We can ask that our child do the last 5 or 10 problems on a worksheet and if they get them correct 90-100% they can skip the rest of the problems in that section. Many teachers will SCREAM about this, but it is very logical. Our kids have a chance to prove they know the material and to then find out if they need to work more on the concept because they don't understand it as well as tehy thought they did. It gives them a sense of control that many of them feel a strong need for. The teachers that I have encountered who were dead set against it mostly used the "logic" that it wasn't fair to the other students if one student didn't have to do teh entire assignment. But isn't that what an IEP does? Gives each child what they need? Many of the teachers also had the sheer unadulterated gall to say that if the gifted student didn't have to do all the assignment then there would be "nothing" for the child to do while the other kids did their work. I have been in IEP meetings and in meetings with teachers and parents of gifted students and have actually heard teachers in more than one school system use these arguments. After the "nothing to do" argument there was a full 60 seconds of shocked silence from the parents in one of the schools. We were flabbergasted!</p><p> </p><p>The answer to this is to have the child attempt to do the problems in the next lesson or to have a book or research project and materials to work on it at his desk. </p><p> </p><p>I am unsure why the person who wrote the email thinks that testing will not help. It may or may not have the answers you are looking for, but if you don't test and/or otherwise try to figure out what is going on in your son's mind when he is "unmotivated" to do his work then you will never be able to help him. in my opinion it is just the same as when a classmate asked our calculus teacher why we should learn it when we were not going to need it in any job that he would be interested in. The teacher responded that you never know what info you will need, what skills will be useful in the future. If you learn it and never need it, you haven't lost anything but if you need it and never used it then you might have a real problem at some point. </p><p> </p><p>Regardless of thsi person's opinion, I owuld push for complete testing. It is pretty common for very intelligent individuals to have learning disabilities. Chances are that the person (your difficult child, me, you, anyone who fits the category) thinks that everyone has teh same problem that they do, so they don't think to say anythign about it. I transpose numbers quite often. Until I was in college I didn't know that it didn't happen to everyone. I have since learned that this is pretty common among those who have learning disabilities. I also remember being totally baffled about why I could NEVER manage to write neatly whether I used printing or cursive. It frustrated me for YEARS and often was the only bad grade I got. After Wiz started showing problems and was diagnosis'd with disgraphia I learned that there was a real reason why my handwriting hoovered the Bermuda Triangle. It wasn't lack of effort, desire or practice - it was a real problem. I often think that our difficult children suffer from this on many issues. I do know that almost every report card in elem school discussed my lack of motivation to have neat handwriting. </p><p> </p><p>I don't know that you can really motivate your child to put more effort into his work, but I do know that until thorough testing is done you won't know if he truly isn't motivated to do the work or if there is something that makes him unable to do the work to whatever the standard is. Boredom is very likely a big factor, but it is probably not the only factor. MWM and others are right about private testing. If it is at all possible, find a private neuropsychologist or developmental pediatrician and have them do the testing. School will also do their own testing, but it is expensive and time consuming to provide accommodations and schools are very motivated to NOT provide these things. </p><p> </p><p>Why pursue a diagnosis? The counselor is very right that more services will be available with an aspie diagnosis or other autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Right now autism is a big deal in the world of those who have/work with/care about children. There are a LOT of programs that are open to autistic children (even aspies and those with high functioning autism) that are simply closed to other children. In many areas the school, doctor's offices and counselors will provide social skills training, but ONLY to children who are diagnosis'd with an autism diagnosis. Insurance also pays for certain things for each diagnosis and right now an autism diagnosis of any kind opens doors that are not just shut but triple locked to children who don't have the diagnosis. </p><p> </p><p>I would esp push for a private Occupational Therapist (OT) assessment for sensory issues. If your child is overwhelmed by sensory input, like Star's son with all the noises that no one else heard, he is highly unlikely to be able to do his work well because he simply cannot concentrate. It doesn't have to be hearing, whatever he is sensitive to may be making things worse. Treatment for this can make HUGE differences. </p><p> </p><p>There is nothing wrong with offering rewards to him for doing his work well. Adults who do a good job get paid, get bonuses and often get other perks. Rewarding a child for putting forth the extra effort that is required, esp when the child is bored and/or has some type of problem that makes doing his job well and behaving well at school, seems pretty logical to me. Would YOU go to work, put up with the hassles, invest your energy in getting things done and done right, etc... if you were not getting a reward of some kind? I wouldn't. As school is a child's job, it makes sense to put something in place to make it worth his while, Know what I mean??</p><p> </p><p>One of the things that really helped Wiz when he saw NO point in doing ANYTHING for his main teacher in first grade (and again in other years) was to put school in perspective as a game. pretend you are interested, make it look like you are paying attention, do what they ask as soon as they ask and with-o fuss, give the teacher what she wants and you will find pockets of time in the school day where you can read your book with-o being bothered. My dad had brought back a copy of the first Harry Potter book from England at that time and we let Wiz take it to school to read in those bits of time when his work was done and done well enough that the grades were B or better and everyone else was still working on the assignment. We made it sort of a 'spy' game in that the goal was to not let the teacher really notice he wasn't working and that his "mission" was to get the work done correctly and then get as much reading time as he could. </p><p> </p><p>After testing is done there may be other ways to help motivate him based on what challenges he is experiencing. I hope this helps, sorry if I rambled a lot. It is something we struggled with for years in regard to Wiz.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="susiestar, post: 419164, member: 1233"] There are so many factors that impact motivation, esp to do school work and extra esp for a difficult child. It is my very strong opinion that our school system profligately wastes the talent and abilities of our smarter or gifted students. If I EVER in this lifetime or the next six lifetimes hear a teacher or educator say that they don't "need" to do anything extra for a smart child because they will "get it on their own" and figure out their own way of handling their abilities I will stand up on a table and scream loud enough that it will make ears ring in Asia. Our school system seems to be DESIGNED to help those who are on the lower end of the ability spectrum and somewhat help those with emotional or learning disabilities and other "mental health" related diagnosis's. But the really smart kid who is bored? Is left to his own devices. Do ANY of them comprehend that if you leave a smart child bored long enough you will have problems in a MAJOR way?? It seems like such a logical, rational observation but it just isn't part of the overall system of education in the US. I do NOT mean to slam all teachers/professionals in the educational system. There are a LOT of good ones who do all they can to help keep kids challenged and interested on whatever their level of ability is. It is the overall SYSTEM that I rail against, plus of course those teachers who refuse to even consider making modifications for smart kids. in my opinion this is a MAJOR reason that for at least a decade one of the population segments with the fastest growing rate of substance/alcohol abuse problems is gifted teens. There simply isn't much out there for a gifted child to get interested in. By 13 or 14 it is assumed that they can stay home alone while parents work even during the entire work week in the summer. There are jobs, some library programs etc... but they are few and far between and they do NOTHING for kids who cannot get there, get hired, or don't want to do these things. in my opinion the old adage "Idle hands are the Devil's playground" is excruciatingly true for gifted teens. Personally the ONLY reasons I stayed away from drugs/alcohol as a teen were the certainty that I would be caught AND that my older gfgbro loved them. I wanted to be as far opposite him as possible so I refused to even try them as a teen. Most teens don't have those beliefs. Another part of the problem of bored smart kids is that those who do the identifying of who is and isn't gifted are those who are LEAST likely to accurately guage it. Several studies have shown that children are correct about 90% of the time if asked to identify who the "smart" or gifted kids are; parents are right about 75% of the time; and teachers are correct less than 50% of the time. A major reason for teachers being far less accurate at identifying this is because they tend to say that the well behaved child who does the work and gets A's on everything is gifted. Reality is that the gifted child is highly likely to get poor grades because they don't want to do boring things and most assignments are boring to them. Either the gifted child doesn't do the work at all or they scribble down the first thing that comes to mind without putting thought into it and often without even fully reading the problem or question. If you were able to do algebra problems without much problem, would you be willing to complete a worksheet with 50 addition problems? How accurate do you think your answers would be? I know that I could get all the right answers but would be likely to write down any old answer just to get it over. I would say that this is a pretty typical and understandable reaction - and something that few adults will actually be faced wtih. We may face addition and subtraction while managing our finances, but those problems represent our money and that adds its own motivation to get the right answers. We are very rarely faced with the task of doing a bunch of problems for basically no reason and where the numbers represent nothing real in our lives. So why would our kids who are gifted/smart/capable be willing to put more effort into this? Did you know that many math textbooks have the problems arranged so that the first problems are easier and the last problems in a section are the hardest? Those of us who have kids with 504 plans and/or IEPs have a chance that parents of gifted kids without those plans do not. We can ask that our child do the last 5 or 10 problems on a worksheet and if they get them correct 90-100% they can skip the rest of the problems in that section. Many teachers will SCREAM about this, but it is very logical. Our kids have a chance to prove they know the material and to then find out if they need to work more on the concept because they don't understand it as well as tehy thought they did. It gives them a sense of control that many of them feel a strong need for. The teachers that I have encountered who were dead set against it mostly used the "logic" that it wasn't fair to the other students if one student didn't have to do teh entire assignment. But isn't that what an IEP does? Gives each child what they need? Many of the teachers also had the sheer unadulterated gall to say that if the gifted student didn't have to do all the assignment then there would be "nothing" for the child to do while the other kids did their work. I have been in IEP meetings and in meetings with teachers and parents of gifted students and have actually heard teachers in more than one school system use these arguments. After the "nothing to do" argument there was a full 60 seconds of shocked silence from the parents in one of the schools. We were flabbergasted! The answer to this is to have the child attempt to do the problems in the next lesson or to have a book or research project and materials to work on it at his desk. I am unsure why the person who wrote the email thinks that testing will not help. It may or may not have the answers you are looking for, but if you don't test and/or otherwise try to figure out what is going on in your son's mind when he is "unmotivated" to do his work then you will never be able to help him. in my opinion it is just the same as when a classmate asked our calculus teacher why we should learn it when we were not going to need it in any job that he would be interested in. The teacher responded that you never know what info you will need, what skills will be useful in the future. If you learn it and never need it, you haven't lost anything but if you need it and never used it then you might have a real problem at some point. Regardless of thsi person's opinion, I owuld push for complete testing. It is pretty common for very intelligent individuals to have learning disabilities. Chances are that the person (your difficult child, me, you, anyone who fits the category) thinks that everyone has teh same problem that they do, so they don't think to say anythign about it. I transpose numbers quite often. Until I was in college I didn't know that it didn't happen to everyone. I have since learned that this is pretty common among those who have learning disabilities. I also remember being totally baffled about why I could NEVER manage to write neatly whether I used printing or cursive. It frustrated me for YEARS and often was the only bad grade I got. After Wiz started showing problems and was diagnosis'd with disgraphia I learned that there was a real reason why my handwriting hoovered the Bermuda Triangle. It wasn't lack of effort, desire or practice - it was a real problem. I often think that our difficult children suffer from this on many issues. I do know that almost every report card in elem school discussed my lack of motivation to have neat handwriting. I don't know that you can really motivate your child to put more effort into his work, but I do know that until thorough testing is done you won't know if he truly isn't motivated to do the work or if there is something that makes him unable to do the work to whatever the standard is. Boredom is very likely a big factor, but it is probably not the only factor. MWM and others are right about private testing. If it is at all possible, find a private neuropsychologist or developmental pediatrician and have them do the testing. School will also do their own testing, but it is expensive and time consuming to provide accommodations and schools are very motivated to NOT provide these things. Why pursue a diagnosis? The counselor is very right that more services will be available with an aspie diagnosis or other autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Right now autism is a big deal in the world of those who have/work with/care about children. There are a LOT of programs that are open to autistic children (even aspies and those with high functioning autism) that are simply closed to other children. In many areas the school, doctor's offices and counselors will provide social skills training, but ONLY to children who are diagnosis'd with an autism diagnosis. Insurance also pays for certain things for each diagnosis and right now an autism diagnosis of any kind opens doors that are not just shut but triple locked to children who don't have the diagnosis. I would esp push for a private Occupational Therapist (OT) assessment for sensory issues. If your child is overwhelmed by sensory input, like Star's son with all the noises that no one else heard, he is highly unlikely to be able to do his work well because he simply cannot concentrate. It doesn't have to be hearing, whatever he is sensitive to may be making things worse. Treatment for this can make HUGE differences. There is nothing wrong with offering rewards to him for doing his work well. Adults who do a good job get paid, get bonuses and often get other perks. Rewarding a child for putting forth the extra effort that is required, esp when the child is bored and/or has some type of problem that makes doing his job well and behaving well at school, seems pretty logical to me. Would YOU go to work, put up with the hassles, invest your energy in getting things done and done right, etc... if you were not getting a reward of some kind? I wouldn't. As school is a child's job, it makes sense to put something in place to make it worth his while, Know what I mean?? One of the things that really helped Wiz when he saw NO point in doing ANYTHING for his main teacher in first grade (and again in other years) was to put school in perspective as a game. pretend you are interested, make it look like you are paying attention, do what they ask as soon as they ask and with-o fuss, give the teacher what she wants and you will find pockets of time in the school day where you can read your book with-o being bothered. My dad had brought back a copy of the first Harry Potter book from England at that time and we let Wiz take it to school to read in those bits of time when his work was done and done well enough that the grades were B or better and everyone else was still working on the assignment. We made it sort of a 'spy' game in that the goal was to not let the teacher really notice he wasn't working and that his "mission" was to get the work done correctly and then get as much reading time as he could. After testing is done there may be other ways to help motivate him based on what challenges he is experiencing. I hope this helps, sorry if I rambled a lot. It is something we struggled with for years in regard to Wiz. [/QUOTE]
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