Monday, November 30, 2009

New Concept I'm Excited About

Doing research on homeschooling gifted children (because that's what I'm doing), and I came across this cool new "label" for kids: 2e (Twice Exceptional).

Apparently, I'm not the only one homeschooling children who are both gifted and challenged, and I (like so many moms) don't want to call my children "difficult" (which is what the school systems call them). And now today I discovered that they are often called Twice Exceptional children--children who are gifted and challenged with something like a learning disability, ADD/ADHD, mental illness, etc. They're called 2e for short. And apparently bunches of them homeschool. I can totally understand this--these are the children that, given good loving care, will become incredible adults but who absolutely do not, cannot, and will not ever fit in public schools. Or private schools. Or, in fact, any lengthy large-group learning situation.

The problem is schools can't double-label these kids--and often can't even really see them. They tend to see the disability and want to put the kids in resource classrooms with other disabled or LD kids (which is totally unfair to gifted kids), or they see them as gifted kids who are lazy and working below their potential (since giftedness OFTEN masks things like ADD--it did for most of my siblings) and try all kinds of motivations and interventions that can actually make the ADD (or whatever) worse.

This is exciting to me because once you have the proper label, you can start connecting with other people who have the same challenges you do. And that leads to support, understanding, and chances for the kids to interact with other children like them.

I have my hands full of 2e kids--kids who are unusually gifted even compared to other gifted children, but we also have ADD, Tourette's syndrome, social phobias, and who knows what else. School? No. Homeschool group of other 2e kids? Summer camps for 2e kids? Online forums for 2e kids? I would be in HEAVEN!

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