A Bundle of Contradictions

Opposition to gifted programs

2009-01-01T15:23:00.000-08:00

I recently read about a school district that was in the process of starting a program for their highly gifted students. I was very disappointed that one of the comments against the program had to do with a large number of students probably coming from wealthy families.

I'm very disappointed that people consider a bias about people's income a valid reason to deprive a child, any child, from receiving the education they deserve. Perhaps the majority of the kids in the district are from wealthy families. However, these are still children who deserve a challenging education. Further, and just as important, this program is part of the public school system. That means that any child in the district who is found to be highly gifted could benefit from this program regardless of their parents' income.

The sad news is that many districts will not consider these types of programs unless there is a large enough need. Wealthy districts, whether is it is fair or not, often have the means to create these programs and often have a larger need than poorer districts. The good news is, and what many people fail to consider, is that many of the programs for the gifted, especially in the highly gifted and above range, will often take students from surrounding areas, especially if their needs are not being met by neighboring school districts. In many places, if there is sufficient room, they are willing to serve students from other areas. The more students they have, the easier it is to justify their existence and continuing work.

The bigger problem, in reality, is that poor families don't often have the means to have their gifted children identified as such. It is commonly acknowledged that students from poor families and racial minorities are seriously underrepresented in gifted programs. However, what is a poor parent supposed to do once they find out that they have a gifted child? The second hurdle is finding an appropriate educational setting. I'm in favor of public schools creating gifted programs, even in wealthy areas, because the programs often provide opportunities for those who would not otherwise be able to afford them.

And regardless of a person's income, every child deserves to have an appropriate education.

Mathematical Minds

2008-12-29T20:29:00.000-08:00

I find the topic of education fairly fascinating because having information which cannot be transferred to another is almost useless. However, something that goes hand in hand with education is the ability of the learner...both the psychology and physiology.

The Eide Neurolearning Blog had an interesting post on the differences between mathematical and non-mathematical minds. One paragraph, in particular, resonated with me.

While most people would agree that "math people" are not like "non-math people", it's not always easy for non-mathematical minds to recognize (and appropriately nurture) mathematical ones. The reasons for this are several - mathematical kids are often independent and internally-driven problem solvers who may or may not excel in the standard math tasks of the elementary school classroom (if he's such a math kid, how come he's getting C's on his timed drills?...) Many students with extreme talents in math may also be relatively verbal-poor, so are less obviously the "smart" children in class. Also they may be reluctant to show what they know or what they are interested in to relative strangers, and may have difficulty explaining how they arrived at answers. Many mathematical minds are dyslexic or twice exceptional in another areas, too, complicating their identification with standardized tests or screening tools. (Bold emphasis added by myself.)

This is a notion which I've always felt to be true but for which I've had no conclusive evidence. Through observation, however, it seems that many teachers, especially pre-high school, have a strong aversion to maths. Through my background and well as my children's, I have run into this time and time again. It seems that a commonly held notion among elementary school teachers is that a good mathematician is one who can execute arithmetic operations flawlessly. My experience, however, is that arithmetic is usually taught as a memorization exercise in schools. Thus, children who are more interested in the higher level view or abstract concepts describing how these operations work (and possibly have no interest in solving specific problems) are often viewed as being "bad at math" when they may be, in fact, extremely talented in the area. This probably follows along the lines that a student cannot be verbally gifted unless they are an adept speller, which is also generally not true. A person who can put together words in a meaningful way but cannot spell well is generally going to have an advantage over someone with impeccable spelling but who cannot communicate their meaning effectively.

By temperament, strong math minds will tend to be introverted and have high focus and task persistence for activities of intrinsic interest. This may mean they are difficult to direct in the traditional or even non-traditional classroom (prefer studying lines of own interest), and they may be benefited particularly by mentors (often relatives or math teachers at higher levels of education) willing to discuss topics, ideas, and problems far in advance of their years. (As before, bold emphasis added.)

This disinterest in following a teacher's plan for study will probably confound identification further. The student who is bored with concepts as presented and seems to struggle with "basic concepts" such as tables is generally not one to be identified as gifted and in need of additional stimulation or acceleration.

How does one identify students as such? There are, of course, traditional instruments. One possible way is to examine most standardized test scores. Several of them, especially Iowa Basics, break down math into further areas such as "math concepts" and "math operations". A student who places high on math concepts probably has a knack for math, regardless of their score in math operations. In fact, if there is a large disparity between the scores, this may be an indicator of a twice exceptional student: the student could be gifted in math but be fighting a learning disability.

Convergent vs. Divergent Thinking

2008-12-28T10:56:00.000-08:00

I'd been prepared to post a "This Space for Rent" sign here. Other things have been consuming my attention, and I really felt like I was running low on time and topics to discuss.

Fortunately, I chose not to do that. This is fortunate because I came across a post that I think warrants discussion. This Brazen Teacher writes about Testing Intelligence. The crux of the argument is that our society focuses on IQ and ignores other talents which may contribute to an individual's success. I would disagree with the first part of the statement and agree with the second part.

Starting with the first point (that society focuses on IQ), I can't say that I agree. Perhaps I should rephrase that: the school system doesn't focus on IQ. Most schools, as I have discussed previously, use the Renzulli Method. That is, a student must be intelligent, motivated, and willing to display their gifts. This criteria only applies to a segment of the gifted population and using it results in lack of identification of many students who have a very high IQ. Additional problems occur when gifted behaviors confound the identification of gifted students.

If children test well enough- they might even get extra funding for their education because they are gifted. As a whole, our culture idolizes high IQ's and rewards them by offering even more opportunities to grow smarter, while the rest continue to receive "standard" opportunities. You can imagine that over time the gap between children actually widens because of this. The smarter children get even smarter because of the expanse of experience and opportunities their test scores open up to them, while the rest just "stay the course."

Unfortunately, it is also clear that Brazen Teacher also doesn't have much familiarity with the issues of gifted students. It is also sad that this is a very common misconception among teachers as well as the population in general. Students who are gifted don't necessarily "get smarter" because they are allowed to accelerate while the rest are left to rot. An average student would not work up to the same level if provided the same opportunities because there is an inherent difference in ability. A gifted student who is not able to accelerate their learning will often suffer from such impacts like depression, negative self-esteem, loneliness, etc. It is in the child's best interest to accelerate a gifted learner, and this should be happening because it enables the child to learn at their full potential, not because of expected outcomes.

I also take issue with the point made in the post that divergent thinking and IQ are mutually exclusive. This may be true when tests like the WISC-IV are administered. Such tests emphasize processing speed over reasoning ability. Because a person is a divergent thinker doesn't imply they are naturally doomed to failure when confronted with an IQ test. A divergent thinker will not necessarily be less capable of reasoning than a convergent thinker. A divergent thinker, however, will probably require more time to come to a conclusion. Further, the person administering the IQ test should be astute enough to question whether an "incorrect" conclusion is a result of inability or an alternate way of viewing the problem. This should be taken into account when scoring an IQ exam.

I do concede the point that there is more to success than IQ. However, those skills will not be gained by a child who is forced to conform to a classroom which operates far below his or her ability. Begrudging the minority of gifted children who do have the privilege to participate in a challenging gifted program will not enable those with other gifts or creativity to have their gifts recognized. All this does is tear things down for everyone rather than creating a system which would, ideally, recognize every child's gifts and enable to them to learn and work on material which is challenging and interesting for them.

Perfectionism: Beliefs

2008-08-04T17:40:00.000-07:00

Perfectionism seems to have its roots in those messages young children think they hear from important adults in their lives. There is also pressure from the media and from peers that contribute to perfectionistic thinking (i.e., the "Barbie body" phenomenon). And I have a hunch that some children's temperaments make them more susceptible to perfectionism. These temperament qualities can be noticed as early as infancy in babies who react strongly by exploding from calm to full-blown wailing in a matter of seconds.

-Reva Friedman-Nimz, "Done to Perfection," Understanding our Gifted, Summer 2006

Friedman-Nimz discusses perfectionism as a continuum with three dimensions: beliefs, explanations, and expectations. In her article, she also includes a brief questionaire to determine where on this continuum one falls, especially in regard to these dimensions.

Friedman-Nimz states that there are three irrational beliefs held by those who are plagued with dysfunctional perfectionism:

1 - It is necessary to be loved by and approved of by everyone (important to that person).
2 - One's competence and achievement are related to self-worth.
3 - It is catastrophic when things don't go as they should.

I've not only been a parent of a perfectionist but still deal with it frequently myself.

I think that gifted children in particular are susceptible to the second point. So often, they are viewed as weird by other children and adults. When someone does recognize their gift, they feel as though that is the entire reason why someone would like them. Without their gift, they feel like they'd be nothing. (Ironically, if they weren't gifted, they may not be shunned as often by peers.) The child's self-worth is determined by their abilities, and they need their abilities to earn the love of those they care about.

An article in New York Magazine entitled, "How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise," discusses how adults tend to react to children. When parents or teachers tell a child they are smart rather than emphasizing their effort, the child will tend to think things should come easily. They will become discouraged and quit if they don't. Likewise, Friedman-Nimz discusses telling a child, "Good girl!" versus, "Good job!" sets up this dynamic. It creates a situation where children feel their inherent abilities are necessary to gain the love and acceptance of those around them. Telling them that their effort is recognized helps the child feel cared for whether or not they reach the brass ring. They will be more likely to make an effort int he future.

Finally, dealing with the third point takes some patience and modeling on the part of the parent. Some children inherently react with anger and frustration to an unexpected outcome. The only way to deal with this, in my experience, is to explain your thought processes to the child about how changes are not always bad and sometimes may be good. It takes time, but it can be highly effective. If a parent models an easy-going attitude to changes, the children will pick up on it...eventually.

Perfectionism in the Gifted

2008-07-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

I was recently given an article by Dr. Suzanne Perry entitled "The Hidden Gifted Learner: The Gifted Perfectionist." In this article, Dr. Perry discusses four manifestations of perfectionism in gifted learners. I can't seem to find the article online and, more unfortunately, am not sure from where the article came. It nicely summarizes behaviors or attitudes that develop when perfectionism becomes unhealthy, so I will discuss the four types here.

All or Nothing Mindset - This student cannot handle exposing themselves as having flaws in a particular area. They will either turn in a perfect product or nothing at all. Being criticized for lack of effort is less painful than the possibility of someone criticizing their intellect or ability.

Procrastination - Putting off assignments means that the emotional fallout from what they perceive as inadequate performance will not last as long as if they'd started sooner.

Paralyzed Perfectionism - Fear of failure prevents these children from attempting anything they perceive they cannot master at their first attempt. These children opt for "safe" activities and will probably underachieve relative to their abilities. They may be top students, but will become so by avoiding challenging coursework.

Workaholics - These children feed off of rewards and praise. They drive themselves to go beyond even excellent work to always make sure they will place far ahead of everyone else.

Even though this article is written about childrren, I suspect many adults can identify. Further, I can imagine one person manifesting different behaviors in responsse to different situations.

Overcoming overly perfectionistic behavior is difficult, but Joanna Fletcher has some excellent suggestions in Perfectionism: Bane or blessing?

The "Default" Classroom

2008-06-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

"Even though teachers think they are teaching to the middle, Slavin noted that the steering group general represents the 19th to 23rd percentile of ability in the class - far too low for the majority of learners in the class."

.....

"In general, the research studies show almost no instances in which whole-group instruction of students of heterogeneous ability is more beneficial for gifted children than some form of differentiated small group instruction. If educators should want to level the playing field of achievement so that all become mediocre in their output, then whole-group instruction is the answer!"

.....

"There is this feeling among all too many educators that what they offer in the classroom is not only necessary, but also sufficient for all learners."

-Karen B. Rogers, Ph.D., "Re-Forming Gifted Education"

The quotations above are within just a couple pages of each other in Rogers' book. In this particular section, she is discussing the "default" option of mixed-ability classroom groups. I find it disconcerting that, given all the evidence Rogers provides, we are left with the impression that not only are gifted children's needs not being met, but those of the average child. If 85% of children can pass grade-level pretests with fairly high proficiency, if the bottom third of the class is being targeted for instruction, if only the slowest children are learning anything new, then why aren't the majority of parents complaining about the state of education?

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I have a few theories:

1 - Most parents aren't sure what is going on in the classroom. They only see that their child is doing sufficiently well, and that is enough to assuage any concerns.

2 - This method of instruction makes average children feel very competant and thus not likely to complain about boredom.

3 - Parents do not heed their children's complaints of boredom seriously. (I know that I began this journey by telling my son that we all have to learn to do things we don't like or find boring.)

4 - Parents are too intimidated by the thought that teachers and administrators are "professionals" or that teaching standards are written by "professionals". They don't feel like they have enough knowledge to advocate for their child's educational needs.

5 - Even when parents and/or children advocate on behalf of their own learning, teachers respond as above: they believe they are teaching to the average student in the class or that they are professionals and know more about education than parents and children.

In essence, the system perpetuates mediocrity because teachers refuse to accept their instruction may be flawed or feel compelled to follow standards exactly. Parents don't feel empowered or sufficiently knowledgeable to push for changes. When children voice concerns about their lack of education, they aren't taken seriously. These possibilities may factor into the reason that the majority of the students in the classroom continue to be unchallenged in their educational setting.

They can be taught.

2008-06-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

This week, I read about a young man by the name of Benjamin Bolger, who has 11 advanced degrees. He is an incredibly accomplished person who had such horrible dyslexia that his mother had to remove him from school to homeschool him.

About 15% to 20% of the population has dyslexia, which affects the way people perceive and process words, says Howell, director of the Michigan Dyslexia Institute. She says dyslexia is not a problem of intelligence, but those affected need to be taught to read and write in a different way than their peers, and don't always get that help.

Bolger says he reads at an elementary school level. He has gotten through much of his education with the help of his mother, Loretta Bolger, who reads books out loud to him and types papers he dictates. He also uses books on tape and has learned to skim books very effectively.

People who have learning disabilities are not incapable of learning. It would be better to think of a learning disability as a preference to learn in a non-standard way. Dyslexics need to have information presented so that they can hear the information they need. Auditory processing disorder means the opposite: materials should be presented visually and not spoken, as much as possible. ADHD students need to be provided with strategies for learning and and presented with organizational methods. They also need time and space to move around.

Very seldom are these children so lucky to be given the accomodations they need. They are often left in a regular classroom where they are overwhelmed with material they are supposed to know but have no way of processing. When they are given appropriate accomodations, they can be quite capable and achieve a lot. When they aren't given accomodations, they are left feeling incapable and unintelligent. They are robbed of the opportunity to live up to their full potential.

The road to learning about my twice exceptional child

2008-06-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

It would have been useful to have known much more about gifted children, or even better, twice exceptional children before my older son started school. As it turns out, my son has ADHD, sensory integration dysfunction, and auditory processing disorders as well as being gifted. His inattentiveness is considerably greater when he is bored because of elementary learning material. He would also act out or not pay attention when he was running up against issues with his learning disabilities. Despite all of his issues, he continues to make huge leaps and bounds in the growth of his knowledge, far surpassing his peers on annual testing. It took a lot of effort to get there, however.

Children aren't able to verbally communicate why they don't like a topic. They know that they are being compelled to do something that doesn't feel right or that they don't like. Being taught in a way that is nonsensical to a child creates a lot of frustration and confusion. The child doesn't say, "The way you're explaining that doesn't make sense." They change their focus, don't pay attention, and try to find something to fill the space of whatever it is that makes them uncomfortable.

However, many teachers don't interpret their actions this way, and most parents do the same. The children's behavior is interpretted, in most cases, as an active avoidance or intentional misbehavior. The key differentiator between intentional misbehavior and that of a child who is frustrated with the learning process is if the behavior is far more prevalent in the classroom. However, when the child is frustrated enough, the behavior leaks into the home environment as well.

My son was reading Harry Potter books in first grade and spent hours playing with Legos. He would spend hours on mazes and puzzles. However, he would rush through is school work, doing a very sloppy job or simply not completing it due to boredom or lack of understanding. Because he was not completing his work, his teacher, who at the beginning of the year thought he was very bright, started saying that he wasn't gifted. His first year in school, my son went to several specialists because his teacher and school administrators would not accept that my son was gifted with ADHD. They were correct that there was more going on, but it wasn't autism, as they kept insisting.

The biggest problem, however, was that they simply refused to provide more challenging material to my son. Given he could and did concentrate on areas of interest, his first year in school would have gone much better if they had been willing to do what the doctor's recommended: provide more enriching learning material and make sure it is presented in a visual manner. Instead, they continued to insist that he was being adequately challenged and they were, in fact, presenting concepts in a visual manner.

By the middle of the first year, my son had shut down, and the teachers blamed him. He was soon diagnosed with opposition defiant disorder (ODD). It should be noted that ODD is almost always comorbid with some other type of attentional or learning disorder. Had I known that, I would have realized that what was happening was my son's frustration level had exceeded all of his coping abilities. I often think his teachers should have known this.

Instead, I began homeschooling, which was a very long journey of untangling all the knots that tied together his learning abilities and disabilities, his various disorders, and his self-esteem. Ultimately, we came to understand how he could learn, when he could and couldn't concentrate, and how to appropriately challenge him in his learning. Now, as a teenager, he is beginning to understand these things about himself and becoming an independent learner.

Are standardized exams really necessary?

2008-06-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

How do homeschooling parents know their children are learning? The answer to this question is, to put it most simply, direct observation. I have only one child. If a teacher had only one child in her classroom, and was unable to describe the reading skills of that child, everyone would be dismayed -- how could a teacher have such close daily contact with one child and miss something so obvious? Yet many people unfamiliar with homeschooling imagine that parents with just this sort of close daily contact with their child require outside evaluation to determine that child's progress. This puzzles homeschooling parents, who cannot imagine missing anything so interesting as the nature of their child's learning.

-Jan Hunt, Ph.D., How do you know your (homeschooled) children are learning?

I recently was involved in a discussion with a person who insisted that homeschoolers who don't wish to have their child evaluated must be hiding the fact that these children aren't learning. I couldn't fathom where the idea originated. Perhaps they were convinced that No Child Left Behind implied all children weren't learning? Or perhaps they tended to be highly suspicious. After reading the above article, it became clear.

Parents whose children are at school all day may or may not have a clear idea of what their children are learning. Their teachers may not, either, given they may be juggling the abilities of 20-30 children at once. My sibling managed to get through three years of elementary school without being able to read. No one noticed!

Aside from the point that parents make direct observation, there really is no compelling reason for a homeschooling parent to compare a child against national norms until they are probably in their teens. Children often learn at different rates, and many homeschoolers have the luxury of giving their children time to learn at their own rate. This is a great benefit to the child.

According to David Elkind, Americans are tied to the notion that education is a race:

Although Head Start is an important and valuable program, it gave rise to the pernicious belief that education is a race - and that the earlier you start, the earlier you finish. This encouraged educators like Carl Bereiter, Siegfried Engelmann, and, more recently, E. D. Hirsch to introduce early academic programs based on the learning theories of E. L. Thorndike and B. F. Skinner. These writers assume that learning follows the same principles at all age levels-ignoring both children's developing mental abilities and the fact that academic skills vary in their logical complexity and difficulty.

One of my arguments in not testing children at such young ages is that this is quite harmful to their self-esteem and desire to learn if they are constantly compared with their peers and don't measure up. The implication seems to be that if they can't learn something right away, they will never be able to learn it.

This reasoning is faulty. Learning to read, for instance, requires a multitude of skills, such as decoding symbols and having the physical ability to focus and move the eyes correctly. It sounds easy, but for small children, it is a serious challenge. Forcing a child to read when they don't have the physical or mental ability will only cause a resistance to learning in the child.

I do believe there are compelling reasons to test a child earlier. If a child has a strong desire to learn, it is helpful to know if the child is gifted. Parents of gifted children, especially parents of exceptionally- and profoundly-gifted, may need to understand where their child's unusual drive and energy come from. Testing provides the benefit of providing the gifted with educational opportunities as well.

If a parent suspects a child may have learning disabilities, it is almost certainly helpful to find out how the child can and cannot process information so that a curriculum can be adjusted to cater to that child's abilities.

And there are children who are both...and sometimes the enigma of these children is only solved when the child is tested.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but for the most part, children need to be given time to learn. As they come closer to adulthood, they probably would benefit from learning where their abilities are relative to where they want to be in order to attain certain career goals, for instance. There is also the issue that test-taking is a skill, and most students will have to deal with our society's obsession with quantification through exams. They will need to take tests at some point or another, and practice at this skill is essential for success.

At one point during my time as a homeschooler, I had to give my son a standardized exam to comply with state homeschool regulations. I was both amused and disappointed with the results. He aced the exam, which was designed for his chronological grade. However, I was very disappointed that it didn't provide information as to what his achievement level really was; it merely stated that he was achieving at the top level for his grade.

I could have told them that without the silly test. All they had to do was ask!

Curriculum Compacting

2008-06-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

Current studies have found that 75-85% of elementary school students of average or above average ability can pass subject pre-tests with 92-93% accuracy. Similar findings have been found for fourth, eighth, and eleventh graders in science and social studies curricula in several states. This means that grade-level curriculum is often too basic and unchallenging for bright learners, as well as for many other learners. Clearly the typical curriculum - at least as reflected in the pre-tests - is set at a low level that would suggest that unless new material is added, gifted children will be stuck in a situation where they are repeating information they already know during virtually all of their time in the classroom. Compacting the curriculum is one oform of acceleration that provide them with more learning and stimulation.

Drs. Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis (1992) directed a large national study, which found that elementary teachers could eliminate - with no detrimental effects on the student's measures of achievement - up to 40-50% of the regular curriculum in language arts and mathematics for the top 10-15% of students. Up to 80% of the curriculum at grade level could be eliminated for extremely bright students.

-Karen B. Rogers, Ph.D., "Re-Forming Gifted Education"

Too many teachers and administrators fall into the trap of believing that educational standards imply that a student must sit through instruction specified for a grade, whether or not the student already knows it. Because many classes cater to the lower half of learners, gifted as well as average students may find themselves bored. There are alternatives to this scenario, however.

Compacting is one option, particularly for those hesitant to move a child out of a classroom with age-mates. Compacting requires the teacher to determine what is essential information, pre-test the students to determine if they understand the material (after having established a suitable standard to show mastery), and then move a child with mastery onto the next material while addressing any gaps that may have shown up during pre-testing.

There are several ways a student can be assessed for knowledge. While a paper and pencil method may suffice, Rogers also suggestions informal discussions, brainstorming sessions, reviewing previous performance, a formal interview or observation of a task which requires the knowledge.

The method can accelerate the child ahead of age-mates, keeping the child interested in the academic content of their studies while keeping them in a chronological classroom. It is a far more efficient (for the student) way of learning that can help prevent acting out on the part of a gifted child who is bored with or uninterested in their current curriculum.

Another option is to include enrichment materials rather than accelerating the student. This has been shown to produce less gain in achievement for the student, however, so it may not provide the stimulation the child wants.

Regardless, compacting requires effort on the part of the teacher, and it may create more social benefits if compaction occurs in a group rather than to an individual.

Gifted Androgyny

2008-06-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

Gifted girls and gifted boys are generally more androgynous than other children (Kerr, 1997; Kerr & Cohn, 2001), a condition that results in both benefits and problems. Interests of gifted girls are usually much broader than the typical girl. They may enjoy girl Scouts, craft projects, and dance, but they may also like rock climbing, fishing, and distance running - the more traditional male interests. Interests of gifted boys likewise are generally more androgynous and have a broader range (Herbert, 2002). Gifted boys may like the traditional football, but they may also enjoy dance and gardening. It is gratyfying to see these children develop their potential in so many areas. However, their androgyny may cause them, and others, to be somewhat concerned about gender identity. Adults with broad and androgynous interests may also experience problmes deriving from their multipotentiality. Their changing passions may make it difficult to establish a long-term career commitment to any one field. Others may judge them to be superficial and flighty.

-Webb, Amend, Webb, Goerss, Beljan, Olenchak, "Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults"

The discussion here focuses on two issues: multipotentiality and androgyny. For now, we'll set aside the multipotentiality and examine only the androgyny issues.

I've mentioned before that I'm not a social scientist. One of the most interesting courses I took in college, however, was a sociology course on gender roles. My background is technical, and due to the fact that I was one of the few women in many of my courses, I was beginning to experience stereotypes about women in those fields. I felt this course would give me a way to explain my experiences.

Surprisingly, the most important information that came out of that course didn't address the issue of women in technical fields. Instead, I learned something very jarring: men have more stringent stereotypes than women, and the consequences for men and boys who try to buck the stereotypes have serious consequences.

That isn't meant to negate the experience of women, but it is important to realize that these stereotypes are harmful to both genders. When dealing with gifted boys and girls in a normal classroom setting, the issue of androgyny become very obvious. Gifted boys may not be as interested in sports and may not be confrontational, thus diminishing their masculinity. Girls who are interested in math or less passive and interested in their appearance than their peers may not seem as feminine. Breaking from these stereotypes causes issues with peers, who will reject the gifted children for their differences.

Hoagies Gifted has several references on the influence of gender stereotypes and how they affect the gifted. In particular, there is a link to Jane Piirto's article on personality types of teachers and gifted children. She makes the point that gifted children very often, especially in the early school years, spend time with teachers who do not understand or appreciate their gifts. Teachers, early on, communicate that they don't value boys who like ideas and non-conformity. They may not take well to a girl who challenges or questions her teacher. In a school setting, teachers appreciate hard working children who follow rules. Gifted children have personality types which vary from the normal child, and these types seem to be somewhat linked to gender. This may be very perplexing to teachers who may expect behavior along gender lines.

Gifted children will undoubtedly receive negative feedback from both peers and teachers. Therefore, it is important for the parents of gifted children to nurture their interests and understand that they may be more varied than the typical age-mate of the same gender. Finally, they may have more friends of the opposite gender who share their interests. The varied nature of their interests and friends from both genders is very normal for a gifted child and should not be discouraged or criticized.

Educational yardsticks

2008-06-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

I read an article today on the growth of online school options. I have been pondering the following quote:

Huerta worries that the report's authors have confused efficiency with quality.

The response, a couple lines later was, Mr. Reed suggests a better way to account for learning: Keep track of course material completed, not number of hours of instruction.

This is a big issue with the gifted in a structured learning environment. The gifted typically spend half their time in school waiting for the other kids to catch up. This means they spend half a day sitting in a desk while attempts are made on the part of the teacher to "keep them busy".

I'd argue that while some online schools don't have the best quality (I had an unfortunate experience with one), it is fairly straight-forward to assess what has learned by giving a student a nationally normed test or some sort of annual growth assessment.

However, for the gifted, efficiency is a big issue. Many spend years relearning topics which they already know for the sake of being kept in an age-graded classroom. Not only is this inefficient, but there is no quality present, either. For the gifted child, efficiency in topics of less interest are better spent allowing them to delve deeply into their passions where it is highly unlikely the quality of public school instruction could ever parallel the gifted student's desire for immersion. As it stands now, most gifted students' education in the public school system is neither a quality education nor is it efficiently obtained.

I would also argue that quality instruction occurs when students grasp the subject matter quickly and can then (perhaps) apply that knowledge. It could also occur when the subject matter is paced for the student's needs. Finally, it provides a depth of knowledge. I can't imagine that public schools would fare much better should a yardstick for quality be developed along these lines. Perhaps individual schools might fare well, but not public schools as a whole.

Therefore, if you can't look at quality as a factor, efficiency probably should become a yardstick for how education is assessed. If the students are doing what it takes to earn a diploma and aren't necessarily passionate about it, there is no point in wasting their time and energy in forcing mastery, gifted or not. They should be allowed to get on with their lives and not forced to sit in a seat simply because they aren't yet 18.

Issues with Auditory-Sequential Thinkers

2008-06-04T06:49:00.000-07:00

Gifted children and adults who have an auditory-sequential thinking style are also likely to have particular behavior patterns that may be misinterpreted and labeled as a disorder. For example, auditory-sequential gifted children generally take matters very seriously; they may not understand why the other fifth- or sixth-grade children are frivolously thinking about things that seem so unimportant. With their intensity, they take their seriousness to an extreme. Auditory-sequential children and adults can be so serious and rule-bound that they experience little joy or spontaneity in their lives, and others may see them as rigid and overly worried, or depressed, even though they, themselvse, feel quite comfortable with their lifestyle.

-Webb, Amend, Webb, Goerss, Beljan, Olenchak, "Misdiagnosis and Daul Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults"

With all the difficulties my son has had, I assumed that life would be much better for him if he were an auditory-sequential thinker. I didn't realize that being a gifted auditory-sequential learner created its own set of problems. Until I read Misdiagnosis, I had no idea what a gifted auditory sequential learner would look like. I assumed they were the ones who were always getting their homework done and were highly organized. I was partially correct.

As it turns out, I have a close relative who is both highly gifted and auditory-sequential. I find her personality to be a bit abrasive as she was always so serious and had, what I considered, a bizarre adherence to social conventions and rules. If my grammar wasn't entirely correct, which is often isn't, she never failed to point it out to me. She was always serious about everything and had high expectations for everyone.

Because of her very adult behavior, she was often misconstrued as being more emotionally mature than she was. Expectations were heaped upon her beyond what she could really handle. She, as a teenager, was diagnosed as having various disorders, including depression.

Looking back, I can imagine it was difficult for her to deal with people who, it seemed to her, were being difficult and careless. It is unfortunate that no one took the time to help her deal with her extreme expectations. Everyone thought she could handle it. After all, she was so smart and mature! Unfortunately for her, her giftedness worked against her. In seeking refuge from people's expectations (and her own) that she always be perfect, even when dealing with terribly emotional events, she ended up dropping out of school and using drugs. It's sad to know that she had so much potential but was never able to fulfill it.

Peer Relations

2008-06-02T06:31:00.002-07:00

We take the position that it is important to consider who is actually a peer for a gifted child. It usually isn't a child who is the same age. More often, it is someone with whom the child shares interests and who is about as skilled as the child in a particular activity. Even though most of us recognize that children of a given age vary quite widely in level of skills and interests, we still group children in school strictly by age, a practice that was probably lost its usefulness for both academic and social reasons. This is dramatically confirmed in the finding that most gifted children in the regular classroom spend one-fourth to one-half of their time waiting for others to catch up to their level of competence (Webb et al., 1982).

Peer relations for gifted children was noted as a problem as early as the 1920s by the psychologist Leta Hollingworth, who declared that one of the major challenges for gifted children and adults was "learning to suffer fools gladly" (Klein, 2002). That is a harsh statement, and Hollingworth may have said it somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But waiting for others to catch up is a real issue for many gifted children. Numerous studies have demonstrated that feelings of alienation and rejection experienced by young gifted children often influence social and emotional development and lead to difficulties, which are then diagnosed as mental disorders (Cillessen, 1992; Hymel, 1990; Parke, 1997; Strop, 2001).

- Webb, Amend, Webb, Goerss, Beljan, and Olenchak, "Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults"

When my son first started kindergarten, the teachers began telling me that my son was constantly vying for their attention. He didn't want to play with the other children, he wanted to spend all day talking to the teachers. This was very frustrating for them as they (rightly) wanted to make sure each child was receiving adequate attention. This problem was only resolved when my son began reading. The reason it resolved was not that he suddenly learned communication skills from reading books. The opposite actually occurred: he began ignoring everyone in favor of reading books. The books were more stimulating than his age peers and never told him to be quiet or go away. He found that many imaginary characters shared his views or suffered from similar alienation.

My son's inability to get along with his age mates, along with other manifestations of his giftedness, eventually led to teachers wrongly assuming that he must have some autistic spectrum disorder.

Unfortunately, this behavior and the reaction to the behavior are not uncommon in the gifted. As noted in Misdiagnosis, younger gifted children often imagine complex play. They want others to participate, but often their age-mates don't comprehend the rules (or the rules may end up looking a lot like "Calvin-ball"). This causes the other children to lose patience with the gifted child and vice versa, ultimately resulting in alienation of the gifted child. The gifted child is often blamed: "If he/she just wouldn't be so bossy!"

As gifted children get older, their interests may become more complex or mature. Often the topics are not of interest to children of the same age. The gifted child will attempt to make friends with adults, who either have similar interests or at least are willing to listen to the child. Many adults don't want to be viewed as a peer for the child and shoo the child away, telling them they need to spend time with children their own age.

Often these children give up and immerse themselves in books. Worse, some of them become depressed and view themselves as being fundamentally flawed because no one seems to like them.

Depending on their temperment and learning style, they will viewed as either extremely immature (usually visual-spatial learners) or too serious (usually auditory-sequential learners) to make friends. It seems doubtful these children are capable of making friends at all. Yet, when gifted children are accelerated to levels where they have the ability to interact with intellectual peers, they usually do very well. These children often benefit from adult mentors who share their interests.

Children who have difficulty with peer relations shouldn't automatically be assumed to have Asperger's or, even worse, an anti-social behavior disorder. Sometimes, it is actually a mismatch between child and environment. The child needs to be in a place where they can find common ground between themselves and those around them.

Gifted Kids' Bill of Rights

2008-06-01T07:05:00.000-07:00

I recently came across the Gifted Kids' Bill of Rights. It was written by Del Siegle, who is currently president of the National Association of Gifted Children.

1. You have a right to know about your giftedness.

2. You have a right to learn something new every day.

3. You have a right to be passionate about your talent area without apologies.

4. You have a right to have an identity beyond your talent area.

5. You have a right to feel good about your accomplishments.

6. You have a right to make mistakes.

7. You have a right to seek guidance in the development of your talent.

8. You have a right to have multiple peer groups and a variety of friends.

9. You have a right to choose which of your talent areas you wish to pursue.

10. You have a right to not be gifted at everything.

Tamara Fisher has written an article elaborating on each of these points.

I think the main themes are that gifted does not equal perfect and that gifted kids should not be forced to dumb themselves down for the benefit of other people or institutions. People often take the term "gifted" to mean that these children are somehow less deserving of proper educational environment. They do everything so well. Why should they be upset or need special accomodations? It would be wonderful is all schools took seriously the need to provide a challenging educational environment for everyone.

Tracking, ability grouping, and differentiation

2008-05-26T06:03:00.000-07:00

When I was in school, some students used to be placed in advanced classes. Some schools use the term "tracking" while others use "ability grouping". This has largely been discontinued due to notions that these types of programs are elitist and racist. However, removing this system was not the answer. In fact, many gifted children find themselves miserable with the lack of challenge in their classes.

Part of the problem with this type of grouping was the implementation. Ability grouping, which is grouping students by ability and achievement but with flexibility in moving a child either up or down in level, has been found to be acceptable by the courts. A strict tracking system where students are chosen strictly by IQ scores and has no flexibility to "cross boundaries" is not acceptable in the courts.

Part of the reason that ability tracking has many opponents is that they claim that teachers don't provide a proper environment for slower-learners due to reduced expectations. It is true that teachers have different expectations and provide different environments, but research by Gamoran et. al. found that providing exactly the same type of learning environment reduced progress on the part of slow learners.

One thing opponents fail to mention is that ability grouping actually increases the self-esteem of slower learners. When they do not have to compare themselves to the faster learners in the class, they don't feel as inadequate about the learning that they have accomplished. Likewise, when fast learners aren't comparing their learning to the slower learners but other fast learners, they have a more realistic sense of their abilities and accomplishments.

There are several studies that discuss these results: School Choice and the Distributional Effects of Ability Tracking: Does Separation Increase Inequality?, To Group or Not to Group Academically Talented or Gifted Students?, and One size fits all? Age based tracking versus ability grouping in elementary school mathematics.

Sadly, the research on this has been ignored in favor of eliminating ability grouping. Instead, the new solution to the problem of differential learning rates has been to attempt differentiation. Most of the research done on this shows that this provides no benefit to the students. The problem is that faster learners may also prefer to learn material with more depth and complexity. They don't gain from learning material that is often more than a year below their level of competence because it doesn't provide depth or complexity. For example, giving a student the option of writing a paragraph or an entire paper doesn't help the student learn more. The fast learner would probably rather spend a significant amount of time learning about the underlying concepts and relationships inherent in a particular concept, whereas the slower learner may struggle just to learn the basic concepts. The materials required to teach these two learning styles is significantly different, which is why in-class differentiation has been found rather ineffectual.

I find my frustration with this issue goes back to my question about standards: what is the point of teaching children something they already know? The point of standards is to make sure they learn certain concepts, not to force them to remain in same-age classrooms where they feel starved for stimulation.

Failure to Accelerate: It can be avoided, sometimes

2008-05-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

When one spends several years advocating acceleration for their gifted child, they are likely to run into a multitude of excuses. Battling these excuses can become very tiresome and, in many cases, causes the parent to give up on the public schools. When administrators refuse to be flexible in accomodating these exceptional kids, the parents often feel that homeschooling is the only viable option.

However, it's good to be prepared for the opposition one might encounter. If one knows the likely excuses administrators will make, then perhaps a way around them can be devised before a meeting takes place. If administrators have alternative solutions, some may be willing to accomodate acceleration for a gifted child.

First, if your child is in K-8, you probably want to fill out the Iowa Acceleration Scale. This will provide some objective criteria to the decision to skip a grade. Unfortunately, when you buy the information, you must buy a packet of multiple evaluation sheets. The idea is that you could perhaps benefit other students and give them to the school so that they may make the opportunity available for other students.

There are still objections that need to be overcome, even with a objective instrument such as this. Some objections fall into the criteria of the shortcomings of the school; they are perhaps worried they cannot provide appropriate curriculum beyond a certain level if, for instance, you want to accelerate in just one subject area. Good ways of handling this may be "crossing that bridge when you get there" and pointing out that there may be available curriculum through other means such as online classes through talent searches. A child should not be held back based on worries about future accomodations. When children are gifted, you may have to get creative. It's as simple as that.

Another objection is that children need to be in the same place as other children after transitions. This is actually a subset of the argument that children of the same age always need to be together. This is probably true for about half the kids in a given class. The only response to this is to provide documentation of studies and reports that gifted children fit in better with intellectual peers than chronological peers.

A third objection is one that I discussed previously: it seems paradoxical to accelerate a student who seems unmotivated or unable to handle the work they already have. Few teachers and administrators can conceive of the fact that gifted children are quite literally bored to tears when they are insufficiently stimulated.

The best way I've found to handle these arguments is to have someone else do it for me. An advocate, such as a psychologist or teacher, can be immensely helpful. They need to be someone who has both knowledge of giftedness and the credibility (usually in the form of a degree or specialization) to impress the people you're working with.

However, even with all this preparation, I've run into administrators who simply lacked the flexibility to work with alternative arrangements. When one deals with this situation, there may be nothing you can do except to pull your child out of the school. In this situation, perhaps you can be lucky enough to find a more flexible school or you can use the most flexible option of all: homeschooling.

Homeschooling the Gifted

2008-05-23T19:21:00.000-07:00

No other educational option accommodates the wide range of abilities of gifted children as well as homeschooling. Gifted homeschoolers can move ahead without skipping a grade. They can learn math at high school level while enjoying sixth-grade books. Or they can take their time through high school and study topics of interest in depth rather than going to college early. A few profoundly gifted children homeschool because they are ready for college-level work before they reach middle school. In all cases, these children fit perfectly in no single grade, and homeschooling doesn't force them to try.
...
Many people assume that gifted children are advanced evenly in all areas, so there should be no problem with simply letting them skip a grade, but this is not the case. They might be years ahead of other children in one or two subjects, but at grade level or even below grade level in others. Some are advanced in almost every subject academically yet their sensitivities prevent them from socializing with older children. They have a hard time fitting into any one group comfortably.

-Lisa Rivero, "The Homeschooling Option"

Rivero makes some very good points about homeschooling the gifted as well as homeschooling in general. I would add, however, that this is even more critical for the gifted/LD child.

In my experience, there are things done in homeschooling that simply cannot be done in a more structured setting. The primary example is changing curriculum. Most public schools cater to the auditory-sequential learner both in lecture and even in the format of the textbooks. Some teachers, probably those who themselves are visual-spatial, may be able to fill in the gaps for those learners who are at a disadvantage in this environment. Most likely, these types of teachers are going to be a minority.

My son is visual-spatial and has either a very strong preference to learn this way or an actual learning disability that prevents him from learning using auditory-sequential methods. The gist of this is that he learns at slightly above grade-level in a classroom. There used to be a significant difference between his IQ scores and aptitude testing. However, when the material is presented in a different manner, he suddenly started getting ahead. In fact, the gap between what he's learning and what the average child in our school district has learned increases every year. In one area this past year, his rate of growth was five times that of the average child in our district.

The change happened, however, when we were homeschooling and switched to a different curriculum. Suddenly things clicked. Unfortunately, that is not a modification that can be made in normal classroom. When a child doesn't understand something, the assumption is that he or she isn't trying or has difficulty learning. Both can be true, but the teacher doesn't have the option of trying different curriculum. Unless the teacher understands the way the child learns and has a good grasp on how to present it, any attempt to modify the presentation may not benefit the child, either.

The standing assumption seems to be that if they aren't learning in the current environment, they aren't capable of learning any better in a different environment. I imagine this stifles the intellectual growth of hordes of students, not just the gifted.

This is not the fault of the teachers. I've seen teachers very frustrated because they know what a child needs but cannot provide it based on the requirements that are dictated by school boards or other entities. The ever present standards and requirements are like the little devil on the shoulder saying, "You can't go out of your way for this child. You'll get in trouble." I feel very sorry for most teachers in this position.

On the other hand, John Taylor Gatto was in the same position. His philosophy, however, seemed to be that the child's individual needs were more important than the mandates of the school boards. Because of his approach to teaching, he won some very notable awards. It's unfortunate there aren't more teachers like him. However, schools are not likely to attract risk-takers. The risk-takers are the ones more likely to pull their children out of school.

The Manual on Child-Rearing

2008-05-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

Few parents realize that nurturing their children's gifts- including advocating in their children's schools - is an ongoing, time-consuming process. It's also crucial. Research shows that parents play a more important role in the development of a child's gifts than schools. A supportive, advocating parent can make the difference between a meaningful education and wasted years.

- Jan and Bob Davidson with Laura Vanderkam, "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds"

If there was a manual written for child-rearing, the first thing is should say is that raising children is time-consuming. I really had no idea how time-consuming it would end up being when I had my first child. Advocating for my son eventually became so time-consuming, emotionally draining, overwhelming, and, most unfortunately, utterly fruitless that I relented and began homeschooling.

I realized that I would spend less time in a week teaching my child than I would dealing with teachers and the emotional repercussions of the well-intentioned but harmful diagnosis being thrown at him. I was getting calls nearly daily about one problem or another. I got the usual lines about how giftedness had nothing to do with this, "all our children are gifted", etc.

My initial experience homeschooling was not as productive as it could have been. Like most new homeschoolers, it took me a couple years to realize that boxed curriculum and "one-size fits all" learning did not work for me or my son. The books in the boxed curriculum were read and absorbed at an amazingly high rate. A month later, the books were done and the rest of the materials were left untouched. At that point, I realized that if I wanted my son to learn something, I should hand him a book and ask questions later.

The biggest lesson I've taken from homeschooling is that, for every topic, there is a faster, more enjoyable way of learning than is generally done in the schools. The problem, however, is that method may be different for each child. Unfortunately, most teachers do not have the time to find the way that works for each individual child. They are also required to have the child produce some sort of work that "proves" they learned something.

I'm beginning to think that schools go about this whole process incorrectly. I wonder what would happen if the classroom became an environment where children were provided materials they needed to learn and then were able to demonstrate their learned knowledge in ways where they were more comfortable. I think much of our current system is about checking off a list of things a child should do while not actually caring if this helps develop the skills or the desire necessary for life-long learning.

Gifted Minorities

2008-05-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Minority students who do not hold positive racial identities may be especially vulnerable to negative peer pressures; they may also equate achievement with "acting white" or "selling out" (Fordham, 1988), which contributes to low effort and, thus, low achievement. Specifically, Lindstrom and Van Sant (1986) reported that many gifted minority students must choose between need for achievement and need for affiliation. These students often succumb to negative social pressures so that need for affiliation outweighs need for achievement.

- Donna Y. Ford and Antoinette Thomas, Underachievement Among Gifted Minority Students: Problems and Promises

Everyone has heard of the blog "Stuff White People Like". I'd heard of it but never visited it myself, until tonight. In searching for information on gifted children, I came across a post about Gifted Children. It's an amazing coincidence because while I've read that minorities are under-represented among the gifted, I read my first account of what it's like to be a gifted minority yesterday.

I was stunned that someone who was profoundly gifted would be ridiculed as "acting white" because of her desires to go to college and eventually earn a PhD. She wasn't celebrated by her community; she was pressured to conform to socially acceptable view of how a black woman should act. What is worse is that this view was being pushed on her by those who ought to have been her strongest allies.

I found it to be quite depressing. It's hard enough to be white and deal with the misconceptions of giftedness that seem to be so succinctly summarized in the referenced post. I imagine it's far worse to be an ethnic minority and gifted (or, on the other hand, to be Asian and assumed to be brilliant because of your ethnicity). This post explicitly states that the assumption of giftedness is just a label to get special things for your kids. The unwritten assumption is that there are few gifted white children, but there are no gifted minorities.

Asking to have your child's intellectual needs met is for "white people". I have read a lot about girls, in particular, who pretend not to be gifted because they want to fit in. I can imagine that the prevailing attitude could be worse among minorities, especially after reading the comments.

I find it sad that the minority communities, who should be the most vocal in showing off their best and brightest to counter the unkind stereotypes pervasive in our society, are potentially more trapped by the anti-intellectualism that is overwhelmingly present in our nation. It makes me wonder how much the problem of low recognition of gifted minorities (and later, underachievement) isn't strictly due to outside ignorance that giftedness crosses racial boundaries. Perhaps some of it may be due the confluence of this ignorance with pressures of families and friends to not "act white".

autism versus gifted or visual-spatial

2008-05-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

Auditory-sequential learners can compartmentalize their emotions better than visual-spatial learners. If they're upset, they can put their feelings on hold during class. Not so with VSLs. They become their anger, their joy, their sorrow. They may be extremely sensitive to how they're perceived by the other students or by the teacher. If you're having a bad day, or a migraine, Zach may interpret your facial expression as indicating that you "don't like him". If he comes to that conclusion, he may be able to learn in your class. However, if Zach feels that you really appreciate his silly sense of humor, his creativity, his far out ideas, he'll be highly motivated in your classroom. Never underestimate the power of genuine appreciation in teaching children.

-Linda Kreger Silverman, PhD, "Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner"

An acquaintance of mine is a teacher, as is his wife. A few months ago, he came back from an education conference very excited about a presentation they had seen. He said that the speaker discussed the role of emotion in learning. A person who is angry, upset, worried, or feels put upon in any way will not be able to learn. As a teacher, one of the first things you must do is make sure that your students are not getting the sense from you that there is something wrong with them. Teachers cannot do anything about the external influences in their students' lives, but they can do a lot in the classroom to foster an emotional environment that is conducive to learning.

I have seen this in action many times, which is another reason I am puzzled that someone would think my son was autistic. His behavior has always seemed to depend very strongly on his teacher. He has had teachers for whom he was responsive and worked hard, and he has had teachers who could not get him to even look at them. I have arrived at the point that I can meet a teacher and determine within minutes how his time with that person will go.

As a VSL, he is incredibly sensitive to the behaviors, words, and emotions he senses from his teachers. He is sensitive to their overall emotional state at any given time, even if he can't identify the specific things that create those impressions. One year, he had an elementary teacher who was an "old battle-ax", and nothing that year went right. Later in grade school, he had a teacher who always was encouraging and showered him with praise. That year went wonderfully. Now that he is in the realm of multiple classes and teachers, his motivation waxes and wanes through the day and will change as semester schedules change.

While it may be difficult to distinguish the presence of autistic spectrum disorders from giftedness or visual-spatial learning styles, there are ways. The dependence of positive emotions from the teacher will have a large effect on the gifted and VS groups, whereas autistic children will have difficulties in any environment. It is important to examine not only isolated social interactions but overall behavior and sensitivity of the child when examining such issues.

Seeing the big picture...

2008-05-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

I know a lot of people who claim to be the ones to see the "big picture". I'm often very amused because they seem to use this as an excuse to avoid dealing with hassle and details. People who really are "big picture thinkers" are either going to fail to notice the details or work meticulously to make the details they do notice fit into the picture they see in their mind's eye.

In my experience, the "big picture" thinkers are the visual-spatial people. They see everything in terms of an overarching principle or theory. When something doesn't mesh with that theory, they're usually quite bent on getting it fixed...as adults.

Children who are visual-spatial thinkers, however, don't really seem to even see the details. I didn't realize how pervasive this was until I started thinking of everything my son did in terms of process (a typical sequential approach) versus theory (the spatial approach). Looking at common examples, I saw the following:

Language - The theory that most children deal with in language is story-telling. Visual-spatial (VS) thinkers understand a story in it's general sense: a chronology of something that happens. Then they work their way down in detail. The next level, so to speak, would be that this chronology should have a main character who solves some problem. Further down, they realize that they must introduce the character, introduce the problem, and then explain how the problem is solved by the character. As you work your way down from the main principle, the requirements of a story become more and more detailed. For most VS kids, once you've gotten to the level of writing words, they're starting to get shaky. At the level of spelling and the mechanics of writing, they're overwhelmed. VS learners have notoriously sloppy handwriting and are notorious, at young ages, for swapping or inverting letters.

In contrast, a gifted auditory-sequential (AS) learner will start by going the other direction. They will often quickly learn reading skills and sequentially work their way up in difficulty. When VS and AS thinkers have the same grasp of the main principle, the AS thinkers are already skilled in the lower-level requirements while the VS thinker is struggling with how to manage the details. The VS thinkers take longer to figure out how the details fit into the big picture, but with time and persistence, they can find a way. However, they may never be as proficient as an AS learner at the details. In many ways, VS learners are at a disadvantage relative to AS learners.

Mathematics - The opposite seems to happen in mathematics, if the instructor is astute enough to realize what is going on in the VS learner's head. VS learners will quickly pick up on mathematical models and processes when they are presented in a visually appealing way, but will have difficulty with formalizing it or writing it out. They have an intuitive sense which often works well for them, but they cannot translate it well to language or writing. They seem to just "know". Because of the difficulty in translating their intuitive knowledge, they will often appear to not understand. Arithmetic is a nightmare for the VS child, but he or she is very clear on the concept of what it means to subtract, add, multiply, etc.

Compared to AS students, VS students will seem at a disadvantage here as well unless the presentation and assessment of concepts is done in a way to bring out their knowledge and reasoning processes. AS students, by comparison, will tend to do well early with mathematics as things like arithmetic will not pose issues for them. They are also more adept at memorizing.

Social skills - When one views social interactions from a principle versus process perspective, it becomes too clear why VS children may be more apt to earn a label like autism or Asperger's syndrome. Most VS learners have a clear idea of how they want interactions to happen. If they learn to visualize the process of socializing with others, anticipating how their behavior will cause people to react, they may have an easier time with other people. As often as not, they simply have a notion that they want to get along with other people and can see in their mind's eye that they are with people who like them. However, the low-level "social cues" that people give are not quickly noticed or recognized as being significant. They are more busy matching how they feel internationally about their interaction with the person while not noticing that they are, perhaps, monopolizing the conversation. They're having a good time, why wouldn't everyone else be?

The difference between a VS learner and a person with autistic spectrum disorders is that the VS learner can be taught to notice the details of social interaction. Once they know what they are looking for and have gained some facility in reacting appropriately, they can actually be very social. A typical example is the shy person one meets in high school who ends up being a "late bloomer". They may end up being very successful later in life and not appear to have any of the shyness that seemed so pervasive in younger years.

A person on the autistic spectrum will not be able to change their inability to focus on details. The follow-through in conversation will seem more mechanical because the person with autistic spectrum disorders is taking a very methodical, institutionalized approach to socialization.

I once read Tony Atwood's book on Asperger's Syndrome. There was a part where he discussed female "Aspies" and how many of them seem to grow out of their disorder. This puzzled me for a long time because, as a neurological dysfunction, it seems absurd to think that they would "grow out of it". I have since come to the conclusion (a personal opinion of mine, mind you) that a number of "Aspies" may in fact be visual-spatial learners who are more concerned with higher level principles of interpersonal relationships.

I find this bothersome as being labeled may cause people to believe they are not capable of mastering "the art of interaction", leading them to believe that there is no point in trying.

As visual-spatial learners get older and gain more facility with incorporating details into their "big picture thinking", many of the difficulties they experience as children will lessen or possibly go away. The more positive guidance they have in figuring out how to piece things together, the more successful they're likely to be in all their endeavors.

Gifted Identification: When giftedness is the problem

2008-05-08T08:21:00.000-07:00

Previously, I've discussed how there can be difficulties in identifying gifted children in a classroom based on several factors. However, giftedness itself can lead to problems in identification. The following list, from Gifted Children Monthly, Feb. 1988, is summarized at this page. I've also added personal notes to the list, showing how teachers often perceive this behavior.

Gifted Traits Can Cause Classroom Problems

High verbal ability, unusually large vocabulary

The child seems older and more mature than he or she is, leading to unrealistic expectations on the part of the teacher; has difficulty developing listening skills; uses this verbal gift to manipulate or dominate others.

Early reading

The child presents problems primary teachers who may not know where to begin to meet the child's language arts development.

A questioning attitude

The child questions authority as well as rules, regulations, and generally accepted facts; teacher may feel threatened, which could result in hostile feelings towards child.

NOTE: Can be viewed as oppositional defiance disorder.

Keen powers of observation

The child sees through sham and pretense; teacher must be secure enough to admit he or she does not know something.

NOTE: Another one for the oppositional defiance disorder checklist.

Long attention span, persistence, intense concentration

The child is unable to go on to a new activity; becomes oblivious to everything and everyone around, sometimes missing explanations, directions or assignments.

NOTE: The behavior can be sometimes mistaken for both autistic spectrum disorders ("rigid thinking", "can't handle transitions", "stuck in his/her own world", etc.) or ADD/ADHD when the child isn't paying attention.

Ability to learn basic skills more quickly and easily, and retain much information with less repetition.

The child resists drill and repetition, becomes impatient with those who do not learn as quickly; devours material almost as fast as the teacher prepares it.

NOTE: When the child resists drill and repetition, many teachers don't understand that the child feels they are wasting their time. They assume the child doesn't know and is actually behind other students. When the resistance becomes too great, labels like oppositional defiance disorder begin showing up.

Wide range of interests

The child leaves activities incomplete.

NOTE: Another ADD/ADHD behavior.

Very narrow interests

The child sticks to things he or she knows or does best, unwilling to risk trying new things; signals perfectionistic tendencies.

NOTE: This is very often misunderstood as the "circumscribed interests" attributed to individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, most often Asperger's Syndrome.

Creativeness, originality, putting ideas and things together in novel ways

The child is seen as being nonconformist or rebellious, even "wierd".

NOTE: Gifted children may try to answer questions creatively, but don't give the "right" answer. The teacher then assumes the child doesn't understand the material. This can be alleviated by probing into the reasons why the child answers the way he or she does.

Unusual, often highly developed sense of humor

The child sees humor in situations that escapes others; sometimes leads to judgements of inappropriateness by others.

NOTE: Another trait often mistaken for autistic spectrum disorders.

Ability to see relationships, make connections

The child makes intuitive leaps which can exasperate teachers who insist on step-by-step procedures.

Sensitivity

The child is often overly sensitive, taking minor jokes or teasing too seriously; has feelings easily hurt.

NOTE: This issue is especially difficult for boys, who are expected to not display emotions or reactions to such teasing.

High energy level

The child cannot sit or wait quietly; is impatient; seems to have inherent need to be constantly engaged in activity; becomes bored, sometimes disruptive; can exhaust teacher.

NOTE: This sounds like every child diagnosed with ADHD.

Independence

The child has difficulty working with others on group probjects or activities requiring cooperative effort; usually prevers working alone, doing it his or her own way.

NOTE: This can contribute to beliefs that the child suffers from oppositional defiance disorder or autistic spectrum disorders, depending on how the child handles social situations. The same is true of the next point.

A "loner"

The child does not develop appropriate social skills, which leads to more isolation.

Standards

2008-05-07T20:11:00.000-07:00

I have mixed feelings about national education standards. I'm inclined to think that, on the whole, they would be beneficial. It would create a set of requirements that is nationally consistent so that all children, regardless of where they live in the U.S., could reasonably expect to receive the same education.

They can also make clear expectations for teachers, which makes their job easier. For instance, The National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics has an excellent set of standards. One of the things I find most appealing is that they emphasize that math concepts should be understood in terms of language, pictoral representations, and equations. If one can master the three ways of describing a concept, obviously they've got it. I believe without such wonderful guidelines, many students would have large deficits in their math education. Of course, their effectiveness only extends to those who use them.

I have a harder time conceptualizing the use of standards in the arts and literature. Perhaps it's a good idea for people to read (and presumably understand) 3 or 4 plays by Shakespeare before they graduate from high school. Most certainly, students should have effective writing skills. What qualifies as necessary knowledge is a bit less clear for me, but obviously language skills are fundamental to success in nearly every area and literature can provide a basis for community.

A serious downside to the use of standards is exactly that: their use. Standards are a great idea, but I see them being misused very often, especially when a gifted child is in a regular classroom. Many gifted children see no need to repeat what they already know, but teachers feel they must stick to standards when teaching. It would be very nice if a classroom would check first to see if the child could meet the criteria in the standard. The child who does meet the criteria can move on and the child who doesn't meet the criteria could learn.

Unfortunately, due to classroom dynamics, that never happens. The point of the standard, in my experience, is to make sure there are no gaps in a child's education. However, many places teach to the standard, and if the child already has that set of skills and knowledge, they are stuck waiting while the teacher trudges along. Standards, sadly, are becoming an excuse to force gifted children into repetition and boredom. It is truly unfortunate that a sound concept can be misused. It would be ideal if a more effective way of using the standards, one that is more time efficient for both teachers and students, were developed.

Sounding elitist...

2008-05-06T13:06:00.001-07:00

When I started this blog, it was because I've not been successful in finding blogs that deal specifically with gifted or gifted/LD education. There are some wonderful and informative websites, but not blogs. (There are many wonderful and informative blogs out there, as well, but few of them are focused exclusively on this topic.)

I wanted blogs because they often take the abstract articles and ideas you see on the websites and boil them down into useable information. They give you more of a sense of what it's like to be "in the trenches", so to speak.

I don't want to come across as elitist, although it may sound like I am. I understand that there are challenges in raising every child. Unfortunately, most people don't understand that there are unique challenges in raising gifted children or even in being a gifted adult! Most people, myself included until recently, believe that having a gifted child means raising a prodigy who is always precocious, motivated, and polite.

If only.

I was horrified to learn that raising a gifted child means that you have a perpetual teenager in the house. The mind knows where it wants to go, but the physical and emotional development of the child are far behind. The child is emotionally and physically clumsy and doesn't know how to deal with the disparity. Somehow, as a parent, you're just supposed to know this and how to make it better for them. (It's hypothetically in the manual.) This is a difficult experience for any parent, but it's even harder when you didn't know how to handle it as a child yourself and your parents weren't of any help.

There's no way I could have anticipated all the difficulties my son has experienced. I'd never heard the terms "asynchronous development" or "overexcitabilities". I admit to having many of these difficulties as a child, but most of it was swept under the rug as I outgrew them. It wasn't until I found my son going through these things that my parents discussed my history with me. Unfortunately, they approach these behaviors as deviant without understanding the underlying cause. They had no idea what caused it and came up with explanations, very often blaming themselves or life circumstances. Once those circumstances went away, they reasoned, the behavior went away. It hasn't occurred to them, and I imagine it doesn't to many parents of gifted children, that having a mismatch between mental, emotional, and physical maturity can cause real ongoing problems for children and their parents. For parents whose children don't have these issues, it probably looks a lot like bad parenting. It's hard to tell until you've been there.

Gifted Identification - or Lack Thereof

2008-05-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.

But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education.

-Charles Murray, "Aztecs vs. Greeks," The Wall Street Journal, 1-18-07

"The prestigious Marland Report (1972) noted that "disturbingly, research has confirmed that many talented children perform far below their intellectual potential. We are increasingly being stripped of the comfortable notion that a bright mind will make its own way." In 1975, one report (Lemov, 1979), estimated that as many as 15-30% of high school dropouts are gifted and talented. Other studies have shown that most youngsters identified as intellectually gifted were significantly underachieving."

"In practical terms, much actual identification of gifted children is currently done by teachers - based either on their observations of classroom behavior, or on group achievement tests. It is these teacher-identified children who constitute most gifted programs. Identifying gifted children on the basis of teacher nominations, however, overlooks many gifted children. Several studies (e.g., Jacobs, 1971) have shown that teacher nomination correctly identifies less than half of students later found to be gifted through individual testing. Usually, the errors overlook gifted students, although about 10% of the students identified by teachers as intellectually gifted actually were not. Even exceptionally gifted students were not immune from oversight. As many as 25% are missed by teachers, (Marland Report, 1972)."

-Webb, Meckstroth, and Tolan, "Guiding the Gifted Child"

I was intrigued by Murray's article when I first read it. It sounded good on the surface, but the more I think about it, the more I dislike it. One of the reasons I dislike it is that while he points out how much our society (if our government could be considered a reflection of society) does not value the gifted. On the other hand, he seems to have a significant amount of faith that this same society will find all the children whose parents aren't aware of giftedness issues and help them find their way.

The latter belief is, in my opinion, complete hogwash.

Had the public schools been responsible for identifying my son's giftedness, it simply wouldn't have happened. I was told by the schools that he was not gifted. In fact, they believed he needed special education services.

Murray may be partially right in that a good number of gifted children have parents who care about their education. Intelligence is a strongly heritable trait, and most likely those parents who care about their children's education were the ones who also were identified as gifted when they were younger.

On the other hand, how many children like myself came from working class families who had no idea they were gifted? I personally was put into a gifted program and then popped back out. One of my teachers thought I was gifted. The fact that I didn't perform well in the G/T program was assumed to mean that the teacher had been mistaken. I wasn't recognized as gifted until very late in my high school career when I accidentally ended up in a class for which I didn't have the prequisites. I managed to earn one of the top grades in the class, and when it was discovered that I wasn't supposed to be in the class, my teacher made every effort to help me along.

No one else in my family had been identified as gifted. On the contrary, one sibling was placed in a special ed program because they couldn't read at nine years old. (Everyone failed to realize that this sibling got through three years of school because they managed to memorize everything the first time that it was read to them.)

When I think about all of the things that have happened to my parents' family and then to my oldest son, I can't say I have a lot of faith that other bright children will be identified. This is especially true of children who also have learning disabilities. They are often seen for their disabilities and not for their abilities. All the research I've seen bears this opinion out. In the age where certain diagnoses are "en vogue", it seems more likely that these children, especially boys, are wrongly labeled, diagnosed, and medicated.

Maria Montessori

2008-05-04T18:14:00.001-07:00

Continuing with my previous post on educational philosophies, I have to admit that one of the few educational paradigms that has made sense to me is that of Maria Montessori. Her philosophy is truly wonderful because it considers all aspects of a child's development. She didn't look simply at what they were learning (i.e. intellectual development) but how the emotional development, physical development and intellectual development were intertwined.

If you look at public education in it's current form, it's hard to see much of her philosophy. Indeed, I believe that this is part of the reason public education fails so many of its students. Sadly, except for Montessori schools which are officially affiliated with Association Montessori Internationale, there is no guarantee that a "Montessori School" has anything beyond the materials developed for the Montessori Method. The whole philosophy behind the materials can sometimes be lost.

My understanding of some of Montessori's main points are as follows:

1 - A teacher cannot rush learning.

2 - Even when a child has learned, a teacher cannot force a child to demonstrate learning when they do not have adequate emotional and physical development. Likewise, lack of development in these areas can hinder learning.

3 - Learning is most quickly achieved when multiple senses are involved. (I personally believe this is a way around many learning disabilities or difficulties.)

4 - Knowledge is most readily absorbed when it can be experienced.

5 - You cannot control a child. A child must learn to control him or herself. The best way to help a child to control his or her behavior is by manipulation of the environment.

6 - Most knowledge that one needs to graduate from high school can be learned by ages 12-14. Around this age, education should shift it's focus from intellectual development to the child's social development. A child should have preparation for adulthood, and self-development is a key aspect of that preparation.

Admittedly, this is simply my interpretation of her method and philosophies. It is likely that I have misunderstood on one or more points. It seems, however, that much modern education flies in the face of her knowledge and education, much to the detriment of the children.

Walking a fine line

2008-05-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, I had the notion that I would progress methodically through a series of topics which I thought were important to discuss. I'm realizing that while it was a nice notion, I occasionally find myself wandering away from the "natural" progression of topics to other thoughts. While I had planned to discuss more on the topic of gifted identification (or lack thereof), I'm going to instead discuss another topic that's been on my mind lately.

Yesterday I posted a quote from a paper by Barry Grant. The thesis of his paper is that compulsory education is antithetic to development as a person. He discusses commentary by such homeschooling pioneers and role models as Holt and Gatto. The point of education, from his perspective, is self-realization of the individual.

By contrast, I recently read some opinion pieces that Charles Murray wrote for the Wall Street Journal from January of last year. In his article "Aztecs vs. Greeks," Murray charges that the purpose of education for the gifted is to be taught to think at an advanced level using classical education. His contention seems to be the opposite of Grant's; the point of gifted education is to create and nurture the leadership of tomorrow. He argues that, like it or not, the nation is essentially run as a meritocracy. Those who run the nation are at the highest level of corporations and government, and the only control we have as citizens is to elect officials (a small group of this meritocracy) and to properly educate the rest.

I find some parts of both arguments very appealing, but I also find that I'm not completely satisfied with either set of motivations or methods. I like the idea of self-paced study, but not self-guided study. I see two problems with self-guided study. First, sometimes one may find a topic worthwhile that they may have initially not considered interesting. In self-guided study, a student may avoid the topic altogether and never discover that it could, in fact, be fascinating. The second problem is that this is a prime way to hide learning disabilities. The learning disabled child may find a topic interesting but choose not to pursue it because their ability to learn the material may be hampered by their selection of learning materials. Likewise, they may just avoid the topic altogether. However, if they are compelled to learn a topic, their disabilities may become evident and rather than avoiding the topic, a new approach may be taken so that knowledge can be learned.

I don't like the idea of saddling the responsibility of the nation on a group of gifted children. Those expectations are only going to be a source of discomfort for a child and implies that self-development is a secondary goal of education. If Murray is correct in his assertion that our nation is run by a meritocracy, then I find it frightening that we could have a nation being run by people who are being compelled to learn and work without self-development. I also think that insisting that gifted be trained using a classical method is not ideal. There are many ways to train the mind, and I cannot help feeling that wanting a particular method of education somehow instills certain values and norms which are not necessarily best for the child and his or her parents but are meant to preserve certain societal norms.

The purpose of education, in my mind, is not as clear cut as either of these arguments imply. My thoughts are that education should have the following goals:

1 - Self-development - A person needs to feel free to explore interests and experiences. They should have free time to enjoy life and not feel caught up in the rat race that seems to consume so many people. They should learn to care about themselves and others while not necessarily carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

2 - Preparation for life - Realistically, we can never break out of the notion that education is job preparation. However, I fear that learning only about topics of interest early on may cut off access to topics that may be available as a child grows. Therefore, it should also encompass a breadth of topics. However, it shouldn't be done on a competitive basis. Not everyone will succeed in all topics. Competition benefits only the winners and makes those who do not win focus on their weaknesses rather than nurture their strengths.

3 - Humility - One should never learn that they are smarter than everyone else. It is important, for gifted children especially, to be in situations which challenge them and in which they are not clearly superior to everyone else. This doesn't mean simply placing gifted children in gifted programs: it means giving all children more access to others like them an unlike them. I don't believe that age-grading is very wise. I do believe that children need more access to society instead of being locked away in schools all day.

4 - Limitations...and that some of them can be overcome! - It is very important to be constantly challenged so that one may learn what they are capable of, what they are not capable of, and how to push the envelope so that they can work around situations in which they are not capable. This is not going to happen in the average classroom.

5 - When to push societal limits - We live in a society that values conformity. It's good to know how to challenge that conformity while being respectful of the individuals who don't feel comfortable in situations without conformity.

Homeschooling is probably the only environment where these things are consistently available, but there are some formal educational institutions which are trying to be more open-minded and creative in their approach.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Gifted Education and Compulsory Schooling

2008-05-03T22:27:00.000-07:00

If gifted education is about anything other than promoting more efficient ways of helping a small group of gifted children develop institutionally approved talents and get into good colleges and get good jobs and become "good" citizens, it is about helping children and adolescents realize themselves. This is my vision of what gifted education could be if it were freed from the strictures of compulsory schooling. I ask myself: What else are the deep goals of gifted education? If not the development of free minds, of creative persons know themselves, know their strengths, and can use their intellectual tools and their sensibilities according to their own philosophy of life, what else can they be? Any goal of education other than the free development of the child means using children to serve some goal we have for them - to become leaders, yield returns as precious national resources, preserve and carry forward civilization, and so on (cf. Grant and Piechowski, 1999).

Education for self-development is not about academic achievement, socialization, schooling, career preparation, serving the nation, or job training. The task of education is the task of living: finding or creating a self and a sense of the world of things, people, and other beings, and finding meaningful ways of fitting self and world together. Education is about living out one's passions and purposes and creating a coherent life, a workable individuality. It is premised on the perennial humanist idea that the only life worth living is one's own life, not a copy of someone else's, not one made of an unexamined hodgepodge of stuff from state-mandated curricula and the youth culture created by preventing children from fully participating in civic life (cf. Decarvalho, 1991; Goodman, 1983; Maslow, 1962; Rogers, 1983).

- Barry Grant, "Education without compulsion: Toward new visions of gifted education," Mensa Research Journal, Vol. 38(3), pgs. 7-16.

Problems in Gifted Identification: Girls

2008-05-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

By the time a gifted young woman has graduated from college, she is likely to have lowered her estimate of her own intelligence, to have changed majors to a less challenging major, and to have lowered her career aspirations. She is much more likely than her gifted male peers to have abandoned her math and science interests, no matter how strong they once were, and is less likely to pursue graduate training in these fields. After college, she is more likely to follow her boyfriend or husband to his job than to have him follow her. She is the one most likely to have major child rearing responsibilities. And although it is now the norm, gifted women often combine work and family, gifted women continue to be more likely to give up full time work for part-time, and to give up leadership positions than are gifted men (Kerr, 1997.)

-Dr. Barbara Kerr, Gender and Genius

Kerr argues that young women are encourage to excel until they reach college. Beginning in college, gifted young women lose or abandon career aspirations. While this may be true and means that the situation for girls has significantly improved during primary and secondary education, other authors have cited many issues which affect girls.

While boys may be overlooked for gifted programs because of behavioral issues due to boredom, girls tend to be overlooked because of their passivity. Girls are more likely to do what the teacher asks and not complain if the material being studied is material which they have done years before.

This passivity does not mean that the girl is fine in an environment where she is waiting for everyone else. She may be more compelled by social pressures to wait or help others who are behind herself. If she doesn't wish to wait, she is viewed as pushy. Consequently, being gifted becomes a choice between being viewed as pushy and non-feminine or hiding ones gifts in order to fit societal expectations.

Girls often have serious doubts in their own abilities and have a strong sensitivity to the responibilities of others. Thus, as they get older, gifted women may have tend to give up on their dreams and goals in favor of caring for others, often times believing they are not really gifted or that they suffer from mistaken identity. Many gifted women suffer from Imposter Syndrome.

Therefore, even when girls are identified as gifted, they are still at high risk for not allowing their giftedness to play a role in their self-esteem and actualization.

Problems in Gifted Identification: Boys

2008-04-30T20:24:00.000-07:00

Boys and girls are very different in the ways they approach school.

...

When a little boy starts school, however, he almost immediatley notices that what he wants to do is not happening in school. To make matters worse, what he wants to do isn't allowed or isn't even available. Therefore, boys are much more likely to act out and complain than girls. As a result, more boys than girls are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or hyperactivity."

-Dr. Deborah Ruf, "Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind"

I discussed previously how learning style can affect someone's perception of a child's giftedness. This is one of many factors involved in identification of the gifted. Giftedness itself can create difficulties when teachers are not aware of the characteristics of the gifted, which most are not. Aside from that, gender and personality also have large impacts on the perception of giftedness.

I hope to discuss all of these points, but I think gender is an appropriate place to begin. Both gifted boys and girls, on average, tend to deal with their higher intelligence in different ways. In general, though, girls will be more passive about disparities in their abilities and curriculum. Boys will be more defiant and oppositional. Of course, because something happens this way on average doesn't mean that girls won't act out or boys won't comply just to get things over with. It is important to be aware of all possible behaviors that can signal educational issues.

Boys are fortunate to have the set of genes or expectations that cause them to act out in the situations when they have caring teachers and parents. Those boys may have the benefit of people who understand that the difficulties may not lie within the child but within the environment. The boys are communicating this the best way they know how. It is up to the adults to listen, and it's hard for the adults to ignore some of this behavior.

Most boys are not that fortunate. They spend time becoming angry, losing respect for adults, and not understanding why they are required to spend so much time in such monotonous, unstimulating environments. They refuse to complete assignments, they will not stay organized, and they don't pay attention. They are labeled as AD(H)D or Oppositional or accused (rightly so) of underachieving.

The key to this problem is it that the adults need to change, not the children. The boys are not being intentionally defiant (for the most part), but they have lost interest and few adults are sympathetic to their plight. Our culture wants boys to learn to, "Take it like a man." The boys are helpless to communicate this in any other way than passive resistance to the authority for which they are losing respect.

Unfortunately, many of these behaviors prevent them from being accelerated. The view is that they haven't earned the responsibility of an advanced material for if they are not responsible in normal conditions, they certainly will not be in an accelerated program. This completely overlooks the issue that these behaviors are the result of a lack of stimulating environment, and medicating them will only keep the problem at bay for so long.

The Paradox of Acceleration

2008-04-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

Many parents find themselves in an awkward position because their children do not cooperate with what is required by the school for an average student, and the teachers use that behavior as the criterion for access to more advanced curriculum. It's the old chicken and egg dilemma. Gifted children don't want to work on things they already know how to do, but until they dutifully demonstrate excellent completion of grad-level work, the children can't "earn their way" into more advanced, appropriate, and interesting coursework.

...

When students experience appropriate classroom expectations and environments - classrooms that teach to their own level and pace - problems with the above expectations disappear. When there is enough real learning to do, gifted children appear more cooperative, feel more respect for their teachers, and find their natural talkative and humorous propensities appreciated rather than viewed as behavioral problems.

- Dr. Deborah Ruf, "Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind"

This Catch 22 is simultaneously the most understandable and most frustrating aspect of enrolling gifted children in the public school environment.

School is not entirely about learning knowledge and information. Perhaps initially that was the case, but now there is much more expected of public schools. Children are also expected to learn how to get along with others, how to be respectful, how to organize themselves, how to manage their time, etc. Intellectually, teachers give high marks to those who not only learn the material but manage their time effectively so as to complete assignments and are willing to demonstrate what they have learned, which tends to be the purview of those who are people pleasers. This is not necessarily indicative of gifted children, and many gifted children are not people pleasers.

A child who is not demonstrating these abilities is generally viewed as having something wrong. They may be learning disabled, ADHD, autistic, or have any number of issues that could disrupt their learning. If nothing can be found to affect their ability to learn, they often receive labels like oppositional defiance disorder or similar.

I have often wondered how many of these label issues would be resolved if the children were challenged in school. Usually the normal response to a child like this is to assume the problem stems from a child who cannot cope with the environment. They leave these children in the same classroom but try a series of measures to make it easier for them to complete the homework.

It would be truly novel if these children were actually accelerated instead. I suspect it would make it much easier to tell who is bored and who is actually suffering from one of the afflictions mentioned above.

The problem is, as mentioned above, it seems paradoxical to accelerate children that already have difficulties in school. It seems logical that a child who is having issues learning basic topics would have more or worse issues when learning more challenging material. At it's heart, the paradox is born from the notion that the children can or should be changed, not the environment. When there is a mismatch between environment and child, it is usually the child that is expected to change, not the environment. In the public schools and many private schools, this is perhaps very realistic. It is difficult for a school to change the environment, but it is easy to medicate a child. On the other hand, schools often overestimate how difficult it would be to create a more challenging environment for children.

What does it mean?

2008-04-27T19:59:00.000-07:00

I wish every IQ test came with a key like the one at Hoagies Gifted. I wish everything written about giftedness also came with a comparison chart so that you could reference the appropriate scores on whichever IQ test had been administered.

I also wish children came with manuals. Unfortunately, while IQ tests do help in that regard, it still doesn't tell you everything you need to know.

When my son was finally tested by someone knowledgeable about giftedness, I was surprised at his scores. They seemed lower than I was expecting, but I was pleased that someone had recognized he was gifted. I didn't understand about the more current tests being renormed for the Flynn effect such that higher scores corresponded to lower scores on newer tests. I didn't understand that some of the older tests used a ratio score rather than a population normalization. I didn't understand that what I thought was a pretty good score was much better than I thought.

It took a long time for it to sink in that my son was exceptionally gifted with subtests running from highly gifted to the profoundly gifted range. I used to ignore information on exceptionally gifted and profoundly gifted children because I didn't think it applied to my son. I wish I hadn't ignored it because it does explain a lot of the behaviors I never understood. Once it finally sunk in that I had an EG child, I spent a lot of time going over and finding papers and articles that I had previously ignored.

I'm still not certain what it means to be exceptionally gifted. I can certainly list a series of negative consequences. A child in this IQ range feels ostracized by peers, misunderstood by teachers, and is generally miserable in the public school system. They are very sensitive and empathetic to those less fortunate, but also very hostile and angry for the mistreatment they receive. They get bored extremely easily. They do not have to be prodigies, although I'm sure there are some who are. They like to goof around and make jokes, much to the frustration of their teachers. I'm guessing a number of them enjoy reading because it's the only stimulation they get if their gifts are not recognized.

Unfortunately, most of these observations only point to what highly gifted children and above are not or how they shouldn't be treated. It doesn't explain how they should be dealt with educationally because an educational plan must take into consideration their individual personalities and interests as well as motivation. It would be nice to put all children in this range into some sort of category, but there are few of these children and they are very individual. If there were some way to group them, perhaps educational institutions would be far more considerate in dealing with them and their parents. In most places, however, they are so rare that they are assumed to be no different than your average gifted child, except more difficult.

Using the WISC-IV

2008-04-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

...a majority of gifted children show considerable variability in their Composite/Index scores on the WISC-IV, a problem less often encountered in average children. When this occurs, WISC-IV Full Scale IQ scores for the gifted may be difficult to interpret and, in some cases, may be lowered sufficiently by processing skills to prevent gifted children from qualifying for needed programs.

-NAGC Position Statement: Use of the WISC-IV for Gifted Identification

When I decided to have my child formally tested, I started with the local schools. I was under the impression they would be in a position to help him, and it was also free. I began by showing them the evaluation for autism which said that my child was probably gifted. They took this as a starting point to evaluate him for giftedness. They also looked at achievement and other things which may be causing issues.

The psychologist was a woman in her late fifties or early sixties who looked like she hated kids, especially the highly active ones. She took my son into a room that was filled with books, posters, and toys. All I could think was that this was a horrible environment for a child whom we believed to have ADHD. After an hour, she came out and looked very upset, complaining that he had been very hard to focus. My son later told me that he tried to make jokes but she wasn't amused. I left from the testing session with a bad feeling.

I began doing some research into IQ testing and found Hoagies Gifted Web Site. Hoagies had a page on testing and assessment. Reading through the references, I discovered that some tests were better suited to testing the gifted. Specifically, I learned that the WISC-IV was a poor test for some gifted children, especially if they were slow at processing. I also learned that if the child scores 17 or above on 2 subtests, it's a good idea to have them take a test with a higher ceiling. The WISC-IV puts very high value processing speed but places less emphasis on reasoning. As mentioned in the NAGC position statement above, giftedness often comes through in reasoning tests.

Another thing I learned was that rapport between the evaluator and the child being tested is critical. If the child doesn't feel comfortable, they are most likely not going to do well.

As it turns out, that is exactly the test they gave my son. His scores were quite literally all over the place. Coding, in particular, was shown as being significantly below average. He had also scored 17 or above on three subtests. When I mentioned that he had "ceilinged out" on those subtests, the psychiatrist was quite adamant that he had not and that his scores were an accurate reflection of his intelligence. According to her testing, he was bright, but did not qualify for gifted services.

Knowing what I did, I was still puzzled. In a conversation with my mother, she said that I had scored pretty poorly on an IQ test given to me in elementary school. I was confused because while I have never been formally evaluated, I knew my equivalent IQ from the SAT, and I knew I was well above the required IQ to qualify for gifted programs.

At that point, I could only look at those scores and assume they were wrong. However, he had ceilinged out on three tests, and I also knew those tests indicated he was probably a visual-spatial learner. I at least knew I was on the right track. I just wasn't sure what to do about it.

How can you find anything in this mess?

2008-04-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

The visual-spatial learner is a set of contradictions. One moment they have no clue what you're talking about, and the next they've just come up with a completely novel way of doing something. The problem most people have with saying someone like this is smart is that you expect a smart person to be smart all the time. Instead, you have a person who seems brilliant at some moments but completely dense the next.

For instance, the following characteristics of the visual-spatial learner (according to Sword) are generally associated with people who have emotional difficulties and/or with learning disabilities:

* often fails at simple things
* is physically sensitive, often has acute hearing and intense reactions to loud noises
* has poor listening skills, often seems not to be listening
* has difficulty finishing tasks/school work
* has poor handwriting or difficulty keeping in the lines or grips the pen very hard and presses on the paper when writing
* has a poor sense of time
* is extremely sensitive to criticism
* is emotionally very sensitive
* has difficulty with spelling/times tables
* is distractible
* is very disorganised

On the other hand, these characteristics are the things that will make people wonder if they are, in fact, intelligent.

* likes complex ideas and tasks and does well on them
* loves Lego, puzzles, jigsaws, computer games, television, making things
* likes art and/or music
* can remember the way somewhere after going there only once
* has a vivid imagination and/or disturbing dreams

If a person is gifted, one assumes that they will think about the problem issues and find ways to solve them. That, of course, assumes that these issues are problems to the visual-spatial learner. Often, they are not as their focus is not how to organize things in a linear fashion, the way most people do, but how to organize them in space.

A good example is an outline. An auditory-sequential thinker will write an outline indicating their thoughts on a topic in some sort of order (chronological, importance of points, etc.). Even though an auditory-sequential learner may view the outline as the basic construct of writing a paper or delivering a speech, it isn't for the visual-spatial thinker. In fact, it will require pre-planning for a visual-spatial thinker. They may need to brain-storm their ideas onto a piece of paper. Once that is accomplished, they find patterns to connect their various points. These patterns may or may not involve the same sort of organization that a auditory-sequential thinker uses. The disadvantage of the visual-spatial process is that is is more time consuming and requires more steps. The advantage is that the visual-spatial thinker may come up with novel points that don't come out in a linear process and may also develop a novel way of connecting the points together. Usually the completed project is well-thought out, once you can get them to go through all the necessary steps. Unfortunately, this can be the most difficult aspect of teaching a visual-spatial learner unless you find topics of interest to them.

A gifted visual-spatial learner will often have a very chaotic environment, frequently will be late, and almost always seem disorganized. This is the way it appears to linear thinkers who probably could not function in such an environment. On the other hand, visual-spatial learners prefer to learn about subjects in depth, can often find what they need in their "vertical filing system", and hate being cut off in the middle of something (which is why they are late - finishing something is more important than punctuality). The processes involved in organization work in entirely different ways for different learning styles. Recognition that there is more than one "right" way to do things is critical for recognizing and helping visual-spatial learners to achieve their potential.

Dabrowski's Overexcitabilities/Sensory Integration Dysfunction

2008-04-23T09:17:00.001-07:00

Sword's article, mentioned in the previous post, was a relief to read once I knew we were dealing with a gifted child. Most importantly, it tied together some very odd behaviors that baffled me. It explained some of the characteristics of the visual-spatial learner. This confirmed, for me, that my son was gifted even while having some behaviors which most people assume aren't present in a gifted child. More importantly, it discussed the overexcitabilities present in gifted children, especially emotional overexcitabilities.

Unfortunately, when most people discuss gifted overexcitabilities, there is often no explanation as to how to deal with them. Parents of gifted children are very often left with the impression that they and their children are held captive to the whims of the child.

In my experience, some of the wisest people in the public education system are occupational therapists. They deal with children who have these strange reactions to normal stimulus on a regular basis, and few things surprise them. They are invaluable in that they actually can provide you with ways to deal with these overexcitabilities, which they often label as sensory integration dysfunction or, more simply, sensory issues.

When a child has sensory issues, what looks like misbehavior can very often be an attempt on the part of the child to make his environment more comfortable or, if possible, to make the offending sensation go away. Children don't know how to explain this, however, and their behavior is completely mystifying and frustrating to adults.

Occupational therapists can explain these overexcitabilities or sensory issues in terms of children who are sensory seeking and sensory avoiding. It is also entirely possible to have a child who is both. By examining these issues from this paradigm, you can find ways to help children who are sensory avoiding to either become more aware of their issues, making it easier for them to explain the problem, or to provide ways to make the sensations less frightening. (My son had a friend who needed to have his skin brushed for short periods throughout the day because he was so touch avoidant, as an example.) For children who are sensory seeking, you can find ways to meet their needs either through therapy, activities at home, or socially acceptable means within a classroom.

Most sensory issues may be worked around when a child is young and therefore the issues may not be addressed. When the child is in school, the sensory issues will become more pronounced. Unfortunately, therapy is most effective when a child is between the ages of 3 and 6, so it important to discover as soon as possible if your child is dealing with these issues.

In my case, I didn't discover this until my child was six, and he still, as a teenager, is in the process of determining ways to cope. However, I could not believe some of the differences I saw in my son once we began therapy. Therapy was worth it even though it was not preventative.

Diagnosis Soup

2008-04-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

When high intelligence is coupled with an auditory-sequential processing difficulty, these two exceptionalities tend to mask one another so that neither the giftedness nor the difficulty is readily apparent. Their learning difficulty depresses these students’ IQ and achievement scores and, as they are frequently not identified as gifted, their educational needs in this area are not met. Their high intelligence enables them to compensate well enough for their weaknesses to maintain year-level expectations and so their learning difficulty goes undetected. They are in a “Catch 22” situation where their giftedness and their learning difficulty cancel each other out and they are perceived as average. In addition, some IQ tests put so much emphasis on processing speed that the IQ of a gifted child with a learning difficulty is likely to be depressed and so the result is an under-estimate of the child’s intelligence.

-Lesley Sword

Ironically, it was because of my first struggle with the autism diagnosis issues that I came to find out that my son was gifted. In the process of wading through article after article on autism, I started investigating visual thinking processes. (Although I will never meet her, I would like to say thanks to Temple Grandin for being one of the most articulate writers on this topic.) This eventually led me to the article I Think In Pictures, You Teach In Words: The Gifted Visual-Spatial Learner by Leslie Sword (quoted above). I read it, thought it was interesting, but moved on.

This was the first time I had come across something which explained my son's behaviors while not mentioning the words autism or Asperger's, however, so I did keep a copy on file. I had never heard of visual-spatial learning styles, I knew nothing about overexcitabilities, and I did not have any clue that my son was gifted. In fact, he seemed moody, temperamental, stubborn, and ornery. It's hard to build a good relationship with and teach such a child.

Had I known these things about him earlier, I think we would have bypassed a lot of unhappiness for both of us.

The suggestion that autism was involved came when my son's teacher had spoken to a friend, who also happened to be a psychologist, and was sure he had Asperger's. Over the next three months, I watched my son became more angry and irritable every evening. (I didn't believe such a thing was possible, but it was.) I watched him chatter happily on his way to school. Once he crossed the threshhold into school, he became sullen, angry and unresponsive. The change was palpable.

After our first round of consultation with doctors, he was put on medications for ADHD and told he also had Oppositional Defiant Disorder. He had bad responses to several different medications. After a few months, we quit trying them. His problems at school kept getting worse. He got more defiant and started having violent tantrums.

I finally had him evaluated for Asperger's. I was sure that must be it. I was told that he didn't, even though I didn't believe it. One of the evaluators had the wisdom to suggest I have his IQ tested. Given my financial situation at the time, I didn't feel I could afford it. However, I presented his teacher with the article by Sword, but for reasons I will never understand, it was ignored. She still believed the words of the psychologist friend over the doctors who had seen my son.

I finally could take no more and pulled my child out of school.

I thought it was crazy that an educator would feel like they could make a medical diagnosis better than a medical doctor or psychiatrist. I learned later that this is actually fairly common, much to my dismay.

Autism

2008-04-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

Of all the diagnoses that have been thrown around concerning my son, I abhor the autistic spectrum disorders the most. They have included high-functioning autism, Pervasive Development Disorder - Not Otheriwse Specified (PDD-NOS), and Asperger's Disorder. The problem I have with these diagnoses is that my son doesn't have them. He has been checked by medical and psychiatric professionals who do research on these disorders as well as non-research professionals. Despite the fact that I have a file drawer filled with the results of these evaluations, it never fails that someone in the education industry will try to attach this label to my son.

Not that I am claiming my son is as brilliant as Einstein, but how many people think Einstein really needed a social skills class? Perhaps he should have been working on his social skills and forgotten about all those crazy theories and ideas that he came up with.

I realize that there is a problem of mindset. So many education professionals are seeking to help children. By assuming a child needs help, you have thus determined the child has a deficit. There are only a handful of people working in the nation's education system, public or private, that understand that this "deficit" may correlate to a gift or ability in another place. Most assume that a problem is a problem and fail to look at what else could be going on.

The problem relates to, quite ironically, the lack of education of the educators. If they had learned somewhere in their training that giftedness doesn't always correspond to the characteristics identified by the Renzulli method and could in fact be associated with a host of problems and difficulties in a normal school setting, the state of gifted education would be miles ahead of where it is now.

Instead, we take the most bright and able students and turn their gifts into disabilities, negative diagnoses and labels, and reasons to hold them back.

It may not be perfect...

2008-04-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

Our educational system has often generated mediocrity except for gifted athletes. From kindergarten, children are bombarded with pressures that urge them to modify their behavior and intellectual development toward the average of the group. Gifted children throughout our society may be trapped in an intellectual wasteland - a world that can be cruel to the gifted (Garfield, 1980).

-Webb, Meckstroth, and Tolan. "Guiding the Gifted Child: A Practical Source for Parents and Teachers."

I get very tired reading screeds against homeschooling because almost always, the person who is opposed to homeschooling ignores two very important things about public schools: (1) all except the most progressive public schools cannot or will not meet the educational needs of advanced children, and (2) the "socialization" that is present in public schools can be very harmful to the emotional well-being of gifted children.

If you bring up these points, the response to (1) is that gifted children will get along fine. They ignore the fact that gifted children will very often spend 50% of their time in school waiting for the other kids to catch up. They learn not to be challenged. The notion that children should always be with their same-age peers overrides the notion that these children have advanced intellectual needs and can feel like they're starving while waiting for something challenging.

The response to (2) is usually something that it is the gifted child who is "screwed up" and needs to learn to get along with other kids. It is completely ignored that school is the only place in the world where someone is forced to sit in a classroom with people of their same age but who may otherwise have nothing in common. It is also ignored that such a system is very intolerant of differences.

The emotional repercussions of such a system are horrible. Gifted children, at the very least, never learn how to put forth effort. When they finally do encounter a challenge (usually in college), they may have to deal with a lot of frustration. Some of this frustration can actually cause them to quit college. Never having been challenged can make them feel like they are stupid and can't cut it.

At the other end, you could have anger. In the book, "Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children," they discuss the prevalence of gifted students among students who have been the perpetrators of school shootings. These children are teased and harassed to the point of wanting to take other people's lives. Fortunately those that get this angry are relatively rare, but the consequences are, quite literally, deadly if the anger becomes too much.

What is most frustrating is that the people opposed to homeschooling do not provide alternatives for children with these needs. (They also ignore that some of these issues affect even non-gifted children.) They just say that the public school isn't perfect but it is certainly better than homeschooling. I wonder if they would feel any differently if it were their children going through these kinds of problems.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Socialization

2008-04-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest arguments against homeschooling that I've heard is the "socialization" argument. This assumes that homeschoolers never take their children outside or allow them to play with other children. What's worse is that some people seem to think that a child can only be properly socialized correctly if a child is sitting in a classroom. There is a belief that the commonality of experience will eventually be the primary social glue when our children become adults.

Homeschoolers simply shake their heads at this. Most of them bring their children with them on various errands, they involve their children in play groups, homeschool cooperatives will often have "classes" where the kids get together to study, and many of these children are involved in sports and community activities (like boy scouts). They view learning socialization in school as being one step above learning socialization in prison.

I lean toward the view that schools are not a good place to learn socialization.

Unfortunately for my older son, neither situation has worked terribly well for us. At home, he was lonely during the day. Our attempts to get involved with things like scouts, sports, and lessons very often did not go well. We had the best run of luck with scouts, but my son often saw the badge-earning activities as being a waste of time. He always participated fully at events, but he was seldom interested in earning badges outside of the meetings. Without badges, you can't advance. Unfortunately, the scouting system is tied in so closely to schools that there really is no such thing as individual advancement.

Public and private school have been nothing short of a nightmare. My son easily is overwhelmed by sensory issues in large groups, and his behavior falls apart when he is overstimulated. He has managed to make a couple friends, and his ability to control his behavior has improved with time. Unfortunately, he has not found many people who share his love of reading. In fact, he complains almost daily that he hears people talking about how reading is stupid.

Many gifted specialists discuss grade acceleration or skipping. Because of my son's learning disabilities and difficulties, our efforts to do something similar in our schools have been unsuccessful. We live in a town that is big enough to have options such as public versus private school, but it is not big enough to have a good set of special programs set aside for the gifted.

My conclusion is that there is just no good way to socialize a child with my son's unique (in my town) set of giftedness and learning disabilities. I have been told that there are programs in bigger cities that might accomodate such a child. I have hoped until now that we would be able to find a working option for my son, but I am now seriously considering moving to a bigger city.

If I had my choice...

2008-04-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

I have tried several educational options for my older son. He's attended private and public school, we homeschooled, and he took distance education courses.

It's very difficult to determine what an "all over the place" kid needs from his education. Because of this, I view homeschooling as the ideal option. Unfortunately, doing this without a support group is like doing trapeze without a net (almost). I spent a lot of time reading the Mensan Homeschooling discussion group on Yahoo, but there was no one locally with whom I could swap notes. This was isolating for my son as he had very few friends.

Curriculum as a homeschooler is very fluid, but I found drawbacks to almost every method. I remember a year of homeschooling where I came up with a lot of matching games for him to play in order to learn facts from the "What Every Nth Grader Needs to Know". He enjoyed that, but it was very time intensive for me.

We tried boxed curriculum. My son devoured everything related to English and History in a couple weeks but would not touch other items. I honestly don't feel it was a waste because he did spend time reading good quality books, but we didn't use about 3/4 of the materials.

Distance education courses were good both because the content can be chosen for the appropriate level and they tend to be clear about expectations. The big drawback to these is their very high cost.

The process of finding the "correct" curriculum can be both time-consuming and expensive. I'm sure, however, that this is cheaper than private school and probably cheaper than public school. Public school requires parents to buy materials, lunch tickets, bus tickets, gym clothes...and then there is all that expensive testing that must be done to show that you do have a gifted child. As far as testing is concerned, you get what you pay for.

The Renzulli Method

2008-04-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

Identification of gifted children within school systems usually involves three elements that overlap ... In this widely used model, developed by Renzulli and Smith (1980), a child is identified to participate in a gifted program only when these three element overlap substantially. Another way of stating the Renzulli model is that superior ability, itself, is not enough - there must also be high motivation to use that ability, and it must be expressed in creative ways, or to an unusual degree. Because it insists on the clear expression of giftedness, use of the Renzulli model overlooks many gifted children who, for a variety of reasons, are unable or unwilling to demonstrate their talents in the ways being measured. For example, gifted children with cerebral palsy, learning disabilities or hearing and vision impairments are often not identified as gifted.

-Webb, Meckstroth, and Tolan, "Guiding the Gifted Child: A Practical Source for Parents and Teachers."

I'm not sure why teachers think that gifted children should also be highly motivated (to follow the teacher's agenda) or that a child must be creative to be identified. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the creative aspect needs to be creative in a way that is appropriate to school employees who are not familiar with giftedness.

What is more disturbing, however, is that if you have a child who is lacking in either creativity or motivation, often proof that a child is gifted is viewed with disbelief. I'm not sure if these children create such a negative impression of themselves that teachers are unwilling to believe, that giftedness isn't as important as conformity for these teachers, or if the teachers simply cannot move beyond their preconceived notions of giftedness including creativity and the even more important motivation factor.

Once you have reached that point, teachers no longer believe parents. They will only believe people who have letters after their names and can write big, fancy reports. Even then, they usually have a lot of reservations about viewing a child as gifted.

What's wrong with you?

2008-04-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

I sometimes fantasize that a mentally-handicapped child would look at a person and say, "What's wrong with you?"

I fantasize about this because normal people do it to the gifted all the time. A gifted person is, by nature, significantly different than the average person. However, the bigger the difference from the average, the stronger the perception that there is something wrong with the gifted person.

I have two sons, both gifted, but one has learning disabilities. I find it interesting that people recognize the gifted child as such (so far), but the gifted/LD child is not perceived as gifted by most people. Some of his scores are in the exceptionally or profoundly gifted areas, which gives him a lot of quirks. However, his quirks and learning disabilities are the first things that people notice about him.

Usually their reaction to him is, "What's wrong with you?"

I so often want to reply that there is nothing wrong with him, that it is the average person who is really lacking. They don't experience the world in the intense ways a gifted child does. The gifted child has an inability to curb his desire to learn and imagine. The gifted child sees everything, catches the details, wants to know more. They can't just settle for letting the world pass them by.

I wish people understood that there's nothing wrong with a gifted child: it's the rest of us who really are missing out on the richness of our surroundings, whose imaginations are seriously limited.

Unfortunately, most people don't see it that way. They don't know what they're missing and don't seem to care. The idea that there could be more to an experience than what they perceive is viewed as dysfunction.

The Beginning

2008-04-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

Most parents of gifted children go through a similar process of discovering that their children are different from others and that the schools won't necessarily recognize or support the needs of their children. Early delight in their precocious, engaging newborns and toddlers turns to confusion and worry as other people point out problems with the children or the children themselves don't conform to everyone else's expectations. These worried parents find themselves having to become activists and advocates for their children through self-education, assessments, and considerable time and effort. Much of this is done on their own and leaves them feeling tremendous frustration, uncertainty, and loneliness. Finally, when they've done everything they can to help their children, most can only cross their fingers and hope that they've made the right choices.

-Deborah L. Ruf, "Losing our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind"

This sums up the lives of parents of the gifted. When you throw in a learning disability, the problem is multiplied.