I gave a definition of what I think constitutes gifted in regards to this blog in part 1. I ended with frequent objections and misconceptions of what is meant by gifted in the guise of education. Here are my responses to each.
All kids are gifted. Yes. I agree. I believe that all kids have their particular set of traits and talents that deserve to be honored, honed, and allowed to blossom. The problem here is one of terminology. A gifted artist. She has the gift of gab. A gifted athlete. A child with talent in the art studio or on the soccer field and deserves the opportunity to grow in this area of talent. A child with a talent for making friends and responding to the feelings of others is someone who should be honored for these abilities and made to feel good about them, and will hopefully be guided in developing leadership skills.
What is a parent of a gifted soccer player or a gifted artist to do? These parents will find themselves purchasing practice goals for the backyard, finding a traveling soccer team with a professional coaching staff. When the child reaches middle school or high school, the child will likely be a starting playing on the school team. The parent of the gifted artist will likely find themselves setting up a corner of the house with art supplies, seeking out art classes outside of school, frequenting the local art museum, and bemoaning the low level of art instruction at school.
Just as a gifted athlete may pick up new skills on the soccer field more quickly than the average kid, a child who is gifted will likely pick up new skills in the classroom more quickly than the average kid. I’m aiming this blog at those these fast learners, those that tend to go more deeply into the academic content presented in school, and those that tend to make rapid connections between lessons, often without the assistance of the teacher.
The parents suffer from the snowflake syndrome.
Well, duh, that’s our job. Our kids are born unique. We raise our children to honor their individuality, and every time we see that spark from our child’s intellect and talents, we want to shout it from the rooftops. As parents, who can blame us?
So what’s the difference between loving the uniqueness of our children, and advocating for the individual needs of our children? If you are advocating for a child as a special snowflake for the sake of a special snowflake, reexamine your motives. However, when discussing real issues with a school, go in with evidence and data showing how your child has unique needs not directly met by the school’s structure. I have plans for posts coming in the next week or so on how to collect this evidence.
I met her kid and he’s no Einstein. Alas, only Albert Einstein can claim to be Einstein.
Here is a problem of vocabulary. The point is defining the level at which it becomes difficult for a child to learn in a classroom. I’m not sure that anyone knows what Albert Einstein’s IQ was, but it was likely well in excess of any school program’s designation. That is, his cognitive ability was likely such that he would have been above the 95th percentile of gifted individuals, or the 95th percentile of the 95th percentile, something exceedingly rare amongst the population (about 1 in a million). However, there is a huge population of children, those that occur in a rate of about 5 in 100, who learn in such a way so as to need educational accommodations to thrive. For a school with a population representative of the broader population, take your child’s class in a given grade. For a typical elementary school, that is probably 50-200 children. I’m addressing those 1-10 kids in that school that are likely struggling to find a fit in their educational environment as a result of their cognitive abilities.
I knew a gifted kid once and his parents pushed him too much. Maybe you do know a kid like that. They’re certainly out there. There are also many kids who push themselves, and what you don’t see is the behind-the-scenes struggle the parents have in teaching their child balance and perspective, while at the same time giving their child appropriate opportunities and challenge.
I knew a kid whose parents thought he was gifted and he certainly didn’t act gifted. Gifted children are, by the Columbus Group definition, are very different from the general population. They can be different from the general population in any number of ways. Therefore, a gifted child is likely to be more different than another gifted child than they are from the norm, particularly if the manner of giftedness is different. This is a big problem when the teacher is saying this, particularly when teachers act as gatekeeper for differentiated or gifted services. These situations are when the need for careful advocacy from the parent is necessary. Often the biggest hurdle for affecting change in your child’s education is in overcoming the preset ideas of the teacher with respect to giftedness and the needs of the gifted.
IQ isn’t important, it’s work ethic. YES. I agree 100 percent. I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, what leads to success in life are qualities like persistence, organization, and follow through. This is something that’s recently been given some attention with Angela Duckworth’s discussion of grit. A lot of grit is persisting to get something done. To do this, an individual must know that they can figure something out eventually, understand that treating others with respect is of fundamental importance, meeting a deadline with a job well done beats an overly done assignment completed weeks past the deadline. When a child is taught about deadlines, persistence, organization, and all these skills in school, and the child is challenged at an appropriate level so that these ideals can become ingrained, then hopefully this individual will become successful.
However, when a child learns so much more quickly than the teacher expects, often times these skills fail to be developed. Children who hear “good job on this assignment, wow, you’re really smart” instead of “good job on this assignment, I like how you tackled that hardest part and persisted” will learn to think that their smarts got them where they are instead of their grit. This works for the child well enough until they are met with something that’s not so simple for them. The logical conclusion for that child to draw is that they just found the limits of their smarts, or that they aren’t that smart after all.
Next planned post: defining your priorities
All kids are gifted. Yes. I agree. I believe that all kids have their particular set of traits and talents that deserve to be honored, honed, and allowed to blossom. The problem here is one of terminology. A gifted artist. She has the gift of gab. A gifted athlete. A child with talent in the art studio or on the soccer field and deserves the opportunity to grow in this area of talent. A child with a talent for making friends and responding to the feelings of others is someone who should be honored for these abilities and made to feel good about them, and will hopefully be guided in developing leadership skills.
What is a parent of a gifted soccer player or a gifted artist to do? These parents will find themselves purchasing practice goals for the backyard, finding a traveling soccer team with a professional coaching staff. When the child reaches middle school or high school, the child will likely be a starting playing on the school team. The parent of the gifted artist will likely find themselves setting up a corner of the house with art supplies, seeking out art classes outside of school, frequenting the local art museum, and bemoaning the low level of art instruction at school.
Just as a gifted athlete may pick up new skills on the soccer field more quickly than the average kid, a child who is gifted will likely pick up new skills in the classroom more quickly than the average kid. I’m aiming this blog at those these fast learners, those that tend to go more deeply into the academic content presented in school, and those that tend to make rapid connections between lessons, often without the assistance of the teacher.
The parents suffer from the snowflake syndrome.
Well, duh, that’s our job. Our kids are born unique. We raise our children to honor their individuality, and every time we see that spark from our child’s intellect and talents, we want to shout it from the rooftops. As parents, who can blame us?
So what’s the difference between loving the uniqueness of our children, and advocating for the individual needs of our children? If you are advocating for a child as a special snowflake for the sake of a special snowflake, reexamine your motives. However, when discussing real issues with a school, go in with evidence and data showing how your child has unique needs not directly met by the school’s structure. I have plans for posts coming in the next week or so on how to collect this evidence.
I met her kid and he’s no Einstein. Alas, only Albert Einstein can claim to be Einstein.
Here is a problem of vocabulary. The point is defining the level at which it becomes difficult for a child to learn in a classroom. I’m not sure that anyone knows what Albert Einstein’s IQ was, but it was likely well in excess of any school program’s designation. That is, his cognitive ability was likely such that he would have been above the 95th percentile of gifted individuals, or the 95th percentile of the 95th percentile, something exceedingly rare amongst the population (about 1 in a million). However, there is a huge population of children, those that occur in a rate of about 5 in 100, who learn in such a way so as to need educational accommodations to thrive. For a school with a population representative of the broader population, take your child’s class in a given grade. For a typical elementary school, that is probably 50-200 children. I’m addressing those 1-10 kids in that school that are likely struggling to find a fit in their educational environment as a result of their cognitive abilities.
I knew a gifted kid once and his parents pushed him too much. Maybe you do know a kid like that. They’re certainly out there. There are also many kids who push themselves, and what you don’t see is the behind-the-scenes struggle the parents have in teaching their child balance and perspective, while at the same time giving their child appropriate opportunities and challenge.
I knew a kid whose parents thought he was gifted and he certainly didn’t act gifted. Gifted children are, by the Columbus Group definition, are very different from the general population. They can be different from the general population in any number of ways. Therefore, a gifted child is likely to be more different than another gifted child than they are from the norm, particularly if the manner of giftedness is different. This is a big problem when the teacher is saying this, particularly when teachers act as gatekeeper for differentiated or gifted services. These situations are when the need for careful advocacy from the parent is necessary. Often the biggest hurdle for affecting change in your child’s education is in overcoming the preset ideas of the teacher with respect to giftedness and the needs of the gifted.
IQ isn’t important, it’s work ethic. YES. I agree 100 percent. I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, what leads to success in life are qualities like persistence, organization, and follow through. This is something that’s recently been given some attention with Angela Duckworth’s discussion of grit. A lot of grit is persisting to get something done. To do this, an individual must know that they can figure something out eventually, understand that treating others with respect is of fundamental importance, meeting a deadline with a job well done beats an overly done assignment completed weeks past the deadline. When a child is taught about deadlines, persistence, organization, and all these skills in school, and the child is challenged at an appropriate level so that these ideals can become ingrained, then hopefully this individual will become successful.
However, when a child learns so much more quickly than the teacher expects, often times these skills fail to be developed. Children who hear “good job on this assignment, wow, you’re really smart” instead of “good job on this assignment, I like how you tackled that hardest part and persisted” will learn to think that their smarts got them where they are instead of their grit. This works for the child well enough until they are met with something that’s not so simple for them. The logical conclusion for that child to draw is that they just found the limits of their smarts, or that they aren’t that smart after all.
Next planned post: defining your priorities