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Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.
One common problem gifted kids face is that they, and those around them, place too much importance on being smart. Such an emphasis can breed a belief that bright people do not have to work hard to do well. Although smart kids may not need to work hard in the lower grades, when the work is easy, they may struggle and perform poorly when the work gets harder because they do not make the effort to learn. In some cases, they may not know how to study, having never done it before. In others, they simply cannot accept the fact that some tasks require effort [see “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids,” by Carol S. Dweck; Scientific American Mind, December 2007/January 2008].
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Add CommentI would like to see the research that is the basis for Mr. Fischer's statement that "most highly gifted children are better off if they largely remain in the grade with other children their age." The research that I have seen indicates the opposite is true. While some students may face the difficulties of the one fourth-grader he described, research studies on acceleration have generally found it to be positive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a nice summary of the research at: http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Deceived/ND_v2.pdf
"Educational acceleration is one of the cornerstones of exemplary gifted education practices, with more research supporting this intervention than any other in the literature on gifted individuals," according to the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC). According to A Nation Decieved, "acceleration is the most effective curriculum intervention for gifted children." They further state that, for bright students, "acceleration has long-term beneficial effects, both academically and socially." Rather than helping gifted children reach their potential, Fischer is perpetuating harmful myths about acceleration which have absolutely no basis in research. That he is doing so under the guise of being an "expert" in the field is shameful.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am also very puzzled about the author's comment that "most highly gifted children are better off if they largely remain in the grade with other children their age." This flatly contradicts the conclusion reached by hundreds (literally) of research studies. The benefits from acceleration, both social/emotional and academic for appropriately selected students are simply no longer in question. The research-based position paper of the (American) National Association for Gifted Children recommends that acceleration options be available to students at every level of learning. See http://www.nagc.org/index.aspx?id=383.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe author touts his own "enrichment" program as an alternative, but doesn't provide any evidence that it is effective. Common sense suggests any benefits are limited. Two hours a week is not very long when students must spend five days a week in classrooms with children of the same age who learn at a slower rate.
I wonder what sort of peer review this article received, given the author's self-interest in promoting his own program and its highly misleading description of what we know about gifted education.
Most highly gifted children crave stimulation more than anything. They are not lazy, they are imprisoned in a classroom where everyone else is learning 11+13 and they are doing powers of ten in their heads. Enrichment means they are supposed to play along with such idiocy six hours a day and then do 111+130 as "extra enrichment" during their evenings. There is no ideal solution for most highly gifted children, but a necessary component is give them something challenging, and then give them encouragement. That too often means homeschooling as a release from the "sit in your chair bored out of your mind 6 hours a day for 13 years, and then maybe we'll let you use all those skills you never had occasion to develop, in college" mindset. Age-mates can be found in sports leagues or other games, but only if the child feels comfortable with them. Too often they have nothing in common.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChristian Fischer did the gifted community and those who serve them a disservice. The author, who claims to be a gifted expert, chose not to base his published opinions on the 80 years of research, from Terman and Hollingworth through Gross and Colangelo, which show only positive or non-negative results from acceleration, which can occur in over a dozen different forms, from full grade to subject acceleration, from early entrance to kindergarten to early entrance to college, plus mentoring and other ways. A current, FREE volume including all the research and an easy-to-read executive summary is available complements of the Templeton Foundation, just search on A Nation Deceived www.nationdeceived.org.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisResearch shows that differentiation, though well-meant by many teachers, almost never happens in the quantity or quality that the teachers intend or the students require. Visit UConn's NRC/GT www.gifted.uconn.edu/nrcgt/ for much differentiation research.
Even Renzulli's enrichment programs function on the assumption that the gifted child is already placed in an academically appropriate classroom for the majority of the day, which may very well NOT be the age/grade classroom.
Underachieving gifted children may do so for many reasons. Trained laziness, enforced by years and years of inappropriate age/grade education is certainly one cause, but there are many other causes. Assuming that there can only be one cause for underachievement is a frightening opinion, especially for the learning disabled gifted child.
And Fischer fails to consider the social / emotional damage that will likely be suffered by the highly gifted child (who he mixes in with the moderately gifted child without notice) who is forced to stay in the age/grade classroom and serve the socially impossible role of "tutor." How can a 5 or 8 or even 12 year-old be expected to serve as assistant teacher in the classroom, then go out onto the playground or sports field and suddenly become a social peer to the other children?
Articles like this, based only on personal opinion and old wive's tales, do far more harm than good for these children. Worse, Fischer was likely one of these children once. What happened to him in school, and how will his opinion will become when he tries to educate his own child in the age/grade system?
Mr. Fischers statement favoring placement of highly gifted children with age peers ignores a large body of research supporting acceleration. The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, in over 30 years of research, has found that acceleration has been shown to be an appropriate practice for meeting the needs of academically talented students; as a way to keep these students motivated and appropriately challenged. There is no evidence to support the notion of negative social and emotional consequences of acceleration for talented students as a whole.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMr. Fischer also perpetuates the negative stereotype of highly gifted children as social misfits, and indirectly condones the bullying of gifted children. He uses the example of a boy who is bullied because he bragged about being smart. In fact, highly gifted children are frequent targets of bullying, simply because they are so smart. Recent research at Purdue University found that by eighth grade, more than two thirds of gifted students have been victims of bullying. Social difficulties are not individual shortcomings as Mr. Fischer implies; they are a result of developmental asynchrony common to highly gifted children. Highly gifted children need help to find friends who understand them and share common interests and who are not threatened by their intellect; these friends are not easy to find among age peers. The highly gifted child will typically have no intellectual peers and endure both boredom and bullying when kept at grade level. Highly gifted children who find older intellectual peers (or other highly gifted age peers) can experience increased self-esteem, not feeling inferior in every other realm as the article states.
The first part of the article sounded promising, but when the author fell back on the old myth about acceleration being harmful and backed it with the canonical anecdote of a kid who reached puberty later than his peers and became a social misfit, he lost all credibility. As if all kids magically reached puberty simultaneously!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnrichment is good, acceleration is good, subject acceleration is good, mixed-age classrooms are good. They are all useful tools to meet the kid where they are and bring them forward. The key is to find the appropriate level of challenge to keep the kids interested and learning. Limiting one's tools because of blind faith in one's favorite tool is stupid. When all you have is hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
I concur with the comments of my colleagues above. The research base is strongly in support of the use of a wide variety of acceleration strategies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAdditionally, the author has ignored the (research-supported) issue that much of what is offered in schools as "enrichment" is not truly enriching nor appropriate for the needs of the gifted child. Frequently, what is offered is fun-and-games worksheets which are still designed around the skills which the child has already mastered, or which represent only a trivial increase in difficulty. Another inappropriate but common offering is a set of one-shot activities which may be interesting and challenging, but which do not represent a coherent, well-thought-out alternative or extended curriculum which would enable students to grow in their depth of understanding and performance over time. I am a strong supporter of lateral enrichment, but it must be designed and implemented in a thoughtful manner, with an understanding of the characteristics of the individual gifted learner. Few teachers have the specialized training and experience needed to develop this kind of curriculum, nor are most provided the time and resources needed to implement the good ideas they do have.
This article was very disappointing in its perpetuation of mythology and its ignorance of the vast body of research on the effectiveness (both academic and social-emotional) of different acceleration strategies for gifted learners. I am surprised that the editorial board did not consult with other experts in the field before promulgating such ill-informed and potentially harmful ideas.
Jan at lassie@smnet.net
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had many thoughts while reading Coaching the Gifted Child especially about my experience as a "smart child" years ago. My rather unique situation was comprised of parents who were very bright but suffered from serious personality disablilties. My mother, upon receiving reports from my teachers that I was far ahead of classmates, would punish me by stating that "I would be sorry for no one liked a smart child and that no man would have me" as I was doubly cursed with a high I.Q and taller than most girls .
This pattern of abuse was ignored by my father who only wanted to keep my mother calm and off her warpath so his response was to sit me on his knee and beg me not to upset her. I could not control my active mind so I learned (like Huck Finn) to stay out of the house and out of her reach. The result was that by the age of 6, I was dragging my beloved books to the most remote areas outside the home I could find and settling in to read in peace. When I would return at dinnertime, I would find that she had either destroyed or hidden my elaborate tinker toy creations or ripped pages from a particular much loved book. This behaviour of hers escalated until I reached high school age and learned to change my report card grades to C's and D's so that she would sign them.
My problem was that I did not know she was mentally ill and, discovering that fact and the price I paid is still an ongoing process to this day. I appreciated Christian Fischer's article but would like to express my reaction that no one can ever understand the "dark side" of being smart and the truly mind-boggling inventive methods a child like me was able to come up with in order to protect my "gift" from such wrath.
I totally agree with Hoagies and the other comments. I've studied giftedness and gifted education for over 10 years. I's like to add that "enrichment" is usually just a scam to make educators feel good. There is not enough time spent, the work is not challenging enough and who waqnts to go to more school on top of the long days you have already sat through? Frequently even in school "enrichment" just means more work and the stigma of leaving class weekly. Far more important, is the social and emotional coaching these children need to deal with asynchronous development. The Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG) is an organization dedicated to what I believe is the foremost challenge in rasing a gifted child.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am the parent of two gifted learners. We are fortunate that our local school system offers a "GT" program that keeps kids within their age groups while challenging them with materials suited to their abilities. It also accounts for the differing learning styles exhibited by humans (spatial, experiential, kinesthetic, etc.). While there seems to be no ideal solution (individuals with high abilities do not easily fit into a third party analysis), this approach of acceleration and enrichment has worked very well for my gifted learners. One thing the author fails to mention: gifted learning begins with encouragement and challenge outside the classroom. Learners who are encouraged will remain lifelong learners regardless of the schemes conceived by non-gifted "educators".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs someone who participated in an "accelerated" environment and skipped one grade in school (luckily not the two that the school wanted), I can provide anecdotal support for the idea that skipping does indeed inject amazingly difficult social challenges into the life of a child who already has been labeled different. My education, insofar as knowledge is concerned, did not suffer as such, but it has taken years for me to adjust socially and avoid compensating for being different.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was also part of a study in the early-mid 1980's by a researcher in Princeton University that may also provide more proof for the doubters of the social difficulties inherent in acceleration. It was found in that study that a majority of those kids who did skip a grade did not complete high school in that environment. (I no longer have details, sorry)
When I was a kid, my parents chose enrichment over acceleration. Inevitably all that meant was that I spent half the day learning cool things with kids much older than me, but then was expected to go back to my regular classroom and learn "the basics" and get along with kids my own age. I ended up performing poorly in my regular classroom and wasn't very successful at making friends with kids that everyone kept telling me I was better than. By 5th grade, I had been slowed down enough to put me right back on track with everyone else my age. If I ever need to make the same decision on my own kids someday, I will most likely choose acceleration.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I entered kindergarten, my IQ was found to be 3.5 SDs above the mean. My parents were presented with the option of putting me two years ahead in school, but chose to keep me with children my age, having been swayed by the argument that I would likely suffer more from social awkwardness than from intellectual stifling. I feel certain this was the wrong decision.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs it turned out, I was small for my age, most of my classmates considered me peculiar for my constant reading, my family moved to new school districts many times, and as a final absurdity, I reached puberty well after most of my class. All of these things served to undermine whatever healthy social development a child would be expected to gain directly from growing up with a group of like-minded peers.
But even in first and second grades, before these problems surfaced, I was getting myself in trouble for disruptive behavior that originated in extreme boredom and impatience to learn. Somehow in all this I came to believe my only value as a person was contained in my intelligence. During about half of the years I spent grinding -- or being ground -- through public schools, I was involved in a one- or two-hour per week "gifted students" class, which usually brought together children at incompatible levels of development, much as the "slow children" of several grades were lumped together for an intervention whose effectiveness was surely just as haphazard.
The author of the article points out that gifted children may not learn to study. I did not. I also skipped most homework assignments and hoped to make up the difference with high test scores. My grades were often in inverse relation to my interest in a subject, as I was more frustrated with what I saw as poor teaching when I had a fondness for the subject.
I would point to the education of Terence Tao, professor of math at UCLA and widely recognized as one of the smartest people living, as an excellent pattern for dealing with children who show very high aptitudes. He was placed in classes according to his demonstrated ability in that subject. Thus at some point he was studying various subjects along with 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th grade students in the same day. And as he moved ahead in his mastery of a subject, he would be moved into a higher grade level in that subject. He is a very kind and modest person with a family of his own, and a hugely valuable contributor to our civilization. How would it have all worked out if he was -- in a real sense of the word -- held back?
While this article gives good advice in some regards, I wish that it had mentioned the role of subjects like art and music for enrichment and stimulation of children's minds. Math and chess and debate are all good mental excercises, but the arts can be equally important as well. And art can give a good solid outlet for the more rebellious sorts of gifted children, especially as they near the teenage years, to express the ways in which they're different from those around them in a positive light. I think sometimes children are too limited by our modern focus on mathematical achievement as a means towards making more money (what most people consider success).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReading through some of the comments here has me thinking more about my own experience as a gifted child in an American public school system. It does seem as though I, and the other brilliant children I knew, were actively punished from time to time, or at least that's how it seemed as a child. As soon as my first testing scores came out early on, I was whisked out of the classroom with children I had known for several years, and isolated with two complete stranger children who weren't my age. I never had close personal friends in that school again, and for the most part the "special material" I was given in the private classroom was just fun and games play work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLater by middle school age, it seemed as though I could pick out the most intelligent kids in school just by how much time they'd spent in "in-school suspension", where I also spent a lot of my time. I would get sent off to a special isolation room as punishment for insubordination, where I was no longer allowed to work on my school work but instead resorted to reading a Webster's dictionary page by page to pass the hours. (My husband, a brilliant man who went through the same thing, has also read the whole dictionary for the same reason). Once I was evicted from the classroom for correcting my teacher during a lecture in biology class (I was right).
Years later we have "No child left behind", which my mother (a schoolteacher) also referred to as "No child gets ahead"...
Back in Elementary School, some of my friends and I were subject to an enrichment program, that, in my opinion worked excellently (despite the opinions of many commenters). It was called the "Challenge" program and it worked like this: every day, or nearly every day, the other Challenge students and I would leave our normal, boring classes and visit the Challenge Office. In there, we were allowed to be creative and release all of the intellectual energy we stored up during the normal school day. The Challenge teacher would assign us (about 5 or 6 kids in my grade) a project to work on for a couple weeks. One fun project was the creation of a board game involving any topic we wanted, or the creation of a fantasy island populated with any creatures we could imagine. The Challenge teacher also provided us with high-level books that were written at a level much too difficult for the normal students. In short, the program worked very well and gave an opportunity for my classmates and me to explore our intellectualism. After Elementary school there were separate classes for children of different level of intelligence, so the Challenge program became less important. Starting in 7th grade, however, I was the subject of a rare acceleration program, where I was placed in a science class with students a year older than me. By 8th grade, I was taking a 9th grade level course at the local High School and I believe that also helped me expand my mind, but I am very glad that it didn't happen back in Elementary school. By 7th grade, everyone (or nearly everyone) is socially adept and emotionally powerful enough to interact with older children. In Elementary school, the difference between 2nd grader and 3rd grader or 4th grader is too immense to be taken lightly and the Challenge program is the smarter option.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you for sharing your experience, Zanna. Now that I think of it, there was never a year without a trip to the school principal's office for me, and my smartest friends tended to be angry and frustrated people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou make a good point about excessive focus on building measurable cognitive skills that will correlate with high SATs and the eventual possibility of working on Wall Street. In high school I started playing rock guitar so that I could vent without hurting anyone, and through a number of twists, became an opera singer. A very smart friend, on the other hand, rejected self-expression as weakness, pushed himself to maximize GPA and SAT numbers, got into the country's most exclusive school and graduated impressively in a terribly difficult subject. But he didn't stop being angry, as far as I can tell.
Imagine a really gifted child in a classroom directed by Christian Fischer. "Let me help you avoid the laziness trap." It sounds like Hell.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost public school teachers aren't much above average, and if they really want to understand the predicament of gifted children, they should spend a year in "special ed." Why a whole year? Because otherwise they wouldn't get to feel hopelessly trapped.
Schools love to define "gifted" at around the 75th percentile, so they can "balance" programs with non-Asian minorities. It's still equivalent to trapping an average child in "special ed."
Gifted children can almost always educate themselves more efficiently than politically correct, over-designed programs which are inevitably out of sync with almost all of them, and the only arguments for keeping them anywhere in the public schools are social, rather than educational. "Society will punish you for escaping from this prison."
Instead of yet another round of testing yet another batch of educational methodologies for gifted children, it would be infinitely more useful to allow a large sample of them more or less complete freedom to educate themselves, providing them with tools of their own choosing, and test them afterward on a few subjects that they choose. Besides dispensing with the myth of "general education," which the abject ignorance of almost everyone about almost everything exposes every day, this experiment would support deeper questions about the situation of gifted children in the public schools. Should they be there?
Now this question is answered affirmatively by so-called researchers in the field, as a given, but it's only self-evident for a self-perpetuating bureaucracy which includes almost nobody who is equipped to understand gifted children on any level.
As other posters have mentioned, the research literature, as reviewed in _A Nation Deceived_ shows rather convincingly that acceleration, including full-grade acceleration, is, in general, a positive decision for most gifted kids who have had that experience. That does not mean that all gifted kids should be accelerated (the same authors, in the Iowa Acceleration Scales manual, detail the considerations that should militate against full-grade acceleration). Nor does it guarantee that there will be no poor outcomes for some kids. There are two logical mistakes being made by this poster, which are the same two logical mistakes being made by many decision-makers:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this[br]
First, they assume that since a small number of gifted kids have negative outcomes from acceleration (most usually because they knew one kid who... or because they were themselves one kid who...), that this must be true for all gifted kids. They overgeneralize from insufficient data. Statistical results show that, while no one can guarantee a good outcome, that, if the decision to accelerate is made thoughtfully and the receiving teachers are sympathetic, the chances for positive outcomes are high.
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Second, they assume that all bad experiences that take place after the grade acceleration must have been the [i]result[/i] of that acceleration. (This is the [i]post hoc, ergo propter hoc[/i] fallacy.) Remember, we have no way of knowing what kinds of experiences the child would have had at that time or at other times if he had [i]not[/i] accelerated. The decision to [i]not[/i] accelerate is just as much an intervention [i]to[/i] accelerate. Often, we see kids who are at risk for poor social-emotional outcomes regardless of grade placement; rather than focus on the grade placement itself, the focus should be on helping them develop the social-emotional skills and resources that will help them be successful in [i]any[/i] grade placement.
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My own personal anecdote, by the way, is that a two-year grade acceleration (I skipped 9th and 10th grades) and a change of school (from a tiny private school to a large suburban public school) [i]solved[/i] a long-standing social-emotional problem, as well as providing me with appropriate academic challenge. I do not believe that acceleration is the right answer for every gifted child, but it is crucial that we have it as a tool at our disposal.
I have come to expect well-researched and documented articles from the Scientific American and expected the same from Scientific Mind. I was disappointed with some points of this article. The author has never really lived with or taught gifted children. Each gifted child has unique circumstances and understandings about their world. The author needed to realize that educating and researching the gifted child is complicated - one size does not fit all and each child reacts differently to their special need.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was deeply affected by Jan who was commanded to deny her giftedness as she grew up. I can't imagine having to do this because the people I most trusted told me to. It wasn't until my husband was 40 years old when he learned that he had voluntarily denied his giftedness just to fit in. This is a common characteristic among gifted children whose environments did not provide for their intellectual and social/emotional needs. He and others have developed grave misunderstandings of one's ability, perceptions and well being. Some will never come to realize what my husband and Jan have.
We must look at each gifted individual carefully and determine their educational and social/emotional needs. And no, a gifted child is not gifted only two hours a week or one day a week as some public education programs insist. They don't always have to be with their academic peers or age peers but they always need support, understanding and challenge.
Oh, BTW, when these children grow up, most learn that being gifted doesn't mean special treatment in the real world. As educators and researchers, we must be aware that our programs do not build false foundations that crumble down as the young gifted adults works their way through life.
My brother and I were both Identified as gifted. I was for a few years part of a GATE program- and it was full of gifted children my age - it was the best experience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOutside of those classes it was a hard fit with others. Later when placed with older students more on my academics- the emotional pitfalls were severe at times. I was rejected for being younger and they pounded my inexperience in other areas as being stupid- like dating and kissing and childish things like that.
I think her point is well made. It is precarious all around. The best is clearly being advanced curriculum wise WITH peers!
I have two sons that are highly gifted and dyslexic. The gifted program at the schools was a one day a week joke really. They had enough in the grade for a full class. Instead most of the week he was bored- and reprimanded for correcting the teacher.
I switched him to a Charter School that was suppose to offer more in science. Alas even in a 3rd/4th grade mix he was bored. The school spent more effort doing remedial math for slower children. (He even challenged the 4th grade science presentation of the screw arguing it shouldn't be classed as a simple machine- because it was an inverted plane around a cone.) That is when I knew the school could not fix our challenges.
I then enrolled him in k-12 curriculum through Ohio Virtual Academy. He can socialize in many venues with children his own age and progress on his own schedule. The curriculum is a HUGE jump forward from the public brick and mortar schools immediately. IE their science is sooo ahead (IE they teach a current version of the periodic table, and introduce it as early as 3rd grade)They even have a wonderful support group for gifted students and parents.
I see her point as well rounded and fair. I felt the kick backs of being with older children and felt more alienated than being with average children my age. In an age of , as it was already well said, "no child gets ahead" Charter Schools and Virtual Schools are powerful choices to consider for the issues raised in the article.
Quote:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The programs and suggestions described here demonstrate that what highly gifted students need most are good mentors to serve as guides as they navigate complex subject matter. This specialized learning process benefits not only the gifted children but others as well: when the participating students share the fruits of their labors, the rest of their class also reaps the reward of learning something new."
endquote
Sounds like universities -- or how they used to be considered until everyone and their uncle was let in for any reason and began arguing about grades, etc. and they had to standardize everything. People who know how to study, get good grades, can get through the system by competing for grades without really liking learning or caring about what they learn (which is necessary to be creative & productive). They become teachers and make the problem worse by making their cirriculum around what they see as normal. Meanwhile the tiny percentage of people we really need to get through college and become professors are left without the study or competitive political skills to get by and are screened out in effect.
Remember that the we invented universities because we valued learning. If you are in college, but would not be there without the potential for monetary or political gain, then you should not be there. With grade schools, they should allow gifted kids the option of guided independent study. I used to stay home from school in High school to read physics books, lol. I belonged to the physics book club. THAT was MUCH more interesting!
This sounds great! I used to HATE when they would teach us the (simplified) WRONG stuff early on, then later we would learn the truth... The "No child left behind" initiative leaves out one thing -- the MOST IMPORTANT students for the future of us all - -the gifted. Leaving THEM out is the worse crime!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne of the greatest disservices we can do for our "gifted" kids is to put them in a system that labels them as "gifted". Being a proud parent of an extremely intelligent child., a parent is so happy that everyone else sees what he sees in his child that it takes on a life of its own. The child hears "gifted" enough times and to the child it translates into "superior" and "entitled". He learns very quickly that within the typical school system, he doesn't have to work very hard to make the grade - at least until around the time he reaches puberty and middle school. It is at that time the walls can come crashing down. The older the child gets, the more he sees that he is not as unique as he was led to believe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe only answer that I can see is advanced curriculum, with his own peers, combined with as much additional study a parent can offer outside the school system. In addition, other aspects of life much be included, such as athletics and the arts, for example. It is important that these kids be offered as many opportunities to develop other talents and to excel in other areas other than "higher thought". What a spirit-crushing experience it must be to be so singularly-faceted and find that you are not as special as you were told you were.
First and foremost, these kids must be taught - and I mean it must be hammered into their heads early on - that intelligence means nothing without results. In addition, kindness toward and empathy for others is just as, if not more important than IQ. Without hard work and social awareness, these kids may as well be dumb as rocks.
(Contributed by the parent of a now-grown "gifted" [I hate that label] child.)
Sarah..what you described is EXACTLY what my son was going through. He was simply bored and acting out. Now that we have discovered his true potential I anticipate seeing a huge difference in his behavior (thought to be ADHD since age 4 and he's 7 now!!)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI completely agree with this article. I was a very gifted child, I started reading at 2 1/2, Mensa member since age 5, in 1st grade they'd put me into 4th grade for math, etc... I was treated very poorly by my classmates because of my young age, I suffered depression very early on and could often (ahem...daily) be found in the nurses office with a "stomach ache". I found that being singled out as smarter than the other kids made them hate me and being so much younger, I was so much smaller and less mature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am now the mother of a gifted toddler and I will take these recommendations to heart when deciding what is the best approach to dealing with his gifts. I think the idea of extracurricular activities that allow you to exercise your mind are a fantastic idea.
PS. I really wish my parents had never put an emphasis on my high IQ growing up, I think it can be really damaging to tell your children how smart they are. To this day I feel like a failure at most things because it is ingrained in me that I should be able to "accomplish" anything and i'm not particularly amazing at any one thing. I always feel like I am not living up to my potential.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe research base on acceleration is strongly in favor of it--this causes me to doubt much in this paper and folks should read other sources on this material. This paper supports old myths and stereotypes far more than it informs us about current knowledge.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a question for the highly gifted. If you think your education was mismanaged by those in charge, K through grade 12, what do you think should have been different ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would have stayed with my age group and had a mentor/tutor for independent projects in the areas of science and social studies. I had lots of free time during elementary school for research and projects. From 7th - 12th grade, I avoided the wrath of a mother somewhat like Jan's (above Jan at lassie@smnet.net )and stayed away from my parents as much as possible. Had I been smarter, I would have altered my grades as she did, but instead "earned" my low grades by writing notes during class and never doing homework.
As a gifted child, I ran into unusual problems. The primary one was utter boredom. They could not, or would not, challenge me, and I eventually stopped caring. Add to that the social pressures to get along, and not rock the boat, and you've got a recipe for under-achieving. Probably the thing I heard most in school was "Does not perform to his potential" Guess what, there are zero incentives to excel, and a million to act dumb. What a shock we aren't getting the best out of our best.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The child hears "gifted" enough times and to the child it translates into "superior" and "entitled". He learns very quickly that within the typical school system, he doesn't have to work very hard to make the grade - at least until around the time he reaches puberty and middle school. It is at that time the walls can come crashing down. The older the child gets, the more he sees that he is not as unique as he was led to believe."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am pleased that someone brought this up because I am currently networked with my cohort and can contribute some anecdotal data to this discussion. I would say that what you described happened to about one third of us. A good friend of mine said that "gifted" school was the worst thing that ever happened to him growing up--he will be a doctor soon but his scars will never heal. We grew, to a point, and then somewhere the system beat us.
As for the others, some of us stagnated and continue to float through life. Some struggle with an assortment of emotional instabilities. The others have continued to accelerate.
I was always told that when you got older, you began to match your peers in terms of intellectual development; either you slowed down or they caught up. I kept expecting that as I drifted through high school. Then I coasted through an undergraduate degree. And a masters degree. When I reached the doctoral level, I was...surprised and disgusted. Surprised because it was just as easy as it had always been, and disgusted because, as spiralsun1 so eloquently described, it is not supposed to be. The greatest challenge in my entire academic journey is to recreate--for myself--the way University is supposed to be. The institution of higher learning has lost it's way.
Many of my friends, probably another one third of my cohort, have continued to accelerate. They realized that as they mastered the most difficult degrees from the most prestigious institutions, there were whole realms of unexplored territory. Most of us have become very, very good at everything we do. We also have families, jobs, and a sense of humour; we can be artistically gifted, or extraordinary leaders. In a sense, we have become the ideal of the ordinary.
I write this because I get frustrated after reading comments by gifted educators or parents of gifted children who think they have an idea of what is going on. If you are gifted and you are reading this, follow what you know to be true inside, and don't pay too much attention to what the people around you are always telling you.
We should not expect that any education system in any country will catch up with gifted people needs. If, on the average, the kid outsmarts the society, why should the kid expect that the society will understand or care for him? I am quite certain that any of the gifted adults had his/her personal traumas in the childhood, and that there is many traps we can fall into. But we can't blame the others. It's a force of nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEssentially it means that parents should enrich the kids environment and do it wisely, perhaps with the aid of a tutor, so the child can both function in society, not looking down on other people, and succeed academically.
Accelerating creates a false impression that the world will adjust and that we will be adjusted to the world, which is not true. I remember the shock when I finished University and got my first job. It was like grade school again, only the academic problems were harder. I had to learn to live with the society. They were slower, yet I had to respect their experience, their emotions, their complicated relationships. Until then, I just chose friends, books and challenges. Well, I wasn't a perfect student, because there were things like journalism that was more fun than the exams. But at the end, I always managed to get into the top 20.
At work, it wasn't fun anymore. My to-be-PI was making bad science and I recognized it after roughly a year of work, when I started to understand the topic. Yet, I couldn't think of anything better, because I knew enough to recognize mistakes, not to create a project on my own. I got very demotivated. I tried to argue, tried to endure, tried to get other activities not to be bored by work that wasn't going anywhere, and by subterfuge, develop the project into something more interesting, which I had neither experience neither help to do. It ended up with a big feud, me telling my boss that he can't do science, and me being fired. Should I know more about people before, I would leave earlier and not making such a mess.
So yes, the gifted kid has to learn to recognize boredom, to get out of it by his/her own means, to learn people and how to fit in, to learn learning and to be independent - to know when to rebel and how. And get his own stimulation. Because if we can't, no one will do that for us. Not any educational system, accelerating it is or not.
Elitist classes "just for gifted" are very bad, they create false impression about the world. When you realize nobody read 90% of your favourite-must-read-absolute-canon novels, you are lonely.
Excuse me for my English, I am not native :)
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