Gifted Mind
Entries from July 1, 2006 - August 1, 2006
Make Mine Romance
An email from Netflix this morning notified me that they had received The White Countess, and would be sending out my next movie. Included in the email was a reminder to check out their recommendations in Romance. What it did remind me of is that such recommendations, whether they're from Netflix, Amazon, or any other site, are based on assumptions about how you make choices. I know that the next few times I go to the Netflix site I'll be greeted by recommendations in the Romance category.
The fact is that I seldom watch romances and when I do, romance isn't the criteria on which I select them. In fact, some of the movies so labeled barely qualify to be included in that category. In the case of The White Countess, my choice was based on the actors (Ralph Fiennes and several of the Redgrave/Richardson clan), and the setting (1930s Shanghai).
What does this have to do with giftedness? Assumptions about the gifted are very much like those that Netflix programs into its recommendation process, based on too little information to have any value. I can ignore a movie site's assumptions about my viewing preferences, but it's not so easy to ignore (or escape) similar assumptions in the real world. What people think of you depends on what they think they know about you, and a good deal of that revolves around what you are capable of doing and what you are allowed to do.
What We Know About Educating the Gifted
“Rejection of the classroom is an international phenomenon and has little to do with whether the schools are public or private, secular or clerical, or with the philosophy of teaching employed in the various schools.” Cradles of Eminence, Victor Goertzel and Mildred Goertzel
“…creative achievers tend to discontinue their education when they feel that they have learned enough to continue on their own. They may simply become bored with formal instruction, or disenchanted with what formal institutions have to offer. …This attitude is clearly expressed by Einstein in a letter… ‘I shall not become a Ph.D. …the whole matter has become a bore to me.’ “ Dean Keith Simonton, in Before the Gates of Excellence, Rena Ochse
“The striking generalization that bubbles up from the MacArthur Fellows' letters (in a survey by the authors) is that our school system, public and private, most often rewards patterns of behavior inappropriate for an independent thinker, researcher, or artist.” Educating Able Learners, June Cox, et al.
Views From the Outside
"The drawing prodigy Eitan, who drew with such brilliance at so young an age, has today, in his twenties, lost his passion for art. At the time of this writing, he plans to go into computer graphics, an occupation only indirectly related to his drawing talent." Gifted Children, Ellen Winner
I never cease being amazed at statements like this and I always wish that I could see into the heads of the experts on giftedness when they come up with these strange viewpoints. Many people have had trouble with the transition of certain skills and areas of expertise to digital form, so perhaps Winner is one of those whose conception of art is so narrow that computer graphics simply can't be regarded as art. Or is something else going on?
Adapt or Die
The world doesn't literally demand that we "adapt or die," but that sometimes seems to be the underlying message. The pressures to fit in, do things the way everyone else does them, and to give up whatever quirky preferences you may have aren't always exactly subtle. But subtle, or obvious, they're always there, nibbling away at confidence and self-esteem. For gifted students and adults, there is no end to the conflict between being who you are and who you need to be, and what the rest of the world wants you to be.
“Gifted youngsters quickly realize that their self-knowledge, the way they know and understand themselves, differs from the way that others see and know them. They thus realize that their real self is hidden from others and they can even be aware of keeping it that way. ” Joyce VanTassel-Baska
Striking a healthy balance between your real self and the public image is part of the maturation process. The open conflicts that are sometimes a part of childhood and adolescence can mellow into the selective use of adaptive camouflage. Walk the fine line between adaptation and personal identity long enough, and it will become something you can do easily and gracefully. The alternative, and one that far too many gifted individuals choose, is to give up who you are and become someone you were never meant to be.
Big Picture or Details?
A question on an online test pointed at what seems to be a simple distinction, whether you tend to pay more attention to details or to the big picture. I wasn't sure how to answer because both are important, depending on the context. But thinking it over, I realized that the big picture is the outcome of choosing which details to pay attention to.
My way of learning about what's going on in the world is to scan news headlines and first paragraphs. When a topic comes up in different contexts and from different perspectives, I get a feeling for what's going on without being burdened by too much detail. Since the details are often trivial and ephemeral, it's more practical to develop a sense of the patterns that are developing and then, if need be, fill in the details from one or two sources.
I thought about this in connection with the complaint I see so often, that people today are overwhelmed by too much information, and unable to sort out the important from the unimportant. This started me on something like a sorting process of my own. A question that came up in my mind was about the reasons for acquiring new information. For me, one reason is related to the difference between participation and observation. I participate less and less in online forums, becoming more of a lurker. I comment less frequently on blogs, even when the subject provokes me to think about something in depth.
A Hierarchy of Needs
In Guiding the Gifted Child, the chapter on motivation includes a discussion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The theory has been thoroughly dissected and criticized over the years, and is still influential, despite its shortcomings. Human needs, for those not familiar with Maslow, develop in the following sequence: physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, need for self-esteem and love, and finally, the need for mental understanding and self-actualization. Maslow’s theory was that lower needs must be met before the person can move on to fulfill the higher ones, and the authors of Guiding the Gifted Child concur.
The authors suggest that failure in some of the earlier needs may be at the root of underachievement in gifted students. Of course, the fulfillment of basic needs is vitally important. Lives can be stunted and twisted by their lack, and this is just as true for even the most highly gifted. And there's no doubt at all that confidence in oneself, which we now prefer to call self-esteem, can make or break an individual's struggle for self-actualization.
Independent Scholarship
I'm reading The Independent Scholar's Handbook for the first time in two or three years, and I find myself dipping here and there and coming up with provocative quotes. Author Gross tells the story of his first post-college job at the publishing house, Simon and Schuster, in New York. He was called into Max Schuster's office, for what was apparently the standard talk for newbies. Schuster told him: "...to choose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or event in history on which you can eventually make yourself the world's supreme expert. Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research, and reflection."
Most intellectually gifted individuals wouldn't have any trouble with the idea of becoming the world's supreme expert on a subject, but I suspect that a lot don't go much further than that, allowing their expertise to enrich their lives as avocation rather than career. The Handbook is about taking an interest to the next level. It can still be an avocation or a lead-in to a career, or something that isn't really either. You don't have to be hampered by the old idea that only a college graduate or a professional in a field can make a worthwhile contribution. The world is full of amateur scholars whose work sometimes provides the basis from which professionals can take off, or even constitutes a new field.
Gross's book was written in the eighties and has never been revised, which is surprising considering that he's still around and writing. The world has gone through immense changes since the original edition, including computers and the internet, both of which tremendously expand the possibilities for independent scholarship. It's an important option for anyone who's felt that they have something to contribute but have let doubts and uncertainties hold them back.
The Independent Scholar's Handbook, Ronald Gross
Patterns and Pattern Seekers
Human pattern detection is tied to survival needs--recognition of foods, weather patterns, and various types of dangers. Our ability to recognize a known individual from some distance away may owe its existence to the need to identify possible enemies before they're close enough to be a danger. These are all concrete forms of pattern detection, tied to the five senses.
What is less common, and vitally important in an increasingly complex world, is the ability to detect more abstract patterns, those that shift and evolve, and which may be obscured by "noise" in the environment. They may seem obvious in hindsight, once someone points them out, but detecting them depends on the ability to discern subtle clues and to ignore distracting elements.
Pattern seeking is not necessarily a voluntary act. For many highly gifted, it is a natural part of how their minds work, and an essential part of their creativity. That's one reason why books purporting to teach creative thinking are little more than crutches, enabling the average person to do in limited ways and under limited circumstances, what creative people do as easily as breathing.
Intellectual Giftedness: the black hole
Catana
in Gifted adults, Intellectual giftedness
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Linda Silverman, whose website, Gifted Development Center, is focused primarily on gifted children, is also responsible for Advanced Development, a series of journals about gifted adults. Out of curiosity, I recently took a look at the two issues I own, and the list of issues to date. The titles of the ten issues which have been published so far are:
Volume 1 - Positive Disintegration
Volume 2 - Models of Integration
Volume 3 - The Possible Human
Volume 4 - The Self
Volume 5 - Valuing the Feminine
Volume 6 - Becoming Authentic
1995 Special Edition on Gifted Adults
Volume 7 - A Kaleidoscope of Creativity
Volume 8 - Counseling Gifted Adults
Volume 9 - Spirituality and Giftedness
Volume 10 - Exploring Intuition
What is remarkable is that in 17 years, (the first journal was published in 1989), there has not been a single issue devoted to intellectual giftedness. Is it possible that this subject has been addressed in issue 7, on creativity? The table of contents lists three poems, a soliloquy, a short story, and seven articles. Two of the articles, "Nuance and Omnivalence in the Creative Mind," and "Intellect as Prelude: The Potential for Higher Level in the Gifted," sound as if they might touch on intellectual giftedness, but I suspect it's no more than a touch.
I've been exploring this issues for several years, and my frustration is now mixed with a sense of irony. Over and over, gifted children are held up as a resource, the potential solvers of problems that baffle humanity. Yet there is virtually no interest in their intellectual development or concern about the effect of that lack on the adults that gifted children eventually become.
Many Faces of Giftedness
1. He said of himself: "When I left the school I was for my age neither high nor low in it; and I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my Father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect." He had such a poor memory that material he memorized one day was gone the next. He was slow at "getting it," needing time to reread and absorb what others seemed to grasp immediately.Yet he turned the world of biology upside down and ignited a controversy that continues to this day, almost 150 years later.
2. His IQ was merely a "respectable" 125. Possibly his scorn for and lack of background in the "finer" subjects like literature outweighed his extraordinary math ability. But he won a Nobel Prize, discovered the cause of a major space disaster, and was considered by his colleagues not only a genius, but a "magician."