Gifted Mind
Entries from October 1, 2007 - November 1, 2007
A Watershed Moment
A large proportion of my life is centered on the internet, which would seem to make me either a geek with no real life, or a loser who escapes real life via the net. There’s a good bit of overlap between the two, and at least a smidgeon of truth. But over the last couple of months I’ve begun to look at the internet in a new way that’s still evolving in my mind.
My impression is that, even for those who recognize the resources available on the web, it’s still not much more than a supplement to “real” education and real life. Real knowledge exists out there in the three dimensional world, and everything on the net runs a poor second. I was past that simplistic notion but I hadn’t gone too much beyond it.
The day that changed was the day I fully understood the niche I’ve been working in for so long, and how important the web has been to its development. I already knew that nobody else was doing what I’ve been doing—creating a unique body of work in a stagnant but important area of knowledge. What I finally realized was that my laboratory has been the internet. Without thinking about it as such, I’ve spent the last few years doing field research, and doing it without all the usual supports (necessities)—grant money, colleagues’ oversight and advice, institutional approval, etc.
And that changes everything. It’s a watershed, in a way that I can’t fully grasp yet. I do know that if I can grasp it—if others can grasp it—it will be a major shift in the way intelligent self-sufficient people conduct their education and their lives. Maybe that’s why it suddenly felt like the right time to build the website.
Acceleration: Does it Make a Difference?
Catana
in Gifted children, Education, Careers, Prodigies, Acceleration
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A subject that I’ve been pondering from many angles is acceleration for highly gifted students. I’m not sure when I became interested in it, but it may have been with my first reading of Accidental Genius. The book is written by Kevin and Cassidy Kearney, the parents of Michael Kearney, an extraordinary prodigy who caught the attention of the media in the 90s. It’s an account of Michael’s accomplishments and his parents’ philosophy, if you can call it that, of raising an enormously gifted child. For me, the book was an appalling illustration of how not to do it. I doubt that Michael’s experiences were typical, but they’ve probably been in the background of my mind every time I’ve read an article on the pros and cons of acceleration.
What I’ve come to believe over the years is that acceleration is an inadequate response to a real need. Its support is rooted in the inadequacy of traditional schooling, but basically follows the same path. As long as acceleration merely means getting through school as quickly as possible, even if it includes the addition of advanced courses, then the ultimate result isn’t going to be significantly different than following the normal curriculum at the normal rate.
Is the Right College Important?
Serendipity strikes fairly often when I’m surfing the net. In a five minute period yesterday I found an article on why the college you go to is less important these days, and then one on a coach who guarantees high school students acceptance by the first college of their choice.
The author of the first article is a partner in an investment firm specializing in small startups. What he learned in the process of interviewing applicants was that he and his partners tended to favor those from prestigious colleges, assuming that they were the smartest and the best qualified to develop and run a business. And that turned out not be be true.
Gifted Education and Women
Pursuing the ideas from the previous post, from a different perspective.
I just read a little book that started me thinking in quite a different way than the author intended. In Where Have All the Smart Women Gone? Alice Rowe discusses her study of 34 college-educated women. Most of them, as might be expected, were in traditional jobs—teacher, nurse, etc. The book deals primarily with feelings—self-esteem, disappointment in relation to their early expectations and plans for themselves, and ambivalence about choices that weren’t freely made. The book’s context is gender—the pressures on women to conform to certain roles, and all the other gender-based limitations that still exist in the 21st century.
But as I read, I started seeing the problems from a different perspective. Many of the complaints actually had nothing to do with gender. Gifted men (I think it’s safe to assume that smart women can usually be considered gifted) express the same thoughts. Rowe said that when the women in her study were young they “heard the message that they could do anything, but they weren’t necessarily given the skills to do it.”
Gifted Education isn’t About Subject Matter
If there is any single thing that prevents the development of a viable approach to teaching the intellectually gifted, it’s the idea that giftedness is all about learning, about subject matter. It’s the central assumption in debates about acceleration and enrichment. It’s central to ideas about achievement. It’s the reason why research and discussions have gone round and round year after year, reproducing what has already been done to death, and producing nothing of value, either to educational theory or to gifted students. Gifted students learn faster, better, more. That’s the essence of gifted education.
How did I come to these conclusions? By using a cognitive skill that I’ve had all my life. Nobody identified it for me; I wasn’t taught how useful it is or shown how to develop it. It’s one of many skills that I had to discover for myself. And I can’t help wondering how my life might have been different if the discovery and development of such skills had been part of my education. How would the lives of hundreds of thousands of intellectually gifted students been different if it had been part of their education?
One Father’s Response to Bad Teaching
was about to write that I stumbled, literally, over a fascinating blog. But does that make sense in a virtual world? I “stumbled” over Astronomy Buff, using the Stumble button on my Stumbleupon toolbar. Literally or not, I’ve been finding a lot of fascinating blogs, web sites, short films, article, you name it, ever since jumping to the luxury of broadband. If my Stumble button was real, it would probably be just about worn out by now.
Back on topic — Tony Darnell, the astronomy buff, decided that he’s going to homeschool his son in science this year. He couldn’t figure out why a kid who loves science and does well at it was consistently getting a C- in his science class. The reason is one that I suspect many parents of gifted children have run into—his grades had nothing to do with his test scores or how well he did his assignments. 80% of his grade was based on filling out his science notebook properly.