"Excelling" in school looks different for (some) gifted learners, and I'm not sure that difference is one we want to encourage.
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| photo credit inwallspeakers |
What it would have looked like for us:
A student who dumbed himself down, in order to keep pace with the class. I'm not saying that the rest of the class is dumb, but I am saying that my son has a very different pace of learning than most students. The statistics say that most learners require 7-9 repetitions before they learn something new. A gifted learner usually needs 1-3 repetitions, and I joke that my profoundly gifted student needs about 0.75 repetitions. Yes, not even a full one. He usually finishes the teacher's thought and makes about five different leaps by the time the teaching point is fully developed. In 5th grade, when he was finally set free to do math at his own pace, he raced through 6-8 grade math in a month, then pre-algebra, algebra 1, and geometry in 9 months. That's 6 years' worth of math in the equivalent of one school year.
A student who may get straight As, but isn't learning. We have seen so many examples of this through the years - the student who "performs" well, but for whom learning is done in the off-hours, or not at all. This was me in school, also. I had nearly straight As through high school, but most of the work was done in the class after or the class before. I never studied for tests until the class prior to the test, which tells me that I wasn't paying much attention in that class, either. But still, As in all of my honors, College Prep, and Advanced Placement classes. But is that what we want? Every student deserves to learn, but I don't consider treading water to be learning. I see it in the Teenlet even in our homeschool curriculum - we do not pressure him (much) about grades, but we do expect a level of excellence in his comprehension. If he takes a test and gets a B or C, it really doesn't matter much to us because he can explain the concepts to us, which is far more difficult than taking a test. (I realize that eventually, he will have to learn to be careful on tests so he doesn't make so many "silly" mistakes, but that will come as he is exposed to more and more external learning sources.)
A student whose passions get lost, because none of his "peers" are interested in the same things. I think this is the most discouraging thing about the push to excel "in school" - the loss of passion. We still have administrators who tell us the Teenlet shouldn't be allowed to participate in college-level courses because he is "too young" and he will be with students who are so much older than he is. Yes, this could be a problem. But these students have something in common with the Teenlet - an interest, a passion, a way of looking at the world - and they have the intellectual ability to connect with him over those interests, in a way that very few other 8th graders can. For his whole life, the Teenlet has preferred to discuss his ideas with adults than with kids his own age. I've watched him, time and again, playing with classmates or same-age friends, start engaging his creative imagination only to have the other kids walk away because they can't go there with him. Even some adults respond to him with, "I can't talk to you because you're too smart for me." It's really tragic to see a child's world shrink so much that they lose interest in their passions because there is nobody else with whom they can share them. Pushing a child to "excel in school" can stifle the creative imagination.
Is that what we want for our gifted learners?
This post is presented as part of the New Zealand Gifted Awareness Week's blog tour. Find other intriguing posts here.
