"What's the point?"
From the Other Point of View
written 14 July 2000 - 30 August 2000
published in The Communicator,
California Association for the Gifted Fall 2000 Vol. 31, No. 4
republished on Davidson Institute's GT-CyberSource
By Andrew Chen
Everyone seems to be so concerned with how, exactly, gifted children should be educated. You know, the most insulting thing a teacher has ever said to me is "Our job is to teach you how to learn." Now I know that she meant that in earnest, and that is what many teachers believe they are charged with doing, but believe me, that is not necessary. We are designed to learn from the minute we are born. We -- all of us -- are learning machines. For gifted children, especially, learning is like eating candy, and even when it's not a consciously activated process, they learn every waking minute regardless of what's going on. As long as you provide them with plenty to learn, inspire them, and let them do their job, they will become educated.
So let me tell you, then, that is not the most pressing problem I am concerned with. What makes growing up as a gifted child hard is simply surviving through the environment of childhood -- to be emotionally intact at the end of that experience so that your intellect can start doing what it's been preparing for your whole adolescent life. Many times a gifted child will not "fit into" their educational environment. There maybe endless speculations as to why, but the only solution which I have ever seen work is a social one. In fact, I believe that it's not even that important how much measurable learning they do at a place so as long as it's a good experience for them which they enjoy.
Let me first start by telling you about the single best educational experience I ever had. During my freshman year in high school, I took a geometry class in an extracurricular program for "talented youth" that the local community college, the College of Du Page, offered. It was taught by a exceptional teacher named Mr. Samide. Instead of making us do endless amounts of problem sets from a textbook, he gave us just five extremely difficult problems to do each week. He either came up with the problems himself or took them from ones he had encountered throughout his teaching experiences. I spent countless hours sitting at home working on those math problems until they were solved when I wouldn't even spend five minutes on easy problems sets that I had gotten from my regular school. He gave us geometry problems that forced us to use everything we had ever learned about mathematics in order to solve them, and one of the great aspects of the class was that there was never the "right" way to go about solving a problem. Each of us would work on them on our own and then, in the next class, we would openly discuss our approaches. Mr. Samide even gave us group problems in which we had to work together and feed off each others ideas to come up with a strategy for solving each problem. Also, if anyone came up with their own problem or conjecture it would become part of our weekly problem set. For me, this was the perfect way to learn. It forced me to work on the mechanics of proofs, geometry, algebra, and arithmetic because it was necessary to master those basic skills in order to solve these problems, which I was really inspired to find answers for. Instead of trying to teach us disjoint blocks of math skills, like in the conventional bottom-up approach, he gave us coherent problems which we had to break down, learn specific math skills for, and then put together to solve the problem at hand -- a top-down approach. It was a brilliant way of teaching, and I will always cherish that class.
Later on, though, I came to realize that a great educational experience is really a double edged sword. A child's education is bound to be mixed with both good and bad teachers, classes, and programs. Unfortunately, the better the best educational experience they have, the worse it can make their mediocre or bad experiences seem. Now, I'm not saying you should give up on trying to provide them with a good education, but be prepared to help them cope with their bad experiences after they have discovered a great teacher or program. It is precisely that contrast that adds a sense of bitter irony to the pursuit of a great education.
The contrast to my class with Mr. Samide was most of my junior high and high school experience. Despite my occasional straight "A" performance, I had an absolutely horrible time! I was alienated from the rest of my peers; I was depressed a lot; and I hated the kids, the teachers, and the administrators. It was so bad at times that I even listed the school building and the tap water in the water fountains as everyday things I hated. Consequently, I ended up staying home frequently and missing a lot of school. At least once a year I would switch schools, and I had to repeat my freshman year in high school in hopes of wiping my records clean. If I had no interest in a class, I would simply not put any effort into it. This meant that I would not do any of the homework, and that typically translated into an "F." At that point, I was already disenchanted with the whole notion of school as a learning institution and subsequently rejected grades as being a motivational factor or fair measure of learning. I found out that even if I got an "F" in a class, many times I would still take away more from the class than the students who got good grades. Everyone who tried to help me was fond of telling me that school was just a game that I had to get through and I should just learn to play that game. Once I was out, they said, I could complain about it as much as I liked, but no one would listen to me while I was still in school. However, stubborn as I was, I consciously choose not to play that game and would just accept an "F," and I continued on my crusade to expose the hypocrisy of the educational institutions I was stuck in.
A favorite story I like to tell is of a biology class I had in my second freshman year in high school. For the first half of the year, I had been doing very well in the class and had one of the highest grade averages in it. Later on in the year, however, I started experiencing problems in the school and stayed home a lot. My attendance was so sporadic, in fact, that kids would keep asking me whether I still went to that school or not. Suffice it to say, my grade in that class drop from an "A+" to a "D-" by the end of the year. Fortunately, my teacher was very nice and believed in me so she let me take the final exam, despite the futility in it. Lo and behold I got an "A" on it! There was definitely no cheating involved, so she ended up with a dilemma on her hands: should she give me an "A" for what I knew, or should she give me a "D" for the lack of work that I did, which would be fair to the other kids who worked hard for their grades? Well, to my great surprise and joy, she decided to give me an "A" because I had learned the material despite my "situation."
Through all of my schooling, I have found that the hardest thing about being gifted is simply not having many people like yourself around. Unlike being a jock or being cool, there's no tangible, positive identity to which you can associate yourself with or model yourself after. There's only really: the geek, the nerd, or the brain. Theses terms don't really have universal definitions, but in the circles I was around a geek was someone who had a lot of knowledge, usually technical, which could be applied -- like computer skills. A nerd was someone who had very esoteric interests such as bug collecting or trivia in which they engrossed themselves. The "brain" was the person everyone considered the smartest kid in school and was usually an academic performer with straight "A's." All of these stereotypes have ostracization as the penalty if you chose to accept them as who you are. I believe that If you take that difference away by putting them together with others like themselves, even for part of the year, they can begin to go through a normal childhood development.
Childhood is fraught with an endless series of rites of passages, and it's important to have someone who can help guide you through that. What has saved me through my journey of educational institutions has always been programs in which I interacted with other kids like myself or adult role models who understood me and weren't condescending. Now, there will still be those who will not fit into even those environments, but the point, I think, is to have enough exposure to others similar to yourself so that you have a chance to find others you can identify with. Once that occurs, you can begin to grow a foundation of emotional stability. Suddenly, there are people that understand you, understand your problems, and can be there for you. Having them helps you to have more confidence in your own identity and who you want to become.
In retrospect, I've been very lucky. My mother always strived to provide my sister and me with an extraordinary education. Every year, since as long as I can remember, she researched all the local and national programs she could find, scrounged and saved up money, and sent us to them all year around. They ranged from extracurricular activities such as Suzuki programs for music, St. Louis area SAGE/FOG gifted workshops, an advanced math program called MEGSSS, and classes for "talented youth" at local community colleges to summer programs such as Northwestern University's CTD program, Purdue University's GERI programs, and Johns Hopkins University's CTY program. There have been so many I can't even remember them all to give you a complete list. The common experience that I had at all of them, though, was that they where all fun environments in which I was free to learn without the threat of grades or ostracization from other kids. At those programs, I was with all these kids who where similar to myself so I didn't have to worry about being myself. Everyone there, both the teachers AND students, were there because they wanted to be. That made a huge difference! The summer boarding programs, especially, were great because there was an additional sense of independence. We had fun learning in the classes during the day and had a blast in the afternoon after classes where over. After experiencing all these programs I started to wonder, "Why can't school be like that?!?!"
It was not until I went to Simon's Rock College that I started to feel comfortable with myself and my peers. Simon's Rock, by the way, is a college for high school age kids. What made that place such a valuable experience to me, though, was not its academics but the people I found there. In fact, I ended up neglecting my studies spending most of my time playing ultimate frisbee, volleyball, and staying up. Consequently, I was kicked out after the first semester and was only there for a short time. However, while I was there, I found a group of people who I could relate to. For the first time in my life I had a circle of good friends who I understood and who understood me.
My parents still believe that sending me there was a huge academic mistake, and I wouldn't sell it as the holy grail of educational solutions, but the truth is that it was a profoundly positive experience which irrevocably changed my life for the better. To this day, many of us who knew each other there are still very good friends and live near each other or at least keep in touch. To me, Simon's Rock's greatest asset is the sense of community it instills in its students. Whenever I meet someone who went to the Rock, there is instantly and automatically a shared bond between us. Just having gone there and experiencing that small community gives us something in common which transcends all of our experiences since leaving there. That sense of community is what I continue to look for no matter where I am because it helps me to get through the day-to-days of life.
I have experienced all the extremes of education on the long journey of my academic career. I have known blissful learning all the way down to complete academic failure and everything in between. In the end, though, it's all the same. Whether or not I had a good or bad academic experience, what lasts to this day is what I got out of the class and the personal experiences I had while I was in those institutions.
When I look at all of my friends today, whom I've met over the years, I know for certain that they are all intelligent. Probably most of them were or could have been considered "gifted" when they where in school. What I have come to realize, though, is that that label no longer has any meaning to us. Together, we represent a diverse set of educational experiences; some of us have gone through private schools, while others have experienced the conventional public schools, and myself, I have under my belt an eclectic mix of institutions and programs. Through it all, we have survived and have emerged from our cocoons of education to find that our paths have converged on the same point. All of us have become well educated adults who work hard, have fun, and try to be socially responsible. Basically, we strive to be good people and decent citizens. So, in the end, no matter how we've been educated, we've ended up in the same place, but what remains and continues is the social bond that we have with one another.
Gifted kids are really no different than any other kid in terms of what they need during their emotional development. While growing up, adults always seemed to be too caught up in my "potential" and never my current state of being. I would plead to the parents and educators out there to pay more attention to how they are growing up instead of how much or how quickly they are learning. Make sure that they at least know that there are others like themselves so they know that they're not alone. They will learn for the rest of their lives, but they can only be children once.
There are numerous options for educating kids now: public school, private school, magnate schools, home schooling, boarding school, etc... If the "perfect" school is not accessible or a practical educational solution, strongly consider clubs, extracurricular programs, or summer programs tailored for gifted/talented youth as good supplemental experiences to their regular education. I think, though, that no matter how you educate a gifted child, it is important to keep in mind that the true goal is to have a healthy, fully functioning member of society at the end of it. I mean, you may end up with the smartest kid in the world, but if they aren't happy and can't fit into society to apply that intelligence, what's the point, right?
========================
Programs Mentioned Above
========================
Center for Talent Development (CTD)
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/
Center for Talented Youth (CTY)
Johns Hopkins University
http://www.jhu.edu/~gifted/
Center for Youth Education
College of Du Page, Glen Ellyn, IL
http://www.cod.edu/conted/talent.htm
Gifted Education Resource Institute (GERI)
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
http://www.geri.soe.purdue.edu/
Math Education for Gifted Secondary School Students (MEGSSS)
nation wide
http://www.megsss.org/
Supporters and Advocates of Gifted Education (SAGE)
Mt. Prospect, Illinois
http://www.mtprospect.org/sage/
Simon's Rock College of Bard, Great Barrington, MA
"The College for Younger Scholars"
http://www.simons-rock.edu/
published in The Communicator,
California Association for the Gifted Fall 2000 Vol. 31, No. 4
republished on Davidson Institute's GT-CyberSource
By Andrew Chen
Everyone seems to be so concerned with how, exactly, gifted children should be educated. You know, the most insulting thing a teacher has ever said to me is "Our job is to teach you how to learn." Now I know that she meant that in earnest, and that is what many teachers believe they are charged with doing, but believe me, that is not necessary. We are designed to learn from the minute we are born. We -- all of us -- are learning machines. For gifted children, especially, learning is like eating candy, and even when it's not a consciously activated process, they learn every waking minute regardless of what's going on. As long as you provide them with plenty to learn, inspire them, and let them do their job, they will become educated.
So let me tell you, then, that is not the most pressing problem I am concerned with. What makes growing up as a gifted child hard is simply surviving through the environment of childhood -- to be emotionally intact at the end of that experience so that your intellect can start doing what it's been preparing for your whole adolescent life. Many times a gifted child will not "fit into" their educational environment. There maybe endless speculations as to why, but the only solution which I have ever seen work is a social one. In fact, I believe that it's not even that important how much measurable learning they do at a place so as long as it's a good experience for them which they enjoy.
Let me first start by telling you about the single best educational experience I ever had. During my freshman year in high school, I took a geometry class in an extracurricular program for "talented youth" that the local community college, the College of Du Page, offered. It was taught by a exceptional teacher named Mr. Samide. Instead of making us do endless amounts of problem sets from a textbook, he gave us just five extremely difficult problems to do each week. He either came up with the problems himself or took them from ones he had encountered throughout his teaching experiences. I spent countless hours sitting at home working on those math problems until they were solved when I wouldn't even spend five minutes on easy problems sets that I had gotten from my regular school. He gave us geometry problems that forced us to use everything we had ever learned about mathematics in order to solve them, and one of the great aspects of the class was that there was never the "right" way to go about solving a problem. Each of us would work on them on our own and then, in the next class, we would openly discuss our approaches. Mr. Samide even gave us group problems in which we had to work together and feed off each others ideas to come up with a strategy for solving each problem. Also, if anyone came up with their own problem or conjecture it would become part of our weekly problem set. For me, this was the perfect way to learn. It forced me to work on the mechanics of proofs, geometry, algebra, and arithmetic because it was necessary to master those basic skills in order to solve these problems, which I was really inspired to find answers for. Instead of trying to teach us disjoint blocks of math skills, like in the conventional bottom-up approach, he gave us coherent problems which we had to break down, learn specific math skills for, and then put together to solve the problem at hand -- a top-down approach. It was a brilliant way of teaching, and I will always cherish that class.
Later on, though, I came to realize that a great educational experience is really a double edged sword. A child's education is bound to be mixed with both good and bad teachers, classes, and programs. Unfortunately, the better the best educational experience they have, the worse it can make their mediocre or bad experiences seem. Now, I'm not saying you should give up on trying to provide them with a good education, but be prepared to help them cope with their bad experiences after they have discovered a great teacher or program. It is precisely that contrast that adds a sense of bitter irony to the pursuit of a great education.
The contrast to my class with Mr. Samide was most of my junior high and high school experience. Despite my occasional straight "A" performance, I had an absolutely horrible time! I was alienated from the rest of my peers; I was depressed a lot; and I hated the kids, the teachers, and the administrators. It was so bad at times that I even listed the school building and the tap water in the water fountains as everyday things I hated. Consequently, I ended up staying home frequently and missing a lot of school. At least once a year I would switch schools, and I had to repeat my freshman year in high school in hopes of wiping my records clean. If I had no interest in a class, I would simply not put any effort into it. This meant that I would not do any of the homework, and that typically translated into an "F." At that point, I was already disenchanted with the whole notion of school as a learning institution and subsequently rejected grades as being a motivational factor or fair measure of learning. I found out that even if I got an "F" in a class, many times I would still take away more from the class than the students who got good grades. Everyone who tried to help me was fond of telling me that school was just a game that I had to get through and I should just learn to play that game. Once I was out, they said, I could complain about it as much as I liked, but no one would listen to me while I was still in school. However, stubborn as I was, I consciously choose not to play that game and would just accept an "F," and I continued on my crusade to expose the hypocrisy of the educational institutions I was stuck in.
A favorite story I like to tell is of a biology class I had in my second freshman year in high school. For the first half of the year, I had been doing very well in the class and had one of the highest grade averages in it. Later on in the year, however, I started experiencing problems in the school and stayed home a lot. My attendance was so sporadic, in fact, that kids would keep asking me whether I still went to that school or not. Suffice it to say, my grade in that class drop from an "A+" to a "D-" by the end of the year. Fortunately, my teacher was very nice and believed in me so she let me take the final exam, despite the futility in it. Lo and behold I got an "A" on it! There was definitely no cheating involved, so she ended up with a dilemma on her hands: should she give me an "A" for what I knew, or should she give me a "D" for the lack of work that I did, which would be fair to the other kids who worked hard for their grades? Well, to my great surprise and joy, she decided to give me an "A" because I had learned the material despite my "situation."
Through all of my schooling, I have found that the hardest thing about being gifted is simply not having many people like yourself around. Unlike being a jock or being cool, there's no tangible, positive identity to which you can associate yourself with or model yourself after. There's only really: the geek, the nerd, or the brain. Theses terms don't really have universal definitions, but in the circles I was around a geek was someone who had a lot of knowledge, usually technical, which could be applied -- like computer skills. A nerd was someone who had very esoteric interests such as bug collecting or trivia in which they engrossed themselves. The "brain" was the person everyone considered the smartest kid in school and was usually an academic performer with straight "A's." All of these stereotypes have ostracization as the penalty if you chose to accept them as who you are. I believe that If you take that difference away by putting them together with others like themselves, even for part of the year, they can begin to go through a normal childhood development.
Childhood is fraught with an endless series of rites of passages, and it's important to have someone who can help guide you through that. What has saved me through my journey of educational institutions has always been programs in which I interacted with other kids like myself or adult role models who understood me and weren't condescending. Now, there will still be those who will not fit into even those environments, but the point, I think, is to have enough exposure to others similar to yourself so that you have a chance to find others you can identify with. Once that occurs, you can begin to grow a foundation of emotional stability. Suddenly, there are people that understand you, understand your problems, and can be there for you. Having them helps you to have more confidence in your own identity and who you want to become.
In retrospect, I've been very lucky. My mother always strived to provide my sister and me with an extraordinary education. Every year, since as long as I can remember, she researched all the local and national programs she could find, scrounged and saved up money, and sent us to them all year around. They ranged from extracurricular activities such as Suzuki programs for music, St. Louis area SAGE/FOG gifted workshops, an advanced math program called MEGSSS, and classes for "talented youth" at local community colleges to summer programs such as Northwestern University's CTD program, Purdue University's GERI programs, and Johns Hopkins University's CTY program. There have been so many I can't even remember them all to give you a complete list. The common experience that I had at all of them, though, was that they where all fun environments in which I was free to learn without the threat of grades or ostracization from other kids. At those programs, I was with all these kids who where similar to myself so I didn't have to worry about being myself. Everyone there, both the teachers AND students, were there because they wanted to be. That made a huge difference! The summer boarding programs, especially, were great because there was an additional sense of independence. We had fun learning in the classes during the day and had a blast in the afternoon after classes where over. After experiencing all these programs I started to wonder, "Why can't school be like that?!?!"
It was not until I went to Simon's Rock College that I started to feel comfortable with myself and my peers. Simon's Rock, by the way, is a college for high school age kids. What made that place such a valuable experience to me, though, was not its academics but the people I found there. In fact, I ended up neglecting my studies spending most of my time playing ultimate frisbee, volleyball, and staying up. Consequently, I was kicked out after the first semester and was only there for a short time. However, while I was there, I found a group of people who I could relate to. For the first time in my life I had a circle of good friends who I understood and who understood me.
My parents still believe that sending me there was a huge academic mistake, and I wouldn't sell it as the holy grail of educational solutions, but the truth is that it was a profoundly positive experience which irrevocably changed my life for the better. To this day, many of us who knew each other there are still very good friends and live near each other or at least keep in touch. To me, Simon's Rock's greatest asset is the sense of community it instills in its students. Whenever I meet someone who went to the Rock, there is instantly and automatically a shared bond between us. Just having gone there and experiencing that small community gives us something in common which transcends all of our experiences since leaving there. That sense of community is what I continue to look for no matter where I am because it helps me to get through the day-to-days of life.
I have experienced all the extremes of education on the long journey of my academic career. I have known blissful learning all the way down to complete academic failure and everything in between. In the end, though, it's all the same. Whether or not I had a good or bad academic experience, what lasts to this day is what I got out of the class and the personal experiences I had while I was in those institutions.
When I look at all of my friends today, whom I've met over the years, I know for certain that they are all intelligent. Probably most of them were or could have been considered "gifted" when they where in school. What I have come to realize, though, is that that label no longer has any meaning to us. Together, we represent a diverse set of educational experiences; some of us have gone through private schools, while others have experienced the conventional public schools, and myself, I have under my belt an eclectic mix of institutions and programs. Through it all, we have survived and have emerged from our cocoons of education to find that our paths have converged on the same point. All of us have become well educated adults who work hard, have fun, and try to be socially responsible. Basically, we strive to be good people and decent citizens. So, in the end, no matter how we've been educated, we've ended up in the same place, but what remains and continues is the social bond that we have with one another.
Gifted kids are really no different than any other kid in terms of what they need during their emotional development. While growing up, adults always seemed to be too caught up in my "potential" and never my current state of being. I would plead to the parents and educators out there to pay more attention to how they are growing up instead of how much or how quickly they are learning. Make sure that they at least know that there are others like themselves so they know that they're not alone. They will learn for the rest of their lives, but they can only be children once.
There are numerous options for educating kids now: public school, private school, magnate schools, home schooling, boarding school, etc... If the "perfect" school is not accessible or a practical educational solution, strongly consider clubs, extracurricular programs, or summer programs tailored for gifted/talented youth as good supplemental experiences to their regular education. I think, though, that no matter how you educate a gifted child, it is important to keep in mind that the true goal is to have a healthy, fully functioning member of society at the end of it. I mean, you may end up with the smartest kid in the world, but if they aren't happy and can't fit into society to apply that intelligence, what's the point, right?
========================
Programs Mentioned Above
========================
Center for Talent Development (CTD)
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/
Center for Talented Youth (CTY)
Johns Hopkins University
http://www.jhu.edu/~gifted/
Center for Youth Education
College of Du Page, Glen Ellyn, IL
http://www.cod.edu/conted/talent.htm
Gifted Education Resource Institute (GERI)
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
http://www.geri.soe.purdue.edu/
Math Education for Gifted Secondary School Students (MEGSSS)
nation wide
http://www.megsss.org/
Supporters and Advocates of Gifted Education (SAGE)
Mt. Prospect, Illinois
http://www.mtprospect.org/sage/
Simon's Rock College of Bard, Great Barrington, MA
"The College for Younger Scholars"
http://www.simons-rock.edu/
posted by Andrew at 11:41 PM
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