DAY 46 – GIFTED AND TALENTED (OR VICE VERSA)

One thought on “DAY 46 – GIFTED AND TALENTED (OR VICE VERSA)”

1. Giftedness and gifted programs are an interesting subject. My classification as “gifted” came when I was in 7th grade. I was in several gifted programs because my family moved often. I had a lot of fun being identified as gifted in various schools I attended.
   In 9th grade I appeared in Santa Barbara, California in the middle of the school year. The gifted program was a closed system, but as part of the intake process I had been given an escalating series of tests that convinced them I should have my IQ tested. I blew the doors so far off a Stanford-Binet and a WAIS that it caused a big bureaucratic scrum between two factions in the school district. My scores offered the perfect opportunity for those who felt the gifted program should be open to new students during the school year to challenge that restriction. The contention was based on the criminality of denying someone like me the opportunity to be educated in gifted classes. After the dust settled they put me with the gifted kids in some classes, the nearly gifted in other classes, and a speed reading class where it seemed they parked everyone. A concession to democracy. I didn’t care, I hated school. The best they could do was in gifted math was a class featuring algebra, and I was already teaching myself trig at night at the Santa Barbara library, which was only about three blocks away from where we lived.

   In my gifted classes I performed just long enough to prove I belonged there and wipe the sneers off a couple of doubters. I got bored with it and turned to the more complex mysteries of life; body surfing, fishing, and trying to figure out how Joe Louis stayed on the biggest wave ever ridden up to that point in time as documented by Surfer magazine.
   
   In a couple of months I sank to the “D” level in my algebra class and disappeared from my teacher’s sight until the day he announced a county-wide mathematics competition sponsored by Mu Alpha Theta, a national mathematics fraternity. After class I popped up in front of his desk and told him that sounded like fun. He was dubious but didn’t have many takers and agreed to take me. I won the grand prize of the whole competition with an extemporaneous chalk talk about inductive and deductive thinking, and earned my way into the finals with a presentation about the history of the Cartesian coordinate system and the logical mathematical reasoning that led to it. Afterward, the judges came up to me at the blackboard and we had a great discussion about it all. They’d never known about the why of it, they’d only mastered the how.
   
   After that I went back to an inexplicable B in algebra, but the teacher never could bring himself to give me an A because I didn’t do a lick of class work or homework and a B was as far as he could stretch his professional ethics. I was able to sympathize with him because after the competition we’d sort of transcended the whole teacher-student thing and had become friends. I told him a D was OK with me. I think eventually the final grade turned into a C. In the end neither one of us really cared about it at all. 
   
   That pretty much sums up how gifted programs worked for me. But don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of value there, too.
   
   In my experience it was the purpose of those programs “to enrich, challenge, encourage and support the gifted child.” In application the old gifted systems simply put certain kids in a box according to their verbal, math, and cognitive processing skills. The protocols typically accelerated informational input. Gifted programs focused on that input and never really snapped to the fact that a box is a box and when you put a child in one, more often than not, the child will learn how to live there. I think that was the true and substantial value of those programs. They were good boxes. They were about social integration. A gifted program reconciles a potential outsider with the system, and gives them a persona to embrace, a place to be, a thing to do. The programs informed gifted kids socially. You are gifted, they said, and that means you are this way, and can do this, this way, and can follow this path, here, and arrive here, and your means and your ways can be this. This can be your definition, your identity, and your path. And the information was validated for most of them by the returns they got from peers, families, teachers, and the educational system. So they followed the path.
   
   These programs work because they provide opportunity. They work because gifted kids, like all children, are perfectly willing to become whatever they are convinced they need to become. They are not convinced by the program. They are convinced by the world, their world, the things that are there and the things that happen there. They are convinced by the love and attention of their parents, the guidance of teachers committed to them, and the systems set up on their behalf that stand ready to receive them as worthy and valuable persons. 
   
   I think this is a valuable thing. I say that with deep sincerity. The box did not serve me, I did not fit there. The nature of my intelligence qualified me, but my earlier experiences in life had convinced me that independence was vital, and authority was dangerous. I had learned how to be alone, without help, in a world that had proven itself indifferent and brutal by turns.  
   
   I can acknowledge now that being guided and taught to function in the world is a lot easier than finding your own way. At the end of the paved road the social dispensations, judgments, and status accrued are much more generous and laudatory and comfortable than the wages earned on the road less traveled. Every once in awhile I’m wistful about the relative materialistic austerity of my own path and think it might have been nice if I had fit into a program somewhere. But then I consider what my life has delivered to me and what I have been delivered to, and I snap out of that self-pitying BS and thank God and life for the amazing experience I’ve had here, outside the box.
   

   Loading...

   Reply