April 24, 2013
46 of 65
Gifted and Talented (or Vice Versa)
Our children began their education in the Jefferson County Public School system. Michael had completed 3rd Grade and Suzanne 1st Grade before we moved to the mountains. Jefferson County was a very large district – the largest in the State of Colorado – which had established programs in most schools, beginning in elementary school, to assist students who were slow learners and to engage those who were considered gifted or talented. Both Michael and Suzanne participated in the gifted and talented program on the recommendation of their teachers.
After our move, they attended the public schools in Clear Creek County, a much smaller school district. We were pleased to find that Clear Creek had a similar program, though there it was called “Talented and Gifted” (“TAG”). Rather than relying on teacher recommendations, Clear Creek utilized a testing system to identify the students who would be asked to participate. Both kids took the test and then my wife and I had a meeting with the teacher/counselor in charge of the program.
She explained to us that the test measured students’ abilities in various areas like science and math and verbal skills. Most of those selected for the TAG program tested high in some areas, but not others. Suzanne, she said was an exception. Her scores in every area were high enough to qualify for the TAG program – a situation that was quite unusual.
Michael, on the other hand, tested as “only” average in all of the areas. She said that because he had been in the gifted and talented program for the past several years in Jefferson County, he could take part in the TAG program in Clear Creek County. She was not sure if he would really benefit, though. “Some [of us] children just don’t do well on standardized tests,” I suggested.
The TAG program only lasted for four more years, and then fell victim to funding cuts. Both Michael and Suzanne seemed to enjoy the special projects they were given as TAG students. I even reaped some quite tangible benefits.
During the last year of the program, Michael was in 7th Grade, which was the first year of middle school. One unit of the TAG class in which he was enrolled looked at economics and the stock market. The students each selected a paper portfolio of publicly traded stocks to follow to see if they would make or lose money had they been trading for real. In helping Michael select his portfolio, I said you can try to find stocks almost any way you want – even throwing darts at the financial page of the newspaper. We decided to use his name as a starting point, and discovered a company called Michael Foods (the symbol was MIKL). Then we found financial information, looked at charts and decided it seemed like a solid company. He included that in his portfolio along with some better known blue chip stocks.
I had never heard of Michael Foods before. As we investigated the company for the class, I became convinced that it really would be a good investment. About the same time Michael gave his list of stocks to the teacher, I called my broker and purchased some shares with real money. Within only a few months, the stock had doubled in price and we sold. A year after that, Michael Foods quit trading on any exchange, though it is still in business. I don’t remember what brought about the change, but it was only of passing interest at the time. We had happily doubled our money on that investment.
Michael was not held back by the “only average” scores on the TAG qualification test. He excelled in everything he studied and finished high school as the valedictorian of his class.
He worked hard to achieve that distinction. He was proud of the fact that he had perfect attendance during his senior year – though the school refused to recognize that achievement. One very cold, snowy, windy morning, I was driving Suzanne and Michael to school. Between our house and the highway was a steep portion of Fall River Road with some sharp switchbacks. As we were coming down from one switchback and headed to the next one, we encountered several cars stopped on the road in front of us. Further down, at the lower switchback, a county snow plow had become stuck in the snow and was blocking the whole road. We could not get around. We simply had to wait until the plow was dug out. We eventually made it to the school, but it was about half an hour after the bell had rung. Michael did not receive one of the few perfect attendance awards because he was counted as “tardy” on that day.
Suzanne was always an excellent student, though she was not quite valedictorian – nor did she want to be. It was probably good for her to participate in the TAG program, but I am not sure how much it meant to her. Now, years later, she is completing work for her master’s degree in Educational Psychology, including course work in the education of gifted and talented students. I need to ask her what part standardized tests play in identifying such students today.
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.