Following are my notes on the National Association for the Gifted Convention, day 3. Click here to read day 1 and day 2.
I can’t believe it! I’m typing this on the airplane home and I may in fact be caught up when we touch down. Now, whether I have time to put any links into this text this evening is still unanswered. But you know how to use Google as well as I do.
This morning, I got right on it by turning up with a crowd of other people at 8 a.m. to hear Jim Delisle speak about teaching writing to middle schoolers. It was a very school-focused talk, and I am sure that if I were to do any of these exercises with homeschoolers I’d change them considerably, but his ideas are great and it’s clear why he is considered at the top of his field. I don’t have the title of his book handy at the moment, but I would highly recommend it to teachers – in fact, I did recommend it by e-mail to one of my son’s teachers. He used a variety of methods to get kids to get in touch with what they really care about, and he is able to help them do the seeingly impossible, such as a beautiful essay by a girl who had been failing English. For once, she was not required to write in full sentences, and her little bits of thought held together beautifully.
I hardly took notes during the panel discussion of gifted kids and sensitivity (again, I didn’t write down the panelists’ names, so I only know that Linda Silverman was one of them). The first question that came up is do we know for sure that gifted kids are in fact more sensitive than other kids? Silverman joked that perhaps her 35 years in the field should be dismissed because she hadn’t submitted peer-reviewed papers to the journals, so we could just consider what she said a 35 year long anecdote. Then she went on to detail the huge amount of data amassed by her Gifted Development Center in Colorado and others and said that from what she’s seen, sensitivity appears to be a prerequisite for gifted learners. Those kids who can’t stand the hum of fluorescent lights aren’t just coincidentally the fastest learners in the classroom. She and the others on the panel all had different ways of coming at the problem, but they all agreed that a hyper-aware brain is part of what makes a brain the sort that excels on IQ tests. Two of the panelists spoke movingly of their experiences as therapists working with families. One spoke bravely of his own struggles with being a highly sensitive person and how it has informed his opinion on how such children should be dealt with in schools.
The final keynote was by Jonathan Mooney, who is apparently well-known though he was new to me. He spoke of neurodiversity, which is a relatively new argument that we should think of the diversity of human minds like we think of plant and animal diversity: something to be nurtured and treasured. For a man who has never lived in the South, the woman next to me said, he sure does sound like a black preacher. In fact, we noticed that the cadences of his sentences were exactly like President Obama’s, which were explicitly modeled on black preachers’ speech. But he was a very engaging speaker, and his message was both in lockstep with what many at the conference were saying – gifted kids are different and need to be accepted and nurture – and also critical on the focus on traditional “academic” learning as what makes an educated person. Like Temple Grandin, he admitted that he is never going to be the well-rounded generalist that our schools attempt to produce. But in his case, there was no diagnosis to go on (though clearly these days he’d be diagnosed ADHD if he were in school). He was made to feel stupid and lazy throughout his school years, and the only thing that saved him, he said, was the unwavering faith that his mother had in him. When he was failing in school, she’d tell him that he was worthwhile and smart. Finally, after failing his way into high school, he somehow turned everything around and got into Brown University (not sure how that happened except that Brown is notoriously creative about taking unusual students such as the earliest gifted homeschoolers when no one else in the Ivies would).
All in all, this conference was a fabulous place to learn and connect with others if you are in education and care about your sensitive, asynchronous, neuro-nontypical, “gifted” learners. Nowhere at this conference did I hear dismissive statements about other kids, just a concern that while advocating for any other group of children is seen as noble and fair, advocating for gifted children, in all their rainbow of flavors, is seen as elitist and unnecessary. It is such a relief to everyone there not to have to apologize for their passion for reaching the thinkers in our society, trying to find the ones who are hiding, trying to heal the ones who have been broken, trying to inspire the ones who have been bored into compliance. The message of the conference was not “these kids are more important,” but rather, “all kids are important, so why are we trying either to make these kids into something they’re not or forcing them always to be on the outside in education?”
Thanks to everyone who gave their time to present at the conference and were willing to talk to someone who nodded vigorously when one presenter spoke of “imposter syndrome.” If you spend too much time feeling like you don’t belong, you can end up believing that you will never find a place in this world.
