Category: Education

Advocacy for Gifted Kids: Vote With Your Feet

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling discusses her take on homeschooling versus traditional schooling, for National Parenting Gifted Children Week.

This is Part 6 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation onFacebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

My choice to homeschool my kids might look from the outside like a big vote of no confidence in our public education system. In fact, a fair number of homeschoolers do vilify schools, presenting homeschooling as the only valid choice.

My choice to homeschool my kids might look from the outside like a big vote of no confidence in our public education system. In fact, a fair number of homeschoolers do vilify schools, presenting homeschooling as the only valid choice.

My experiences and point of view, however, are somewhat different. I admit that public school and I got off to a bad start. I did due diligence on our local elementary school and opted for a small private school for our first child’s kindergarten year. I had many reasons, but the big two were these:

  1. Our local public schools had no interest in serving the needs of families. To make busing cheaper, our local elementary’s kindergarten started at 7:40 in the morning, and to save money on staff, it was only two and a half hours long. I did the math, and decided that private tuition was worth the extra hour sleep my kids and I would get.
  2. The principal scared me off. When I described my son’s learning and what we were looking for in a school, he said, “It sounds like you are a family I’d love to have at our school. Unfortunately, we can provide nothing that you’re asking for.” No GATE program, no foreign language (in fact, he said “teaching Spanish is illegal!”), no art, music, or PE besides what teachers and parents provided.

We eventually happened upon a charter school that was a better fit for my son and our family, but it ended up being a terrible fit for our daughter. Our quiet, compliant son was suffering through the long stretches of boredom he met in an undifferentiated classroom. But I realized that our twice–exceptional daughter would never function in a school geared toward serving the needs of the kids in the middle of the spectrum.

So we ended up trying private school for our daughter as well, and finally gave in to homeschooling.

As soon as we started homeschooling, I knew that we needed some sort of “school” to go to. Despite her difficulties in the classroom, my daughter is very social and was bored with me alone at home. So we found a public homeschool program that was wonderfully accepting of her and her unusual behavior, and then again accepting of my son when he started homeschooling.

So how do I see our schooling history as advocacy for gifted kids?

I think that too many parents keep quiet about their gifted kids’ needs. Their kids suffer in school, but not quite enough for their parents to feel like it’s worth making a fuss. And thus teachers, administrators, and decision-makers on up the educational food-chain don’t get the message that gifted kids’ needs aren’t being served by our schools.

Yes, I could have stayed with our neighborhood schools and advocated for more: teacher training, differentiated classrooms, broader educational goals, and reintegration of essential curriculum that has been lost. But I knew enough about the state of our local schools to know that I wasn’t going to be effective in that fight.

However, there is one thing that bean–counters do understand: money, and who gets it. My kids move from school to school carrying their ADA funding with them. I transfer them out of our district into a smaller, friendlier district, one that supports alternative education, if not specifically gifted education. By registering my children with a public homeschool program, I keep them in the system and the system knows where they are.

I wish I could do more on this front, but I decided long ago that I have to put my kids’ needs ahead of any activism that may tempt me. I make sure in a variety of ways that we vote with our dollars. Our local district has never bothered to find out why we—and many other families—transfer to another district. If they did gather that information, I believe they’d be surprised at how many gifted kids are “voting with their feet.”

To a certain extent, I do believe that our public school system needs to learn its lessons the hard way. The more they emphasize test scores, the more families with high–scoring kids leave the system. The more they cut the curriculum to the bone, the less money they will have for the active, experiential learning that would tempt these families back.

I have no wish for us as a society to lose public schooling. Our public schools bring us together and offer us a common vision of ourselves as a country. But as long as it is possible to choose an alternative to inappropriate schooling for my children, I will. I am glad that for now, we have a public school that we love.

Continue to Part 7.

The Difficult Question of Gender Identity

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their gifted children – in this post, when it comes to gender identity.

This is Part 4 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

When my daughter was still a preschooler, pretty in pink with long, curly blond hair and a charming smile, I started to watch the way older girls acted and dressed as they approached puberty. I wondered how I was going to help my daughter through the difficulty of being a girl in our society. And that was even before I knew what kind of girl she’d be.

At about the age of six, my daughter decided to do away with girlishness. She insisted I cut off her gorgeous locks. She moved to the boys’ section of the clothing store. She developed an abiding interest in weapons and potty language. Her favorite book was Captain Underpants. Except for her undying love of baby dolls, she declared all things girlish “stupid.

Despite my being a woman who appreciates the finer parts of girlishness, I supported her decision not to follow gender norms she didn’t like. I agreed to cut her hair, though I warned her that she would be taken for a boy. She decided this was a consequence she could accept. I tried to squelch the potty talk in public, but there was no stopping it at home. My husband and I successfully moved her from Captain Underpants to King Arthur, which at least had literary value.

But the fact is, my daughter suffers the consequences of being an unusual girl on a daily basis. Despite telling some people repeatedly that she’s a girl, she is often referred to with masculine pronouns as if the speaker is unwilling to accept a girl in boys’ clothing. Teachers expect her to “act like a girl” and often come down on her harder than they might a rambunctious boy. Other kids make open, hurtful comments about her.

All this, and she doesn’t even go to school.

School is a minefield for all kids with gender differences. Gifted kids, according to research, are less likely to adhere to gender roles than other kids (see Webb et al., Misdiagnosis). When you add giftedness and gender differences together, you get a lot of fodder for bullies.

My daughter is homeschooled, and most of the above experiences happened in the context of homeschooling. You’d think I might think twice about homeschooling, but the fact is, these experiences have been few and far between. Homeschooled kids, in general, are so much more accepting of differences because they haven’t been socialized to enforce conformity. I know that things would have been much worse in school.

Not long ago a homeschool group we belong to took part in a science workshop. Included in the group were my daughter, a boy with long hair who wears girls’ clothing, and a boy with long hair who wears boys’ clothing. After the workshop, our group received a letter from one of the teachers. She said that as a transgendered person, it was heartening to work with kids who accepted each other’s differences with respect, unlike most of the kids she works with.

It was lovely to hear that, but it also made me think of all the gifted kids in school who suffer because of their gender identity. Although many schools are making the right moves toward creating a more supportive atmosphere, the enforcing of conformity is still alive and well, and often has tragic results.

I have no idea what kind of woman my daughter will be. A friend tells me that her daughter dressed like a boy until puberty, when she suddenly changed without comment. Sometimes my daughter muses about growing her hair out, and since her softball team was forced to wear pink uniforms, she has decided that wearing pink isn’t the worst wardrobe nightmare by far.

But no matter what kind of woman she grows up to be, I want her to feel comfortable in her own skin. I want her to know that whoever she wants to be is fine with me, with her father—with everyone who loves her. And those people who feel threatened by someone who doesn’t follow their expectations of gender roles? I’ll just remind her of her attitude when she was six:

Those people are just “stupid”!

Continue to Part 5.

The Role of Parents In Identifying Gifted Children

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their gifted children.

This is Part 1 of her guest series. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

Before I had children, I reacted to the word “gifted” like the majority of people I knew: I just had no use for it. I distinctly remember a friend telling me that she was having trouble choosing a school because her son might be gifted, and I wondered, “Why would she care?”

When my husband and I bought our house, I only gave cursory thought to the real estate agent’s admission that our local school district “wasn’t the best.” My husband and I figured that we sweated through public school, and our kids would, too.

How things change when your children move from the realm of imagination to the physical world! Our kids’ intelligence didn’t surprise us, but their needs did. I had always believed that every child’s needs could be served well by a single good school. But when I started to experience the world as a parent, things changed. I still believe strongly that a well functioning society offers everyone the chance to pursue a fulfilling life, but I no longer believe that kids’ needs are as interchangeable as their sneakers.

Research shows that parents are the best identifiers of their children’s giftedness, and this aligns well with my experience. Most parents I have met are well-attuned to their kids’ needs, and most of them are unlikely to call a child who falls within the typical learning curve “gifted.” In fact, I think the problem is not that too many parents identify their children as gifted, but rather that too few acknowledge their kids’ giftedness when doing so could help their kids thrive as students and as people.

Why are parents reluctant to identify their kids?

First, many parents are unwilling to identify their children as different from the herd. They are influenced by teachers and administrators who believe that in order to have cohesive school culture, all kids must be treated the same. They are influenced by our culture, which places a great emphasis on being part of the team. But of course, look at any well-functioning team and you will see a group of people who acknowledge each other’s different skills and needs. A baseball team doesn’t offer the same training opportunities to pitchers and catchers. A bank doesn’t look for the same qualities in tellers and financial analysts, nor does it offer them the same training.

Second, there’s the whole weighted issue of what giftedness is. Lots of parents (my past self included) think that even using the word is divisive. They think that their gifted kids should be able to deal with school as it’s presented to them, and even when their kids are unhappy in school, they will blame their student’s behavior before even considering that perhaps the classroom is unsuited to their student. People who would never consider putting their “husky” child into “slim” jeans think that any school should do just fine.

Third, there’s the general confusion about why our schools should serve the needs of gifted students. Some experts promote the idea that we have to serve the needs of the gifted because they are an elite who will be important to the future of our country. Parents with gifted learners who aren’t high achievers will generally be turned off by this attitude, because their children don’t fit the mold that this view of giftedness promotes.

Other experts believe that gifted children have a form of special needs, and their giftedness makes them not only unusual in the classroom but also unsuited to typical classrooms. In this case, parents might fear that separating their kids from the general school population won’t be healthy for their students or for the school. And parents may be hesitant to label their kids as having “special needs” when they expect them to be high achievers.

Amidst this confusion of ideas and attitudes, it’s understandable that parents might not consider the possibility that their children are gifted or might downplay their children’s differences from the general school population.

It’s common on gifted support e-mail lists for new parents to enter with their digital tails between their legs. “I don’t really know if I belong here,” they’ll start. “My child never really did well in school,” they’ll apologize. “My child doesn’t even like math,” they’ll despair, “can she really be gifted?”

So many of us fall victim to the feeling that there’s something wrong with parents identifying their children as gifted. But instead of being embarrassed with self-identification, we should feel comfortable knowing that we know our children – and their needs – better than anyone else.

Continue to Part 2.

Why I advocate for gifted children

Posted on by Suki

Parents with kids designated “gifted” have a choice to make: When they’re out in public, will they use the word? You’d be amazed at how often I see this theme recur on gifted parenting lists: “Do you tell people your child is gifted?”

Of course, parents have no trouble admitting to their children’s other qualities. You don’t hear people trying to find ways not to refer to their kid’s red hair or skill at catching a baseball. But somehow, when your kid is smart you’re supposed to hide it. Some parents go so far as to deny it—they don’t want their children set apart.

In my case, I had no interest in the word until I needed it. We were having troubles with our second child that didn’t fit any parenting manual, and didn’t fall neatly into any psychological profile. I finally found the answers amongst literature about gifted children. Like other parents of gifted kids, I found my parenting manual in A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children.

The thing that I’ve noticed since is that in general, people really don’t understand what this is all about. The most common reaction is confusion—my old reaction: why do you care?—but I also get people thinking that I’m bragging about my kids, thinking that I’m some sort of pushy helicopter parent who wants to promote her kids, and probably lots of other unflattering things I haven’t heard.

So why do we care?

There’s a national organization dedicated to gifted children. There are many state organizations. They all have conferences. Teachers get special training. Parents seek each other out on the Internet and in person. All of us care about gifted kids and their welfare. But why? Aren’t gifted kids automatically successful? Aren’t they every teacher’s dream? Aren’t they bound for success and happiness?

Well, no. We care about the welfare of gifted kids because things aren’t always so rosy for them. Yes, I’m sure you know a kid who’s a straight-A student, has the most wonderful boyfriend, is polite and kind and well-mannered, plays violin like a dream, volunteers at her local soup kitchen, speaks three languages, and, well, you get the picture. There are gifted kids like this, and they don’t need much help. For whatever reason, they are thriving within society as it’s presented to them. (It’s also possible that these kids are getting a lot of help you don’t see.)

The gifted kids who need advocacy are the ones who aren’t thriving. They are more often bullied than kids of average intelligence. They are more likely to have unusual sensitivities and have trouble with social interactions. They are more likely to check out at school if their teachers aren’t trained to deal with them. And surprisingly, they are more likely to drop out of high school than kids closer to the academic median.

It’s true that these kids sometimes come out ahead in the end—choose your favorite billionaire Silicon Valley nerd. But they suffer a lot of pain and risk being lost as productive members of society because they don’t get the help they need. And those of us who advocate for these kids think that is just as much a shame as when other kids are at risk. These kids are not better than other kids; they’re just kids and they need help.

How and why are gifted kids different?

The How is much easier to answer than the Why. First of all, there does seem to be a correlation with the sorts of mental acrobatics tested by IQ tests and various patterns of development. Gifted kids are:

  • More likely to show asynchronous development. This means that they are “many ages at once”—a math-smart fifteen-year-old boy who still cries easily or a six-year-old with adult verbal skills and a two-year-old’s temper tantrums. [Read more about asynchronous development.]
  • Likely to exhibit what are called “overexcitabilities.” They have certain quirks that are more easily triggered than the general population. It’s very common for gifted kids to show sensory processing disorders, to become belligerent when they are bored in school, or to need to run around and flap their hands when they are learning something fun. [Read more about overexcitabilities.]
  • Likely to learn in fundamentally different ways than the “average” child (whatever that is) such that classroom learning can be frustrating and fruitless for them. Gifted kids’ learning speed often means that they so quickly grasp the material presented that they become disruptive in the classroom, asking the teacher questions that derail the discussion. Also, lots of gifted kids are visual-spatial learners. They simply don’t learn from reading a textbook and never will. It’s not uncommon to hear from parents on gifted parenting e-mail lists whose kids had gone from a special education classroom to being designated at the very top of the IQ scale. Sometimes giftedness looks like something else. [Watch a video about misdiagnosis of gifted kids.]
  • Often found to have learning deficits that mask their strengths. So-called “twice-exceptional” kids suffer doubly, from the same frustrations in the classroom and social groups, and also from the fact that they often don’t get help for their LDs due to their ability to mask them. [Read more about 2e kids.]

Why gifted kids are different is under much discussion at the moment. The question is being looked at by everyone from neurologists to popular writers. Stay tuned for the conclusive answer. But parents and teachers of gifted kids can tell you that they are clearly different, whether by nurture, nature, or something much more complicated (my opinion).

Are gifted kids “better” than other kids?

This is the crux of the matter. This misconception stems from two roots: First, the longstanding anti-intellectual tradition of American culture. Think we don’t have a longstanding anti-intellectual tradition? Just read a few biographies of gifted kids of the past. Torturing the smart kid isn’t a new phenomenon. The dislike and distrust of smart people is so deeply rooted in our culture parents are afraid to describe their kids as smart for fear it will elicit a negative reaction. Second, there’s that stupid word: “Gifted.” The word implies a value judgment. It implies that other kids don’t have gifts. Many of us who write about gifted kids prefer a neutral term like “non-neurotypical,” but that’s a mouthful, and that’s not the one people recognize. (Also, spellcheck hates that word!)

The designation of gifted is a description, not a prediction. Gifted kids are no more likely to be successful than the general population, no more likely to be happily married, no more likely to win the lottery. But intelligence is, in fact, part of the description of some activities. So you will see that Nobel Prize winners are more likely to be gifted. You will see fewer math-savvy people winning the lottery (because they don’t play). You will see more voracious readers teaching in college classrooms. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs largely fit the gifted description.

But none of this is surprising. If you trade a gifted brain for height and coordination, would it surprise you that taller, more coordinated people are more likely to become basketball players? But in the end, it’s the people who work hard, have some lucky breaks, and believe in their own capabilities who achieve success. Giftedness is not a ticket to success—it can just be one of the cards in a winning hand.

Do I think my kids are special?

Sure I do, and I hope you think your kids are special, too. But I don’t think there is anything fundamentally more special or more important about any “type” of person. Old sayings like “it takes all kinds” don’t become old sayings for nothing. This world would be one heck of a terrible place if we were all alike. And this world is a worse place when any child is not able to reach his or her potential.

I was chatting with a woman recently who told me her daughter’s story: She said, “She really hated school, so I took her out. She decided that she’d just skip high school and go straight to college. She’s eighteen now and on her way to university… to get her PhD.”

Would the world really be a better place if that girl had been forced to sit through high school because it’s “what we do”? Would it really be a better place if she had been forced to hide how smart she was to get along with others? Not all gifted kids end up starting PhDs at eighteen (I doubt mine will), but all gifted kids are kids with special needs. And like all kids with special needs, our society benefits when those needs are taken care of.

From the archives: What a Mitzvah! A Day in the Life of Fundraising for a Preschool

Posted on by Suki

Continuing with cleaning out my files, I keep coming up with old gems that I don’t just want to delete. Here’s another, from my days as the director of fundraising for our preschool.

Each year for the last few years we have had a big rummage sale to benefit our preschool, which is a program supported by our local Reform Jewish Temple. We ask all the temple members and our parent community to give donations, then on a Sunday morning we park on the front lawn of the temple and sell it.

It’s a pretty good fundraiser, pulling in well over a thousand dollars a year. Preschool education is expensive, no matter how you cut it, and our school needs the funds. It’s also a good way for the parents to get to know each other—hauling loads of other people’s stuff seems to cement a bond like nothing else we’ve tried.

As the fundraising director for the last few years, I have only minor grumbles when it comes to the parents. The first year we did it, apparently the parents thought their participation was optional…and more than a few didn’t turn up. That was pretty bad. But since then, I’ve started our rummage sale season with the threat that if not enough parents signed up, we’d call it off and they’d have to haul away the junk we got. That seems to work.

I also have few complaints about our customers. We get our share of nutty people (who usually pay) and scofflaws (who try not to). But we also get lots of young families, new immigrants, and people on small incomes. It feels good to do good—in Judaism this is called a mitzvah.

The thing that makes me wonder, however, is the motivation of some of our donors. I have to say that the majority of things we get are good, sellable items. And I know that a lot of our temple members and parents (myself included) save up our stuff all year long so that we can donate it. It’s a pretty easy mitzvah to do.

But I’m really not sure where some of our donors get their ideas about what belongs at a rummage sale. We can start with the people who admit the quality of their junk, like the parent who arrived with a truckload and told our director, “This is the stuff our neighbors couldn’t sell at their rummage sale.”

And then, perhaps, people like me who think the things they donate are eminently usable until we see them in the stark California sunshine and think, hm, perhaps that should have gone in the recycling bin.

But what motivates our donors to give us (this year alone)…

…A ripped garden hose…

…A cat box with used litter still in it…

…A box full of mysterious wood pieces that probably fit together to make…something…

…Half-eaten boxes of crackers (several flavors!)…

…A pair of sweatpants ripped nearly in half…

…Lots of very used underwear…

…A queen-sized mattress with urine stains…

You have to wonder what they were thinking. I prefer to think that most of our donors are motivated to do good. Temple members are generally very supportive of the preschool, even though it’s a drain on the budget because tuition just can’t be high enough to pay our costs. And I’m sure that our donors aren’t out of the ordinary. One parent told me that she’d seen even worse stuff when she worked for a relief group taking donations for flood victims. “We had to sort it,” she said, “or the people would get mad and make us take it back.” Imagine the nerve of those flood victims!

I guess I prefer to think that a lot of us just aren’t comfortable with our disposable economy, and can’t bear to put things in the trash when “someone might have a need for it.” When I donated the sippy cup bottoms that didn’t have tops, I swear that I thought that perhaps another family was in the opposite situation: perhaps those sippy cup bottoms would find their life partners through a rummage sale! Of course, they were still there at the end of the day.

But I guess as hard as I try to access my preschooler’s elastic imagination, I can’t find a rationale for some of the donations. Couldn’t they have emptied the catbox—and the diaper genie that came equipped with some used diapers? And did they really think that we’d be able to sell that mattress? A mitzvah is to do good for someone, but all that mattress got us was grief. All day we watched it towering up there, leaning against the porch, while people picked through the clothing, eyed the furniture, and tested the heft of the silverware. Our all-volunteer staff (which counts our director, who doesn’t get paid anywhere near enough to get up at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday) didn’t need the added stress of what to do with a mattress.

What saved our life was the Free Cycle, our local branch of a national network of folks who believe that we need to rebel against our disposable economy. These people believe as a matter of faith that there’s someone out there who wants pretty much anything.

Even, it turns out, a stained mattress. Kelley, a plain-spoken computer engineer who has a dad with a big truck, came and took it all from us. She didn’t ask for anything in return. When we broached the idea of making the last straggling customers take entire bags of clothes, she said, “I’m afraid if we did that, they’d just throw them away.” Instead, she let them pick out what they wanted (it was all free by then) and waited patiently to take away the remains.

Everyone involved in this sale tried to do, in their own way, a small mitzvah. I felt great when a man with a hard-earned wizened face told me he was taking lots of our free stuff to the program he runs to help other men get off the streets. The young couple who spoke little English seemed embarrassed but happy that they could take away the baby changing table for free, and that we even took it apart for them. The temple’s janitor helped carry tables back inside, though he really didn’t have to.

But the greatest mitzvah of the day was from the Free Cycler, who took away all our leftover follies: the mangled picture frames, the worn out shoes, castoff dishes, the book inscribed “to my darling,” my formerly precious sippy cup bottoms, and even, yes, the mattress. They took the stained mattress and by golly, they are going to find it a home.

We tweak the workings of this fund raiser every year, though often the suggestions are impractical. Could we have a parent on duty to sift through the stuff people want to donate? What would they say if one of their fellow parents wanted to donate a used catbox? Would we get any donations at all if we restricted donation times? Fund raising for small nonprofits is fraught with these sorts of logistical questions. We all love our school, but just how much do we love it?

Near the end of our mercifully cool day, our director suggested that perhaps next year, we could do a silent auction. I wonder what sort of donations we’ll get for that!

Now available