Musings on Giftedness
I preface this by clarifying that I am relating ideas about "academic giftedness" and to a lesser extent "creative genius" as opposed to "physical giftedness" which is a whole 'nuther ballgame (and for which success is very much down to the luck of the draw).
I have done a lot of unpacking about "genius" and "giftedness" as they were labels I had applied to me when I was a child but they were terms that I don't think many people understand very well. The best way that I can explain it from my perspective is that;
learning is something that happens on a "need to know" basis, and the gifted child acutely feels the need to know.
In my experience as being a gifted child and knowing many adults who have lived as gifted, brainy, smart, intelligent or academically superior I can see that there are several traits that can work both ways as far as personal success. Gifted kids tend to be wired tight. Neurologically they can be very easy to stimulate. They can be oversensitive to touch, bright light, or sound; they are generally obsessive meaning that they can get fixated on "correct" ways of doing things; they are puzzle solvers and seek relevance even in seemingly un-related things; they have tenacity and relentlessness; most importantly of all they seem to find even the most trivial things relevant, which can make them seem a bit bizarre as children, and incredibly bewildering or even boring at dinner parties.
Children who find all things relevant can be seen as finicky or pedantic, but it's that same indiscriminate attention to detail that makes them great at remembering factoids or focusing on otherwise superfluous details of past events. These form the foundation of learning (schema) on which they can build understandings relatively quickly compared to other people. I guess what I am trying to say is that because a "gifted" child has focused on all the "meaningless" bits of information as well, then if you tell them something that relates to those previously unnecessary bits of information they can jump on it with an "ahah!" type of enthusiasm and join up all those dots, rather than needing to have a whole idea explained from scratch.
Processing information like this has a snowball effect. If you think of all things as relevant and you tend to hoard "information" like treasure then you end up with a bigger basis for inter-relating information. It's easier to group like objects together if you have more of them to see the similarities and differences. If you only have 10 plastic farm animals it could be easy to group animals with 4 legs and animals with 2, but if you have 300 it quickly becomes necessary to differentiate between the cows and the horses.
On a personal level, what happens if you are told you are "gifted". You have something to live up to. If you are wired tight and already prone to some anxiety it can be an added pressure to make sure that you "forget nothing". So gifted kids can give the impression that they are super-human, when what they really are is neurotic little balls of "remember everything" who often focus on things like memorising things because you can and it's expected of you, pleasing parents and teachers, and getting everything right.
How does this impact on creativity? Well for starters a gifted child may seem very creative (an some really are) but many give up on creative endeavours by the time they are adults. If you read a lot and you have a lot of understandings that you pick up outside a classroom it is easy for you to pick up the form of writing and if you find it easy to draw connections between seemingly unrelated things then it can look like you are being creative, but it's more compared to "normal". Mental disinhibition (or going there even though it's weird) is a trait common in schizophrenics, that is similar to childhood giftedness in that, as puzzle solvers and meaning finders, gifted children are continually looking for links between all things.
Why is it that more gifted kids don't do exceptional things in their adult years? Well if you are continually fixated on knowing all things, there comes a point where you will hit a wall of complexity, a point where you realise that there is more than one accepted truth, and a point at which your ability to take on board everything like a sponge is overwhelmed by the deluge of information. This challenge is met in several ways.
Some children write off entire areas of learning as "too hard" because if they are a "genius" and if they are struggling then it must be that they don't have aptitude at that discipline and they should refocus their efforts on something more achievable. In my opinion this is why so many of the brainy boys end up in the physical sciences, because arts and humanities have too many levels of complexity at a beginner level.
Some gifted kids burn out all together. Everything becomes so overwhelming that they focus on repetitive methods and tasks that don't stress them out and they live very pedestrian lives doing simple jobs or slipping through the cracks altogether and ending up either in care for mental health problems or worse.
So where do gifted kids end up? Some of them end up in academic jobs learning about the stuff that "improves" our society or making technological advancements. Others find something they are truly passionate about and excel at it. Still more end up as night-fill at the supermarket or sickness beneficiaries... but this just describes their vocations.
How do gifted kids turn out emotionally and inter-personally? For starters it seems like a lot (not all... this entire piece is generalisation) of "gifted" kids exhibit autistic spectrum traits. It takes a little bit of disregard for other people's opinions to persist in seeking knowledge even when it's considered weird by everyone else in your class including your teacher. It is also very difficult to learn social skills and form meaningful bonds with people of the same age as you, when the words and concepts that you are wanting to discuss are either irrelevant or far beyond a common basis of understanding. In my opinion gifted children gain very little from being "mainstreamed" in mass schooling.
For "gifted" people to start making meaningful relationships with people, they first need to be able to communicate face to face with people who share similar interests to them. Due to the way our mass schooling system works (by grouping children of like age from similar geographical/socio-economic area) many "gifted" children don't get to start meeting other people who are interested in the same things as them until they leave school. A decade and a half or more of social isolation can take its toll. Many gifted kids come out the other end a little bit scarred - anxiety disorders, superiority / inferiority complexes, anti-social behaviour, depressive illnesses, being just a few problems that are not specifically part and parcel of being "gifted" but are simply environmentally exacerbated by prolonged social isolation.
So by the time Mr. Awesome (age 23) is head honcho of his web-services company and pulling in a clean $100k paycheck there's a good chance that he hasn't had a date yet... and that he doesn't know "what girls talk about" anyway. Gifted girls seem to get it a bit easier when it comes to finding a mate, maybe due to the tendency for girls to have stronger communication skills... or maybe because they have boobs *shrug* but they often have difficulty finding and making meaningful friendships with others. Maybe it's just due to lack of practice. I haven't put a whole lot of thought into this dynamic, but in my experience, most gifted kids, tend to grow up into kind of lonely adults unless they undergo some serious hard work and / or therapy.
So..... what can you do to help gifted kids turn out alright?
• Give them the chance to share their passions
with others who are interested in the same thing regardless of age.
• Don't expect that because a child is "ahead" at one discipline, that they will be at the same level as a child x
years older than them for all things.
• Don't compare them to others;
assess their achievements in mind of their goals and their own personal challenges .
• Encourage failure. Failure is not a permanent condition, it's feedback. Reframe failure as a learning opportunity.
Nobody ever learned how to improve by getting 100% on a test.
If a child is getting 100% all the time, then you are testing the wrong thing.
• Focus on meaningful purpose. Gifted kids are great at memorising, but often produce nothing.
It's no good fluffing about learning all about something that you can never share.
Gifted kids need to know "what it's for". If you need them to do something in particular give them complete
instructions and the success criteria (maybe a copy of the marking schedule).
Better yet, get them involved in real projects with concrete gain, like planning submissions for the local Council,
building their own playground, or designing their own herb garden, where they can enjoy their own successes
and learn from their own mistakes.
• Encourage self assessment.
Prioritising is a key tool in learning what is relevant.
That sort of filtering is a skill that's HARD for people who think that whatever they engage in is Priority 1.
You can't rely on everyone else as an indicator of how you are doing if you are on a different page to them.
I'm sure there is much more to be said on the issue. But I'm coming up against time pressure on my end. I WANT there to be things that I have missed. Glaring omissions are awesome, especially if someone else's perspective can fill in the blanks. I readily welcome any and all input and criticism.... but please... please share your opinion :)