by Novem5er » Wed Aug 26, 2015 2:11 am
Hey, people.
It's been maybe 2 years since I've posted, and nearly that long since I've visited RI. I was a long time lurker before I ever posted, back when Jeff was still writing on the blog. Anyone remember the LATOC forum? So after the worst year of my life (this year), I've been back lurking. My wife and kids are okay, we're together, and we have a house for the moment. We suffered an extremely violent act against our family earlier this year, and it's been tough. Browsing the RI forum again has helped some nights.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
I was also identified as Gifted in late elementary school. I think I'm a lot younger than many other posters because this took place in the early 1990's. I can honestly say that the gifted program was great for me. I was pulled out of class once or twice a week and I met with other gifted students in the school. We had a very nice teacher who inspired us to think outside the box. I remember we learned about stop-animation and made our own cartoons. We had a popsicle bridge contest where we learned through experimentation. I mostly remember that we played a 20 questions kind of game, where the teacher read a prompt form this book called "Stories with Holes" and we had to figure out what happened by asking yes or no questions.
Famous example:
"Wanda lay dead on the floor in a puddle of water, surrounded by broken glass. What happened?"
We could only ask Yes or No questions, and being kids, we all tried to solve it in one question. "Did Wanda fall out of a window when it was raining and that's how she died in water and is surrounded by glass????!!"
"No."
Our teacher prompted us to ask "bigger" questions that would narrow down the possibilities. Some kid (not me) finally got the hint and asked, "Is Wanda a person?"
"No."
That got us going! I wont give away the answer for people who want to guess at it and then google it, but it taught us an important lesson. It might have been the most important lesson I ever learned in school, which basically sums up to this: ask the right questions. Looking back at it, it was Rigorous Intuition for 11 year olds.
A few years later my family moved across the country to Florida. I was still in the Gifted program, but it was much different. We didn't go on field trips to the art and science museums. We didn't really build anything. However, circa 1996, we were introduced to a budding technology called the Internet. Of course, by this time, most of us had baud modems at home, so it was nothing "new", but our gifted instruction centered on using the internet for research purposes. So, we basically did research projects of our choosing, using a mix of standard library references and web resources.
This kind of stuff is standard fare for school students now, but back in the mid-90's we were the only kids in central Florida really doing this kind of stuff.
Sorry, no spook stuff or ESP cards. I guess by the 90's that was all passé,
My story is pretty boring, so I'm questioning why I even posted it. I think I wanted to show that some people have had a positive experience being labeled gifted, at least on an academic level. I was never singled out by my peers. I was smart and went to that smart class. It turns out that us gifted folk attract each other because so many of my friends from high school or since have been gifted. Not all, but disproportionately so. For the record, being gifted did not let me spell disproportionately without right-clicking the word to spell-check it. Damn.
Because I haven't seen it mentioned here, do you know how kids are identified as Gifted now? Or at least since the late 80's. It is based on IQ score, taken from a standard test, usually the Standford Binet test. The basics is that the Stanford Binet scale has a norm score of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 points. To be considered gifted in most states, a child has to score at least two standard deviations above the norm, thus an IQ of 130 is the cut off. There are some allowances for racial bias in the test that has been acknowledged and adjusted for in some cases of low socio-economic children, etc, but that's basically it.
Now, how is a student selected to take the IQ test? Honestly, someone has to ask the guidance department to do it. So it's usually up to a teacher to say "hey, this kid seems a little different." The problem is, a lot of teachers think that the gifted kids are just the smart kids with good grades, when in fact, it is often a disruptive, underachieving child that is gifted. I was selected when I went from quiet and good student to suddenly a mouthy, brash kid who hated school. Supposedly I broke my dear teacher's heart when I turned on her emotionally. I was her sweet student and then, one month, her greatest stress. I'm blessed that she didn't hate me, and in fact, recognized that I was special and needed something more.
This post got rather long, so I guess I had a lot to say on the matter. I will close with this. Over my years as being gifted and knowing many other gifted folk, I've recognized a trend. We gifted few do a much better job at synthesizing, which is an academic term they use in schools now that means "taking bits from existing sources and creating something new and original". We can synthesize term papers, works of art, or even world views. It's a lot like what I shared earlier with the Stories with Holes; asking the right questions to arrive at a new way to view a situation.
Unfortunately, most gifted people take this ability for granted as something that is normal and easy to do. Thus our frustration in dealing with a lot of other people.
