On Being Gifted

                Time did strange things in school.  The seconds would creep across the clock, taking a breathless eternity between one tick and the next.  In their torturous journey whole universes existed.  Meanwhile, light bent and warped until all the eyes in the classroom were collapsing into me like some horrid, exasperated singularity.

                “Ummm…” I would squeak.  “What?”

                In Kindergarten my teacher, a veteran professional, was convinced that I must be autistic.  In the second grade I spent two terrifying weeks in a room with several cheerfully aggressive students who, looking back, must have had Down Syndrome or FAS and were three times my size.  I remember crying and gluing stars on a cut-out Christmas tree.  My third grade teacher felt I needed to be held back and told my mother that I was an incorrigible discipline problem.  I’ve been accused of plagiarism, cheating and referred to psychologists. I’ve been the target of frightening spats of temper from otherwise professional educators.  I’ve experienced bullying from my classmates and have been so miserable that I would weep at just the thought of school. 

Such can be the experience of the so-called “Gifted” kid in a regular classroom.  From kindergarten until the seventh grade when my “ability” was finally diagnosed, I was screened for various and sundry popular disabilities as I habitually frustrated my teachers, disrupted my classmates and confused the heck out of my family who knew me to be intelligent and did not understand why I was struggling socially and academically. 

My experience is not unusual among the “Gifted.”  Through a fluke of genetics some children can process information differently than others.  Sometimes faster, sometimes just differently.  To a young person who doesn’t have the information and perspective to understand why they are different, it doesn’t feel like a “gift” it feels like a curse. 

Imagine if someone took away your Big Wheel tricycle and expected you to operate a sports car without any training at five- or six-years-old.  Now imagine being punished and humiliated for wrecking the thing.  Being “Gifted” is a little like that.  A “Gifted” student has all sorts of powerful and specialized equipment and often no guidance on how to use it.  These kids become agitated, bored and depressed.  They, their teachers and their classmates become locked into a little dance of disruption.  They are the class clown, the geek, the explosive temper who gets sent to the principal’s office every day.

“Gifted” kids are often thought to be high achievers, the kids who enjoy and do well in school.  Because of that stereotype, “Gifted” programs are underfunded or not funded at all.  When a school district’s resources are stretched thin providing for kids who are not testing well, resources for the “Gifted” can seem unnecessary.  Parents, administrators and educators need to remember that accommodations are accommodations.  Taking away services to “Gifted” kids is like taking away another child’s wheelchair, only letting them use it during P.E. or as a reward.  That child may learn to drag themselves around the school building but it is doubtful that they will be learning up to their potential.

It was in the spare and soothing atmosphere of seventh grade science when I finally found my advocate.  We were discussing relativity (Einstein was a “Gifted” student who failed in a standard classroom, you know) and the possibility of time travel.  More accurately, the best teacher and coach in the whole world, Brian Epley, and I were discussing relativity and time travel while the rest of the class fidgeted.  He finally waved his hand and said, “Well, Billeen, that might be something you could look into during Quest.” 

“But,” I replied, hating to cut the conversation short, “I’m not in Quest.”

Shortly after, I was taken into a little room, was asked all sorts of interesting questions and was allowed to play with colored blocks for several hours.  From then on, for a couple of hours a day, every day, I was allowed to accompany a handful of other kids into the library (the library!) to work on fascinating bits of this and that which would have probably bored the general population into a coma.  My Quest teacher, Mrs. Ladd, worked with me to find something that could help me engage in school in a meaningful way.  After some trial and error, she plunked me down in front of a beige Apple Macintosh computer, cutting edge technology at the time, opened up a word processor and I began to write.

Time did strange things.  It flew by.  I can envision myself in middle school Quest Language Arts as a sort of wood chipper.  I can see Mrs. Ladd tossing in all sorts of information, the hated accelerated grammar primer, Great Expectations, the Future Problem Solving program, while I ground it up and threw it out on a wavering bluish computer screen in sometimes unrecognizable configurations (I resented the editing process).  Instead of experiencing frustration, being a disruption and being bored literally to tears, I had found a little niche in school which carried me all the way through high school where I flourished under the patient guidance of one Nina Faust, purveyor of wholesome and delicious cookies and hero to Quest students for an entire generation.

While I did not write the Great American Novel before the age of 25, I believe that the Quest program introduced me to a world of academia that I might have been permanently alienated from.  As the parent of a “Gifted” student, a volunteer and a substitute in the school district, it frustrates me to see students who clearly need an accelerated and/or differentiated curriculum left to languish in a standard classroom.  Even kids who may not be diagnosably “Gifted” benefit from the availability of programs that might, on occasion, spark their interest where “standards” do not.

Being “Gifted” is not a free ticket to ride on the success train.  “Gifted” students drop-out, get involved in drugs and alcohol, commit crimes and commit suicide.  Alan Ginsberg’s famous poem, Howl, opens with “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”    I think many of us can appreciate that sentiment.  The list of “best minds” from Homer who have met bad ends is not short.  It is a profound tragedy when apathy and disaffectedness leads “Gifted” students, just like any other student, into trouble.  Especially when many of these problems could be alleviated by administrator awareness, educator sensitivity and parent advocacy.