Sally Reis on Gifted Education

shawbridge
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:14:58 +0000

I’m no expert, but the neuropsychologist who tests my son told me, I think, that the tests are set with a maximum score and the scores at the top are thus very sensitive to missing one or two questions. [We’ve noticed variance over the years and so I asked].

We live in Massachusetts, which doesn’t believe in gifted education because everyone is special. My son is both gifted and has learning disabilities – which meant that we couldn’t ask the teacher just to let him read something, because he was/is really dyslexic.

We found that with an IEP, the school system could be guided to trying to help the learning disabilities, but except for the personal interest of the Special Ed staff (they had never seen these extremes of giftedness and disability together) and the assistant superintendent of the school district, there was no interest in helping nor any institutional capacity to help on the gifted side. To compensate, my wife and I read thousands of books to him over the years. Starting at an early age, I introduced him to conceptually advanced areas wherever I could.

It may not have been a good choice, but we concentrated on helping him learn to read and write rather than really play to the areas in which he had gifts (which really involved abstract conceptualization, strategic reasoning and ability to make art and thus it was hard to focus). The improvement in reading and writing has been staggering.

By high school, we really had to take things into our own hands. He came to me during freshman year and said, “Dad, these people are wasting my time. In honors math, they explain the idea on Monday. I get it on Monday. We’re still doing it on Friday.” But, because reading and writing was fatiguing for him, doing the busywork homework really exhausted him. So, we worked out an arrangement where he did partial homeschooling. Some subjects (like lab science, art, and social studies) were done in school. Math and English typically were done outside. He did EPGY freshman year and I hired a Harvard grad student to work with him in sophomore/junior years. He completed the junior year curriculum in half a year and then worked on advanced subjects. In English, I wanted him to focus on learning to write well, especially to write expository essays and to use assistive technologies like speech recognition. We also let him work on creative writing and he was/is co-authoring a novel. Math worked pretty well (other than EPGY), because he could work at his own pace) but he really needed to work on the writing. By luck, his really hard work and some good choices, his writing has dramatically improved. The in-school part was mixed. He found AP Chemistry trivial. He was sick for a significant part of his senior year and basically taught himself AP Physics. But, it turned out the the biggest contributor to his writing and to his intellectual stimulation over the last couple of years was his decision (to parental trepidation) to sign up for Moot Court and take Constitutional Law with a gifted teacher. Her high school Con Law course was taught at a serious college level and he soared.

So, I think we did OK with a gifted kid with challenges, but I don’t think that there is any easy path. There may be a very few private schools (Andover, Commonwealth) that can handle gifted kids. There is a boarding school called the Davidson Institute (I think, in Nevada?), which is aimed at kids with IQ’s over 145 (or something like that?). But I don’t think private schools in general are a panacea. My daughter goes to a relatively prestigious private high school in the Boston area which admits for the most part very bright kids, but I don’t think the school is prepared to handle truly gifted kids. My son went to a private middle school, where they refused to a) pull out; b) accelerate; or c) create group projects for the few really strong kids in math. They didn’t believe in individualized curricula. And, many private schools wouldn’t necessarily have the teacher resources to do much even if they did want to use individualized curricula.

I will say that our public high school eventually offered us real flexibility when we approached the very supportive assistant superintendent of the district. My son would have preferred full to partial homeschooling, but my wife did not want that. I’m not sure what set of choices would have produced a better result.