Goals of the gifted

[Tabouli]

Sigh. Resisting this gifted children thread and trying to distract myself with broad beans is clearly useless.

Cindy:
> I find myself wondering whether a child who sets a goal "beneath" the expectations of parents, teachers and psychologists will receive tremendous pressure to set a higher goal. Perhaps the 8-year-old who does high-school 
level math is free to declare that he "just" he wishes to teach pre-
school, but I have trouble imagining that this goal wouldn't be 
questioned early and often. <

Ooo, big "ex number one" alarm bells.  He was picked out of a working class primary school by a well-meaning teacher as "exceptional", IQ tested, gaped at, delivered via scholarship to a posh academic private school, effortless success in every field until the mid-teen crisis.  By his mid-twenties, he was thoroughly miserable, talked about suicide, would alternate between believing himself to be above all other mortals in supreme isolation and cringing insecurity about his "failure" and inability to choose a direction in life, not feeling at home in either the middle or the working class.

I tried asking what inspired him and he said he loved to make things.  Building bicycles.  I said so why don't you? and he went all evasive and gloomy.  It was pretty apparent that this wasn't an option, because you see, he was born for Something Better... just look at that sky-high IQ of his!  And I'd visit him and he'd be sitting there tinkering with his bicycle and calculating the physics of the gear ratios at various spoke tensions (or something along those lines - strange pieces of paper covered in impossibly complex mathematical calculations, pen in one hand, spanner in the other).

> I have to wonder, however, whether we're necessarily doing gifted 
children a favor by saddling them with these expectations and 
obligations.<

Exactly.

Ali:
> I don't actually know whether Britain does now have special 
programmes for "Gifted" kids, but certainly in the 70's and 80's 
nothing was apparent.<

There was, I believe, a British Society for Gifted Children at that time, though I've no idea what its function was.  Anyone know about this?

Tabouli.




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