What it means to teach gifted learners well
Hmm, that&#x27;s a lot, and it&#x27;s even deeper than it looks! It&#x27;s interesting stuff, but I wonder if the author was annoyed at being told to sum it up.<p>Maybe meta: It&#x27;s kinda too bad, in a lot of ways, that there&#x27;s still this gifted&#x2F;not dichotomy, this cultural meme we&#x27;ve labored under for multiple centuries now.<p>A few years back, for a while, I made hard-but-good money coaching parents in understanding the gifts of their children. Every single child has a set of gifts that are really valuable. One approach I used was designing a more theoretical gifted context around the child, tracking and tailoring it while observing them, and then relating those idea-space concepts back to the here and now.<p>The approach I preferred is way different from the traditional &quot;gifted child&quot; definition-based approach, by which data and professional levels of subjectivity are used for ranking. I still have a couple of friends from this world who are in their &#x27;40s and fighting over who has the higher IQ. Which is not to say it&#x27;s all like that, but I do think the weaknesses of holding this weirdly polarizing view can and should be put behind us, even at this late point.<p>Even though my approach was different, I never realized until I started how hard parents will try to 1) discern just how _you_ view intellect and gifts, and 2) attempt from day zero to shoehorn their child into the extreme higher ends of that model. I had to develop a separate model for working with parents who had extreme views about gifted children. If you&#x27;ve ever worked in earnest to develop a very thoughtful model meant to help create the best outcomes possible, only to watch people try to game it over and over, you know what I mean.<p>One of the most important issues for most of the kids (IMO) was so much different though--it was definitely not this gifts&#x2F;no gifts issue. It was closer to the perception of troubling relationship differentials among the people in their various life contexts. Kids and parents. The family at home. The kids and the teachers they don&#x27;t like. And it&#x27;s funny, it&#x27;s not even a perception of hatred, anger, or abuse. It&#x27;s more like the full spectrum. The person who can make you laugh and act in the now can be just as dangerous to your well-being as the person who pisses you off.<p>This stuff was causing so many of the kids pain, robbing them of sleep, and throwing them into a strangely irresistible open rebellion against family members, friends, and other people and school systems that were trying to help them. It could get so bad that there wasn&#x27;t any room for learning anymore.<p>So in my view one of the easiest blockers that can prevent the &quot;gifted effect&quot; at all is really obvious--it&#x27;s this troubling relationship differential issue. It will get in the way of everything, it will block powerful learning-stimulation signals and it will make psychological damage almost certain once it starts disturbing sleep.<p>Conversely when most of the contextual relations are at least pretty calming, or ideally even mutually-encouraging and open, _everybody_ starts looking gifted. Plus there&#x27;s less of a reason to say, &quot;I&#x27;m _more_ gifted,&quot; as a means of self-protection. This was always my favorite thing to see.