Problems can arise if they are not challenged:
“The most common problem is that they don’t learn to work,” says Maureen Neihart, a clinical child psychologist and coauthor of the book “The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children.” Children who earn good grades and high praise with relative ease may not learn how to try hard and to persevere when things are difficult. They can come to equate their academic success with innate intelligence and fail to understand the role that effort plays in achievement. When school work finally becomes demanding, they are often in for a rude awakening and may lack the determination and self-confidence to succeed, Neihart says.
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{ 20 comments }
So now the ‘gifted’ have an excuse to fail; society failed to challenge them sufficiently.
We keep making excuses for anyone and everyone to fail. Fortunately the marketplace is the ultimate corrector here; no one is going to give a challenging job with good remuneration to someone who accepts the liberal’s willing acceptance for failure.
Excel or die. It was not so many generations ago that this was the harsh reality of the world. Now it is too easy for pop psychobable spouting appoligists to coddle folk who would have been eaten by the bear just a had they been on this continent two centuries ago.
A couple of asides:
1. This is why the brightest genius doesn’t necessarily succeed in medical school. Wrapping your brain around medicine is hard for anyone, and requires a lot more than memorizing facts.
2. It’s also the reason why you don’t necessarily want the most intelligent person as your head of state (though getting a C-average at Yale is not generally a ticket to the White House).
Very bright people are not by nature negotiators, willing to compromise what’s right with what works on a diplomatic, human level.
Having a “gifted” child myself (IQ >170), I can say that it is not easy to keep their interest in school. We sent him to a private school and had trouble keeping up. By the school’s recommendation (not ours) he was advanced twice and always did much better the year he skipped (surprisingly he did better socially). Now the classes are much more challanging (Taking AP History) and he is happy.
These kids can succeed, but you need to adapt to their learning. You can’t “mainstream” them any more than you can do so with an LD child. If we allowed these kids to run as fast as they could acedemically, there would probably be less of the stories of brilliant kids that bombed out in school. This is not a license to fail (as gasman said), it is a call for us to have a system that nurtures the best and brightest, not penalizes them.
“It’s also the reason why you don’t necessarily want the most intelligent person as your head of state (though getting a C-average at Yale is not generally a ticket to the White House).”
All the more reason to elect Ted Kennedy to the White House eh? to paraphrase the immortal Dean Wormer: Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son
This sounds familiar.
High school was so easy.
College was a wake-up call and my first two semesters were utter failures. Once I learned the skills my less-gifted peers had mastered years earlier, I again could excel.
I don’t think this is an excuse to fail, and I doubt anyone is making it one. We just need to be aware that gifted children need different stimulation and challenges. If we let them have it too easy, then they won’t know how to work later when they need to.
Who’s talking about coddling them? We’re talking about pushing them harder.
You big boys seem to be missing the point here.
There are people who think that if we simply leveled the playing field, everyone would happily succeed. This study proves that they are incorrect. People need different levels of challenge to truly excel.
Gifted children are marginalized because their needs are not met in the school system. It is not unusual for a gifted program to be the first thing gutted if there are budget cuts. That is assuming there is one in the first place. If this happened to disabled children, people would cry prejudice.
My kids test in the top 1% of their age group peers. We are lucky to have a very good program for them here, and we will not move away from it. The teachers in the program are very aware of the need to challenge these kids and make every effort to meet these needs. But other teachers have often grumbled about it. Several are hostile the program, because they feel this gives those kids special treatment. Also, this is in a magnet school that I have to drive my kids to. They will not bus these special needs children, even though they’ll bus special needs children who have disabilities.
Of course, I’m just one anecdote among many, but I’ve always suspected this was perhaps the main problem I had growing up. My classwork never engaged me and I never developed a work ethic. Despite making all A’s in high school, my lack of self-discipline caused me to fail out of college in short order. “But I’m not supposed to have to work this hard to succeed.. Something must be wrong.”
I’ve matured a lot since then and while I could probably return to school, it probably wouldn’t be worth it, since I have a lot of good work experience now.
Oh, that is so familiar. High school was easy, and then I hit college, which was an utter disaster.
When I went to work I quickly realized that I was surrounded by people who weren’t nearly as smart as I was, but they had an education and were therefore higher up the ladder.
Bingo! I went back to college and transformed myself into an A student. I’ve worked hard ever since and been successful.
Whenever I read a post from some jackass who says “my kids test in the top 1%…”, or “my kids are gifted, and…”, I know that the kids are social rejects and probably close to retarded and will end up in the lowest income bracket based on the pompousness of the parents…the apple does not fall far from the tree
Having exceptional tallents does not require extra societal support.
It is in the interest of the whole of society to have a broadly educated middle class. Some kids just require too many resources to produce too little incremental gain and society should be capable of setting limits on how much extra resource to spend on any one individual of some outside the norm capability. Note that the preceeding is written neutral for kids at either end of the bell curve.
We do not need kids with high potential who are not also focused and energetic self-starters any more than we need slackers with little potential for academic success.
I must agree with 7:59, we must be living in Lake Wobegon, because if you ask your frineds all their childen are above average and it gets mighty crowded in the top few percentile.
I think one problem with American school is that until high school it is way to easy, so for kids who are above average not just gifted, it is indeed pretty boring and for quite a while. I know that virtually every kid who comes from Europe finds the US schools too easy. They really love it too – because they don’t need to work that hard. In high school, gifted kids can take AP classes in the subjects they are good at, but there is not much before that. And with so many hours spent in school there is not much time left to study what one really likes.
Where I grew up, all of the school material was more spread out. Everyone could read after the 1st grade so even those of us who learned to read before starting school were “bored” for only a very short time; we memorized multiplication table and learned division in the 2nd grade, fractions in the 3rd. And it wasn’t just memorization, we had to solve problems that often involved logical thinking. Almost from the start math was more about logic than just memorization and drills. This was years ago, since then they moved algebra from the 6th grade to the 4th which I think made it easier because some problems we had to solve in 5th grade using only arithmetic and logic breaking it up into steps were much easier to solve using algebra.
We also had to write compositions as soon as we learned to write, so anybody who is gifted in language could simply write a better composition on the same subject. Teachers read the best compositions in class. I remember one girl whose compositions were like short stories when she was still 9, but she wasn’t particularly good in math.
From the 5th grade we had algebra, geometry (where we learned the concept of proof and the difference between a theorem and axiom as the very first thing), physics, biology, chemistry, native language, literature, history, foreign language, etc. as separate subjects. Only a couple hours a week in virtually everything but math and language/literature, but with homeworks. So even kids who were gifted and way ahead of the others in one subject, had some work to do in other subjects. I haven’t seen anybody who was so great in everything that every class was boring. People who got A in every class were more more diligent than others. “Gifted” kids were more likely to be great in one or two related subjects but had to work hard to get a good grade in other subjects.
In addition, we spent less time in classes as kids do in the US, so we had time for extra-curricular activities some of which could include study groups and competitions in subjects one was exceptionally good at and really interested in. In high school one could transfer to one of the “special” school with more advanced instructions in subjects one was interested in but still the same base program. US-equivalent would be AP classes; but our basic program was still more demanding.
I think US high school has lots of opportunities for really gifted kids, but until high school the program is way too easy. Also, because everything is crammed into high school a lot less kids actually learn sciences.
It becomes a society’s decision:
Do we want to spend our time, energy and resources:
* teaching the brightest students to achieve at their maximum potentitial?
* teaching everyone the same thing?
* teaching to the people in the class with the most barriers to learning?
Simply put, how does a society treat it’s most intelligent (”book-smart nerds”), it’s members with average intelligence, and it’s members and it’s members with difficulty learning.
That says more about a group of people than income or standardized tests.
This is nonsense. Smart kids will figure out what they need when the demands are accelerated. When I was in school, maybe 1-2 of the people i knew in accelerated classes had academic problems and dropped out… the majority did well and pursued talented careers and challenging educations.
My wife pointed me to this entry and the underlying article. I have to agree with lindsay and david. I, too, have come to find this was a problem for me. Not only high school, but college, too, was pretty easy. Majoring in Mathematics, I should have figured something was wrong when Differential Equations rocked my world. The first real time I had to struggle — and my response? I moved to a different major thinking Math was not for me. I still graduated with honors (and a minor in Math) and thought college was easy.
Then I started law school at a top tier institution (a top-20 school). Suddenly the bottom dropped out. I had no skills, no discipline to handle the amount of material that was delivered. The first semester was a disaster. The next two were nightmares. Finally, in year three, when other classmates were taking GPA-padding classes, I took some heavy hitting seminars and courses and nearly made dean’s list.
I am still trying to get a grasp on some skills that I’m certain I should have mastered years ago. And I’m certain, too, that if I had been accelerated way-back-when, things would be different now. Fortunately, a new day starts every 24 hours.
Gasman: you are wrong on this issue. Excel or die would work if the schools were designed around that concept — but they aren’t. Too much of what CS Lewis foresaw in his “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” is coming true. We have, as a society, made mediocraty the goal for our children. Because we don’t want to label some kids as “below average”, we’ve adjusted the bar so that most kids can be above-average. This was best illustrated to me when I attended my nephew’s high school graduation in a small Texas town. As I looked at the program, a full 70% of the seniors were graduating with honors! So instead of letting those who are bright stand out, we knock them down to be with the rest of the crowd so those at the bottom are made to “feel better” about themselves. Oh what we do to satsify the god of self-esteem…
Agreeing with one of the anons who thinks that US schools are incredibly easy. Two people from my class were sent to the USA on an exchange when they were 16. After taking the first week they were bumped up a school year; when they sent us back some of the work they were doing were we gobsmacked – this was on a level of things we did when we were 11.
Both of them were in the ‘bottom streams’ at my selective school, so no way geniuses, just a bit above average. They graduated with high grades a year early having done bugger all work. Oh, and business leaders in the UK say that the Uk workforce leaves school unskilled… I dread to think what it’s like in the USA.
(US colleges seem to be much more rigorous – that must be a really big jump for a lot of kids, not just the gifted ones. Is that more of the issue?)
I’ve heard anecdotally that an increasing number of colleges are being forced to provide remedial education to incoming freshmen who simply aren’t prepared for college-level work.
This says to me that high school is becoming seriously watered down.
I’m not sure if it’s the kids, the parents, the schools or all three.
I know personally of kids who won’t sign up for AP courses because they’re afraid they won’t get an A and it’ll affect their GPA and their chances of getting into a “good” college. Some high schools have cut back on these types of courses because not enough kids are signing up for them. We have a new generation of teachers who were educated under this “dumbed down” system and think mediocrity is normal.
I love how all these foreign twats say that American schooling is inferior, yet they come crawling on there hands and knees from whatever godforsaken hellhole they came from to send their kids to school here…
Anon at 6:23 have you thought that people who send their kids to the US schools are not from the same countries who criticize US schools?
World is really big, you know. Are you comparing the US schools to places where kids from poor families have to work from a very young age?
Not sure how this ended up on a medical blog, but I felt obliged to post, just to give context.
American high schools for the most part train for the average student. It is quite easy for someone who is average. American colleges don’t have the same plan and if you use the same studying skills in college as you did in US high school you will fail. I learned to study as a freshman in college and then again in the first year of medical school. There were some truly smart people at medical school, but the ones who succeeded were the ones who studied the most.
I read something in the last year speaking about the dicotomy between the US and the rest of the world regarding education and the work place. The US coddles children with their education and overpromotes, while the capitalist workplace is very Darwinian. The quasi-socialists countries of Europe are the oppositie. School is very rigorous and the adult workplace is quite lax. I don’t know if that is true as I’ve never been in a European school or workplace, but it rings true after reading some of the above comments.
Lastly, I’ve found that regardless of race, ethnicity, class, country of origin, most people don’t know how to work hard. Whether that means studying, being diligent in your career, or putting in the hours necessary to succeed, few people learn what hard work means.
b
To Anonymous 7:59
You are right, remedial social skills often go hand in hand with high intelligence. This was one of our concerns, and it is one of the things that our local program addresses. And arrogance is one of the things that I address. I always tell my kids that everyone has different needs, and this doesn’t make them better or worse than anyone else.
I grew up nerdy and socially awkward, and it was very painful, not to mention that my low self esteem at the time and boredom kept me out of the gifted program where I grew up.
Anonymous 1:24 has it right. Every child should be helped according to their strengths and weaknesses. Society has a lot to gain from it, and not just profit.
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