Gifted children all get straight A’s and wear thick-rimmed glasses

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Or how to waste the talent nature has given us

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Pedro López Tolosana

The mid-1980s. A classroom in the days of the old BUP system. At the front stood a teacher who looked like a G.I. Joe, a man who clearly enjoyed tormenting his pupils. He began covering the blackboard with a formula, frantically filling it with unknowns, numbers, brackets and every conceivable mathematical symbol. Throughout the performance he kept his back to the class, glancing at the pupils only from the corner of his eye so he could savour their bewilderment. Then he placed the chalk on the ledge, turned towards his astonished audience and asked:

“So, have you managed to follow all that?”

His moment of triumph lasted barely two seconds. It ended the instant one of the pupils raised his hand and pointed out that halfway through the third line of the formula, the negative sign should in fact have been positive if what followed was to make any sense. A few seconds of silence followed. The teacher’s expression slowly changed. A brief flick of the wrist became an emblem of defeat as he drew a vertical stroke through the symbol, transforming the minus sign into a plus. The correction was greeted with something close to a standing ovation.

What that teacher had not reckoned with was that, statistically speaking, there was every chance that one of his pupils would be gifted. And however shy such children may sometimes be, they often find it hard not to follow a problem through to the end, to get to the bottom of whatever lies before them and to say exactly what they think, even when doing so may land them in trouble.

Thirty years later, in a café in an upmarket part of Barcelona, close to a foundation for gifted children, a couple are having coffee before attending a parents’ workshop at the foundation. Through the café’s glass frontage, the husband notices a man whose walk seems strangely familiar. He watches him for a moment before saying to his wife:

“See that man over there? We’re about to meet him upstairs.”

His wife asks whether it is someone he knows.

“No,” he replies. “I haven’t seen him in thirty years.”

Five minutes later, they finish their coffee and head up to the foundation. The husband looks around, stops the mysterious figure again and greets him.

“I recognised you from the way you walk.”

The other man turns around and immediately calls him by name.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve brought my son.”

“And you?”

“My nephew.”

The father had known he would run into his former classmate because, during the parent workshops, he had learned that giftedness largely comes down to the vagaries of genetics. He remembered a number of things clearly, among them the anecdote with which this article began, which had involved the very man he had spotted through the café window.

Back in their school days, both had stood out in a series of group intelligence tests administered as part of career guidance. Nobody told them anything more afterwards. Giftedness was simply ignored. There was no legislation, no guidance and little understanding of what should be done with pupils whose abilities set them apart.

“They’re intelligent; there’s nothing to worry about.”

Like many teenagers, one of the two used those abilities to get away with doing as little work as possible throughout his education. As a result, he never acquired proper study habits—or rather, never needed to. He eventually ended up in a career far below his potential.

The other, less interested in social life and more absorbed by scientific pursuits, went on to study physics at university.

Things had changed by then. Both men had taken care to ensure that their children received the specialised education they themselves had never enjoyed.

Today, gifted children are formally recognised within the legal framework as pupils with Special Educational Support Needs. Whether that recognition has translated into reality is another matter altogether. At present, only around 0.3 per cent of pupils are officially identified as gifted, compared with the 3 to 10 per cent estimated by the scientific community.

One reason for this neglect is the widespread misconceptions surrounding giftedness. People often assume that because these children are highly intelligent, they require little support—or perhaps even less support than other pupils. Nothing could be further from the truth.

First, they learn at a different pace from most of their peers. The pace of the classroom simply does not suit them; it bores them and often causes them to switch off. Like everyone else, they need an environment in which they feel comfortable while also being intellectually challenged.

The second reason is that these pupils frequently experience asynchronous development: a mismatch between their intellectual development and other areas of development, whether psychomotor, emotional or even different intellectual domains. One obvious example is the gap between the speed at which they think and the speed at which they can write. This often leads them to develop an aversion to writing, something that requires specific attention in its own right.

The third reason is that they frequently display what psychologists refer to as overexcitabilities, meaning that they respond more intensely to different stimuli. They tend to be highly sensitive children and may therefore be more vulnerable to emotional difficulties.

Finally, there is another factor worth mentioning: being different comes at a cost. Gifted children are often targets for bullying, and this is something that schools need to monitor carefully. So what do we actually do with these pupils? All too often, they are simply given more work or told to keep pace with everyone else.

Paradoxically, we have the High Performance Centre (CAR) in Sant Cugat, devoted to helping elite athletes win medals at international competitions, yet we have no equivalent institution designed to nurture the pupils who may one day produce the technological breakthroughs that could improve all our lives, particularly the lives of those most in need. Among them may be the people who design eye-controlled computer interfaces, lighter and more affordable wheelchairs, or implants for people with hearing loss. Once again, specialisation is confused with segregation. Creating this kind of centre—or, at the very least, specialised programmes within mainstream schools—would genuinely promote inclusion. Not the rhetorical kind, but the real thing.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons