That Label Again

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I am having a whole lot of school flashbacks now that I'm here at the Space Place.

See, my basic job description is Tell Kids How Cool Space Is. Which is pretty great. But my coworker, the guy who tries to keep all us presenters headed in more or less the same direction, has pointed out that I am specifically good at telling gifted kids about space.

"Oh, that's common," my friend who is a bona fide teacher informed me. "You teach to your own type. It takes a conscious effort if you're teaching other types."

So I've embarked upon a crash course in figuring how to teach other types of learners. It is REALLY DIFFICULT, you guys. When I was a kid, a lot of the techniques teachers used in the classroom to try to drill some knowledge into our skulls struck me as patronizing, redundant, and stupid. My coworker assures me that had more to do with my own brain than the teachers', and that the techniques that simply annoy me--like making kids repeat vocabulary terms--are quite useful. I have no idea if that's true, because if it is my own brain, there's no way I can be objective. So I have to believe him for now and try to do a lot of education that seems to me to be counterintuitive. And I keep flashing back to being a kid who had to put with this nonsense.

It also reminds me of something that was a unique problem for a gifted kid--that unlike other types of special ed, having/being a gifted kid was seen as desirable. And that made it really hard to talk about the problems involved (like frustration with bafflingly obtuse peers,* social awkwardness, and boredom at school) without getting a lot of "CRY MOAR, EMOKID" responses. Even now, I am not sure if I should talk about my life experience because people think it's bragging, when I'm mostly trying to figure out why the hell life seems so different to me than it does to others. So the Space Place job has been surprisingly revelatory.

But! It's not all terrible! The cool thing is that we are also called upon to tailor our lesson plans for different learning styles--like, for example, GIFTED KIDS. Which means that my unique talents are useful! I offered to try finding resources to expand our current lesson plans for the kids with the same kinds of upside-down brains as my own. So I get to dig into gifted resources and try them out, and it's gonna be AWESOME. I may be weird, but at least I an use my weirdness to help other weird kids really enoy their Valuable Learning Experiences. And that's what's making the Space Place job so darn much fun.


*I must have been annoying as fuck as a kid, beause I simply didn't understand how other people couldn't grasp concepts that seemed so simple.

Comments

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

I once explained to a teacher taking a course in teaching gifted kids, why being a gifted kid really sucks sometimes. He wrote that up in a paper for his course, along with how blown away he was because he had had no idea, and hadn't expected it. It helps that I was one of his favorite students, and that he was paying my best friend to type up his papers for him. (This was way back in the mid-80s when writing papers rarely involved a computer.) I'm sure he knew she was going to show me. But it really surprised me how this teacher, who was generally good with teaching a variety of students (but not my sister) and learning styles, and was generally a compassionate person, had never thought about the down sides of being a gifted kid in school. It was an educational experience for both of us.

As a teacher, I've learned to use a variety of techniques to help multiple learning styles, including things that I know drove me batty when I was a student, but I see that they work for some of the students. Try different things, and watch reactions. If you work with one group for any length of time, you can really pick out students' different learning styles. Even for a short time, you'll probably spot a few. When you try something different and a kid sits up straighter, or gets that "oh, wow, now I get it" look. Those moments are fantastic!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The presentations are usually half an hour or an hour long. But it's amazing how much of a feel you can get even in that time.

Part of my philosophy is also that the Space Place is more to be an experience than an infodump. Though we do include a lot of information with the presentations, a lot of it is performance, and just getting them interested in it with the cool stuff you can see in the dome theater or the sphere or whatever. So I try to provide information understandably, but also figure that I'm more providing the exciting parts and the teachers can fill in the blanks (some better than others, true ...).

And I've had a few kids have a "WOW I GET IT" moment, or come up and ask a lot of questions. It IS awesome!

Yeah, nobody recognzes that gifted kids are SPECIAL ED and have their own unique challenges. If you try to present it that way people just think you're trying to humblebrag.

[spiffikins]

Hee, this reminds me of elementary school, and how while the teacher would be going over the lessons with the rest of the class, they moved my desk out into the hallway and gave me the *next* workbook in the series to keep me occupied, since I had already finished the workbook they were all doing.

I remember those workbooks - I think this was grade 2 - each section was a different colour, and the top corner of the page had a colour and page number, and when you completed a page correctly, the teacher would CUT the tip of the corner off - so you could see your progress.

DAMN I liked to get my corners cut! And I remember being MAD because I WAS NOT ALLOWED to do more pages!

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I also remember getting mad because I wasn't allowed to work ahead. Very frustrating.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I hated being asked not to read ahead. That was just impossible.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Listening to my classmates read aloud was absolutely excruciating.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Oh god, no kidding. I'd sometimes lose track of where the class was because I'd have read ahead a chapter during one person's droning recitation of a passage.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Likewise. And then the teacher would call on me and I'd have to hastily figure out how far back everyone else was.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* You're not alone.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I also got in trouble for reading after I finished my work. And, occasionally, while I was supposed to be paying attention to the teacher. Eventually there was a conference about it. I don't know what Mom said, but the outcome was that I was permitted to bring my own books and read, as long as I had finished my work and as long as I paid attention and kept the book put away while the teacher was actually talking.

Now that I'm an adult, I appreciate all the more how much my mother helped me. She was always fair and she didn't let me squirm out of things I had to do, but she encouraged me to follow my interests and gave me every opportunity she could to let me learn. And she tolerated my weirder interests with great serenity. I should probably go let her know she's awesome some more.

[sriti.livejournal.com]

So, do you now fashion your lesson plans so as to cater to all the kids, gifted or otherwise? I.e. do you mix it up a bit?

Also, I don't mean to be nosy, but you're the first person I know who's been recognised as being gifted! Where I come from, they don't give out such recognitions...you either do good in school, or you don't. So, may I ask you a few questions about it? Which, of course, you're free to ignore!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I try to make them accessible for everyone, but I'm not always sure how to do it. I also follow the leads of my fellow presenters, so that helps.

You're welcome to ask away! I'm not sure how helpful any of my answers will be!

[sriti.livejournal.com]

Ok, so how is it assessed whether a kid is more intelligent than others? Do they take regular IQ tests at school for this? Also, if a gifted kid is studying in the same class as other kids with not so high an IQ, how does it matter if that kid is gifted or not? (Will get consistently good grades, yes, but besides that?) Does a gifted child graduate as the same time as other kids of that age? Does he get more preference at higher studies levels?

As you can see, I'm quite ignorant on this topic! But extremely curious!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

IDEALLY, teachers and parents stay alert for kids who might be gifted while teaching; a lot of it is based on teacher assessment. If your school's lucky, you'll have a counselor trained in assessing learning differences, too. And there are also written tests, but IQ tests are really just rough estimates of a few specific abilities.

Giftednesss is a learning style, not just a measure of intelligence, so in a regular claim a gifted kid might get good grades but be bored, or just shut down and get terrible grades. But getting them the special ed they need isn't always easy--it takes money, resources, and teacher training, so often they're either left in regular classes or just moved up a grade our two, which doesn't always work because they don't have accelerated development in all areas. So is pretty complex! S lot of advocates are working on making it better, but there's a long way to go.

[hrhleia.livejournal.com]

I absolutely get where you're coming from - both my brothers and I are gifted, and my youngest brother is 'twice exceptional' - gifted and with a learning disability. I was frustrated by a lot of my education, and my mom went through so much trying to get the public schools to teach us appropriately that she gave up and homeschooled the youngest until high school. Now that I'm teaching some classes, I have difficulty with the kids that don't get something, because I can only figure out how to 'dumb it down' so far. Luckily it's rare, but it does happen.

I could go on and on about how the education system is failing gifted kids (and special ed kids, and everyone else) but you're right, some people do take it as bragging. It is hardest for the twice exceptional kids I think because the giftedness compensates for a lot of the disability, making it hard to diagnose, and even now a lot of people don't believe it's possible. But I think it's great that you have the chance to provide some more in depth material for the kids that want it!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they tried to give us some gifted education, but they just didn't have enough to work with. Though I did get to go to an awesome summer school program for a while that really did understand how to frame gifted education, which was great, but for most of actual school I was pretty dang bored.

I had some teachers try to get me to tutor other kids who were lagging. It was AWFUL. I never understood how to explain things and would just sit there helplessly. I think the teachers caught on pretty quickly.

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

"I had some teachers try to get me to tutor other kids who were lagging"

OH GEEZ THIS WAS THE WORST.

Because you sit there and you say a perfectly reasonable thing that makes perfect sense to you and the other kid just stares blankly.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

In middle school (somewhere in the grade 4–6 range, can't remember exactly which year) they separated out the "gifted & talented" kids for part of the day some days, and put us in a room at another school for some sort of "semi-structured learning" thing. They had some "learning stations" set up around the room on various topics, and we were expected to go from one to the other in any order at our own pace. I did some of the science & math ones, pretty much ignored all of the others, and most days ended up spending most of my time on the Macs playing Tetris or occasionally fiddling with a music scoring program (I couldn't actually read sheet music, but I could click & drag symbols until I'd basically filled the screen with "enough notes" and then hit "play": the results were inevitably like Danny Elfman getting in a car crash with Iannis Xenakis). There was also some sort of overarching project where we each got assigned a country and had to contact the embassy & put together some sort of presentation; I got Uganda, but had zero interest in social studies, so after dutifully writing to the Ugandan embassy and getting no response I pretty much blew it off. It didn't affect my grade (which was still based on what I did in normal class) and it didn't interest me, so the hell with it.

So basically the "Gifted & Talented Program" meant "farting around for a few hours until it was time to go".

[westrider.livejournal.com]

This is actually part of why I didn't end up becoming a teacher. I'm really bad at teaching to the middle of the bell curve. I do well with gifted kids (like I was), and I actually do pretty well with many of the kids with various disabilities. But the middle of the road? I just can't hit the right balance, and I always end up losing them, one way or another.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hee! That was my conclusion early on, too. Never thought I'd wind up in a job where I had to figure out how to do it anyway1

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I think that the "gifted and talented" programs should probably be renamed. Naming them that implies that we're normal kids with a bit extra on top, rather than kids who function and learn differently, and that's a disservice to everyone involved. (And everyone not involved, because it's the wrong impression and it gives that "extra-desirable" edge.) Semantics? Maybe. But semantics exist for a reason, and the language used to talk about individuals and teaching plans makes a difference in how people think about the subject and approach its challenges.

I must have been annoying as fuck as a kid, beause I simply didn't understand how other people couldn't grasp concepts that seemed so simple.

My mom still tells a story about me in kindergarten, when I was five: I had done the chicken-bone-in-vinegar experiment, and because I read and understood reading earlier than most kids, I understood the science behind it, or at least the kid-friendly simplified version. That was FASCINATING! So, naturally, I took it to show and tell, and I showed the class how the chicken bone was all bendy, and started explaining earnestly that it was bendy because I had put it in vinegar and the vinegar had leached the calcium out, and partway through my explanation I noticed that nobody was paying attention. This was a travesty. I stopped, frowned at the class, shook my rubbery chicken bone at them, and yelled, "YOU GUYS LISTEN! THIS IS INTERESTING!"

It didn't even occur to me till YEARS later that the average five-year-old probably doesn't possess the baseline scientific knowledge and logic required to follow along and understand what I was talking about, and I have a clear snapshot memory of the frustration of seeing blank and uninterested faces when I had brought along what I thought was amazing interesting stuff that everyone would think was cool.

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

"I think that the "gifted and talented" programs should probably be renamed." Ugh, yes, a thousand times yes! Nothing is "just" semantics, especially when it comes to how people view/categorize children.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHA that sounds like something I'd have done. "COME ON, GUYS, PAY ATTENTION! THIS IS COOL!"

I vaguely recall that they kept changing the name of the gifted programs because parents kept clamoring to get their kids in too. It never worked. And cramming other kids into the gifted classes is bad for everyone--for the gifted kids who are once again forced to slow down, and the other kids who are cool and great without being gifted who are expected to be something they're not. That's just not fair.

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

I was a gifted kid, and people kept saying I should teach math when I grew up since I liked it so much. That always struck me as an incredibly stupid idea - if I understand something intuitively, I'm the worst person in the world to try to explain it to kids that *don't* get it. Plus, you know, the idea of going into a career where I constantly had to deal with the sorts of children who made my childhood miserable because I was "too smart" somehow just didn't appeal to me.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Argh, yes. "I get it; why don't you?" is a terrible way to teach something. I had a few times when I grasped something so fast that the teachers asked me to tutor the other kids. It ... didn't work so well.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

This is, more specifically, the issue I had with trying to teach math. For some reason, I can break it really far down for the kids who are struggling with the basics, but for the middle/high school level stuff, I get it too intuitively, and I can't even see the smaller steps that make it up.

[sylvidoptera.livejournal.com]

OMG, sweety, I feel you. "I must have been annoying as fuck as a kid, beause I simply didn't understand how other people couldn't grasp concepts that seemed so simple." I was the exact.same.way. Even most of the gifted teachers couldn't keep up with me and my sisters. And I had to test out of school early just to get away from the sheer slowness and annoying social problems that were making me hate it so much. Love learning, hate the "go along at the slowest pace so everyone can keep up" type of thing.

It's why I didn't become an English teacher like I thought about. I get so frustrated when people don't pick up something after the first explanation/demonstration. I'd end up yelling at students and that wouldn't be good for my paycheck. ;)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I decided early on not to be a teacher. It would be terrible for everyone.

I like the irony that now I've got this job. Probably it's good for me. ;)

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

I love how the comments section has become a gifted child commiseration zone.

I also wonder what my life would have been like if my mother hadn't decided to homeschool me from third grade to the start of high school. (True, the reason she decided to homeschool me was, in theory, because my second grade teacher had moved me to the front of the classroom when I started having trouble seeing the board rather than, y'know, letting my parents know I might need glasses, but there were also already signs that I didn't fit in with my peer group. Like my favorite recess pastime being the reading of Redwall books when everyone else wouldn't read something without pictures on every other page, and only did that reading when required.)

I should note that after the first couple of years, my mother's strategy for homeschooling me was to pretty much just make sure I had workbooks and textbooks for math and science and history on hand and I could work my way through them at my own pace, while reading as many books as I possibly could.

Public high school was pretty rough, but mainly because I had no mechanism to deal with being SO. VERY. BORED. in the classes geared towards the average student, even if it was the average honors student.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

We gotta share SOMEWHERE!

"Average honors student" is a great way to differentiate. A lot of those kids are incredible workers and achieve a lot, but they still don't have the same style brains as gifted kids. I remember my 7th grade English teacher mentioning the difference to my mom, and apologizing for the fact that even the "gifted" classes became classes for the "average honors students" because there were a lot more of them. It did help put things in context for us.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Another thought: I learned, early this year, that my way of processing the world is essentially inverted from the way most people do it. Watching my daughter react to the world reminded me of how I perceived the world before I learned to filter a bit for coping and efficiency, and I found that with a little mental effort in a non-busy moment I could take the filters back down and just SEE everything again, the world in all its overwhelming detail and beauty. It's not something I can do all the time, since I've got a lot more stuff to worry about and keep track of now. But it's a good thing to have for the occasional sensory trip. Thing is, when discussing this experience with my girlfriend, I discovered that she sees the object first and the detail second, where I see the detail first and the object second. The best way I've figured out to describe this is that she sees the building and then observes that it is made of brick, where I see the bricks and observe that they make a building.

I don't know if this is a gifted kid thing, an HSP thing, or some other brain quirk. A few of my friends share it, but it seems like the majority of people go top-down.

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I'd qualify as 'gifted', but I was certainly much more advanced academically than others my age, plus some learning disabilities we didn't figure out until high school. But omfg it made my primary school years so horrible. Kindergarten was at a public school that point-blank refused to make any accommodations for me, which pissed my mom off, so next year was private school. My first grade teacher was absolutely amazing, she went over and beyond for the 'different' students. And then second grade was a teacher didn't care, third grade was the emotionally abusive terror who shall not be named, and yeah I never again got a teacher who was as awesome as Mrs. Brown in first grade. I bounced around through a lot of different teaching and school styles and some things worked and some didn't.
But yeah people really don't get how horrible it can be when, as a child, you're on one level, and nobody else is on that level, and you get more or less shunned (or at least mocked/passively ignored/given scathing looks of disgust/actively bullied by adults who should damn well know better).

On the plus side, I've been exposed to enough different learning and teaching styles that I'm really, really good with giving museum tours or talking to clients at work nowadays. Even if I am rather introverted and don't particularly care to interact with others for 10 hours a day :p.
On the down side, I don't think I ever did as well or went as far academically as I could or should have, due to lack of consistent support. Oh well.

[broken-moons.livejournal.com]

I love how much you're getting out of this job at the Space Place - it really sounds like a good place for you, challenges and all!

And oh, man, I can't say that I was a gifted kid, but I was definitely the Reading Kid. Thankfully read-aloud time didn't happen often but whenever it did it was definitely excruciating. I tried to read ahead as slowly as I could but even then I had to scramble to find the right place when it was my turn.

And one time I got into an argument with my school's principal when he filled in for a sick teacher and decided to fill up some of the time by reading to us from a book about Sinterklaas. Without giving us copies of the book to read along. It was torture, and halfway through I decided to stop trying to hide how bored I was, and then I decided to be obvious about how bored I was, and long story short this was the only time ever in my school career that I managed to piss of a teacher so much he sent me out of the class.

But come on, what teacher includes an hour of reading to his kids in the final year of primary school? It was an affront to all of us, not just me as a fast-reader.