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

[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".