Lisa Van Gemert

I read an article about the pervasively pale nature of gifted programs.  Let's speak what it is: racism.  The article focused on one young woman who faces stereotype threat from both communities (school and her race) because she is what society tends to think is rare: a gifted child of color.  The article was about one particular school system, and the data isn't pretty.  The truth is that it is typical of districts around the country.

Why is this?  There are so many reasons, and they are deep.  Let me share just one scenario.  The old Stanford-Binet (I'm 44, and it was THE test for admission to gifted programs when I was young) was clearly racially biased.   The images below appeared in the 1960 test.  So, if I were a young black child taking this test in 1960, and I'm asked which person is more attractive, I can answer incorrectly (they say) and choose the person who looks more like me, or I can give the answer they wanted and internalize the idea that I'm not attractive.  Bam!


So let's say I answer it incorrectly (along with other similar questions), and I don't get into the gifted program.   That means that even if I had high potential, it was not nurtured, so when I have children, even if I see the same sparks of intelligence I showed, I never assume that they may be gifted because they are like me, and I was told I wasn't gifted.  And so on and so on.

We do not yet have a level playing field with regard to giftedness, and we won't ever have one until we start seeing ourselves as talent scouts rather than gatekeepers.

Kudos for addressing it well and head-on in this article.

Read the article here.

Watch a video of the anthem, "Young, Gifted, and Black" here:

I was out of town this week to speak at a conference, and I had an experience that I don't think is unusual - people wasted my time. At restaurants, in classes, and elsewhere, there seems to be a lot of waste in the most precious area of all - people's time. I don't just mean time spent waiting for your check, although that's part of it. I'm mostly talking about a lack of respect for the idea that when people give you their time, they're giving you their lives for that moment.

You may be wondering what this has to do with giftedness. Gifted kids (and adults) resent time being wasted, and I would argue that they rightfully resent this at a deeper level than more typically able people. Why? Because their minds move so quickly - or can - that ten minutes wasted to anyone else is like half an hour in gifted years. That may be an over-simplification, but I'm sticking with it.

My mother was in Toastmasters once upon a time (my mother is a truly exquisite public speaker), and she told me when I was maybe thirteen that when you are speaking to a group of fifty people for an hour, you'd better make sure that what you have to say is worth fifty hours of time because that's what you're using.

This has been the guiding principle behind my own speaking style, but this week has taught me that I need to expand this. For gifted learners, the more teachers streamline their instruction and classroom procedures, the less time they waste - which has to be good. The more teachers try to focus on the essential elements necessary in homework practice, the more time kids have to think and feel and be.

So my challenge is to try to identify small ways in which you may be inadvertently wasting others' time and try to correct it. Think about my mom's golden rule, and make sure that if you're taking an hour of thirty students' time, you're giving thirty hours' worth of instruction for it!

In this picture, you can see one of the really important things gifted kids can do with their time if it's not being wasted by adults...This is my foreign exchange student, Malte, reading in the backyard on a day he didn't have five hours of homework.

With apologies in advance to Howard Gardner, the creator of multiple intelligence theory...

In the book that is my resource of the month on my website (www.lisavangemert.com), Made to Stick, the authors discuss how urban legends spread and become "sticky" - meaning that people remember them and they go viral.  The same thing happened with Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory - the idea that we are all somehow "gifted" in different ways and can only learn when taught (or learn most effectively when taught) in that way.  The idea morphed into educational theory that has become so rampant that you literally cannot avoid it.  Teachers were made to feel that if they didn't reach all their "kinesthetic learners" then they were somehow sub-standard.

Not that long ago, however, an interesting paper appeared in Educational Psychologist.  This paper, published by Lynn Waterhouse, began the conversation whose essential idea was that, "The emperor has no clothes."

Enter Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M, who, after looking at the research, agreed with Waterhouse.  In his view (read an article here), the MI theory is more philosophical than research-based.  Even more, it makes people feel good.  So what if I can't read - my interpersonal skills are out of this world!

But what's the harm?  Even if Waterhouse, Ferguson, and others clearly demonstrate that MI is pedagogical snake oil, so what?  The harm is that teachers and school districts spend precious resources trying to make instruction fit a false model.  Does that mean that MI techniques are useless?  No, but it means that you cannot say that because a teacher has one style that only appeals to so-called "auditory learners" that that teacher is somehow inferior.

Believe me, visual learner or no, if someone yells "Fire!" I'm learning.  I don't need a picture.

This, then is the true crux of it.  Focusing on MI takes teachers away from the things that truly do make for effective teaching. It is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic for an ineffective teacher to incorporate a bunch of MI theory when the core teaching is lacking. 

The lessons: 

Beware of theory.  Read the research yourself.  And don't think that because they didn't act it out they aren't going to remember it.  Where were you on 9-11?  Did you need to pantomime the planes to remember?

Here's professor Daniel Willingham from the University of Virginia explaining it in a video for all you visual learners...