Lisa Van Gemert

One of the hallmarks of gifted children is an early, intense social conscience that is often neglected and allowed to atrophy until it becomes the victim of societal pressures toward avarice and self-centeredness.

Parents and teachers of the gifted should invest time into guiding children and teens on how best to find charities to which to donate time and money. Finding reputable charities that match the child (or group of children's) interests is easy with the Web site www.charitynavigator.org. Charity Navigator rates charities (stick with those earning four stars) based on a number of criteria and lets you search based on interest.

Some charities make better avenues of giving than others for kids. Kids want to make a connection with their giving and the amounts they are donating are typically small, so stick with charities that can put a "face" on the giving and where small donations can make a noticeable difference.

One I recommend is Kiva, a microlending charity in which you can donate the same $25 over and over as it is repaid. You can choose the person the loan goes to by a variety of criteria. If a class can bring (or raise) $1 each, you are off! Other good choices for kids are the African Wildlife Foundation Water.org and Heifer International.

You can often get gift cards to charities, so consider requesting one as a gift from grandparents or friends for birthdays or Christmas. The selection of the loan through Kiva or the choosing of an animal to adopt through AWF can be a centerpiece of a birthday party.

If you don't want to deal with money, a terrific option is Soles4Souls, a charity that collects new and gently used shoes for the 300 million children in the world with no shoes. You can collect the shoes and then drop them off at one of a multitude of drop sites - no money needed.

Another possibility is to have kids help make things. When I taught third grade, I had a small quilting frame set up in the class, and kids loved tying small quilts. These can be made very simply out of two pieces of fabric with batting between them, then bound with bias tape when they are tied. They can be donated to hospitals or shelters.

The method of giving isn't the important thing - even the charity itself isn't the important thing. The key idea is that gifted kids feel deeply and profoundly about the world around them and the adults in their lives need to facilitate the translation of that feeling into action. We know they can change the world with their minds; let's be mindful of their need to change the world with their hearts as well.

Watch this segment of Frontline about Kiva:

I've been working on a six-hour training for teachers of the gifted on emotional intelligence in gifted kids. If you've read my previous posts, you know that I am not a believer in "learning styles." I believe people learn different things different ways. For example, I learned to quilt by doing it, but I also read through magazines and books, and I listened to the advice of other quilters. Knowing that, you may believe that I would feel that Emotional Intelligence is quackery, but I don't. We consistently see that one of the things that keeps gifted individuals from achieving what they otherwise could (professionally, academically, and socially) is not a lack of IQ, but rather less-than-stellar EQ.

One of the things that strikes me as a problem is the difficulty people have is being truly open to their strengths and weaknesses. Our society frowns on people saying "I have a strength in this area." It's seen as arrogant. We privilege self-deprecation. This isn't healthy. If we want people to recognize their challenges, we have to make it okay to recognize and name their strengths. As we do this, we often find that our strengths and weaknesses are the same.

If you haven't seen this short clip, watch Marcel the Shell recognize his strengths and weaknesses in a small but healthy way.

I gathered and developed a series of 3.14 activities to do with your kids for Pi Day, and was invited to share some on "Good Morning, Texas." It was a fun experience, and the anchor, Rob McCollum, was awesome! He's a grown-up gifted kid!

You can view the segment here to get some Pi Day ideas (or go to www.us.mensa.org to get them all!)

http://www.wfaa.com/good-morning-texas/Celebrate-Pi-Day-117932829.html

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...

 

The first semester is over and students are in the winter doldrums.  For GT kids, this can be a hard time of year. How can parents help them put some wind in their educational sails?  Here are a few tips:

1. Plan down time.  Everyone puts places they have to be on the calendar.  Help your child schedule some goof-off time  - no guilt, no chores, no school.  It doesn't have to be a lot - even an hour a week in bits and pieces is fine.  Bite your tongue when they spend it in ways you don't think are a good use of time.  That's not the point.  The point is decompression.

2.  Find a new interest.  The TED website is a great place for GT kids to explore new interests.  Let your child browse through some talks and find a new avenue of intellectual interest to explore.  My grandmother always says a change is as good as a vacation.  It's not a cruise, but learning about something new and interesting is actually fun and invigorating for smart kids!

3. Celebrate.  Use websites that share interesting holidays and birthdays to create fun and interest on the most doldrummy (is that a word???) day in the winter of your child's discontent.  How can you feel ennui when you are celebrating Stephen Foster Memorial Day by belting out "Oh, Susannah!"?  By the way, January 19th is National Popcorn Day...you might want to stock up now.  Here's a site to get you started: http://www.holidayinsights.com/moreholidays/.

4. Give back.  The easiest way to improve your mood is to give to others.  For instance, January is National Soup Month (who knew?).  Make some soup (or soup mix) and take it to a neighbor.  Read "Stone Soup" and invite some of your child's friends over, asking each of them to bring an ingredient.  You supply the rolls and let them enjoy their creation.

5. It's summer somewhere.  It's summer in the Southern Hemisphere right now.  Let your child track the weather in a city "down under."  Their movement toward Fall means we're getting closer to Spring!


Here's a TED talk to get your child started in thinking beyond the frightful weather outside to the eternal spring that is her amazing mind: