Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Interesting article about verbally gifted

..and underachievement. This was accurate in my case, and seems to describe my DS9. If I don't see the whole picture memorizing seems pointless.

http://giftedkids.about.com/od/Unde...ievement-Of-Verbally-Gifted-Children.htm

(New link for article - https://www.verywellfamily.com/social-and-emotional-problems-affecting-gifted-children-1449336)

Thanks for sharing that article, it deserves to be widely read. The citation indicates 1989; Having that information available for 25 years, some may say that gifted pupils ought to be better understood and therefore better served by educational systems.

I'm not sure why they use the term "verbally" there, rather than talking about gifted children in general. Traditionally, the holistic learning style has been more closely associated with individuals who favor visual/spatial processing, rather than verbal.

DD9 is very holistic, and we had a conflict about multiplication tables just as the article describes. One of the ways we got her past it is I demonstrated their utility by solving a multi-digit problem for her.

It doesn't describe her perfectly, though, because DD has yet to encounter an external reward too useless for her to want to earn it.

Except that the passage of time, by itself, doesn't really mean anything.

Well, the passage of time means that things can get worse, stay the same, or improve. The passage of time also means that all three things can happen at once.

Sage observation. The passage of time with information available does indeed mean that things can get worse if powers-that-be have absorbed decades of information on how to best educate and support the gifted and have utilized a strategy to apply the opposite techniques in attempt to stymy the development of the gifted, with a goal of creating statistically uniform achievement among all students.

This is DD-- to a tee.

She's entirely rational about it-- if you explain the point, however advanced/esoteric, she's happy to go there.

And unlike Dude's DD, she is simply not extrinsically motivated. At all. Oh, sure-- she's happy to collect her awards, and all, but it's the intangible aspect of it that matters to her-- the internal satisfaction of BEING the best, not getting the medal, if that makes sense. She didn't even (really) care about the trappings of being valedictorian (which it turns out she was, in the end-- in spite of how it was announced at commencement).

Times tables? YUP. But I had the same problem. It's a holistic thing-- my brain simply doesn't DO blind algorithm or working memory tasks without larger significance attached. Not happening. What I am incredibly good at, though, is remembering extremely complex system information and manipulating, using parallels and analogies, etc. I've always attributed this to having a very poor working memory. Brute force rote memorization tasks play to that very weakest of my skills, and my brain rebels-- significantly-- when it is required to "hold this" without being told where to file the information. I don't have a good buffer to hold information like that. I HAVE to know where to file things in my brain-- where does the information belong?? With 18th century Italian history? Or with plane geometry postulates??

Low level stuff like this* has to be turned over to my subconscious processing, though-- has to. I can learn it, but only through application. DD seems to be the same way. It's incredibly difficult for her to learn "these ten things." Not so much for her to "use these ten bits of data" forty times in rapid succession, or to explain how they fit into some larger framework. Come at it from the more complicated (for most people) side of things, and she can learn those ten things more rapidly than her peers. Come at it from the simpler side, and you might well conclude that she is developmentally delayed.


* sitting with my daughter in Driver's Education has been a wake-up call to me this way. I seriously cannot say what it is that I use as "landmarks" in positioning my vehicle. I do it holistically within the first few minutes in ANY vehicle-- and so does my DD. Yet she's going to be required to approach it algorithmically for the course. This may not go well-- her processing and retrieval speed for the algorithmic approach is unsafe. FAR far better to not have her thinking about that as a distraction. But what do I know, right?? This is precisely the kind of task that she has to briefly explain to her subconscious before turning it over-- and if you prevent that from taking place by insisting on conscious, deliberate processing, you just cut the SPEED of that processing by at least 80%. :disappointed:

In a workplace setting, this is why the level of the work being performed has to be matched to the individual doing the work.

In a sense, the issue isn't whether the task is "complicated" or "simple". Rather, it has to do with your range of tasks on which an individual is effective.

It appears that as you increase the level of "complexity" of a task (for lack of a better word...complexity isn't quite the right word...degree of variability of inputs along with a temporal component?) you lose the ability to deal with the less "complex" tasks effectively. Mostly because, for all intents and purposes, it would drive such a person insane to perform them on an ongoing basis.

Also, such a person will appear developmentally delayed in such a situation.

This is also a good illustration of why what I think we are calling "gifted" end up in poorly matched situations.

I'm confused I don't think the school I hired to teach driving teaches using landmarks to "position" the vehicle. My DS just took the first step towards learning to drive. It's not a required step.. he can't get a permit for another 5 weeks. But he did a 2-day skills training with a a company that that teaches driving skill designed by race car drivers a week ago. Before they ever put a kid on a road, they drive them around a track and teach them to drive instinctively. They put them on a skid pad and make the car skid.

Driver's Ed.. is a boring class DS is taking online. That doesn't include any information on HOW to drive. It's mostly rules of the road, and lectures on drinking and driving, that kind of stuff.

State-mandated curriculum and content, taught at a local community college. {sigh} It's a long story, but suffice it to say that as usual, one-size-fits-most doesn't fit SOME.

Every state does this differently. My hassle this summer is that drivers ED is boring, and it's a BUTT in seat for 30 hours class even when taken online. Then you can shave it down to maybe 25.. they honestly make you watch video's and click to continue and prove you have watched it. It's all about fulfilling the hours, rather than material mastered.