Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Outliers, Tiger Moms, and Nature

The 14 digits thing was a bad example, so I definitely stand corrected there. The triple axel was a better example.

My original point was that in US society, there is a myth positing that you can do anything and be a success if you just practice enough. I don't think that success is that simple, and feel that this philosophy is an extreme one that sets people up for failure while not giving them the tools they need to understand why they failed. Pushing too many people to go to college is an example of that.

"You can..." is not the same as "You might; see what happens."

Val

Oh boy. When I get back in I cannot wait to read all these posts! Two thumbs up for taking what I saw as interesting bait for a conversation! Keep it coming, I'll be back today!

I think that what is being overlooked here (unless I missed it) is passion. No one is going to spend 10,000 hours on something that they aren't passionate about. There has to be 3 ingredients. Talent, commitment and passion, for it is the passion that keeps you going when things get tough.

I'm not in US society and don't, perhaps, have a very good understanding of how it differs from UK society. In the UK, what I think I see is some people - most of them teachers! - promulgating the falsehood you're criticising, but in reaction against a much more prominent general assumption that what matters is "potential" or "raw talent" and that nurture, practice, parenting, education and the environment in general have only minor roles to play. Maybe knowing that will make it clearer why I kick against that falsehood (too) - I agree that both are false and unhelpful.

For example, a big political issue here at the moment is the funding of universities, and the government proposes to tie a particular freedom for each university (letting the university charge more than 6Kpa fees) to that university's achieving particular targets - implied, much higher than they achieve at the moment - for the percentage of students it admits who come from disadvantaged homes and/or schools. (One article, another article.) The govt wants universities to lower entry standards to do that, arguing that there "must" be plenty of students with the "potential" to achieve at university, even if their results so far do not demonstrate it, and that universities should admit on this "potential". At my university, and I'm sure at others, we are seriously keen to admit students who will benefit from what we can offer, and we do lower entry requirements where we feel that they aren't a good reflection of how a particular student will do on our course. However, we aren't in a position to re-teach school material to students who haven't got it at school, and it's clear that our courses require some very fundamental skills which are difficult for students to pick up quickly at university if they haven't learned them in the first 17/18 years of their lives. Even if (to avoid issues irrelevant to this argument) we assumed that, say, the most disadvantaged 5% of children are, at birth, just as likely as the most advantaged 5% of children to have the potential, if they were given equal circumstances, to benefit from our courses, it doesn't follow that we're failing if it turns out that we admit more students from the latter group than from the former. What happens to the students between birth and university admission actually makes a difference to who they are and what they can do, and hence whether - at that point - they are suitable students for our courses. We are unable to do anything by fiddling our admission criteria or by running great pre-university summer courses that can come close to compensating for 18 years of disadvantage, and it is unreasonable of the government to expect us to. Yet that's where the "it's all about talent" argument which is what I mostly see in the UK leads to.

[For the benefit of anyone who knows which university I'm talking about, of course I speak here in an entirely personal capacity!]

<nodding> Yes-- I know precisely what you mean.

I was floored the first time it was none-to-subtly suggested to me that I just needed to "take the students as they come to" me... (this from my dean)

uh.... wait... a... minute... remind me again what "prerequisite" means, exactly, to YOU??" I can't teach advanced chemistry to students who have no grasp at all on basic algebra, and it is GROSSLY unfair to the well-prepared students in those courses to expect that I should.

But apparently saying such things out loud is, well... verboten. <shakes head sadly>

___________________

I agree that passion is the third essential ingredient in whatever one chooses to call it-- success, mastery, etc.

But I don't think that it's necessarily independent of the other two, either, and I think that mastery is possible for very gifted people even in the absense of that passion.

Kids are definitely just born "musical" or "mathy." Particular passions may be discovered along the way, but there is no question that I was destined to be a scientist. My basic mode of cognition is the scientific method and so for me, it wasn't "being taught" those concepts so much as learning the formal terminology for the way I approach the world.

My parents were downright perplexed by the way I thought about things, even as a child; neither of them thought that way. My DD has yet to discover her life's great passion-- but we see glimmers of it now and then. She loves reading, but not "literature" per se. She loves math, but not theory, no matter how elegant. She seems to love argumentation, social justice, talking, statistics, and physics (including the mathematics).

She's good at a number of things that do not particularly feed her soul. I think this is a challenge for many gifted people-- that you sometimes feel pressured to follow your natural strengths, whether or not they bring you existential joy.

Oh, yes. I was the project lead for designing three courses several years back. I wanted to include prerequisites. I was told that they had to be just for guidance and not mandatory. The department was afraid that "someone might sue" because of making entry requirements unrealistically high (remember, everyone deserves a chance!!).

For the record, the courses were second-year-level and I wanted a course in introductory college-level biology for course 1, that plus course 1 for course 2... you get the idea. I argued that everyone had the same chance to take intro bio, but forget it. It wasn't "fair."

OK, I know I'm veering off path here, but this made me think of how difficult it must be for some of our elementary school teachers when we ask them to "take our kids as they come to them" (advanced, in the case of our GT kiddos)... Of course, the problem is reversed, but....

An excellent point.

That's probably no more off topic than my observation that just because you are GOOD at something doesn't mean that it is personally worthwhile to pursue mastery of it, either.

Both are problems/observations that are somewhat tangential to the mainstream conversations surrounding these issues (nurture v. nature, I mean, and what sort of "nurture" is desirable/appropriate in the first place); but both are unusual and critical aspects of these issues for gifted persons in a general sense, and those of us parenting gifted children in particular.

I've really been enjoying others' observations.

Terrific thread. I posted the same thing on another site, and not one bite. And if you read this this start to finish, I think it is fair to say our kids didn't fall far from some bright trees.

@chrys I love the corner you show Bill Gates being painted into... wonder which party he feels has better claim, if any.

And the parenting matters but genes constrain conversation is great.

As for grade skips, it is like taking fever reducer but not antibiotics. You minimize the discomfort but you do not rid the underlying problem. And that is these kids are not products of hothoused achievement but fundamentally gifted. So moving up provides challenge until they are caught up - but their learning speed may still outpace traditional classrooms. Hmmm... untouched traditional education and the gifted? Is that like 10,000 hours of wasted time and practice. What if that 10,000 hours went into challenging work.

On red shirting, I would simply like similar questions asked to ensure like grade advancement that it is in the long-term best interest of the child. I think sometimes folks can be parent centered not student centered. Maybe it feels good to be a parent of the kid who walks into k knowing everything, and just hands down covered. But how does that child feel after 2-3 months of answering the questions, not learning something new. Choir preaching here I bet.

So research makes its statistical claims - but without citing - how would you rate the pull of nurture vs nature as it relates to your child's gifts?

My favorite request -- "your thoughts without citations." It's hard for me to separate nature versus nurture very much, because I have always provided DS with many opportunities. But in the early years, I can guess that nature predominantly led to a 2 year old teaching himself to read, despite the hours of me reading to him. I know other parents who read to their kids just as much, and they did not magically learn how to read. Nature created the HG+ child, and the opportunities we gave to him nourished his HGness. Would he know so much about the things he is interested in if we had not provided resources? Probabaly not to the extent he does now, but his nature would still be HG+ (the potential, say). But then again, we haven't pushed or created very many additional opportunities for the kid, compared with families with more resources/time. Hmmmm. Good question. To be the kid he is today, I'd say nature was 70%, nuture 30%.