It's tricky. I think we recognize that there is generally an oversupply of people who are very talented and hard working in the classics. You might get a PhD and end up teaching Latin in a Catholic School like a brilliant and super-competitive (e.g. Jeopardy: Tournament of Champions) friend of mine.
There is a real--but unrecognized--shortage of qualified teachers of the gifted in the US, and there is very little support for them right now. Many public schools and districts either do not consider the education of their gifted students a problem that needs solving, or they consider it to be a problem that will go away--to the private schools--if ignored long enough. Seriously, most principals in my experience probably don't even think about it that much. At the flagship public university in my state, gifted education is a portion of an undergraduate course on differentiation for diverse learners. There is no graduate coursework offered in gifted education there.
I, too, am a former student in a gifted program. I am also a general education teacher in a middle school, who has much more experience evaluating students who may have a disability, and creating and implementing plans to deal with those. I would love to create and implement plans for gifted students, but nobody is asking me to do that.
I am talking to the folks at the University of Georgia about their online program in Gifted and Creative Education. There is a small possibility that I will not see any pay increase, even if I complete the degree. There is a significant possibility that I will never work with gifted students that don't happen to be randomly assigned to my classroom in the usual shuffle. There is a tiny possibility, if I complete the degree, that I will become the gifted coordinator for my state.
That's about the size of it. I've been reading some of the books listed in the syllabi of the program that interests me. Not a book I've seen listed there, but a good one nonetheless is _Living with Intensity_. I hear there are some Dabrowski enthusiasts at Georgia. _Methods and Materials for Teaching the Gifted_ is big and expensive, but valuable. I bought it as an e-book for my Kindle. You might be able to download a free sample.
