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

<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>

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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.