I am becoming actively annoyed with the "academic precocity" definition of giftedness.
Oh, me too, me too!
More and more I'm thinking that we've got it all wrong when we think of "gifted" or "intelligent" as being on the same railroad track as everyone else, just moving along it faster. A gifted 4-year-old is not the equivalent of a NT 8-year-old. And I'm not just talking about asynchronies, I mean that the intellectual process is fundamentally different.
(Like you, I'm alert to this issue because of my kid. Hanni didn't talk early and shows no signs of being an early reader, but she offered her first causal explanation when she was still in the two-word stage. She doesn't fit the stereotype of a gifted kid, but there is so clearly something astonishing about the way her mind works.)
I think that when we test kids early, we are inevitably measuring the wrong thing. What we want to know is whether the kid will grow up to be a person who is capable of complex and sophisticated thought. What we are able to measure is whether the kid is ahead of the curve on mastering the basics. There is some correlation between these, but they are
not the same thing.
The science of understanding giftedness is still in its infancy. We need to know a lot more about what is going on in gifted brains, and what signs of that can be detected early on, before we'll really have a handle on this. (I'm thinking along the lines of how it's now possible to identify kids at risk for autism very early on, just by watching videos of the kid and knowing what to watch for. But a lot of basic science had to happen to get to that point.)
Back to my own experience, what I see in my kid is a skill at constructing mental models of a situation and playing around with hypotheses about how it works or how it might work under different conditions. This is a skill that is lacking in some of the grad students in my department's PhD program, and I can pretty much predict who will bomb out of the program based on it. It is absolutely essential for playing in the big leagues, and it cannot be taught. And I can see it in my 4-year-old, but I'm damned if I could figure out how to test for it.
I'm very late to this party, but I just had to comment on this one-- AB.SO.LUTE.LY insightful and probably exactly (no, really) what I'd have said if I were more succinct about these things.
I should probably just leave it at that, but y'all know me...
I think that
precosity is just one of the things which is most notable
earliest in many gifted persons. That may be why there is a consensus (er-- or a sort of consensus) that it matters and is a useful benchmark for identification.
The earliest signs of giftedness
in my own experience?Keen observation and recall, often from.... well, birth-- and often with it, a complete upending of ND milestones, which seem to not even apply at all to HG+ kiddos. Not only keen observation and recall, but a way of experiencing reality which is
deeply constructivist by its very nature. Not all of them communicate with others about this, and not all of them demonstrate any particular skill very precociously... but there is an
understanding of things which is so stunningly EFFICIENT that it is a little awe-inspiring. These are not children that make the same mistake twice (unless they are unvestigating what a higher N does to things
BTDT ), and many of them learn to think many steps ahead in cause-and-effect long, long, long before they are hypothetically (via ND milestones) 'capable' of that sort of thing.
But that very precosity of intellectual
development (as opposed to precocious knowledge/understanding, which I'm pretty sure isn't the case) can produce an entirely different trajectory, I'd say-- so no, it's definitely not like a bullet train on the same tracks as the freight locomotives. It's fundamentally
different to have experienced "I don't want to use that object to pull myself up to a standing position, because-- well, THEN WHAT? I'd be stuck. I should consider how to move about better. Or at least how to sit back safely on the floor. I'll think on that."
A ND child is
never going to "catch up" to that particular moment. The moment is simply radically
different between a gifted infant and one that is neurotypical.
I also detest the focus on precosity because it comes with a LOT of baggage for gifted children who happen to be unusual enough for adults to praise/remark upon it. Because at
some point, particular skills will no longer be extraordinary-- then what? Is the child no longer "extraordinary?" That's as obviously ridiculous as praising a person for being an early adopter of a particular technology; being an iPhone owner seven years ago would have been quite noteworthy...now? not-so-much.
Ooooooo you can READ!! Impressive enough at three. Not so much at
twenty-three. (I hope.)
So in short, my definition of what it is to be 'gifted' is partly about pacing (sort of) but also about a fundamentally different way in which the hardware works.
It's about having a more
efficient processor, basically. Other bits of hardware may get in the way (2e) of demonstrating that processor speed, and there's no way to observe the difference whe TYPICAL tasks are presented without being open-ended enough to allow for divergent methods to be obvious.
I agree completely with MegMeg regarding how blazingly obvious this difference is in some settings that favor the more efficient processor, too. There are some things which
cannot be taught. That instinctive grasp of cause-and-effect is one of them. It leads to precosity only in that it makes learning
inevitable, instinctive, efficient, and continuous.I also love Grinity's observations about providing what all students
need removing the need for the label in the first place.
And no, I could care less what it's called. You could call it 'double-secret-probationary-school' and as long as it was appropriate, I'd be thrilled to have my kid in that program.
Asynchrony arises in my own understanding of this model primarily because of
physical development which lags cognitive development, but also cognitive development which varies from typical (again, resulting in turning the milestones and sequence of "ND" on its head). My DD was quite happy to talk Shakespeare and evolutionary theory at seven. Not so happy to write a paragraph about her neighborhood (or anything else, for that matter).
Great, thought-provoking discussion.
