"Nearly 4.5 million Americans are bitten by dogs each year...."
Also, what has all this got to do with gifted education?
It's showing that gifted people are susceptible to irrational fears, just like everyone else. Some good messages here have pointed out that trying to approach these fears by educating with facts and statistics doesn't work --- not even on gifted kids or gifted adults. Many of the responses in this thread are demonstrating that point quite effectively.
There are roughly
10-11 million US car accidents annually, but I haven't seen anyone claiming that hiding to avoid a trip to the grocery store in the family car or climbing a tree to avoid it is a "reasonable assessment of risk."
IMO, this thread is very relevant to gifted education, and I'll use some of the information I've read here to help one of my kids address his own fear of some dogs.
