Late follow-up (sorry, sometimes I only check the board every other day or so).
First, the essay is in the book High IQ Kids. I don't have the skill yet to get italic or underline fonts into my posts (I tried) so sorry about the ambiguity.
Second, there is a Roeper related essay I came across on the web that anyone might be able to find with a Google search.
Third, Roeper's emphasis on the emotional did not lead her to neglect the cognitive, nor to an excessively psychological focus on gifted kids. It was partly her way of looking at the whole child when considering how to form the best educational environment for him/her, rather than just the intellectual side. If I have understood her properly, she feels that a high degree of emotional sensitivity and intensity is the driver for development of so-called gifted cognitive functions; the child is driven to understand as much about the world as he or she can in a way because of emotional needs for fairness, balance, wholeness.
I'm probably not presenting her position quite right, but it's one that is intuitively appealing to me (perhaps in part because I attended the school she and her husband founded when I was a child, and continue to look back on it very fondly).
Responding to Dottie, I think faith and religious systems are, on the whole, very effective human effort to come to grips with these dimensions of human experience. I have a pretty secular in outlook and and driven to find secular ways of coming to grips with them. However, this discussion could lead us very far afield ....
Thanks for all the responses!
Last edited by fitzi; 08/10/08 12:04 PM.
