For whatever reason, intellectually gifted children are, more often than not, held back in their learning to conform to the pace of other children in their class. Perhaps they merely irritate us gardening would be so much easier if all children progressed at the same rate. Perhaps they are what we would wish to be, and are not. Perhaps they threaten us as teachers few of us encounter, with perfect equanimity, a young child whose capacity to learn is considerably greater than our own. Perhaps these children offend our egalitarian principles and our sense of what is fit. But flowers that grew on single stalks – flowers that stood alone – had been lopped if they threatened to disturb the symmetry of the bed they grew in.Īs a teacher and academic working in gifted education, I have become sadly familiar with the cutting down to size of children who develop at a faster pace or attain higher levels of achievement than their age-peers. The gardener couldn’t do much to impose uniformity on bushes, or on flowers that grew in clumps the roses and the crocuses were all different sizes. I certainly didn’t think that is what gardening was all about! But it made me take more notice of the flowers in the public gardens, and over the next few weeks I noticed something strange. But I don’t think that’s what gardening is all about, do you?” “He wants to make them all the same size, darling, so that they’ll look tidier. I ask my mother, in puzzlement, why he is cutting down the tall tulips, and when she answers there is a trace of sadness in her voice. Some of the tulips have grown faster than their peers so that they are taller their golden heads stand higher than the others and the man is cutting off these heads so that the stalks stand bare, denuded, but now the same size as the other plants in the bed. But he is doing something else that I can’t understand.
I feel a sense of pride that I understand this my mother has explained it. There is a bed of tulips, golden like sunlight, lifting their heads to the high Edinburgh sky and the man is tidying the bed, weeding between the plants, removing leaves that have blight. The sea winds setting the flags streaming, the soaring plumes of the Ross Fountain, and the almost overpowering perfume of the flowers roses, carnations, pansies, anemones and lupins in serried ranks, bank upon bank of them, terrace upon terrace, leading the eyes upward to the broad street with its trees and hedges fringing the pavement.Ī man is working in the gardens and I am intrigued by what he is doing. There is so much to see and to experience. It is a morning in early summer, and my mother and I are walking, as we often do, in Princes Street Gardens, set in a valley between the austere beauty of Edinburgh Castle, high on its rock, and the Georgian elegance of Princes Street itself. The place is Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, where I was born and grew up. Let me share with you one of my earliest memories. Parents of the highly gifted become aware of their children’s developmental differences at an early age yet parent nomination is under-utilized by primary and elementary schools, and information provided by parents regarding early literacy and numeracy in their children is often disregarded or actively disbelieved. The very early development of speech, movement and reading in many highly gifted young children serves as a powerful predictor of unusually high intellectual ability. This may compound the problem by ignoring early indicators of demotivation and underachievement. Teachers who have had no training or inservice in gifted education, and who are reluctant to use standardized tests of ability and achievement, may rely only on gifted behaviors to identify extremely high abilities in young children. Additional factors are their own early awareness, that they differ from their age-peers, and their consequent attempts to conceal their ability for peer acceptance. Summary: Highly gifted children are frequently placed at risk in the early years of school through misidentification, inappropriate grade-placement and a seriously inadequate curriculum.
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