Life is like a box of Chocolates
Rosie Williams (BA Sociology) looks back on 18 years of raising a profoundly gifted child. How do we know if we have a gifted child? Is it really a never ending award show or does the reality paint quite a different picture?
Smiling faces surround me. The room is filled with warmth, from the sunshine streaming through the windows to the glow of respect emanating from the group, here for this special occasion. Their collective gaze turns toward my child, performing prodigiously before all. Obvious in their gaze is their acceptance of us and I breath a sigh of release. I am at peace: I feel that as a mother I have done my job…
This fantasy is pierced by my infant son, whose most obvious talent is the unbearable habit of squealing like a stuck pig at the top of his enormous lungs for what feels to be interminable swathes of time. He is tearing apart some junk mail on the floor of our rented sunroom/kitchenette. His fingers work angrily as he clenches and unclenches his fists with each high pitched bellow and I wonder why he is such a frustrated little fellow? The dream slips from my consciousness, like the dribble off his chin, as I am drawn back into the storm that is raising a highly spirited child alone and in poverty.
“We don’t have ‘problems’ in our Opportunity Classes!” the principal declared with distaste, as he inspected the reports offered him. My son, now seven, sat in his old school uniform next to me, expectantly hoping someone would teach him something, anything really- he wasn’t fussy.
I blinked in astonishment, unable to believe what I had just heard. Here was a Department of Education employed principal telling me that my profoundly gifted child would not be given a place at his school in the class for gifted children because he also had ADHD. Never mind that he had read The Hobbit to himself in kindergarten. Never mind that achievement testing done the same year had given him maths results of a conceptual level between grades 3-9(!) Never mind that he had an IQ test score in the top 1% and had been given permission by the Head of the NSW Selective Schools Unit to sit the OC exam at the unprecedented age of seven. No, it was all going to end here apparently, in the office of this man who felt that for all my son had accomplished in his few short years, he was not going to be given any chances at THIS school. I left, my face hot with embarrassment and choking back tears of rage on behalf of my son, determined that a person like that would never be given a position of power over my child’s education.
And so it transpired, that prior to beginning university just five years later, my son Brenton had spent little more than one year in the school system. I first began teaching Brenton during his pre-school year, on the recommendation of a psychologist who had tested him in an effort to understand his insatiability and frustration. Within a year he had covered most of the primary school math curriculum and read at a similar level. He read music and played violin and piano under my tuition. Within three years he was composing four-part harmony, drawing cross-sections of every machine (often after tearing them apart to look inside) and devouring every magazine, book and manual he could find. By ten he had attended the grade 11 Scientia Challenge workshop on bio-technology and won third place for his composition in The McDonalds Performing Arts Challenge for ages14 & under. Two years later he was studying programming online through RMIT with High Distinction. We did this together and alone without a cent of education funding.
Today Brenton is a man of eighteen years who has already begun to repay his HECS debt. He has worked as a Software Developer full time from age fifteen, when he left UNSW for a graduate position. Now in his dream job, he describes working for the award-winning Katalyst Web Design as ‘awesome’. Brenton goes out with the guys from work and local anime club. He’s finally become typical- if an eighteen year old with two years as a corporate professional could be mistaken for typical! Aware of his ideosyncracies, Brenton tempers undeniable pride in his achievements with a self-depracating Aussie wit.
Yet the task of parenting such a child weighs heavily on one’s shoulders, forever caught between the ill-understood problems felt by gifted children and their families and the popular myths about high achievement and genius. So common is the myth of what it is to be gifted that we can be staring right into the eyes of a prodigiously gifted child and be completely oblivious. A Victorian mother of ten year old ‘James’ recalls some of their earliest experiences with educational and medical systems:
At age three, after two weeks of my son not enjoying ’school’, I had my first talk with the (private school) early learning teacher who said “I see no sign of intelligence, I think he’s Autistic!” We got a referral to a children’s hospital, to check if he could be Autistic, the paediatrician didn’t test him but said he had ‘Asperger Syndrome’, although ‘he probably didn’t need to be institutionalised’. When I questioned why he thought he had Asperger’s and wasn’t a gifted child he said “I know your type, you’ll destroy him if you don’t accept he’s autistic!”
The world’s top athletes, people of great talent, dedication and sacrifice have recently been the focus of international media. I found myself wondering why we watch the Olympics? Perhaps we like to watch others risk a life-time of investment in their talent, all for the small chance they might one day succeed at their chosen passion. For these Olympians and their supporters, that one moment in the spotlight is worth a lifetime of rigorous training, sacrifice and the investment of many. We love playing voyeur to other people’s success or failure, watch the euphoria of dreams made or witness in their face a spirit shattered in defeat, all from the relative safety of our own obscurity. How many of us dare to believe so uncompromisingly in ourselves?
As obsessively as any prospective Olympian, so too, our intellectually and artistically gifted children want the chance to see how far their talents will stretch. They have the potential to reach world fame, to change the world or local communities in their own small or great way by virtue of their uniqueness. Yet we are so uncomfortable with the idea of children possessing different capacities for intellectual or artistic endeavour that we often fail to acknowledge and certainly fail to accommodate them, particularly where these traits are most obviously expressed.
At first we were blissfully unaware that our child, a girl, was gifted. We thought it perfectly normal that she could do the things she did. We lived on a high, this child we were blessed with, we knew I couldn’t have any more. One of our friends did try to tell us about giftedness, he even gave us some reading material. I said thank you, smiled and put it into a drawer for later. As first time parents, we were inundated with well meaning advice on pregnancy and child behaviour. We thought he was just being kind about some of the behavioural problems we were experiencing.
When she was four, I approached the local school asking for advice; my daughter had been writing for some time and would only use capital letters. She told us that writing is for communication and she was communicating. I couldn’t see anything wrong with that logic but I wanted the advice of a professional about whether this would become a problem when she went to school at age six? The abuse I got from the head mistress could be heard at the other end of the school: ‘How dare I teach her?’, I mumbled that every thing my daughter has learnt was self-taught. ‘Impossible!’, she says.
My daughter sat curled into a ball on my lap and I, listened, stunned. As we stumbled out, a Grade 1 teacher stopped us, she had heard the abuse and suggested we home school until our daughter was 10. We were too numb too pay much heed but thanked her. By the time we got home the shock had turned into anger. I began writing letters to the Education Department.”(Mother of a teenage gifted child- QLD, 2005)
Miraca Gross, Director of the Gifted Education Resource, Referral and Information Center housed at UNSW, wrote the bible for these families ‘Exceptionally Gifted Children’ (1993). In it she tells story after story of exceptionally and profoundly gifted children shut down and shut out by our school system from kindergarten on upwards. Dr Gross taught in the South Australian school system where she encountered children of such extraordinary potential and ability that they could find no easy fit within the school system. Rather than ignore these children, Dr Gross invested her career in learning from them and their families.
Children such as these can make us very aware of our own limitations but they should also remind us that human potential is an open book for our children to write upon it their own story. For an unidentified and unsupported gifted child, a dozen years immersed in our lockstep curriculum can be a suffocation rather than an inspiration of that which is most valuable both to themselves and society: their uniquity.
Fin Davis (2004), wrote of his primary school experiences at age 12:
Nobody had the same interests as me, and I only knew about mine…I watched through my veil of black and white words. But everything was grey and by the end of the year I had given up watching… [but] How do you see if you do not watch? You can’t. Not to see is not to love, and not to love is to be empty. Now all I had was my blanket of words, which I wrapped tight around me, and greyed. I greyed to that colourless shade of infinity, greyed myself out of the right to death that should have been mine. So now I sit immortal and obsolete. I have given up on life, although it refuses to give up on me. All because I stopped watching. Never stop watching.
Perhaps we ought to think about what this lock-step curriculum is doing to non-gifted students as well. We might wonder at the benefits for our more average students in promoting the needs of gifted children? Is a school system in which gifted children are afraid to perform, afraid to experiment, to explore and be themselves really going to be the place where any child is likely to be comfortable taking risks? Surely to free one group from the political need to be ‘normal’ is to free all to be themselves and if we can not give that to our children, what can we expect them to give back to society?
…the AIS has been the nation’s sports training powerhouse; nurturing and supporting athletes who have gone on to become Olympic and Paralympic medalists…This is no coincidence.When you have world-class coaches, sports scientists, sports medicine practitioners, counsellors and administrators pushing the boundaries in their own fields to help athletes perform better, the results soon follow. (AIS web site- scholarships page)
Contrast this with the attitude we have to our intellectually talented children, received by teachers who by deliberate policy choice have no specialist training in gifted education. One of the recommendations arising from the 2001 Senate Inquiry into Gifted & Talented Children was for all pre-service teachers to be trained to identify and respond to gifted children from all student groups. That the Australian Education Union is against ability grouping and grade-skips may explain why the recommendation is still just an idea. The current focus on teacher quality and the National Curriculum Project could be a window of opportunity to act on these issues. These concerns are not new. They were originally identified through our democratic policy process as far back as the Senate Select Inquiry into Gifted & Talented Children in 1988 and reiterated at the more recent 2001 Inquiry.
That Brenton now earns more than the educators who showed his intellect, not to mention my endorsement of it, such contempt may be a justice of sorts. But there was a price paid by us both, a price that I still pay every time someone asks me why I do not have a career and I can not begin to explain. But what of children still in the system such as ‘James’, the grade 5 student whose introduction to the education system began with a misdiagnosis of Autism? After years of frustration despite some extension programs, he has been offered a trial enrollment at a small private high school. His mother’s enthusiasm reflects that of her son:
When I picked him up (from school) he said “can we extend the trial because it’s better than I expected?” He’s like a kid at a birthday party, he never stopped talking about what he did today. I usually get nothing much or no challenge but today he’s firing on a billion neurons…they really want him.
Surely this sense of belonging is the right of every gifted child and not a privilege of those in the right place at the right time?
Australia is rightly proud of our sporting success which, with a population only a fraction of our overseas counterparts, finds us among the top contenders for medal-count at every Olympic Games. Imagine what would happen if we showed the same moral and financial support for our young scientists, artists and philosophers instead of trying to beat out of them their passion, uniqueness and insight. In a society such as ours the intellectually gifted are too often met with ignorance and resentment. But resentment is something from which we can learn. My own has shown me that our unwillingness to acknowledge the success of others is because it reminds us that we have not reached our own potential. To do so requires that we look into our own souls and stare down our own inner critic. Our resentments allow us to focus that unwillingness on someone else. When we are happy within ourselves we no longer care what other people have. When we are unhappy within ourselves it does not matter how much we have, we still feel unsafe.
Like our prospective Olympians, our gifted children are our leaders of tomorrow. While I am proud of both my son and myself for what we have accomplished together, why it remains such an incredibly difficult challenge to negotiate the education of our most gifted children in a country replete with so much opportunity and infrastructure is a lesson from which we can all learn. When generation after generation of parents say there is a problem with their education and acceptance perhaps we should listen. In so doing we may find the answers to many of the issues holding us back as a nation. Rather than reinforcing inequity and exclusion, we may find we open the way for acceptance of the voice that whispers within us all, awaiting the moment when courage overcomes fear and we allow ourselves to be everything we can. Imagine that!
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National Curriculum Board Web Site
Australian Association for the Education of the Gifted & Talented