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On
Homeschooling Gifted Children:
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Over the
past decade, I have found myself interacting increasingly with homeschooling
families. Most commonly, I have met them through my teaching at MIT's
Splash
and
High School Studies Programs
,
but a number of friends and acquaintances are also among the unenrolled. When
talk comes around to "What do you do in real life?" or "Oh?
What do you teach?" and I explain about my involvement with gifted
education, the most common responses I get are either "What do you mean
gifted
?" and "Well, we're
homeschooling, so it doesn't matter if our child is gifted or not."
"What
do you mean
gifted
?"
As with any
popularly used term, this has come to mean many things to many different
people. Part of the problem stems from the age-old sense that giftedness had
only to do with academics and IQ scores. While this is not necessarily so, it
does provide a useful perspective for understanding the concept. The normal distribution
or 'bell curve' of IQ tests presents a standard of 130 and above as gifted. There
are tests in which the split is at 132, but it is still in the same ballpark.
According to the statistics, approximately 2.5% of the population meets or exceeds
that level.
Of course, we
all know that the IQ tests don't measure everything! Leadership, acting ability,
emotional sensitivity, and creativity are just a few examples of what is
not
being tested. Does that make the IQ
test invalid? No, because it does demonstrate something about some children. However,
it does not provide proof that a child is
not
gifted, because it didn't measure those areas in which a particular
child may have her or his major strengths. My general rule of thumb is that a
child is gifted if her or his abilities fall in that top 2.5% in any particular
area.
Umm How
do I
know
that a child is in
the top 2.5% of all actors? Okay. I yield, I don't. But I
can
tell if the child presents needs that
go sufficiently beyond the norm that the needs represent both quantitative and
qualitative differences - as surely in the
more
direction as special education provides for qualitative and quantitative differences
in the
less
direction. (LD/Gifted
is an important issue for another day.)
"Why
does it matter?"
In the purest sense, it doesn't, or at least,
it shouldn't. Then again, it shouldn't matter in the schools, either. There are
reasons why it does. Some of them have to do with 'fit.' Curriculum may not be
designed for the pace of learning of a gifted child. It may not cover the subject
sufficiently broadly. By adhering to the curriculum, the education path may inadvertently
stifle learning rather than encouraging it. Gifted children frequently ask questions
that are not answerable in the course material. They may be disturbed by images
that most children (and adults) just accept without a second thought. They may
quickly outgrow the available resources in a given subject, while moving less
rapidly or surely through another.
There are potentials
that are a part of these children that come with their abilities and are sources
of confusion for parent and child alike. Recognition and understanding of these
potentials can make the difference between a child's feeling weird or normal,
between discomfort and comfort. In future columns, I will present some of these
potentials, their implications, and some possible responses to them.
It matters that
your child is gifted in the same way that it matters that your child is tall.
It is important that you find the best fit - and sometimes that means paying more
attention to the labels than you might otherwise like.
Please forward questions and comments to
jshaine@mit.edu
.
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