Tag Archives: Giftedness

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

6 Apr

 

I last wrote a blog post in November 2019, not long before the holiday celebrations and family visits began.

And then came 2020. Let me begin with personal experience. In a post here back on May 7, 2014 titled “No Less than the Trees and the Stars” I told of losing my husband and two of our four sons in 2013. Like that post, this one again confronts the subject of death in my own life, as my dog died in January of this year and my third (and last) stepson died on February 2. With my remaining son and his family I returned from the memorial service in Florida on February 29th, just days before Covid-19-related travel restrictions began.

Since 2013 people have often asked me how I managed to come to terms with the three deaths in that four month period. I would answer that grief can be utterly devastating, but I had found a way to cope through a philosophy I discovered in 1999 and began calling “story principle.” I spoke about it in a talk I gave at the National Association for Gifted Children conference in Kentucky in 2005. After that people began asking me if I could please expand that message into a book. So eventually, I did. It’s called Change Your Story, Change Your Life, and has been available on Amazon as both a physical book and a Kindle version since 2011. While the philosophy didn’t make coping with the deaths of 2013 easy, it did make it possible. The loss of my dog in January this year left me fully alone in my new home, and the death of my stepson took away the last member of the family that became mine when I married in 1964. Once again story principle is helping me cope.

Now, of course, the whole world is dealing with a pandemic that is continuing to bring death to every continent we humans inhabit. Kids are out of schools and families, many of whose gifted children are extremely sensitive and empathetic, are doing their best to cope with what may be the single largest and scariest disaster anyone on the planet today has ever experienced. We are told by those who study the subject of grief that we are all now currently faced with major grief caused by the sudden loss of the patterns our normal lives depend on.

 After a number of internet gatherings and email exchanges with families of gifted kids, I decided last week to make my book easily available in its entirety as a free PDF and posted the link to that PDF on all of my Facebook pages. I am including it here at the end of this post.

Now let me share some thoughts about how to connect with this material, if you decide to download it.  It was never intended as emergency help for a situation as difficult and life-changing as this pandemic. What I hoped for those who wanted to put it to work for themselves was that they could take it a chapter or two at a time, try whichever of the exercises between chapters that appealed to them, and move through it as far and as fast as seemed right for them. The structure of it was designed to bring the reader into the use of story principle one small step at a time, mainly to help them come to terms with how hard it can be to believe the principle without experiencing it personally. There is nothing like seeing and feeling it work for oneself to encourage a beginning acceptance and a willingness to experiment further.

 But now, as I think about the possible effects of the current world situation on the highly gifted, highly sensitive and aware PG population I’ve written about all these years, I would suggest a different approach to the material than I had envisioned when I wrote it. Maybe read the short introduction and then Chapter Two, “Story Principle 101” as a beginning, but after that you may want to skip around in it a bit.  Browse chapters and scan the “Putting it to Work” exercises to see what appeals to your particular interests or needs or life experience. It’s always possible to go back if you feel you’ve missed something that might help you understand more about how (or why) it might work for you.

Though with death tolls now a part of daily news broadcasts, one might be tempted to move quickly to the final chapters that focus on death, my suggestion would be that there are some pretty important chapters that come before those—especially from Chapter 9 on—to provide a more solid foundation first.

Science of Mind, from which Story Principle grew, was itself based on spiritual principles that can be found with some variation in most of the world’s religions. So some readers will immediately recognize aspects of it, especially if you come from a religious tradition that acknowledges “miracles.”

I wrote it to help people, as I had been helped, to bring more joy, more comfort, more fulfillment into their lives. I wanted people to discover the enormous power that their minds, their attitudes, and the “stories they tell themselves” have over their life experience. William James (1842-1910) wrote “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” It’s a discovery that has mostly been lost to later generations. This is just my way to help share it.

When my son first read the manuscript he said “Nobody’s going to believe this coming from you, Mom. Your life has been way too good. They’ll just say, ‘Easy for you to say!’”

Well, possibly they would have said it then, but not so very likely now. Nobody’s life is without losses and grief. But I couldn’t have imagined when I first wrote the book what a solid foundation it would give me for dealing with my own.

Here it is in its entirety. Feel free to download and also to share:

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

 

 

 

 

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On Authenticity

7 Aug

A while back I titled a blog post Deep and Deeper and my last post, Who Are We?, led me to return to the intention that motivated that earlier post. Death (along with individual identity) is certainly a subject that can be described as deep or yet deeper. So deep is the subject of death, in fact, that many, perhaps most people in our culture, do their best to avoid talking or even thinking about it altogether.

Back in 1992, when the five women who began the Columbus Group, gathered at my house in Columbus, Ohio to try to come up with a different definition of giftedness than was currently in vogue (a definition centered on academic achievement) one of the very first examples of the qualitative difference between highly or profoundly gifted children and other children of their age [the difference we would soon name Asynchronous Development], was the case of Jennie–and death. Four year old Jennie was traumatized when her grandfather died. Extrapolating a principle from one subject or event to another, as profoundly gifted children tend to begin doing even as toddlers, she began to worry that her mother or father might die as well. Her mother, doing her best to comfort this very little girl, told her that she didn’t need to worry. They were not going to die, she assured Jennie. “Grandpa died because he was old. I’m not old. Your father isn’t old.” Jennie was not in the least comforted by this story. She watched the news on television, after all. “Other people die,” she said. “Even children die!”

The problems very young children have with asynchronous development is that their minds outdistance their emotional maturity, so the simple cushioning stories that adults often give young children to soften the impact of painful truths don’t work well with them. Not only do such stories not provide the cushioning the children need, the stories’ simple platitudes, so obviously untrue, are likely to be taken as adult dishonesty. Jennie had not long been identified as profoundly gifted, and her mother didn’t yet realize that she needed to deal with such issues as the inevitability of death on a much more adult level with Jennie than she had expected.

The deep and deeper human issues need to be addressed with super bright kids both more honestly and earlier than we might be prepared for. Examples of these issues—our inhumanity to each other and other life forms, our predilection for violence and warfare, our failure to protect the planet that is our only home—the list is long and more and more “in our faces” these days. Which means, of course, that we have to face these issues ourselves on a deep enough level to address them honestly from our own perspective when we talk to these children (or even when they’re within earshot). As Stephen Sondheim reminds us in a song from “Into the Woods,” Children will listen!

Many of us got our first stories about such issues from the religions of our parents or grandparents or our ethnic culture. Or from other kids, or science text books or the “mass media.” Often, as we grow up, whatever we were told from whatever source, begins to feel wrong or untrue. For myself, I long ago rejected the version of reality that was provided by my religious education—some of what was labeled wrong no longer seemed wrong to me, and what was right sometimes had begun to seem distinctly the opposite. Even worse than the loss of religious certainties in some ways, was the realization that what I had learned in school as undisputed fact (history, for instance, or even science) had too often been either purposely distorted to support a kind of cultural propaganda, or just an error that had continued to be taught even after it had been superseded or at least challenged by new information and new theories.

For myself, various “truths” began to disintegrate when my own personal experiences contradicted them. As a fiction writer, I had always intended to write “realistic fiction,” until the line between imagination and reality or between what could be and what really was could no longer be firmly drawn. There were things I experienced that I didn’t talk about in public because, except when I was talking to children, my audiences didn’t seem to me ready to hear what I would have said.

But when I was speaking to an adult audience dealing with kids at the far right tail of the curve, where unusual experiences become more common, I began to stretch the boundaries a bit. Back in the days of the Hollingworth Conference for the Highly Gifted, I explained in a keynote, for instance, that becoming a Reiki practitioner—I wasn’t yet a Reiki Master, able to teach the method to others—had ended my problem with seasonal allergies. (Reiki is an energy healing modality that originated in Japan.) All these years later, I still don’t have those allergies! One year someone wrote on a conference evaluation form that I was “too far out.” (The next year I titled my keynote “On Being Too Far Out.”)

I had, of course, found those “far out” things well-supported in books written by leading edge scientists, some of whom I knew personally, though the ideas hadn’t yet shown up in school text books. What had once been labeled “New Age” and outside the realm of rationality, began to fill the shelves at book stores even before the internet had made them readily accessible to anyone with an interest. I still find it odd that after nearly 100 years of challenging the certainties of material science and Newtonian physics, quantum physics is apparently still not a standard offering in most high schools.

Between 1992 and today, my thinking about “deep and deeper” has moved from the need to be willing to honestly talk to super gifted kids about the difficult emotional issues of human life, to being willing to honestly address questions of consciousness, reality, values and spirituality (which may or may not include religion) with them. The most important word in that sentence is “honestly.” About these issues there are seldom certainties for us other than personal experience. Being honest with them, of course, means admitting that there is “mystery” involved—as with the orbs (mysterious and sometimes colored “balls of light” often with internal mandala patterns) that show up all over the place in photographs taken both indoors and outside at Camp Yunasa—so in talking to campers about them I make no effort to explain the phenomenon. This tends to drive the campers a little crazy. All I can say is that none of the “standard explanations” involving dust particles, moisture, or the closeness of lens to flash in digital cameras, explain them either. During my “orb slide show” last year kids got out their cameras and began taking photos and sure enough, a few orbs showed up at first, and the more photos they took the more orbs appeared. Photo above taken as two of Yunasa’s Fellows walk back to our bunks after Spirit Journey–August, 2017.

 

I don’t usually write—or talk—to persuade people any more (though I used to, for sure). I write to share my thoughts, and usually some of the reasons I think them—especially when they aren’t mainstream, or not mainstream in the gifted realm. Ernest Holmes, author of Science of Mind, said, “The child-like mind is more receptive to Truth than the over intellectual.” He suggests this, I think, because children tend to be more open to mystery than those of us proud of our very good intellects. We tend to have minds stuffed with facts we’ve learned and beliefs that we think of as true, but Ernest is after something larger (and deeper), something (Truth) that he dares to capitalize without defining. And since one of his principles was always to “stay open at the top,” I’m pretty sure he would have said that Truth for us changes as we and our perceptions change. And change we humans do, if we allow it.

When I started The Deep End Facebook page  back when I was new to social media, I hoped the page would encourage discussions of some of the nonrational capacities and experiences of the highly gifted that are quite common among this population (which those of us with long experience know, even though many parents are hesitant to talk about them, for fear of disbelief or ridicule). As soon as such discussions began on that page, however, some folks who limit their ideas about consciousness to the purely rational, and apparently about science to the purely material, launched attacks that closed those beginning discussions down. It can be psychologically dangerous to talk about nonrational experiences among hyper-rational gifted folk all too poised to attack. So okay, this is a blog instead, and I write it. I get to choose what I write about.

After I posted “Who Are We?” I heard from some folks that they appreciated my honesty. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in this “gifted biz” for a long time, or more likely it’s because I believe what Anita Moorjani (author of Dying to Be Me, a book about her amazing Near Death Experience) says about the need to be one’s essential self. It is that need that led me to share with Yunasa campers last year (my final year with the camp) the “evidence” I have that there is life after death. There, too, I didn’t ask them to share my interpretation of that evidence. They have to make up their own minds, as do we all. But unless we share what is deep and deeper in our own lives and experience, how will openings to new perceptions and awareness come about?

For me, it is easier to talk about death these days now that I am totally convinced by my own experiences and some astonishing evidence that it is illusion—transformation not ending. But I don’t try to convince people. I believe that honesty and authenticity have real and lasting value, no matter how others respond. (Also, I’m old enough not to care so much what people think of me as I used to.) But I must also add here that while taking the fear of death out of the picture is astonishingly liberating, it does not save us from the grief of such loss. Believe me, I know.

TolanMemorial 16

Tolan Memorial 2013

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Who Are We?

2 Aug

Tomorrow is the one week anniversary of a sudden and unexpected death that has rocked the gifted community and has brought a deluge of memorial messages that the writers surely hope will assuage their own shock and grief, and comfort both Jim Webb’s family and all those who have benefited over the last 37 years from the work that he (and SENG) did to bring attention to the needs of gifted children and families. In addition, of course, there is the plethora of books that he published in the field, from the first days of Ohio Psychological Publishing (initial publisher—1982—of Guiding the Gifted Child) to the era of Great Potential Press.

As I have read those messages, I have been aware that the Jim Webb those writers describe is not the Jim Webb I met in 1981, nor the Jim Webb I knew during the approximately 20 years thereafter during which he and I and Elizabeth (Betty) Meckstroth discussed and sometimes attempted to write a second edition of Guiding. We never managed it because it turned out that she and I, by then both members of the Columbus Group, no longer were in agreement with what he wanted to say about giftedness. (When I was doing the writing part of Guiding, I found in his notes the statement that a gifted child was a child first and “gifted only secondarily.” so I called him up and explained that Betty and I did not agree with that statement. He acquiesced. The book’s theme became pretty much the opposite—giftedness, certainly extreme giftedness, is inborn.) Because our Guiding contract did not allow Jim to engage someone else to write the revision, the three of us finally gave up on revising it. After that his and my interactions dwindled to social events at various conferences, so I didn’t know him at all well in recent years.

But because I am among those in the gifted community who knew him “almost from the start,” I have been contacted to share for publication my thoughts about him and my feelings about his passing. I decided to write here instead. Of course, I was as shocked as anyone that he should leave the world so suddenly and so “young.” He was only 3 years older than I, so we are of the same “cohort” as it were. Too young, in other words! And I’m as aware as anyone of the enormous impact his work—his speaking and publishing, and the work of SENG—have had on the world’s understanding that the complex population of gifted kids, adults, elders and educators is of vital importance to humanity. I did post a couple of comments on the FB pages of others.

But the requests for comments, and the reading of what others have been posting in social media, got me to asking “who are we?”– we individual humans. The profile photo on my own personal Facebook page is not one anyone except my family would recognize as me—I was a blond, pigtailed child of eight at the time it was taken. Who I was then was an “annoying” kid (according to some of my teachers—and maybe my parents, and probably my older siblings). There was no such thing as a gifted, much less a highly gifted kid in my world at the time.

Back in the 70’s when Jane Piirto did her study of successful women writers, of which I was one by her study’s standards, as I was in the Directory of American Poets, and worked in the Poets in the Schools program, I actually claimed (because I believed) that I had “loved school.” I got good grades, after all. (psst: it’s called repression.)

It wasn’t until the conference in Nebraska to honor Leta Hollingworth (in 1989, seven years after the publication of Guiding!), when I heard Leta’s poem “The Lone Pine” in a documentary, that I confronted the very new truth that I had been a highly gifted child who loathed and despised school except for a very occasional teacher. (I think there were 5 or 6 between Kindergarten and college.) I could add that my teachers did not like me either, to put it sometimes mildly. I literally cried the whole second leg (Chicago to Albany) of my flight home from Nebraska and then wrote obsessively for six hours afterwards, uncovering a veritable dump truck load of painful memories. So it’s a tricky question.  Who was I before and after that conference?

I wrote a great deal about parenting gifted kids before I ever knew I had been one—though my husband’s extreme giftedness had been unmasked when our son was identified. My mother-in-law explained the shocking truth that the one year of elementary school he remembered—when he got to ride a trolley to a special school (a school he thought was for “difficult” kids) was actually a pilot program for the highly gifted. I remember all too well his horror that he hadn’t accomplished more as an adult—he was “only” a theatre director with a Ph.D. after all. Who was he before and after?

I interacted with Jim regularly for years. When SENG conferences began I spoke at them. But when a friend of mine who headed a national organization that had financially supported one of them took me to dinner at the conference and asked me about stories he had heard from other speakers about Jim lowering contracted speaker fees at the last minute with a threat to take them off the schedule if they didn’t sign the new contract, I told him that it hadn’t bothered me because I had just corrected the amount on the contract to the amount I’d been promised, initialed it, and signed. He asked me further questions, and I answered truthfully with whatever facts I knew. The organization never again supported SENG and I was never again asked to speak at Jim’s conferences.

I was born in 1942 and grew up in a world where most women stayed at home and few professions were open even to bright and accomplished women. And I spent some time (5 years) in higher education, where my male office mate, with precisely the same credentials as mine, made one fifth more than I in salary. I wasn’t happy about it, but it was “the way things were.” There was a huge power imbalance in our world, we knew it, and we pretty much put up with it. When Jim promoted Guiding as his book, Betty and I used to call each other “Et” and “Al,” which was the most common representation (when we got any) of our participation. Once I even saw myself listed as the author only of the “Open Letter” chapter, https://welcometothedeepend.com/an-open-letter-updated/ which I had copyrighted in my name so that I could use it elsewhere, as above and in Out of Sync https://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness. But I long ago forgave him. The book gave me my work with the gifted, for which I am enduringly grateful.

In this era of “#Me, too” I’ve sometimes been bothered when men who have had long and successful careers, sometimes doing important work for the common good, can essentially lose everything when it is revealed that they previously used their power in ways that are now recognized as inappropriate, sometimes decades ago, at a time when the whole culture turned a blind eye to their behavior. Except for actual crimes (and even some crimes have statutes of limitation) I wonder, in spite of those who want to insist on truth, whether it is just or fair to judge a person for “who they were then,” when it is at least possible and maybe probable that they are not that person any more. I know, the culture needs to truly change, but still…

In the many comments I have read about Jim’s kindness, his caring, his deep friendships and unstinting emotional support, I recognize that these people, many of them friends and colleagues, knew a more recent and very different person than I ever did. I honor their experiences because it is very, very easy for me to remember myself treating other people when I was younger in a way that would pretty much horrify me now. I would not wish to be thought of as that person today! In a world where caring and kindness, inclusion, deep listening, and efforts to understand those who disagree with us or have less power than we do are getting vanishingly rare, and desperately needed, I remind myself that we never, genuinely never, fully know someone, perhaps even ourselves, the only one whose mind we inhabit. So today I mourn the Jim Webb those people are mourning.

And having survived some terrible losses myself, I send deep and heartfelt condolences to Janet and his family!

 

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Celebrate Giftedness; Consider Success

18 May

New Zealand is choosing to celebrate giftedness in its annual Gifted Awareness Blog Tour, with the theme “Catalysts of Success.” So let me first celebrate celebration—remember this song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M

Unusual intelligence can feel like more of a burden than a gift, but it’s all in how we choose to see it. We who are gifted and we who care for and work with gifted kids, have a very great deal to be grateful for and it is really important for our own well-being to remember that. The song in the above link says “celebrate good times,” and what many people don’t realize is how very important it is to first notice, and then celebrate the good times. If we focus always on what is not working and our ferocious (and admittedly sometimes unsuccessful) efforts to get those things “fixed,” we can get into the habit of seeing only negatives—only bad times—and ignoring or taking for granted the good ones. It is hugely important to recognize and remember that giftedness itself provides us with vast and out-of-the-ordinary internal resources. Celebration is a truly important positive attitude. And a positive attitude not only leads to success, but can become itself the very definition of success.

So that brings me to the theme:  “catalysts of success.” The first essential for me here is to define success. There are plenty of people who define it in terms of achievement, usually achievement in terms of money, power and fame. I would never suggest that money, power and fame are not worth having, but I do suggest that they are not the definition of success. When I began writing (and publishing) novels and they did not immediately shoot to the top of the best seller lists, did not get lucrative movie deals, in fact did not make me a living that could even measure up to the salary of a first year teacher almost anywhere in the states, it would never have occurred to me to consider the fact that I was able to write them (writing was, after all, what I had wanted to do since childhood) as success. More than that, publishers were willing to publish them, and children and young adults were reading them and writing letters to tell me so. However tricky it was to raise a family on the modest income provided by two adult human beings “doing art” in the U.S., my husband and I were both doing what we loved most to do. When I look back on those times, I wish I had understood then how important gratitude and celebration were. And how grateful we both should have been, no matter the difficulties, that we were “gifted” with the ability and the opportunity to do what we loved, what fed our souls.

Now for the definition of “catalyst”:  An agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action. We all know that things are not ideal for gifted kids in the educational world no matter what country or continent we represent, so since change is inevitable, we can be certain that “significant change” in a positive direction is always to be desired. Whether you are one of the gifted population, a teacher, a parent, an administrator—any or all of the above—I could suggest a whole list of catalysts you can cultivate to help provoke and/or speed significant change. Effort, determination, purpose, intentions, goals, preparation, willingness, persistence. I am sure you can add a few more of your own. But for me (some of you may remember an article of mine called “In Praise of Pollyanna,” which can be found in my book “Out of Sync”: https://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness ) Pollyanna’s focus on looking for things that made her glad is worth adopting. The single most important catalyst is gratitude. Well—that and celebration!

 

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Deep and Deeper

13 Apr

“All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. This we know: Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.”–Chief Seattle

“When we try to pick out something by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”–John Muir

It has been an absurdly long time since I wrote something for this blog. But today it’s time. Last month I did a workshop for the Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship program’s annual seminar, sponsored by IEA, the Institute for Educational Advancement. The theme of this year’s seminar was “Intersections” and my workshop was titled “From Indra’s Net to the Internet: Intersections, Reality and Consciousness.”

To prepare for the seminar it was suggested that the attendees watch this TED Talk about “multipotentialites”:

https://www.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_callingIf you don’t have time to watch the talk (though I highly recommend it), let me explain that Wapnick uses the term multipotentialite to describe a person who can’t relate to the idea of finding “one true calling.” If they commit to a job or a subject matter, as soon as they have learned or mastered it they need to move on to something else; there are always lots of other paths (interests) pulling them to explore. Many of “our kids” will recognize themselves in this talk.

Watching it, I realized that I am an “elder multipotentialite.” My 6th grade teacher told my mother that I would never amount to anything because I was interested in “too many things.” Miss Shreve deeply believed in the saying “Jack of all trades, master of none.” She was not, you may be sure, one of my favorite teachers! I am lucky, though. I’ve managed to have the best of both worlds. I do have one true calling, but it is writing, a calling so broad and varied that there is no limit to my ability to follow it for a lifetime and yet avoid boredom.

Most of you who read this blog came to it because you share, for your own reasons, my personal passion for serving the needs of super bright kids and adults. This blog and much of the rest of my nonfiction, along with much of my public speaking, has been about extraordinary intelligence, and what I’ve written and talked about on this subject is best known in the gifted community.

But many of you also know some of my fiction for kids and young adults. Certainly Welcome to the Ark and Flight of the Raven, along with my much earlier novel A Time to Fly Free, are specifically related to highly gifted individuals, but I write other kinds of children’s books as well. And my plays, most of them written in collaboration with Katherine Paterson—author, among many other award-winning novels, of Bridge to Terabithia—are meant to appeal to a broad audience of kids.

Most recently my interests and my life experience (some of which I’ve written about here) have led (or pushed) me in a new direction, the first book from that path being my book Change Your Story, Change Your Life. Some of you may have found it through my websites http://www.stephanietolan.com or www.storyhealer.com.

I expect more nonfiction writing will come from the spiritual perspective that the losses in my life forced me to discover and that the current chaos in the world we all share continues to test and expand.

The theme and title of this blog refer to the metaphorical “deep end” environment that mermaids (unable to survive long on dry land) need to survive longterm. But since I created the blog, the term has taken on a new meaning for me—has become, if you will, even deeper. I will not lose interest in the subject that led me to begin it (how could one get bored in the realm of the gifted mind—as broad a territory as writing itself?) but the new depths that interest me may not appeal to everyone. The title of my CDB workshop refers to both the mystical image of Indra’s net and the material world reality of the internet, two very different ways of perceiving intersections, the connectedness of all things. What I will be doing here in future is exploring both kinds of “deep.”

And meanwhile I’ve begun the intense work of writing the third book of the “Ark Trilogy,” Within the Dark. Because, of course, fiction is a fundamental part of my “one true calling.”

 

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A Message from New Zealand…

21 Nov

Back from NAGC in Charlotte, and intending to post a blog about the final panel of this year’s convention, I am instead sharing what Rosemary Cathcart (the newest member of the Columbus Group, whose Reach Education online course won an award this year from NAGC’s Professional Development Network–and who flew from the other side of the world to receive it) posted in NZ yesterday. This message is needed around the world wherever people assume that giftedness is not innate to the individual, and equates with achievement.

“I can do it. Anyone with persistence and hard work can do this.” 

Is mindset a basic truth, or a damaging fallacy, or simply muddled thinking? How does it really relate to giftedness?

[First posted on the tki gifted community forum (New Zealand) on November 20 2017]

There has been a good deal of discussion on this site in recent days about Jo Boaler’s concept of mindset, and it’s evident that many people are feeling somewhat confused about this whole subject, and just where it fits in relationship to giftedness

That’s very understandable. We all know that some degree of effort is required to master any skill, from the simplest to the most complex. We all know this from the daily experience of our own lives. It’s true for every human being, and as David Attenborough and other wild-life experts have shown us, it’s also true for every animal and every bird on this planet. Even insects and spiders: as the story of King Bruce and the spider reminds us, mindset is hardly a new human discovery. Not only practice but the will to maintain that practice until competence is reached is a fundamental life skill for all living creatures.

It’s also true, of course, for gifted individuals. They are not somehow exempt from the universal need to practise to achieve. They too need persistence to keep going when success or competence does not come immediately or easily.

So what’s the issue?

Jo Boaler’s argument is that the stronger the will and the more sustained the effort, the higher the level of competence eventually reached. Because, as a general statement, that’s demonstrably true, she has gone on to claim that this somehow disproves the notion of giftedness. Her assertion is essentially that what we call giftedness is just people who’ve tried harder and longer and with more persistence to achieve. The implication is that any individual who has the will and the determination  – the “grit” to use the term commonly applied – can reach a gifted level of performance.

But here’s the flaw:

Achievement is dependent on two qualities: sustained effort–AND innate ability level. This latter reality also sets boundaries to what can be achieved.

Perhaps it takes an extreme example to best show how thoroughly misleading Boaler’s argument is. At the NAGC convention I’ve just come back from, Stephanie Tolan in a presentation on asynchronous development spoke of a child aged less than four months who was already talking in groups of up to three words and who was able to greet a surprised visiting doctor by saying “Hello” as he peered over the edge of the cot. As Tolan said, this child’s hugely precocious speech can hardly be put down to months or years of practice or “grit”! (As a matter of fact, I myself have a niece who was speaking at four months – it happens, generally leaving parents feeling thoroughly gobsmacked and wondering “What on earth do I do now???”).

You and I, as people who work with gifted children, also know this from our experience with them, even if not quite to that extreme. We see the child who not only grasps concepts so much more fully than age peers but who generates questions which go far beyond the boundaries of the regular curriculum. Routinely we find ourselves working in an entirely different conceptual landscape from that of the regular classroom. (I’m thinking, for example, of a local four year old who wanted her kindy teacher to explain the difference between infinity and eternity…..).

You and I also see how gifted children are often denied recognition, not only of their innate ability, but also of their need too for sustained practice. Regular school work just doesn’t require the effort, the sustained struggle, that builds persistence. It’s a double whammy for them, and Boaler’s misguided attempt to make all human beings fit the same simplistic model seriously compounds this issue.

Why did the mind-set theorists get it so wrong?

My own guess is that the underlying issue here is the narrow focus Boaler and the mind-set people and also the talent development people and all too often our school systems have on quantifiable achievement. If what primarily matters about a child is how far up the scale they can get, then you simply don’t have that depth of understanding which would enable you to recognise the complex inner experiences which shape the responses of the gifted child and which so significantly differentiate those responses, not just in quantitative ways, but in fundamental nature from those of most age peers.

It’s not, and it never ever has been, about one child being “better” than another. It’s about recognising and celebrating the wonderful and exciting diversity of human ability and accomplishment. Don’t you agree?

 

Dr Rosemary Cathcart
Director, REACH Education
www.giftedreach.com 

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Parenting, parenting, and then one day…

10 Oct
HC20677

Newborn

 

Many of you may have seen a recent research article: 

High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities

 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324 

And you may be forgiven for saying, “Well, duh!” This research shows what those of us who are and are raising highly intelligent folk (“cheetahs” or “mermaids/men”) have known all along. There are downsides to this “gift.”

When our kids are little and driving us crazy with their messy rooms, or forgetfulness, or endless arguments, or intensity, or sensitivity, or the scary downsides that the above article addresses, we may wonder about upsides. This post is a celebration of upsides, and a follow up to an earlier one, (Feb. 12, “On the Lighter Side”) in case you missed it.

If you’ve never read it, you might want to take a moment to go up to the top right hand side of this blog and click on “An Open Letter….” When I was in the trenches, learning about high range giftedness and coping with school issues and asynchrony (which hadn’t been named yet), nobody told me that it might not be a good idea to “out” my child to the larger world—so when it was decided to make the open letter I had written to my son’s teachers a chapter in Guiding the Gifted Child, 1982, it didn’t occur to me to hide his identity. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be hurt by this (except for the embarrassment of having the words “Gifted Child” as an on-screen caption during an interview with me on the Today Show when he was an adult working in New York City).

“On the Lighter Side” tells the history of the Applewhites books, including my idea (back in 2012) to ask RJ to collaborate with me on the third book my editor had been urging me to write. He agreed, amazingly soon came up with the initial plot outline, and so we began to write, discovering in the process that neither of us was entirely thrilled with the need, sometimes, to let go of a brilliant idea of our own to embrace the brilliant idea of the other. It wasn’t all roses and sunshine but thanks to its being about the Applewhite family there was a lot of laughter. And then the book got sidelined by family tragedy in 2013. It didn’t come to life again for a very long time. But finally it called us back to our keyboards. Laughter had won out!

So we will have a great celebration party next Tuesday, October 17, at Books of Wonder (18 West 18th Street, New York, NY), when Applewhites Coast to Coast is officially launched. It is impossible to fully express the joy of working together, sharing the ups and downs of life and of the creative process. And the fun of celebrating this birth together!

tolan-and-tolan-42.jpg

Mother/Son Selfie

 

 

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The Value of Challenge

15 Jul

 

Almost all parents of highly to profoundly gifted children know quite well that one of the major difficulties in their children’s education is a lack of appropriate intellectual challenge. When Leta Hollingworth suggested in the first half of the last century that highly gifted children waste most of their time in school and profoundly gifted children waste almost all of it, she was making it clear that the primary challenge for these kids in most school situations was boredom. There was little or nothing for their active, questing minds to engage with, little challenge from which to grow and develop their knowledge base, or discover new ideas and to evaluate them, or to learn how to come up with and best express their own important thoughts and judgments. No challenge.

In a blog post entitled “The Right to Struggle,” The Gifted Development Center’s Dr. Linda Silverman poses the situation as a matter of civil rights. “How are egalitarian beliefs served by teaching a student what he or she already knows? Effort is kindled when students wrestle with new concepts—when they have to struggle to learn. Gifted education specialist, Carol Morreale, said that when we give gifted students the same work as all the other students, we deprive them of the right to struggle to learn.” [italics mine]  http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/blogs/bobbie-and-lindas-blog/right-struggle

This lack of challenge or “struggle” is clearly shown in the answer a profoundly gifted teenage girl gave in 2012 when Patty Gatto-Walden and I asked Yunasa campers to respond to a speech made by the then President of NAGC, advocating a move away from the idea that “giftedness” is an innate difference.

“…I started ninth grade when I was twelve—and … there was another girl a couple months older than me who was also starting the ninth grade…the main difference between us is that she was working really, really hard to maintain good grades at the ninth grade level at age 12. She was having a real struggle, she was constantly having to do homework, she had to put a ton of effort in. Whereas, I was sitting in all my classes daydreaming because I still wasn’t being challenged—because the way traditional curriculum is taught doesn’t hold my attention, so I always thought there was an extreme difference between [us]. …seeing this girl’s experience compared to mine when we were the same age in the same grade, …I didn’t really understand much about giftedness, but even at that point I thought, ‘This doesn’t really seem like the same situation!’” (Gatto-Walden & Tolan, 2012 presentation at NAGC)

None of this will surprise parents of highly gifted children or the teachers who understand and work with them to provide either acceleration or intense levels of enrichment (or both) to give them worthwhile learning experiences in school. They need to encounter real challenge.

But today I want to take this idea of the value of challenge in a different, and maybe new-to-most readers, direction.

Bear with me. When I was a child we kids were sent out in good weather to “play outside” and told to be sure to come home by dinner time, or when the streetlights came on. My husband’s and my boys (the next generation kids) were also allowed to go out and play on their own. It was what kids did! They rode bikes or roller skated, played games, invented games, pogo-sticked, walked to parks, libraries, playgrounds. In my case the kids on my block explored the shores of Lake Michigan, across the street from my house. Kids without adults, just being kids.

But something changed in 1979 when our youngest had just turned seven. Six year old Etan Patz, walking the two blocks to his school bus stop in New York City by himself for the first time, disappeared. What followed across this country was the launching of the missing children movement, the practice of putting the faces of missing children on milk cartons, and the idea that all children must be taught about “stranger danger.” Even though we lived in a pleasant residential neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio I remember following the official advice to get our son “dog tags” to wear with his name, address and phone number. Of course, he knew that information himself and could perfectly well find his way home on his own, but news broadcasts reminded parents steadily that “something might happen” to children to keep them from being able to do that. That “something” that loomed over all of us was whatever had happened to Etan Patz. Eventually, of course, the world learned that he had been murdered by a mentally ill neighbor.

But something fundamental had changed in our culture. Over time parents came to think that whenever their children were outside their homes “unsupervised” by an adult they were actually in danger of being hurt or killed by a stranger. Though some (or many) parents knew how rare such events really were, they were still plagued by a fear that such an “almost-never-happens” catastrophe might happen to their child. And it would have been their fault…

Now, closing in on four decades later, parental fear has grown and spread from the possibility of kidnapping or murder to a huge variety of unpleasant experiences that children “need” to be protected from. The media (social and otherwise) bring us a steady diet of warnings, and examples of dangers children may face on a daily basis. And given that highly and profoundly gifted children are often unusually sensitive and different enough to be frequently bullied, they may seem to be especially vulnerable.

It is this constantly growing fear that has created the phenomenon known as the “helicopter parent.” The image this term conjures may seem extreme enough that most parents don’t see themselves this way, but it can be hard to avoid some of the over-protectiveness it suggests. That over-protectiveness has spread beyond individual parents to our society itself, so that neighbors and even strangers have been known to contact police to report children going to a park, a library, even sometimes on their way home by themselves, without an adult to watch over them. It is in response to this level of concern that the “free range children” movement was started to bring childhood at least a little closer to what it was when I was growing up. But the phenomenon of helicopter parenting does not appear to be greatly affected by this press for greater freedom. Usually starting when children are quite small, over-protection continues these days into high school and college.

Recently, my grandson (who starts high school this fall) was talking to my son about where he might like to go for college. Son told grandson that out of state tuition for his first choice university was wildly expensive. “That’s okay,” grandson said, “you and Mom can just rent an apartment there and I can take a gap year and live in the apartment so I can become a state resident.” There followed, of course, a brief and realistic financial discussion!

When I learned of this conversation, I pointed out that I’ve been hearing about helicopter parents who rent an apartment for themselves in the town or city where their child goes to school (in some cases may even buy a house!) so they can live close enough to help their son or daughter choose classes, to feed them, do their laundry, meet all their professors, and arrange regular conferences with any who fail to give the child acceptable grades, etc. My son just shook his head. “In this family we are all looking forward to the time this kid goes off on his own!”

So when I was recently talking to a young woman whose job it is to counsel students who are having difficulty adjusting to college (of which there are apparently an ever-increasing number), I asked if this issue of parents taking up residence in the same town was something this particular school had to deal with. “Not just in the same town! There are mothers who move in with their kids—sometimes even in the kid’s dorm room.” It was in that startling conversation that I first heard the new term, snow-plow parent. “These parents don’t just hover over their kids,” she said. “They go in front of them in everything they do to make sure the kid doesn’t encounter any obstacles of any kind. It’s practically an epidemic!”

These conversations got me to thinking about the whole issue of learning and challenge. For a number of years employers have been reporting that young men and women newly out of college (or even prestigious and challenging graduate programs) seem unable or unwilling to take responsibility and make decisions for themselves. When given a task typical of the job they’ve been hired for they need far more support in figuring out how to do it than earlier generations did. “They want and expect—in fact need—someone to lead them by the hand, tell them what to do and how to do it, and then keep an eye on them to be sure it gets done.” I’d like to think this doesn’t apply to highly or profoundly gifted kids, but given some of the top schools these young people graduated from, one wonders.

So I decided to write this blog in order to ask  parents the question “What, if anything, might you change in your parenting methods and strategies if you treated your children’s need for life challenges the same way you treat their need for intellectual challenges–as a valuable, even necessary aspect of their development as human beings?”

Years ago I gave a talk at NAGC called “The Problem of Pain,” which was later published in the CAG Newsletter in California and is included in my 2016 book Out of Sync. [https://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness] The piece provides what I call a “Nifty Tool Kit” for helping one’s child cope with pain. It is difficult for any of us to watch our children suffer physical, emotional or psychological pain. We tend to want more than anything just to take it away. Fix it. Find a way to keep it from recurring. But no one gets through life without pain. Reaching adulthood without developing any strategies for coping with it is not a benefit.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating pain. I’m not a believer in the adage “no pain no gain.” There are many ways to learn important life lessons from positive experiences. And by life challenges, I don’t mean only those that bring pain. It is a challenge to choose a major, a challenge to fulfill an obligation one may have undertaken without fully understanding the work involved, a challenge to walk away from a relationship that is forcing one to camouflage one’s real self, and a challenge to stand up for oneself when one has been judged unfairly. And it is, of course, a challenge to begin accepting responsibility for one’s actions and choices. Those are all part of learning to be a fully functioning adult. And here’s one that highly to profoundly gifted adolescents often struggle with—a challenge to discover not just what one can do, but what gives one joy in the doing.

Life—for everyone—includes difficult challenges like loss, grief, loneliness, uncertainty, disappointment, mistakes and bad choices. If their parents constantly rush in to “fix” any uncomfortable situation, or remove any and every obstacle children or adolescents might encounter, how do they develop the kinds of coping strategies that will be essential in the rest of their lives? We insist that children need to learn at or near the top of their cognitive capacity so they’ll have the intellectual tools they’ll need to reach their potential. It’s equally important to let them stretch themselves to contend with the difficulties they encounter in their personal lives.

Parenting is difficult and scary, and parenting out of sync kids is no walk in the park. We don’t have “owner’s manuals.” We do the best we can. I’m certainly not suggesting you abandon your child in the face of difficult life experiences! I’m suggesting only that you consider that question I asked earlier:

“What, if anything, might you change in your parenting methods and strategies if you treated your children’s need for life challenges the same way you treat their need for intellectual challenges–as a valuable, even necessary aspect of their development as human beings?”

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Mind’s Diversity

4 Jun

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”–Albert Einstein

In the midst of the current world chaos when people encounter the word “diversity” what probably comes to mind first is what might be called obvious diversity—race, religion, ethnic origin, culture, citizenship, gender, economic status. What I am writing about today is less noticeable and for some perhaps rather more controversial—I think of it as diversity within mind.

I don’t mean the differences between gifted and more typical minds, between left and right brain dominance, between math/science and humanities preferences, or even Dabrowski’s OEs. There is much to be said about all of these, and of course much has been written about all of them in the gifted literature.

What is less discussed in that literature, less discussed in the academic community, except obliquely, is the fact that the human mind has two primary modes of operation. They could be called ways of accessing information or even ways of knowing. These two entirely different modes are Intellect and Intuition. The first is the aspect of mind measured by most intelligence tests—intellect. It is the dwelling place of reason, logic, rationality. It is generally thought of as a specifically human attribute, the mental capacity that allows us to learn, explore reality, understand, share ideas and knowledge, create, and invent. When some people use the term mind what they mean is just this—intellect. If they think about intuition, they consider it to be some vague and unreliable something that, if it exists at all, is akin to what in animals we label instinct, a lesser kind of consciousness that might occasionally surprise us when the phone rings and without seeing the caller I.D. we have a “hunch” about who is trying to reach us.

In spite of Einstein’s words, above, intuition is not most generally a serious focus of attention when considering the unusual or extreme intelligence of gifted individuals. While intellect is rational, many refer to intuition, therefore, as irrational, and dismiss it on those grounds. I far prefer the term nonrational, which acknowledges its difference without dismissing its genuine value. A couple of years ago when I was in a FaceBook group created to discuss giftedness, any mention of the kinds of unusual awareness that are available to us through intuition was met with hostility and ridicule. I probably posted the Einstein quotation before I left the group, tired of the futile attempt to broaden the conversation to include the aspect of mind that allows direct knowing. Yet in a kind of linguistic U-turn, in earlier times to say that someone was “gifted,” or had “the gift,” actually meant that the person had highly developed and powerful intuition, sometimes known as second sight, sixth sense, or psychic ability.

Interestingly, speaking to a diverse audience about mind and giftedness when I ask people to raise their hands if they have ever experienced an accurate, intuitive “hit,” a majority raise their hands. For some this sort of direct knowing is frequent and common enough to be relied upon, for others their intuitive experience was a one time, goose-bump-raising, highly memorable event.

I’m among those who argue that intuition is a valuable and basic aspect of the mind, every bit as worthy of being recognized and developed as intellect. For those who distrust it or disbelieve in its existence, I would remind them of a time (I’m old enough to remember it) when elementary school children in this country (especially in Catholic schools, but elsewhere, too) were discouraged or even punished for using their left hands instead of their right. Handedness was not yet understood as an innate aspect of the individual’s brain structure. As we learned more about the brain, we realized that being left handed—or ambidextrous—is not only natural to some, but is associated with some unique and worthwhile attributes.

In the Myers-Briggs inventory of types, one of the variables (N) stands for intuition, the method of taking in information that is opposed on the scale to sensing (S). Those who prefer Sensing on the N-S continuum look for information that is concrete, can be accessed through the senses, and includes details and facts. Those who prefer Intuition are more likely to get hunches and trust them, and to perceive underlying structures and patterns and make assumptions based on those. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines intuition as “…the immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning; instantaneous apperception.”

Both N and S are natural capacities that may be more or less developed, more or less used, according to nature, but nurture is involved as well. When we do not respect or allow intuitive ways of knowing, we may do as much to shut it down in those whose natural capacities are closer to N on the continuum than S, as forcing the exclusive use of the right hand distorted for many the attributes of left-handedness. Those who have been told (or believe) that intuition either doesn’t exist or is vague and unreliable, are much less likely to develop and use it than those in whom its presence is acknowledged, supported, valued.

As we are more and more inundated with information, more and more challenged to keep up with the constant flow of new information on almost every topic imaginable, it’s likely that we are going to find it more and more critical for the individual to acknowledge and gain access to that “other” way of knowing that is entirely outside the realm of reason, rationality, logic and intellect. We need to have a way of sorting through the deluge to limit our intake, to get accurate hunches about just what pieces of information in that stream we most need in any given situation or any given moment. When we do get such hunches we need to respect them rather than dismissing them automatically, even though they may be given to us in a “still, small voice” easily over-ridden by the loud and confident intellect. As we begin to trust them, they begin to work for us more and more often, more and more accurately.

One of my colleagues is affectionately known as “Nancy Drew” because she’s able to find information other people can’t. She is led to that information intuitively. Though she reads incredibly fast, she is often able simply to go directly to the right shelf, the right box, the right file drawer in the midst of an archive that might take another person weeks or months to sort through in a more rational, methodical way. She trusts her methods, and seeing her results lets the rest of us trust them, too. Books she needs have even been known to fall off the shelf to get her attention.

I knew that my Myers-Briggs results showed me to be far out on the N side of the N-S continuum, but I didn’t realize that many psychics refer to themselves as Intuitives. So I often said, “I don’t have a psychic bone in my body.” Then several professional psychics told me I was one of them. Thanks to my strict, rational-materialist upbringing and education, I dismissed their suggestions. Then one of them told me that while I could learn to access my intuitive nature, people with highly capable intellects (“the gifted”) are among those most difficult to teach to do that. I was lucky, though. I’m a fiction writer and have made much of my living with my imagination.

Once, while doing research for my novel Welcome to the Ark, I went to hear the grandson of Edgar Cayce speak, and he quoted his grandfather, saying “Imagination is the doorway to intuition.” Imagination and intuition are not the same thing, since intuition is a way of knowing and imagination is a way of exploring (or creating) possibilities. Imagination allows us to escape from the tyranny of what is already known, from facts previously established, and from the “real world” to explore new territory. In that new territory intuition may then encounter its truth.

Einstein famously said (in a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post) “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Much of what Einstein gave to the world came from a combination of imagination and his own thorough grounding in what was already known or theorized and the extraordinary intellect that let him devise ways to test and share his sudden insights. But it certainly was the free flight of imagination that allowed him to make intuitive leaps to entirely new ground. He also famously said that to encourage children to become scientists one should nourish them with fairy tales.

Intellect feels safer. One can follow its trail from fact to fact, from source to source, from concept to concept, thought to thought, reflection to reflection. The accomplishments of intellect can be traced, diagrammed, understood—unlike the “Eureka!” moment, when, like a kaleidoscope turning, an entirely new pattern suddenly emerges in what feels like a magical way that could not have been predicted or understood by analyzing the trail.

While it’s true that some people are intuitive super stars, able to tune in to information, “vibrations,” others cannot sense, that is no more of an excuse not to train ourselves to use this aspect of mind than it would be to say that no one other than the profoundly gifted should work to develop their intellect. I have been working at developing my own long-neglected intuition for a number of years now (over the often strenuous objections of my rational mind), and I’ve come to believe that it is essential for the future of humanity, not only to accept intuition’s apparently magical existence, but to respect what it can give us that reason cannot. Some of its aspects can seem “paranormal” and unsettling, since we have no way to really understand them. But I remind myself regularly that we don’t actually understand intellect either. Consciousness itself is still one of the great mysteries.

Personally, I’m not sure I would want to hand the task of helping children develop their intuition over to our schools, since they are overburdened as it is. But—as I’ve said often before, I think it amounts to educational malpractice not to tell kids that it exists, that it is a powerful natural aspect of mind, and that it can be developed. And schools can certainly do far more than most do now to help children value imagination, use it, practice it, and most of all respect it. Respect for imagination both allows and encourages the opening of that door to other ways of knowing.

Meantime, there are many people who are intuitive masters already engaged in teaching people how to access, develop, and use this aspect of mind. There are many books and workbooks for this, some designed for adults, some for children. Parents may have to be the ones to find the resources for this, but from my own childhood experience, I can confidently say that telling children that their moments of direct knowing are dangerous, unreliable, and should not be accepted or used, is like forcing left-handed kids to use only their right—a kind of purposeful crippling. It is only when we respect and encourage the development and best use of  the whole mind, both intellect and intuition, that we access humanity’s highest intelligence. Edgar Cayce said imagination is the doorway to intuition; I would add that intuition is the doorway to the infinite.

 

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Out of Sync

21 Mar

Announcement, announcement!OOS (Imagine a flourish of trumpets!)

On March 3, 2016, my new book, Out of Sync, Essays on Giftedness came out from Royal Fireworks Press, the publisher that brought the Columbus Group’s book Off the Charts to the world. Here is the link where you can check it out (and also buy it):  http://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness

This book is both new and old, because it’s a collection of my writings that have been published over more than three decades. Many, though not all of these pieces have been available for a number of years on my website, www.stephanietolan.com . Consequently, some of you will have read some of them already. That’s the “old” part. The new part consists of an introduction to each piece that provides a personal and cultural context.

My journey as a parent led from my husband’s and my concerns about our son’s schooling to concerns about American education, the definition and meaning of giftedness itself, the complexities of human intelligence and the reaches of the human mind, as well as how the differences we call giftedness affect one’s whole life trajectory. These are some of the subjects I’ve written about over thirty-plus years as my life and focus changed, in essays that are included in this book.

Unusually bright children are “out of sync” developmentally from birth, and will remain out of sync in one way or another throughout their lives, but they will only be children for a short time (one that can seem long in the midst of it, but like the blink of an eye at its conclusion). So in this eye blink from my perspective (1982 to the present) many parents who found my work helpful when coping with giftedness in their children (and themselves) have taken a journey from worrying about play dates for their kids to helping them choose graduate schools, or plan weddings. And yes, some are now becoming grandparents to a whole new generation of out of sync kids.

Sadly, the “old” stuff isn’t out of date, as I so wish it were. The same issues keep coming up. I see daily on social media questions from parents just beginning this journey that are exactly the same as the ones I faced and then worked (and wrote) to help answer. Last spring at a state gifted conference, I asked the audience of teachers and parents how many of them had read “Is It a Cheetah?”—my single most well-known piece, and the one I’ve been told has had the most success convincing educators that there really is a need to provide different nourishment for the different beings in their care. Only a few hands in that audience were raised, and it occurred to me that a new generation of parents and teachers is embarking on this journey who haven’t found the “old stuff” that can continue to provide a helpful guide to the obstacles out there, and some useful answers to the same old questions.

So that’s why this book—now one can get the pieces that readers have told me were the most helpful to them in one slim volume. (And BTW, the feet in those out of sync socks on the cover are my own!) Yes, I’m still out of sync, too.

Repeat:  http://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness

 

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