Simple Gifts
Winter term brings frost, midterms, and a whole new wave of worries.
“My child is struggling in math because he’s just so gifted.”
It is a refrain we teachers hear constantly. Usually, it isn’t true. Almost every child who is advertised to me as “gifted” is normal-smart, and usually the struggle comes from something other than innate aptitude. Normal-smart is a great way to be in this world, so please don’t take that as an insult.
Giftedness is a true phenomenon. And it can be really hard on a kid. If your child actually is gifted (or if you were gifted as a child) you get the burden of it. To be gifted is to be an outlier, usually in just one area. To stand out. To be both revered and resented by peers. It is to be perceived as older than you are in some ways, and then to disappoint when you act exactly your own age in others. It is to fall outside of the norms for which your education was built, and to very much have to figure out your own way to navigate in the system we have, or how to leave it. It is to have everyone constantly watching you with such very high expectations. It is an awful lot of pressure.
How do I know a gifted child? The kids who skip several grades in math? Some of them are gifted. Many of them are just normal-smart with ambitious home-culture. The ones who get perfect scores on their SATs? Perhaps, but these days, SAT scores are bought by the wealthy, usually via tutors and prep courses. If they’re gifted in other areas, like English, chances are, I won’t even notice from where I’m teaching. If they’re gifted in art, I may see it scribbled in the margins of my quizzes. But if they’re gifted in math, I know from the workings of their minds. How does a child work through a problem? How does she envision her world? How does her brain get to the answer? How excited is she to look at a problem from every possible angle? How eager is she to learn? Does she swim in the math like a fish in the sea?
In modern schooling, we aim to keep most of our students in healthy challenge at school. If a kid is gifted in math, she may have to create a lot of her own challenge in school or seek it elsewhere outside the classroom in the form of tutoring or extracurricular math. IEPs (Individualized Educational Plans) often call for enrichment, but it is rarely enough.
So if your child is truly gifted in math, here are three strategies I’ve seen my gifted students use to customize their education as they go.
Get really curious about how many different ways to solve one problem. I had one student who loved this route. She was such a creative math thinker, always surprising me with her strategy. In the first 10 seconds of my writing a problem on the board, she’d have her first answer. But rather than give into boredom, she got curious about how else she could look at it? How else could she solve it? By the time her peers were done, she’d have figured out 5 or 6 really ingenious ways to approach the problem. It kept us all engaged.
Become a helper. Get invested in peer success. Those gifted in math are not necessarily gifted communicators. So to challenge herself, a student could work on her exposition, figuring out how to slow down her process and explain it to someone else who needs the help. This can be an especially gratifying path to the very empathic. But it’s also great practice for those who are working on growing socially.
Supplement with outside resources. I especially love competition math team work. Math Counts. Math Olympiad. Each week, new questions are posted on the website that are thoroughly thought provoking, and if you want to start a team yourself, it can be an awful lot of fun to make it a team sport. This isn’t just for gifted kids, of course. Competition math can be fun for anyone who gets a thrill out of problem solving. It’s a great complement to all math studies.
This year, nothing is normal. We’re in global pandemic. Everyone is trying to survive and piece together some semblance of normalcy in education. A lot of the usual enrichment strategies are under-employed right now. A far broader swath of learners may have to go on a quest for our own motivation and enrichment in learning. Sometimes it can be found within the class, like finding multiple paths to a right answer, and other times, we may have to push beyond and crack open an enrichment book, or break out of the system we’re in and supplement with other classes. THIS struggle, right here, IS the learning. Even when it looks like boredom.