Gifted, creative, or ADHD?

The last few weeks have brought several articles on ADHD and its impact on kids. SENG (Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted) had a news release on how it plans to alert pediatricians on the similarities of ADHD and gifted traits (and for this I am grateful). The New York Times released a controversial opinion piece on how ADHD drugs don’t work long term, and the Times’ Motherlode blog replied with a thoughtful post. Finally, the Wall Street Journal’s article on Ritalin and creativity suggested that creativity is greatly dampened by ADHD medications.

Well. Great. More noise about ADHD and how it is over-diagnosed and over-prescribed and not a danged thing on what to do about it. Drives me batsnot crazy. See, our 2e son has ADHD.

Or does he?

Could it simply be that he is gifted and his wiring just keeps his body moving non-stop? That school bored him to the point that he tuned out? (Um, yeah, it did…but that’s a post for a different day). That our parenting in his early years affected his brain development and thus his behavior?

Possibly, absolutely, and are you freaking kidding me?

A has always been on the move. Always. In utero he did laps until he played soccer with my kidneys. I stopped wearing shoes with laces when he was two, because I couldn’t get them on fast enough when he’d bolt from Music Together classes. When he was three I asked his pediatrician if he thought A was ADHDish. The answer was yes, but too young to make an official determination. At four we embarked on a yearlong quest to find any other reason for his hyperactivity and difficulty paying attention. Occupational therapy, vision therapy, diet changes, sleep studies, and a tonsillectomy for sleep apnea followed. All this time the curiosity intensified, and he was deemed to be twice-exceptional. At five we finally caved and put him on medication.

And saw this:

This picture means more to me than most. This was the first time my son voluntarily sat down and quietly drew out an idea he had in his head. December 2006. I still have the intricate picture he was working on.

The last five years he’s been doh-see-dohing with various medications, trying to find that delicate balance of efficacy and acceptable side effects. The biggie is loss of appetite. For me that would be awesomesauce; for my 25th percentile son it’s a very fine line. On meds he can focus enough to read, work on inventions, do school with me, has a higher frustration tolerance, and is basically easier to live with. We see the giftedness. Off meds he pings around the house and talking to him is like shouting through a waterfall. And I’m not just talking evenings; he went 18 months off meds a few years ago after some scary side effects joined forces with weight loss. He went back on last spring when it was either that or I was going to wring his neck. That’s where the other E comes out to play.

So are we medicating him simply for our benefit, to make parenting him easier? Are the medications inhibiting his creativity, his ability to express himself? Is his gifted wiring just such that he has to move nonstop and get lost in his own mind, unwilling or unable to listen to others?

Or are these articles simply noise? None of them seem to be written by a parent of an ADHD kid. Sure, it’s easy for an adult to say having ADHD as a kid made him more creative, but I bet his parent was at wits’ end most days. My job is to get this kid to adulthood in one piece, ready challenge life on his terms. If meds help get him there when everything else has failed, does that mean I have failed him? Of course not. I already beat myself up that he’s so thin because of the side effects, I don’t need that joining in.

So here’s what I want to say to all the ADHD OpEd writers (with the exception of SENG, which I think is doing the absolute right thing in raising awareness of ADHD/gifted similarities): Be quiet. Stop. Enough. You do not speak of nor represent all those who have to cope with ADHD. For some the diagnosis and medications were a last resort, and even then the second guessing doesn’t stop. I am not damaging my child by keeping him on ADHD medications, nor am I dulling his creativity. I am providing what he needs, when he needs it, to get him to where he needs to be.

The rest is just noise.

Different is as Different Does

Let me first say what an honor it is to be selected to guest blog for Christina. She has done some very remarkable things within the gifted community and I’m thrilled to contribute in any way I can.

That being said, I come with the Learning Disabled twist on Giftedness, so it’s a niche within a niche and not a huge population, but significant for more than just humanitarian reasons, and I’ve been thrilled to see more 2E folks out and about. Some may have a mental double take going on when thinking about how a person can be both LD and Gifted at the same time.  It’s not hard to imagine a person who is gifted and blind (Stevie Wonder / Ray Charles) or gifted and paralyzed (Stephen Hawking), but for some reason many people often think that if you’re gifted, you can’t be learning disabled. It would be an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or broken Black Box. I was a little pained when it came out so recently (again) in a study posted by the L.A. Times “Dyslexia not related to intelligence, study finds” but I guess since I’ve been trying to dispel this myth for 15 years, I should be happy with any help in de-mything it.

The difficulty lays in finding/diagnosing such individuals because they often have learned how to jury-rig their life to get by at a rather early age.  They figure out how to compensate for areas that may be weak. I’ll use myself as an example here. I have dysnomia. This means that I have the “word on the tip of your tongue” syndrome. Everyone has that occasionally, but for me it’s once or twice per sentence, not once or twice per day. I developed a large vocabulary early and use analogies and examples often when expressing myself. This worked in many situations, but not in all.  Once I received a 90 out of 100 on a college sociology test in which I missed all 10 points in the “fill-in-the-blank” section.  I was still undiagnosed at this time. I always knew I stank at fill-in-the-blank but I didn’t know there was a reason behind it still. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was a semester away from either graduating college or dropping out.

Very rarely are these twice-exceptional individuals recognized as both. More often than not when they are discovered at all, it is the learning disabled aspect that is diagnosed and not the gifted. I don’t want to bash the LD system as a whole, but we often times find a very low-expectations system in place when it comes to kids in LD programs. Also when students with LDs are placed in “regular” classrooms as opposed to placed in Special Ed. classrooms they have greater success, as noted in No Disabled Student Left Behind posted in the Boston Herald earlier this year.

What I have not read in reports, but I hear from actual LD labeled students, is that they are “spoon fed” answers and often if they ask for further understanding of a question, they are simply given the answer instead. Imagine a gifted student who sees questions in multiple ways needing clarity on what is being asked. In a gifted program this is looked upon as creative. Unfortunately this same instance is looked at as slow in the LD room and confirms their LD label.

The real problem occurs when we start looking at the emotional issues that come forward as students are not understood and don’t understand themselves. They don’t fit in and feel it’s something they are not doing that everybody else can do, so they should be able to too. One of my colleagues wondered what it would take to make other people think, “I wish I had a learning disability.” I think that’s wonderful.  The new challenge should be finding the positive in the difference; celebrating our diversity and knowing we bring a rare perspective into most areas. Maybe we’ll see more studies like “The Upside of Dyslexia” soon.

We really need to change how we view differences, especially in students that have so much to contribute.  Maybe we need to start with:

1)       Identify and understand the differences
2)       Identify and understand distinctive aptitudes
3)       Build on strengths

What do you think?

Together, We CAN do more…

Happy Monday. Today I want to share something a bit…inspirational. But first, a little background. I was recently promoted to a new position within my school district – Program Specialist for programs related to emotional and behavioral support. While I will not officially assume the new job until my current position is filled (another week or so), I am more than a little excited for this new adventure.

Part of this new role relates to training and development in the area of mental health and schools. And so, although I haven’t taken the job, I have been attending numerous trainings on the topic of mental health. Most of them have been fabulous. And every now and then, I get information that is so relevant to both my job AND the work I do with gifted children, that I just HAVE to share…

This is one of those moments.

Recently, I have had the opportunity to coach a lot of parents regarding navigating through the often difficult maze of education with their gifted kids. Sometimes the kids are bored, their needs unmet in traditional learning. Sometimes, the situation is made more complex because the child is both gifted and a student with a learning disability, or gifted and a student with a mental health concern. Working with these children can pose unique challenges; and sometimes the challenges are discordant with what we “want” to do in education. Or discordant with what we “think” we should/must do.

Enter the video I want to share with all of you.

This inspirational video is all about breaking barriers, changing points of view, and realizing if we commit ourselves to thinking out of the box and being flexible in our dealings with children – all children…

If we refuse to accept the status quo and remember that these are CHILDREN who deserve the best we have to give…

If we decide to develop partnerships with each other, with parents, and with the community…

There really is nothing we can’t achieve.

We can meet the needs of our GT population. We can meet the unique challenges of our 2E kids. But only if we commit ourselves to the task.

Watch this video. Share it. And then, take action. The only way we can help our GT kids flourish is if we decide to do something about it.

Next week I am going to talk more about the judgments and labels we sometimes place on people, and the resultant stigmas. Until then, I’d love to learn more from you -

Did you like the video? Was it inspirational to you? What is something you are willing to do to help our GT population?

Looking Back on Growing Up As a Gifted Kid: The Open Classroom

This the continuing story of my experiences growing up with the “gifted” label. My first installment can be found here.

In 1973, my family and I moved to a different area and a different school district. I was put into an “Open Classroom” which was a mix of 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students, and two teachers.

This school district’s gifted program was called HAPP. (High Academic Performance Program).  Unlike the Mentally Gifted Minors program that I was involved with in 2nd grade, students didn’t go into HAPP until 4th grade.  I remember feeling as though I had been treated unjustly when I would watch some of the 4th and 5th graders from my class getting called away to do their HAPP activities. I asked my older classmates how I could get in the program, since I had already been in a gifted program at my old school. When they explained I had to wait till 4th grade, I wasn’t having any of it. I went to my teacher. Surely, she would listen to reason. I explained that I had already been in the gifted program at my old school and this was 2nd grade, so of course, I should be put in the gifted program here, now that I am a grade older.  My teacher explained that the HAPP program was for 4th – 6th grade. I tried to explain that even though I was technically in the 3rd grade, I should still get to go since I had already been tested and qualified for that program.  She said I would still have to wait till 4th grade. I walked away deciding adults were just stupid. I was seven-years-old.

I was sure my “giftedness” would wither away and die like an unused muscle if I didn’t get into that program somehow. I expressed my concerns to my mom. She said that when she was registering me for school, she explained that I had been in the gifted program at my old school, and that was why I was put in this open classroom. I was one of several third graders in a class also populated by fourth and fifth graders. The classroom environment was intended to give me the mental stimulation I might have otherwise missed out on in a traditional classroom.

In addition to the classroom being the size of two classrooms, and the students varying in ages from seven-years-old (at the beginning of the school year) to eleven-years-old. Instead of desks, there were tables and chairs, and couches and recliners. There were clipboards available if we needed a hard surface to do our assignments.  Every couple of months, we would split into groups of our choosing and make “Centers.” These were  little educational centers around the classroom that we would decorate with colorful butcher paper, construction paper,  corrugated trim and our own artwork. We had to display at least one book from the library that had to do with our subject (chosen by us, approved by a teacher). We had to have several educational activities available for the other students to do. Once we all finished building our centers, we would go around the classroom to each center and we had to complete a certain number of activities from a certain number of centers by the end of the week (or end of the month?)

As I am writing this, I am starting to remember the checklists. We still had to do regular classwork for math, reading, spelling, etc. Sometimes we would meet around a table at a scheduled time in a small group with a teacher. For other assignments, we could choose which ones to do first as long as they were all done and checked off the list by the end of the week.

I also remember Suzy, who was one of my best friends and a fourth grader in the same classroom. Sometime during the school year, her mother, who happened to be a 4th grade teacher, had her moved to a traditional classroom because she didn’t think Suzy was being taught what she needed to learn for 4th grade (this was Suzy’s explanation. I didn’t bother to question her mother at the time. I doubted she would feel the need to explain her decision to a 3rd grader). I felt sorry for Suzy because I thought her life was going to quickly become very boring. the next year, when I entered 4th grade in a traditional classroom, I somehow managed to be in all the highest math, spelling and reading groups, so I must’ve learned something in that open classroom environment!

Looking back on this now as an adult, I would have to agree 100%. I remember the 3rd grade as being the most creatively stimulating year of my school career I think it was a shame that most schools ended their “Open Classroom” programs just a few years later.

I will continue with my experiences about how being labeled “gifted” affected me later in school, in adulthood, and finally with raising three very different children, all who have been labeled as “gifted.”

Donna Leonard

You can read my regular blog at Manic Meanderings

When Gifted Children Grow Up

I recently had the amazing good fortune to have dinner with about a dozen highly gifted adults, mostly women. As one by one we shared stories, I was struck by a thought: Each one of us as individuals was looking around the table, feeling that we were the odd one out, the less gifted duckling in a glorious pool of graceful swans.

Many of you first started thinking about giftedness as I did, in order to understand and meet the needs of your children. Until our son was three, I had never heard of gifted education, much less the emotional traits and needs of very bright children. The first book I read on the topic was Bringing Out the Best: A Resource Guide for Parents of Young Gifted Children, by Jacquelyn Saunders, lent to me by our school’s gifted and talented coordinator. I still remember the relief, the “aha” moment, when I learned that being “sensitive to emotional issues at an early age” and asking “many questions about pain, death, anger, love, violence, etc.” were aspects of being gifted and not necessarily a sign that we were doing something wrong as parents, or that something was wrong with our child.

From that point on, I embarked on what was to become both a personal and a professional journey of passion, that of understanding what it means to live with this thing called giftedness. I focused primarily on the concerns of gifted children, and I immersed myself in every resource I could find. Information about what happens to gifted children when they become adults was not only harder to find, it just wasn’t as interesting to me at the time, except in the tangential sense of its effect on parenting.

In hindsight, though, I can see that I was also embarking on another, more personal journey that I hear echoed in others’ stories. I was pegged as “the smart one” in my class of three students in the two-room country grade school I attended (the other two students were “the funny one” and “the kind one”). I was quirky and imaginative and had a hard time making friends. I remember at some point along the way making a conscious effort to study the other children and to do whatever it took to fit in, a goal I succeeded at all too well. By the time I went to the county-wide high school, I smiled my way to popularity. I was valedictorian and voted most likely to succeed. My high school yearbooks are filled with versions of “You are really nice, for a brain. Stay just the way you are.”

Through it all, though, I wondered when I would be found out as the impostor I feared I was. Not only had I erased much of my real personality, I also never had to work hard to get good grades. This was not because I was brilliant, but because there was little rigor in my classes. The drop-out rate in my high school on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation was very high (it is currently about 50 percent), and the percentage of college-bound students low. It was not that difficult to distinguish oneself.

Sure enough, as a first-generation college student hundreds of miles from home, I hit the wall. Hard. Never having developed the study skills or work habits necessary to handle challenging classes, I was the textbook example of someone with what Carol Dweck has termed a fixed mindset: I believed that my ability was set and ultimately unknowable, something to protect at all costs rather than develop. I acted as though potential alone would be enough for me to succeed, and I had internalized the belief that being smart meant I shouldn’t have to show much effort or even planning. The problem was that by the time I was in college, potential and reputation no longer sufficed. What mattered were diligence and organization and persistence, skills I was sorely lacking.

Not until graduate school and beyond did I finally start to learn to engage and even at times enjoy my own potential and the intensity that is a part of it, to bring it out in the open and to work with it rather than treat it as a fragile, mysterious object. This engagement was and is a sometimes painful process that reminds me often of my own limits. But that is part of the deal. True personal development requires discomfort and setbacks, a lesson that seems harder for some of us to learn than others.

The process of recovering and creating my personality has taken even longer.

This is the part of the post where I am supposed to provide an answer, or at least some insight. For now, though, I have only questions and the feeling that, once again, I am just beginning something. If I still have trouble applying the word “gifted” to myself and figuring out what it means, after over ten years of writing and speaking about the topic, how many others are wrestling with these issues, especially once our children are on their own and the only giftedness that remains is our own?

What is your story of when gifted children grow up?

Redefining Normal – New Book News

Happy Monday! I have been loving the posts and conversations on the blog of late. THANK YOU everyone – new contributors and new readers!

Today, I thought I’d share an announcement with all of you:

Prufrock Press is publishing my third nonfiction book, entitled:

REDEFINING NORMAL: A Girl’s Guide to Embracing Her Identity and Realizing Her Potential

I am very excited for this book. It is sort of a gift to my own girls, and something I have been working on for the last several months. As described in the original proposal, REFINING NORMAL covers all aspects of resiliency, including social acceptance, self-efficacy, and emotional balance. I provides girls with evidence-based strategies to understand, evaluate and develop their own resiliency. Furthermore, it covers some areas unique to girls, including relational aggression, cyber-bullying, social acceptance, peer pressure, and empowerment.

One of my favorite aspects of the book includes stories from other teens and adults about their personal experiences finding their own unique voice.  If you would like to contribute your story, or participate in this project in some other way, please CLICK HERE and complete this form.

REDEFINING NORMAL is slated to come out in the Fall of 2013.  I hope you will be part of this exciting project in some way! I am planning a mini-series on resiliency as it relates to giftedness starting next week. Hope to see you then as well.

But what about parents?

They have the IEP, the ALP, the 504. They have afterschooling, summer camps, tutors. They have occupational therapy, vision therapy, therapy therapy. They have robotics class, debate team, competitive dance. They have classes and events and mentors.

In a perfect world, gifted kids have these supports. In a perfect world. I’m fully aware that not every gifted or twice-exceptional child has these opportunities, but they exist. They may be expensive, they may be difficult to find, they may be a pain in the neck to schedule and attend, but they exist.

But what about their parents? What’s out there for them?

<crickets>

Yes, there are SENG parenting groups, but they’re few and far between, and are only for a short period of time. Anything else?

<crickets…truck passing down the road…rustling in the bushes that may or may not be a skunk but your dog will surely let you know with great glee-turned-horror>

I’m even going to get a bit more specific. What is out there for parents that isn’t advocacy or ways to help your kid, but specifically for parents?

Not.Much. And it’s frustrating as hell. Here are these incredible kids, we have the honor and frustration of raising them, and the support that is so desperately needed just isn’t there. Our kids aren’t in parenting magazines or most parenting books. Our kids and our parenting needs are here and there on the internet, but are often shouted down by other, more mainstream publications. Last week a Babycenter writer posted a rather insensitive ditty about her perception of gifted kids and their parents. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I fired off a passionate response. And my little piece of the interwebz exploded. The frustration, the pain, the deep need for connection from the parents (mostly moms) who commented left me in tears for days. My own emotional over-excitabilities went into overdrive, my heart breaking for all the parents out there (including me) who were struggling trying to raise these incredible kids, with little organized support but plenty of condescending scorn from society.

I would love nothing more than to see support groups for parents of gifted and twice-exceptional kids. Not to figure out ways to advocate for state funding or 101 ways to convince the school to reverse its cranial-rectal inversion, but parenting. What to do when your kid has a five alarm meltdown over something so trivial your own brain twists itself into a question mark. How to keep your marriage strong when neither partner has the emotional strength to converse after an insanely difficult day. Ways to change the subject when well-meaning family members opine about your child with great fervor. I’d love to see family get-togethers where everyone there is in the same leaky boat and askance looks and snide comments don’t exist. Wine tastings. Lots and lots of wine tastings. Little talk of advocacy or school situations, but lots of I got your back and I know you got mine. If there’s already something like this out there, I haven’t heard about it, and please share if you have.

These amazing kids came into our lives, throwing us into Advanced Parenting (prerequisite: gestation), and our village  doesn’t know what to do with us. We need our own neighborhood in the village, where the hearts and souls and brains of gifted kids and their parents can roam free.

Who’s with me?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jen writes over at Laughing at Chaos.

Intellectual Overexcitability in Action

To be intellectually overexcitable according to Dabrowski’s theory of Overexcitabilities is to love an intellectual challenge and to be driven to solve problems, ask probing questions, and engage in theoretical anaylsis.

This weekend, my parents and I had a conversation that demonstrated how these intellectual passions can manifest themselves. Between us, we have 7 degrees from Oxford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, London School of Economics, and the University of Sussex. I expect our average IQ is at least 140. My mother relaxes by doing the most difficult cryptic crossword puzzles she can find. I also love puzzles. When my mother and I took up Sudoku, my father became interested in questions like ‘How many Sudoku puzzles are there with only one solution?” It is a family with intellectual overexcitabilities.

Last weekend, the three of us took my four kids to the Ontario Science Centre. The Ontario Science Centre is large, busy, and loud. Before the kids could settle into exploring any one activity, they had to adjust to the crowds and the volume. They rushed through the building without seeming to take anything in. Eventually we arrived at a contained area with familiar exhibits and they began to relax.

From here, the adults tempted them into new areas where they spent time interacting with new exhibits. Eventually, they absorbed all that they could take and started running around again. This was our cue to finish up and make our way to the car.

I was exhausted, having spent four hours counting children, confirming my parents could see the ones I couldn’t, and managing my own sensitivities to the fluorescent lights and the volume. The children were drained and zoned out for the drive home, watching the world pass by at highway speed, and hardly talking. If I had been the only adult in the car, I would have driven meditatively, focusing only on the driving, relaxing into the present moment, and enjoying the silence from the back seats.

But, I was not alone.

My father remarked that the Science Centre doesn’t reflect his definition of “science,” and we were off. I was re-energized. The adults in the car dove into a passionate conversation involving these topics:

• What understanding of science is embedded in the design of the Science Centre?
• Is the Science Centre’s purpose to teach science or to stimulate interest?
• How did we learn science?
• What is my father’s definition of science?
• Does defining science as “a body of knowledge based on evidence and models” sufficiently encompass our understanding of scientific methodologies or must acceptable forms of evidence be defined?
• How does one teach methods of scientific research?
• Why are high school laboratory curricula frustrating to bright students interested in science?
• What sort of data did we falsify for lab reports in high school when our experiments didn’t work as expected, but we knew what the results should have been?
• Did the science curriculum we had as students give short shrift to engineering?
• How are science and engineering different?
• How do visits to the Science Centre fit into a homeschooler’s science curriculum?

The conversation was fast and emotionally charged. The most in-depth part of the discussion focused on the definition of science, and we did not settle the question of whether one could simply mention evidence and models or whether one had to define what constituted acceptable evidence and models.

We concluded that the design of the exhibits we had seen reflected a focus on engineering, not science; playing with the exhibits could teach concepts of repeatability and variation while encouraging the kids to explore and ask questions; teaching scientific methods in school is difficult to do well; and the Science Centre is good for encouraging kids to experiment, notice patterns, and ask questions, but isn’t sufficient as a science curriculum.

30 minutes after my father’s initial comment, we pulled off the highway, and the conversation shifted to other topics, like what to have for dinner.

This is typical of conversations within my family: intellectual, passionate, reasoned, and covering a wide variety of related topics. We can’t let a topic go. When someone wonders aloud why something is the way it is or how it might be different, we have an almost obsessive need to investigate.

And that is Intellectual Overexcitability in Action.

Dear Gifted Me – Edith’s Whisperings to herself

The question was asked, what would I share with the young teenager experiencing the struggles and the excitement of being a teen with high abilities?

Where was I as at and what was I doing?  I was an Army dependent and changing schools on average every 18 months.  I went to four different high schools.  I was taking advanced sciences and maths (sometimes that just meant skipping to the next grade level).  I was organizing activities for myself and peers to do.  I was active in lots of extracurricular activities (the Latin Club triathlon).   I was interested in boys.  I was reading lots.  I was the oldest of seven, so helping out at home a lot (both ‘girl’ stuff and ‘boy’ stuff).

What do I want to share……..   One thought that crosses my mind is do enjoy entertaining and creating get-togethers, and at the same time don’t lose yourself in the performance.  Remember to be who you are and not try “too hard” to fit in.  It is great to have lots of people around you that are having fun.  Remember also what is in you that needs to be expressed.

Another thought is all the girls are struggling in some way in developing their relationships with the young men, even if it seems they have it all.  Be proud of your abilities and be true to yourself (yes this is easier to say as an adult, an adult that continues to struggle with relationships).  Also, realize the young men are floundering with how to relate also.  Follow your instinct to know yourself and what you are capable of and your passions.  The confidence in that spark that is within will connect you with others with common threads.

Yet another thought, do not limit yourself with one interest, do explore the many things that grab your attention.  Pursuing many directions is a choice.  Those varied talents and interests can coalesce or lead you down a series of wonderful (and yes bumpy) roads.  Denying interests and passions to conform to having a focused direction means burying part of yourself.  You journal – take it one step further and keep an idea book so that you can add to each idea and capture them to develop in their own time.

Yes stretch your wings in the flock of geese and in independent soaring of the eagle.  Look both upon the dark and the light as the owl who sees well both in the day and night.  Gain the wisdom of Self and of the world to understand the beauty of the ugly duckling.  With Love from an adult that is still discovering the dreams of the teenager.

How Does it Feel to Be Labeled “Gifted?”

I guess I should have seen it coming. Before I was even in Kindergarten, I remember playing with kids who were older than me. Their even older siblings and their moms would be amazed at how I spoke like an adult. I didn’t quite get what the big deal was, didn’t everyone talk this way? How did this make me feel? I liked being admired by grown-ups and by the older kids. It also felt a little awkward because I felt like this wasn’t something I had worked for or earned; it was something that just was. I couldn’t speak the way they expected the average 4-year old to speak if I tried!

In Kindergarten, I was in the highest reading group–yeah, I know, try not to drop your teeth in shock. One Friday, when school was almost out, my teacher announced that she wanted anyone who was having trouble with a particular word, should line up at her desk and she would write that word on their hands to help them remember it over the weekend! A school sanctioned temporary tattoo! Of course back then, in the early 1970′s, no one had temporary tattoos, but the concept felt the same at the time. As I watched kids line up, I wanted Mrs. Olsen to DRAW on my hand too, but there weren’t any words I was having a problem with. I got in line anyway, hoping I might get some inspiration from the other kids as they told the teacher what word to write. When it was my turn, Mrs. Olsen looked at me, tilted her head in slight confusion and said, “Donna?” Her tone said, “You? You are having a problem with a WORD? Oh, I don’t think so honey.” Because she was kind, she asked, “Okay, what’s your word?”

Even at age five, I caught the subtle unspoken exchange: Okay, I know you just want me to write on your hand, so I’ll play along this time. I answered, “Look.” She wrote the word on my hand and drew eyes with the double “o’s,” explaining that I could remember it, because it was “looking” at me. So, I got a little extra art work as my reward for lying! Maybe she viewed it as wanting to fit in with the other kids who hadn’t yet mastered all the reading words as quickly as I had? I hadn’t been labeled, “gifted” yet, but I knew that I usually did better with my school work than most of the kids in my class. How did this make me feel? Relieved, mostly. I observed how school life could be difficult and possibly embarrassing for the kids who did struggle –at least I imagined it was at least a bit embarrassing to have to read out loud and not know how to pronounce ANY of the words. And of course, my desire to gain adult approval was fulfilled.

In second grade, I was still in the highest reading and math groups. Sometimes I was in the second highest math group, which was okay, as long as I wasn’t in the lowest! That would have been humiliating for me. I never looked down on the kids in the lowest groups and was friends with some of them, but already, I had decided it would be humiliation for me to be put in a “lower” group. The teacher never came out and said what level the groups represented. We were called, the Red Group, The Blue Group, The Green Group, etc. But everyone knew what they really meant because of the level of work each group was assigned.

This year, they had an “Enrichment Group” also called “MGM” (Mentally Gifted Minors). The first week, my teacher called out the names of kids who were supposed to go to Enrichment. They left the class for a while to do other activities. My name wasn’t called. I was kind of upset because I was pretty sure if there was some class called “Enrichment,” I was supposed to be there! A week later, when my mom got a call from my teacher asking if I wanted to be in the Enrichment Program, all I could think was, “Yes!” and, “It’s about time!”

We moved to a different school district for third grade and things changed a bit with the Gifted Students programs.
I will continue with my experiences about how being labeled “gifted” affected me later in school, in adulthood, and finally with raising three very different children, all who have been labeled as “gifted.”

Donna Leonard

Manic Meanderings