Keteleeria tree stolen from the Washington Park Arboretum

Last week a tree was cut down in Seattle and is probably now sitting in someone’s living room, wrapped in lights, festooned with glittering ornaments, and draped in tinsel. This would not be much of a story, especially in December, except for the fact that the tree in question was an exceedingly rare specimen of Keteleeria evelyniana, a conifer native to China, that had been transplanted ten years ago to the Washington Park Arboretum. The staff arrived on December 9 to discover that overnight someone, presumably looking for a free holiday decoration, had removed the tree.

Asked about its appearance during an interview on NPR, the plant collections manager for the Arboretum, Randall Hitchin, said, “In general aspect, it looks like a conifer: tall, dark green, symmetrical.” Sort of like your run-of-the-mill Christmas tree? “In the dark,” Hitchin replied.

Gifted children can be like the K. evelyniana. To an untrained eye, or to those who don’t know the difference (or care to know, as in the case of the tree thief), most gifted kids look like your typical, run-of-the-mill kid. In a classroom of students, it is often easy to miss the unique qualities that make them stand out, that make them rare specimens.

Gifted students, like the rare tree in Seattle, have unique needs. They have an often unappreciated value that can seem surprising to some: in their attempt to save sixty or seventy dollars, the arboreal bandits destroyed a $10,000 treasure.

But the real issue isn’t that we so often miss the value of our gifted students. It isn’t that we have a few rare gems to pick out from among the ordinary stones. The issue is that we even consider any child to be a “typical” or “average” one. Every single person in every single classroom is a $10,000 treasure. Every student has unique interests, abilities, needs, and talents. Every child deserves to be nurtured, respected, and cared for.

So why do gifted students deserve special treatment, then? They don’t. What they do deserve is to be treated as the individuals they are. They deserve to be taught at their level, at their pace, respecting and nurturing their unique qualities. Just like every other child in the classroom. If we don’t, we run the risk of allowing someone to come in and destroy our own rare trees.

The staff at the Arboretum are still mourning their loss because the tree is irreplaceable.

So are our children.

As adults, when we are in a learning situation that’s boring, it is often because the content is something we already know and don’t need to practice more.

It’s important for us as parents to remember that children often don’t have the vocabulary or introspective ability to explain what they are feeling, so they may fall back on “boring” as the closest approximation. They also may not understand the root causes of their feelings to be able to describe for you where they are coming from.

Certainly students will be bored when the work they are asked to do is too easy and they have already mastered it, and it is one of the first things we need to consider. But there are many other things that might be contributing to the feeling that a child associates with boredom. When a child says, “I’m bored…,” it could also mean…

• The work is too hard
• The work isn’t interesting to me
• The work is…work
• I’m afraid I can’t do it
• I don’t like the subject
• I don’t like the assignment
• I don’t like the teacher
• I don’t like my classmates
• I don’t understand
• I don’t want to understand
• I’m tired
• I’m distracted
• I’m preoccupied
• I’m uncomfortable
• I’m angry about something that happened this morning
• I’m worried about something that might happen tomorrow
• I’d rather be at recess
• I’d rather be at home
• I’d rather be at the movies/pool/park/etc.

If we are too quick to assume that “bored” always means “too easy,” then it won’t take long for our children to learn that when they don’t like doing something, just saying those magic words will make it go away

It’s up to us, then, to be sure we don’t take this kind of statement at immediate face value. Instead, ask questions and probe deeper into the situation to find out more about what is going on and why. Then we will have the information we need to address the problem and fix it.

(Originally posted June 5, 2008 at Grandé With Room)

A scenario with which you are probably familiar: You are giving directions for an upcoming project, or explaining a complex math concept, or leading a discussion about the story the class just read in the reading book. Dozens of eyes are focused in your direction as the students hang on your every word. You glance to the left, where you see one of your gifted students, eyes down, pencil drifting lazily across the page of her notebook in elaborate, abstract swirls and angles. Interrupting your speech, you call her name. She looks up, you ask her to put the pencil and notebook away and pay attention, she complies, and you go on, confident that she is now engaged in the important stuff.

Most of us have been in that position. I’m certain, though, that you can recall more than once in class (or as likely, graduate school) being where that student was.

Why do we doodle? It is entirely possible that by making your students stop doodling, you are actually harming their ability to focus on what you’re teaching. A report about this on NPR last week has some interesting implications for teachers of gifted students. Jackie Andrade, a psychology professor at the University of Plymouth, has studied doodling and its effects, and found that it is a coping mechanism that people use to give their brains something to process when they are not being sufficiently stimulated:

But even more, consider the possibility of being proactive in your approach:

• Whenever possible, plan high-engagement and high-stimulation activities
• Give your students scratch pads or paper and allow them to keep them out at all times
• Switch modes frequently to keep the brain alert
• When students doodle, don’t take it personally
• Look for cues that you need to take breaks or shift gears

Understanding the brain and recognizing the outward signs of what it is doing will help you stay in tune with your students and meet their needs more easily. And the next time you’re in a faculty meeting, glance around and see how many of your colleagues are keeping their brains occupied.

Now before you start writing your comment chastising me for being a cruel dad, most of the time when we insist he taste what we’ve made, he likes it and will eat it. And he has yet to go to bed hungry. So my wife and I actually balance each other nicely. Don’t tell her I said that, though.

My attitude towards my son’s eating habits would change, though, if it were a matter of health and nutrition rather than preference. If he had a condition that required a specific diet, I would go out of my way to provide it, even going so far as to cook special meals for him. I would give him supplements to replace deficiencies in his body and keep the nutrients at optimum levels.

We tend to treat education like nutrition. The regular curriculum is designed around the recommended daily allowance of reading, math, science and social studies. The content is nutrition, and we provide the amounts that are needed to keep children’s brains growing and learning. Some students have deficiencies, and we spend extra time, effort, and money to customize their diets to bring them back to optimal health.

But what about the gifted students? I fear that many people look at them in the same way as the child who likes to eat a lot. We’re worried that if they eat too much, they’ll get fat, so we carefully regulate their diets, keeping them to the recommended amounts, making sure they don’t go overboard. It’s the same thing my wife and I do when our kids equate being bored with being hungry. Instead of giving them snacks every half hour, we redirect them and give them something else to keep them occupied.

But this model is wrong. Instead of looking at gifted kids as overeaters, we need to realize that they actually have an entirely different kind of metabolism. They consume more not just out of preference but out of necessity. They have a condition that requires much higher amounts of complex and different nutrients just to stay healthy. But when they balk at eating the same diet we’re giving to the rest of the family, we tend to see them as whiny brats and respond just as I do to my youngest son: “It’s good for you. Just eat it. And if you clean your plate, then you can have dessert.”

It’s not a matter of keeping their appetites under control. It’s recognizing that their nutritional needs are completely different than ours. The learning they crave isn’t dessert, and forcing them to eat the meal first doesn’t keep them healthy. Withholding the challenging content, or keeping it carefully controlled, or ignoring the messages they give us about what they want and need isn’t actually preventing obesity, it’s malnutrition.

1. Perfectionism is emotional. It can be a vicious cycle for the perfectionist: making a mistake causes fear, which makes the student want to be even more perfect, leading to anxiety which causes more mistakes.
2. Perfectionism is social. Perfectionists may feel that they won’t be accepted unless they are perfect.
3. Perfectionism doesn’t make people more successful. It is not the same things as striving for excellence.
4. The environment influences perfectionism. Perfectionist behavior may be learned from the behavior of others around them. A chaotic environment also contributes to feelings of needing to be perfect.

Here are a few thoughts, then, on how teachers can deal with perfectionists in their classrooms:

• Create an environment of acceptance. Avoid “zero-tolerance” policies in your classroom. Provide second chances whenever appropriate. Set high, reasonable expectations, but show understanding and acceptance when students inevitably don’t meet them. Focus on positive character qualities in each child rather than on shortfalls.
• Celebrate imperfection. Let students know that not only are mistakes are normal, they are expected and even essential to the learning process. When a student makes a mistake, celebrate the effort, or point out any good thinking that went into it. Tell stories about learning that happened because of a mistake, and point out that school is a place for learning, not for performing. Give each student a “mistake pass” to allow them to make an error any time without penalty. Or maybe give them two. Give students full credit for a mistake if they can tell what they learned from it.
• Allow play time. Gifted children are still children, and letting students play without a specific goal allows them to explore thoughts and ideas without the pressure to perform. As any Kindergarten teacher will tell you, a great deal of learning takes place during unstructured play, and it is just as true for older students. The form of the play will look different: gifted students in upper elementary and beyond will play with ideas, words, and images, and numbers. Let it be what it is; don’t try to force it into an academic box.
• Show your own flaws. We’re not talking about airing dirty laundry, here. Just let students see that you aren’t perfect yourself, and give yourself the same second chances that you give students. Make mistakes in class (deliberately if necessary) and allow students to correct you without penalty.

What else do you do to help your perfectionists loosen up a little?