Relativity of Giftedness in a College Preparatory School
Finding the right educational setting for gifted children can be problematic.
Sometimes teachers use the brightest and most advanced students as examples for the other students, e.g., if Johnny can ace the test, you should all be able to. In the typical environment where most people believe effort is the primary force behind achievement, this makes sense. And although effort matters a great deal, not everyone starts with the same intellectual toolkit or general intelligence to help their learning and achievement process. In this case, I am referring to actual, real intellectual differences between and among people who have had similar opportunities to learn.
During the years of my consultancy as a High Intelligence Specialist, I was invited to an elite private midwestern college preparatory school to help faculty members learn how to recognize and respond to the unique needs of the gifted children in their classrooms.
Private College Prep Schools
Private college prep schools generally accept students who are at least above average on ability and achievement tests. The teachers at these schools have a narrower ability range among their students than typical public schools which must accept all students. This – having all students in each classroom be above average and college-bound – is one form of ability grouping that increases the chances most students will find “true peers” even when the school doesn’t deliberately ability group for instruction.
In the eyes of many parents, this grouping takes away the need to bargain and cajole the school’s personnel to teach their bright gifted child appropriately. It all happens rather organically.
Like many wealthy suburban public school districts, private college prep schools have a high proportion of gifted students. As I’ve written before, it’s all relative. Most of the students do not need any special arrangements because they are already in groups of learners who can keep pace with each other. And like other schools, there are still students whose intellect is beyond most classmates. The school personnel sometimes attribute those differences to “trying harder” or being a “better student” rather than to needing something more, something that will meet and stretch their attention and learning.
An Outlier in the High School Classroom
On my first day at the school, I met with an upper school English teacher who talked about his amazing student, Ben. The ninth-grade teacher typically administered a vocabulary test during the first week of school. It was normed for much older students, possibly college-aged, and he used a different version every year so no one could study ahead. The teacher, too, took the test and typically got about 95 out of 100 correct. Ben got a 94 and the next highest score was at least 10 points lower. The teacher enjoyed telling me about how he used Ben’s results as a motivation for the other students to aim that high.
The English teacher knew Ben was unusually smart, but he didn’t seem to understand that Ben was an “outlier,” someone so different from other learners his age that to use him as an example of what the other students could do “if they only tried harder” was more of a shaming strategy than a motivating one. True, the other students might have been initially motivated, but as they continued to try harder and not have the same results, those students would be confused by the relativity and context issues involved. If Ben had not been in the class, the student who scored ten points lower would have been lauded instead. When an intellectual outlier is in your classroom, and relativity and context issues come into play, everything can get confused.
An Outlier in the Lower Grades of the College Prep School
In that same school, one of the families with whom I worked had a child, David, who we discovered during evaluation was a profoundly gifted Level Five youngster. The parents had already moved David to the prep school—known for its excellence[i]—when the mother reported to me about a recent incident at the school during Grandparent’s Day.
Apparently David’s grandparents had been unable to attend the special day, and the school paired such children with classmates and the classmates’ grandparents for the events of the day. When David’s mother, my client, went to pick David up at school later, she thanked the classmate’s grandmother for including David in the day. The grandmother gushed,
“I thought my grandson was gifted, but since I met David, now I know what giftedness really is!”
Fortunately, neither boy heard this comment. David’s mother, who had worked with me to handle such situations, told the grandmother that her grandson is also gifted and there is a range of gifted abilities among gifted children. They are not all alike and we shouldn’t expect them to always be and act the same as each other. And, of course, this was another example of the relativity of giftedness.
College Prep in a Public High School Setting
One of the subjects from my longitudinal study[ii], Cynthia, reported some of the results of being too intellectually different and yet such a good student no one worried at the time. She attended an excellent public high school in a wealthy district and it rivaled a private prep school.
Nonetheless, Cynthia had a Satisfactory, not excellent, high school experience for several reasons:
I had a bad attitude in my high school years. When I was unable to be in accelerated classes ... because of scheduling ... I struggled not only to not be bored, but also to not feel some disdain for my classmates. Knowing I was gifted definitely inflated my ego some, but not to a point of not being able to make good friends or learn social skills. I have always been better at making friends with older people than many people my age, but that might be more a result of having older siblings than anything else ... I knew that I was smart, but within the context of my family it didn't feel unusual. I was arrogant in high school, felt way smarter than anyone around me. I had higher test scores and better grades. I eventually discovered I had areas that weren't as good as others and I became aware of my shortcomings.
Cynthia also said this about how being the outlier (she didn’t use that word herself) continued to affect her:
College was the first time I experienced having to work to do well in a math course, and I didn't do the work and didn't do well.
She related this to the pitfalls of not being challenged earlier in life and how hard it was at that point in college. She scored a perfect 800 on her SAT Math exam and won many accolades throughout her last six years of middle and high school. She simply expected everything to come easily to her. When it didn’t, it took some time to figure out what she really wanted and what she liked to do.
A Level Four intellect, Cynthia struggles in her mid-to-late twenties with what she wants to do for her career because she has many, many options simply because she is so smart and capable. Multi-potentiality is one of those extra layers of personal complexity that makes finding one’s path all the more difficult for the exceptionally and profoundly gifted. She is fortunate, however, in that her parents will still support her if she needs either financial help or more time. When she talks about foreclosing too early on her future by focusing on her math strength, she wrote that other options “were ruled out for me” as though she had no say in the matter. She was happy with the earlier choices at the time.
[i] “Excellent” or “Good” schools can bring out what’s already there to bring out; poor school settings can leave what talent and ability is inside the child suppressed and undiscovered by both the school and the individual.
[ii] The 5 Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up: What They Tell Us, 2023, 5LoG Press. Available on Amazon.
My current published books about the gifted:
The Five Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up: What They Tell Us (2023). https://www.amazon.com/Levels-Gifted-Children-Grown-Up/dp/B0C9SHFRLH or https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-5-levels-of-gifted-children-grown-up-phd-deborah-l-ruf/1143719859?ean=9798988323709. This is an 18 year longitudinal study follow-up about the original gifted child subjects in 5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options (2005, 2009).
Keys to Successfully Parenting the Gifted Child (2023). Keys to Successfully Parenting Gifted Children (2022, 2023)
5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options in 2009. Here are links to the 5 Levels of Gifted book on Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/5-levels-of-gifted-deborah-ruf/1126358834 and Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Levels-Gifted-School-Educational-Options/dp/0910707987 or directly from the publisher: https://www.giftedunlimitedllc.com/store/p12/5_Levels_of_Gifted.html
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Thanks for sharing your article, Deborah. One of the aspects of giftedness that I have continually struggled with is dealing with comments from others regarding them perceiving me as being highly intelligent (e.g., being some kind of outlier because I self-learn material from pure math books for fun). When this does occur, my increased awareness of the relativity of giftedness, the great diversity of impressive talent that exists within the gifted community, my limitations, and my uncertainty about high intelligence/giftedness (e.g., does being gifted according to some human intelligence scale translate to being gifted on a universal/multiversal scale? How does one determine where he or she falls on a reality wide scale of intelligence? Where do humans fall on the intelligence and moral /ethical development scales of different sentient lifeforms?), motivates me to immediately downplay or dismiss such notions and to attribute any unusual ability of mine to effort, interest, luck, etc.
That said, reading this article also reminded me of your article about giftedness and humility. IMO, it can be very challenging to acknowledge one's limitations via honest introspection and humility, but it can also be very easy to downplay or deny one's strengths/gifts due to the various negative connotations that seem to come with the giftedness label. Hence, IMO, it is very important for gifted individuals to challenge themselves to find creative and humble ways to acknowledge those strengths that make them unique and beautiful rather than giving in to the temptation to fit in and avoid offending others via denying key aspects of their identity.