Why Gifted Students Hate School The ever-thoughtful and provocative Shaun over at Red Sea School, whose blogs about homeschooling her gifted daughter Violet are always entertaining to read, posted a compelling entry the other day about scary teacher stories .
If you have a gifted child, especially if you have a way gifted child, you probably have one of those scary teacher stories. Shaun related several of hers and others’, so I’ll relate one of mine, or rather one of someone I know rather well. This person — let’s call her Ginnie — was in the school system way back in the days when Jim Morrison was still alive, microwaves were just a form of interstellar radiation, and “personal stereos” meant those refrigerator-size behemoths in your living room that looked pretty much like this:
That said, though, I don’t think much has changed since then.
Ginnie came to school already knowing how to read — not just Dolch sight words, but fluently, probably on a third- or fourth-grade level, maybe more. The teacher, which was the practice at the time, put her in a reading group, but Ginnie noticed that there was a somewhat unusual characteristic about the reading group: they were all doing it funny. Like robots.
“Dick. And. Janee…. Wennnt. to. the. p–…to the p–… to the park. Wit…h Sp…sp..ot.”
Perplexed, Ginnie couldn’t really figure out what the joke was supposed to be — was it Robot Day or something? Whatever it was, it was stupid, and she would have no part in it. “Dick threw the ball to Spot. ‘Run, Spot, Run,’ said Dick,” she read, flipping to the next page, totally flummoxed when the other first graders at her table turned to her and angrily hissed at her to slow DOWN.
“What’s going on over here?” the teacher demanded. Her name was not Mrs. Hack, and she was the kind of person whose legs bulged out puffily over the tops of her black knee-high stockings. When the kids filled her in, Mrs. Hack looked at Ginnie. “Read it slower,” she said tersely.
Ginnie tried. “Dick and Jane went to the park today…”
“Mrs. HAAAACK!” one kid called. “She’s READING too FAST.”
For disobeying the teacher and causing a classroom disturbance, Ginnie was promptly paddled. Back in the day, this happened a lot, and every teacher had a wooden paddle in her room that looked more or less like this:
The conversation that ensued between Ginnie’s mom and the principal resulted in Ginnie’s being taken out of Mrs. Hack’s class and put into the library for “independent study.” All day. Every day.
Ginnie didn’t mind — didn’t even know that this measure was probably intended as some kind of punishment, or at the very least, a Pontius Pilate way of dealing with a classroom disturbance. Ginnie wrote book reports that she now realizes were really never read, only checked off as evidence that she’d done something more worthwhile than nothing. She read through most of what the library had during that year and learned virtually no math. By second grade, Ginnie had become somewhat feral as far as classroom management was concerned, and the teacher learned, as had Mrs. Hack before her, that really the best thing to do with Ginnie was leave her on her own to read in a corner, puzzling out the mysterious French and Greek phrases in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and memorizing them, even though she knew no French (and Greek was beyond her).
Scary teacher stories abound — it’s one of the main currencies of gifted parent get-togethers. Like WWII vets, parents bond over war stories that sound as if they came straight out of one of the best pages on Hoagies Gifted, “Ridiculous Things I Heard Today.” You’ll hear how one mother’s kid who was doing precalculus was told that he’d have to do the fourth-grade math anyway “because I can’t teach him high school math — what would the high school math teacher teach him if I did?”
Initially, I was puzzled by these stories, particularly when one element kept emerging time and again: the motif of teacher anger, of offense, as if the teachers in these parents’ stories had been personally offended by the fact of their student’s giftedness.
We can all understand being pissed at a student who deliberately seeks to be rude or to blow off the work or to disrespect a teacher’s earned and deserved authority, sure. What puzzled me — at least at first — was how disproportionate was the anger of some teachers to the actions of these kids, though. Children who pointed out that yes, you can indeed subtract seven from five seemed to spark an unreasoning dislike in some teachers, a dislike for what they viewed as a disregard for authority – and, in the case of someone like Mrs. Hack, a dislike manifesting itself in immediate punishment far out of proportion to the cause.
I have some theories as to why, but I’ll save them for next week.
I posted last time about my theory about why gifted students hate school (short answer: scary teachers) and added, somewhat mysteriously, that I would write more about the issue.
Here it is, in brief: Gifted students hate school because school is a sucking quagmire of mediocrity.
Okay, I know this hardly qualifies as an original thought, but perhaps my personal experiences can enlighten the issue a little bit: the mediocrity begins in society, but it seems to be concentrated, like B.O. in a cabbie’s upholstery, in schools of education.
In society, for which schools are a major tool of “socialization” (a word every homeschooling parent rightly fears, particularly since California judge H. Walter Croskey recently admitted that a central reason all students should be sent to public school is to enforce their “loyalty to the state“), mediocrity has been a rising fashion trend for some time now. Certainly television has elevated mediocrity to the status of a spectator sport: on reality TV, quite literally, anyone can be a star. Long gone are the days of celebrity when maybe you needed some kind of….oh, you know, talent to be a star: beauty, singing ability, a lovely figure, a handsome face, the ability to dance, act, or tell a joke. Now, you just put yourself on YouTube and you’re an instant classic: you become the Leave Britney Alone guy or the Temper Tantrum About the Car girl, or (unwittingly and unwillingly) the Star Wars kid. The line between talent and talentlessness has become so muddled and obscure that it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. Mediocrity rules.
The problem with gifted students is that basically by definition, they’re not mediocre.
The problem with schools is that basically by definition, they are.
Schools of education have taken the job of apotheosizing mediocrity – enshrining it, insisting on it, working dutifully to ensure that mediocrity defines the system from A to Z starting with the very people who populate those schools: ironically, the very worst students in the system. The influential 1983 report A Nation at Risk, whose findings have not substantially changed since its publication, found that too many teachers are “drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.” Those same students become teachers, so rather than your kids or my kids being taught by the best and brightest (or at least the solidly competent), they’re being taught in too many cases by people who essentially weren’t very good at school.
What’s worse, many of those students of education become professors of education: a case of the blind leading the blind. Acknowledging some of these problems, the University of Chicago, one of the most academically demanding universities in the country, utterly eliminated its own college of education some time ago, saying, “Our primary criterion in making this recommendation was academic excellence. If the department had been excellent, but costly, I certainly would not have recommended closing the department.” But it wasn’t. So they did.
Obviously – or maybe not so obviously – not every teacher is mediocre. Lest I be misunderstood here, I’ve been proud to know a great number of excellent, inspiring, and professional teachers whose energy and ability to turn on those mental lights made a profound difference for me.
However, let me hasten to say this: they were the exceptions to the rule.
When I was going to the College of Education at Unimpressive Local University, I was surrounded by students and professors who were a great deal like my observer Pat. These people weren’t evil, weren’t scheming, weren’t “bad” in any moral or ethical sense. Most of them were in education because they “loved kids,” which isn’t necessarily a good enough reason to think they could teach them, but on the whole, loving kids is a good quality for a teacher to possess. Many were in education because something else – their go-nowhere day job, their marriage, their ambitions to become a lawyer – hadn’t panned out. Quite a few were in education because they thought it would be easy: job security with summers off.
One thing you need to understand, though: Not knowing the Nation at Risk data at the time, I naturally thought that people who wanted to be teachers were probably people who had excelled in school.
At first, I couldn’t figure out why being at the College of Education felt so different from my experience earning my M.A. in Useful Content, but I kept flashing on a few key elements such as…
… the girl who pronounced the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida’s last name as if it were a snack chip. When she made fun of Derrida’s theories – or what she said were Derrida’s theories; they didn’t resemble my understanding of Derrida – no one corrected her.
… the teacher who looked and sounded like a clone of Tipper Gore who taught Methods of Teaching Literature (a multiply oxymoronic course title, as it turns out). Actually, Professor Tipper didn’t actually teach “methodS,” but more like “method,” period.
The method in question was reader-response, which consists of a student reading a text and saying what they found (in Professor Tipper’s words) to be “imPORdunt” about it and how it made them “FEEyul.” You weren’t supposed to mention what the author’s point was or how she used the tools of language or argumentation to communicate it, as I found out. The dance of the author’s language, the stretch and press of her attempt to put into words an elusive emotional state or vast, unspoken realization wasn’t important — sorry, imPORdunt — and what she was trying to reveal to the world about the world’s condition wasn’t of interest either; what mattered is how you felt about it.
The first time I tried to respond to what was impordunt, I mentioned the one element I had enjoyed in the poem she’d given us: that there was a (possible?) allusion to a line in the book of Genesis about “dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.” Yeah, I know it was a stretch: I based that idea on the fact that there was the word “dust” in the poem and someone died at the end. Eh. Oh, well.
“How did it mayke yew FEEyul?” Professor Tipper smiled. She was one of those people whose teeth are too white. “What you said is very innerestin, but the imPORdunt thing is how it made you FEEyul.”
How did it make me feeyul? A little bored. Somewhat nauseated.
This method of teaching, I thought, would basically turn the students into little one-celled paramecia: creatures not capable of any real insight into the author’s point they’d found there in the words and used their brains to bring forth, but creatures only capable of the bluntest responses to the bluntest of stimuli. Reader-response wouldn’t teach students about anyone else’s conceptions of the world, only about how others’ words existed to stimulate their own self-referential feelings – whatever those feelings were and whether or not they had anything to do with the author’s meaning or point. An endless reinforcement of a tautologically narcissistic worldview, this method would give those students nothing beyond themselves and hardly even that.
“It’s kind of hard to express,” I lied.
“Weyul, just tell us.”
“Really? You really want to know?” I asked somewhat skeptically.
Professor Tipper nodded brightly.
“Maybe you should call on someone else.”
She declined.
“Okay…I feel…that this is an emotionally exploitative work whose main purpose is to make the readers regret teen suicide, but, well…it’s about as honest and truthful as a Very Special Lifetime Channel program with lots of hugging and learning.”
Professor Tipper’s smile vanished. “Um,” she said, turning away from me. “Verry innerestin. Anyone else?”
I soon found out that very little was demanded of me academically in the College of Education. In place of the long analytical papers I’d written for my Useful Content degree — papers where I’d been required to micro-analyze data and lengthily explain in what way that data applied to my thesis (and find out again and again where I’d basically failed to do that and needed to work harder), I was essentially asked to do little more than make the occasional silly presentation or contribute to some nebulous “group project” in which any of the work or thought I’d done was subsumed in the mediocre whole.
Now, maybe the stuff I would’ve done otherwise would’ve been lousy on its own – but if this makes any sense, at least it would’ve been my lousy work. I might have learned from my lousiness that way. In the College of Education, even though I’d come there to learn, I learned very little, and what I did learn, I learned from competent experts – in short, people who were not professors of education, but who were actual classroom teachers like Barb. If it hadn’t been for Barb, I would quite literally have had not the first clue what to do on the first day of school — or the other 179 that came after it. I
When I went back for my endorsement in gifted education, I was less surprised but no less dismayed to find that education classes really hadn’t changed. I already knew a decent amount about giftedness from reading articles on Hoagies and Davidson Institute of Talent Development’s website, or reading books like Deborah Ruf’s Levels of Giftedness or certainly the Templeton Report. However, very little was taught to me in the gifted education classes – and I don’t mean, “I already knew a bunch of stuff that they were teaching” but more, “They didn’t teach very much content.” One class was entirely devoted to how to use PowerPoint. I don’t mean one class period; I mean an entire class. Hey, I admit I had no clue how to use PowerPoint and actually did learn, but I ended up devoting far more hours to my projects than they deserved – dedication that earned me the title of classroom PowerPoint God, an honor that was bestowed on me unfairly, mostly because PowerPoint acted on me as heroin does to an addict: with my sad, sick, and completely anal-retentive fixation on trivial details, I could not leave these stupid projects alone until they were absolutely perfect.
Irony time: to the best of my knowledge, I will never actually use this technology in the classroom.
The sad thing was that I really wanted to write a paper on profound giftedness and explore the topic as I had explored the texts I’d read as a graduate student in Useful Content: I wanted that sense of mental dig, of grappling with the logic of my argument and finding sources to support it, but I was told to do a PowerPoint, and that pretty much limits what you can say to a few words on a handful of slides. I should add that even though I’ve now taken seven classes in gifted education, I really don’t know much more than I did after reading the Gifted 101 articles on Hoagies — and I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do in a gifted classroom.
In short, there is a relentless tide of mediocrity in schools of education, one that’s nearly impossible to swim through because only your personal ethic, your sense of wanting to do an outstanding job on whatever meaningless, useless, time-wasting group project you’ve been assigned stands between you and just doing whatEVurrr to get the meaningless grade you were going to get anyway. Going through education classes was like trying to sharpen a knife on a marshmallow – you meet with no substance, no real resistance. You learn to be mediocre. You learn that not to be mediocre — to strive for scholarship, to insist on a level of academic rigor — is either viewed as useless or pretentious, or it’s groupworked and PowerPointed out of existence. Mediocrity is the norm — and that creates an environment that is downright hostile to gifted students.
I’ll say this for the week and end here: Schools are not about achievement. I used to think that teachers would love gifted students, or at least tolerate them. Now I think that the system — and of course, some individual teachers themselves — actively hate them. But more later.
I’m going to come out and say what someone should’ve come right out and admitted a long time ago: Lots of teachers just plain hate gifted kids.
I’ve been reading The Fountainhead lately. Lest anyone think this is the moment when I whip off all disguises and reveal myself as Adso the Objectivist, Closet Alan Greenspan Fan, this is not it. I’m not an Objectivist nor a passionate Rand acolyte: I disagree with significant elements of her economic and political philosophy and found myself shaking my head more than once at what I considered to be less-than-probable character motivations or situations in the novel. That said, though, Rand was, by all accounts (even the hostile ones), a clearly gifted, clearly brilliant thinker, and she has a brilliant person’s intolerance — contempt, really — for mediocrity and incompetence that speaks profoundly to the condition of anyone who’s ever been a gifted student in a public school.
What Rand understands better than any other author I’ve ever seen is the concept of the meme: the notion that an idea, a thought, a way of looking at events or thinking about them can be spread almost like a virus. One person expresses an idea and it catches on as that person says it to another person who says it to another person until finally the point of origin is lost and the meme starts being just one of those ideas that “everyone knows.” (Two brief examples: When did you first hear the phrase “bling bling” or “Rick roll’d”? When did those first slide into your consciousness?)
Rand’s deep grasp of the idea of the meme is more astonishing when you think that the bulk of her writing took place well before television became a significant force in American culture or had more than three channels – and the mysterious tubes of the Internet, with its blogs and YouTube and “viral videos,” lay in the far-off, Jetsons-like future decades and decades away. Through the power of the meme, Rand understood, a way of conceiving reality could become reality: a meme could become “what everyone knows” or “what everyone says” or “what everyone believes.”
Whoever controls the meme, to paraphrase Orwell, controls the perception.
Rand’s archvillain, the improbably-named Ellsworth Toohey, reminds me a great deal of an adult version of The Family Guy ’s evil infant genius Stewie, and very much like Stewie, Toohey is a seemingly-harmless manipulator with dark dreams of world domination. Unlike cruder fascists of his and Rand’s time, Toohey has no desire to use such blunt tools as force or war, particularly since he desires a greater power than physical control: he wants control of the mind. As a columnist for an influential USA Today-like newspaper chain, Toohey has a subtle understanding of the force of the media and its power to generate memes. Put your finger on the crucial lever of the meme, Toohey suggests, and you can run the entire machine with the subtlest touch.
As the novel progresses, it becomes horrifyingly clear that what Toohey wants is not to control what people think. After all, if you prohibit freedom of thought, as in Orwell’s 1984, people — even people who never particularly seemed to value freedom of thought before — tend to rebel despite the best efforts of the Thought Police. Toohey is more insidiously brilliant than that. Rather than control what people think, Toohey wants to prevent them from being capable of thinking at all.
To do that, Toohey argues, one must erase people’s capacity to make distinctions between good and evil, excellence and mediocrity. Lacking those crucial intellectual yardsticks, we can no longer distinguish the one from the other and the two become the same. To paraphrase Orwell again, freedom becomes slavery, war becomes peace…and ignorance becomes strength. Mediocrity, in Toohey’s plan, must be elevated to the level of excellence, a plan he foreshadows in a discussion with an utterly crappy playwright named Ike the Genius, the author of the monumental theatrical oeuvre No Skin Off Your Ass:
“Ibsen is good,” said Ike.
“Sure he’s good,” [Toohey replied], “but suppose I didn’t like him. Suppose I wanted to stop people from seeing his plays. It would do me no good whatever to tell them so. But if I sold them the idea that you’re just as great as Ibsen – pretty soon they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…and then it wouldn’t matter what they went to see at all. Then nothing would matter – neither the authors nor those for whom they wrote….There’s no room in the theater for both Ibsen and you. You do understand that, don’t you?” (472).
What does this have to do with gifted kids?
Easy.
I made the point before that public schools select the most mediocre (or worse-than-mediocre) students to be its teachers and professors of education. It’s not a real insight to observe that students who do not do especially well at school do not particularly like the students who do. The students who need the same concepts to be taught and retaught before they can be adequately mastered generally resent the ones who get it on the first or second try. The students who struggle to grasp an idea will resent being tutored by “the smart kid,” even if “the smart kid” approaches peer tutoring with patience and compassion – traits which people still measuring their ages in single digits do not often possess in great measure. Some students who have achieved success in school by dint of sheer hard work harbor genuine – and understandable – resentment of the ones who never study, who never have to study. Life – or at least school – seems to come so easily to them…almost as if they had been, well, gifted.
When those struggling students become teachers in their own right, guess what happens when some of them have a gifted student in their own classes?
Is it any wonder that the reaction of too many teachers to a gifted pupil is not joy that they have a brilliant pupil who grasps a concept the first time she hears it, but a sense of vicious satisfaction that at last, they get to put that smartass knowitall in her rightful place?
I would argue that, like most hatreds, this one also comes out of a sense of fear. Some teachers cannot tolerate the idea that they’re not the smartest person in the room…nor even the best-educated one. Teachers who majored in education instead of some version of Useful Content are particularly vulnerable to having their levels of education probed by the kind of gifted kid who’s been exposed to more mediocrity than is good for him or her. I have a student like that right now. Like a teenage version of Oscar Wilde (complete with raised eyebrow and utterly devastating power to use words as a weapon), he constantly tests me to probe what literature I’ve read, what philosophy or art I’m familiar with, shooting somewhat obscure cultural references over the net of conversation to test my intellectual backhand. I enjoy his presence thoroughly.
I have a feeling, though, that this opinion has not been universally shared by all of his teachers — and that, if pushed, he would easily unleash the mental hounds and expose a teacher who pissed him off as an intellectual fraud, kind’ve like this scene from Finding Forrester:
In real life, of course, kids usually get the verbal smackdown and stop there. They tune out, they act out, or they don’t come, just like Mr. W. mentioned in his comment from a few weeks ago:
I really don’t understand teachers that dislike the smart kids. One of my brightest and most interesting, although proportionately lazy, students from last year has an English teacher this year who can’t stand him, has declared him arrogant, and doesn’t think he should be in an honors class. The kid was challenged in English last year, and this year he’s disrespectful because he’s bored. I’m sad for him.
It explains in large part why, when parents of a gifted child advocate for acceleration to a higher grade, this kind of teacher seizes with evident glee on pointless, irrelevant, worthless skills like shoe-tying, skipping rope, or handwriting to “prove” that the child should remain precisely where she is.
This backlash that takes place daily in classrooms around the country is the only theory I can offer for such intellectual blights as “multiple intelligence theory” or its prevalence in schools across the country. Under multiple intelligence theory, everyone is gifted in some way, whether that be by the traditional standards and measurements of giftedness, or for more (shall we say) esoteric forms of intelligence.
My second favorite “intelligence” of all is naturalistic intelligence, where you really groove with leaves and trees and name your first child Rain even if he’s a boy, but my all-time personal favorite must certainly be intrapersonal intelligence, the idea that one excels at knowledge of oneself. How that’s actually to be…you know, measured or compared in the manner of legitimate definitions of intelligence is really beyond me – really, what are you going to say? “I know myself better than YOU know YOURself”? Then again, I’m not very intelligent in that regard.
Multiple intelligence caught on in pretty much every classroom in America and became a staple of education college theory. Many, if not most teachers, are required or expected to include lessons tailored to the many different intelligences present in one’s classroom. For the kinesthetic intelligences, teachers could have students move around while learning; for visual learners, teachers could show a movie instead of having their kids read the book; for musical learners, teachers could have students do a rap song for their Romeo and Juliet unit instead of writing some boring old paper analyzing the author’s point. You get the picture.
Multiple intelligences goes beyond that, though. If its only power were to suggest that teachers break it up a little and find more than one way to communicate a concept, that would be a sound piece of commonsense advice for many teachers to take – not exactly a concept that’s world-shattering in its novelty, but good practice overall.
But no, there is more, much more that multiple intelligence theory actually does in a classroom.
Multiple intelligence has a lush and irresistible appeal to anyone who has ever felt that their own intelligence is somewhat mediocre. So muddled and murky is the understanding of “intelligence” in this theory that almost any talent, quality of personality, personal preference, or simply existence can be defined as a form of “intelligence.” When I was in the College of Education, we learned about this theory and again when I was getting my endorsement to teach gifted. The ed. professor passed out little self-quizzes so we could all find out what kinds of intelligence we all had. (According to those results, I myself am quite good at linguistic-verbal thinking, logical thinking, and despite my scorn for this form of “intelligence,” naturalistic thinking. This is because I can identify a maple tree and tell it is not a tamarisk.)
For some formerly mediocre students learning of this theory in education classes, the multiple intelligences self-quiz is a moment of joy, a time when they find out that yes, they really WERE gifted the whole time, because literally, under MI theory, everyone is gifted.
We’ve all heard that, haven’t we? It’s become common knowledge – it’s what everyone believes and knows to be true, even the experts in education. How many times have you heard PTA parents, school administrators, or yo momma saying, “All students are gifted,” or “I don’t really believe in giftedness because everyone has a gift”?
The last statement amuses the crap out of me: it’s like saying, “I don’t really believe in the color purple because everyone is purple.”
It’s the logic of the first statement that is truly dangerous. You see, if I assert, “All students are tall,” that basically erases the whole notion of “tall,” doesn’t it? What if I asserted that “All children are fat”? Presented with a child whose BMI was dangerously low, I could merely assert that all children are fat in their own way and this child was on the obesity spectrum regardless of the fact that I could sink my fingers between each of his ribs.
If all children are gifted, of course, then no one is. Not you, not me, not the kid who can do calculus at age 7. It’s “Harrison Bergeron ” all over again. It is Ike the Genius raised to the level of Ibsen until finally, no one can tell the difference between the two.
Wow. Talk about a meme which worked.
Poster Comment:
Turtle was gifted, excruciatingly bored by school, and so lived in his imagination from first grade to 12th.
Dancing Turtles and Bouncing Boobs
...that's 