While reading an article for my gifted certification class on meeting the needs of exceptionally and profoundly gifted students, I found myself thinking of my daughter, a handful of students I have taught in the past 14 years, and myself. The article highlights an elementary boy named Alex who is far advanced academically, yet he is not challenged by his teachers and becomes thoroughly disengaged from public education as a whole. There is no discussion in the article regarding the boy in question to his parents’ advocating for him, yet by his relationship with a professor and college aged students, I can only infer that his home life was an enriched one. However, an enriched home life is not enough as students spend more than 80% of their lives in school with teachers who come from all backgrounds and teaching ethics; parental involvement is critical. When you are the parent of a gifted child, your battle is never done. I do believe that just as education must provide the least restrictive environment for learning disabled students, it should also provide the least constricted environment for learning enabled students.
When my daughter and I first moved to our school district, she was in second grade. In our previous district, when in kindergarten, she was already reading chapter books, and was placed in 5th grade math. She was in the gifted program in our prior district and she was excelling. Happy. Thriving. From the minute we set foot through the doors at her Charter, Title One school, all of this changed. I was told she could not read books in the Accelerated Reader (AR) program that were above grade level as this would skew the data used for Title One funds. She was made to read picture books. Apparently to them accelerated meant more, not advanced. We supplemented at home, but this was difficult as young children are by their very nature rule followers and see teachers as the highest of authority. By the time she was in third grade there was a battle with her teacher over the fact that my daughter preferred fact over fiction. She preferred reading biographies to the junior versions (allowed) of the Harry Potter series. Her favorite fictional books were those in historic settings. The closest she ever came to enjoying fantasy was Black Beauty… told from the horse’s perspective.
The AR program was required, and in 4th grade, my daughter who read at that time on a 12th grade level, lost her love of reading. The same was done to her in regard to math, and all that she had learned at such a young age, was lost. The methods used to teach math were lost on her, and she now struggles in math, a subject she once excelled in.
Science, also was a favorite. She was curious. By the age of five she wanted to be an anthropologist. Due to a phenomenon I call “Learning in the Bible Belt” – science, inquiry, and theory building is not taught to any of our students, except in the areas of math and some sciences (not life or social sciences). She was chastised by classmates for not going to church and for “believing” in dinosaurs. Teachers never addressed these issues. At the age of 16 my daughter is just now becoming comfortable with not being confined to a cathedral shaped box. Had I been able to, we would have moved to a more progressive area. Now, I wish we had, as my daughter’s natural gifts have been to a large degree extinguished either by teachers who due to their own biases did not teach inquiry, or due to their own fear of chastisement by administration. Yes, this exists, as I have been on the receiving end of such chastisement my entire career.
There is research to support that students who are taught that bible stories are fact, have difficulty discerning fact from fiction in school. I propose that teachers who believe bible stories as fact have difficulties teaching students to question and to delve, to challenge the text to dig deeply, to inquire. This might be one of the contributing factors in Bible Belt schools producing the lowest scores across the nation among White. Black, and Hispanic students, while Asian students tend to excel.
Students who gravitate toward my desk for ex parte conversations about science, history, and social issues are the ones who have not been encouraged to question the unquestionable. These are also the students who thrive in my classroom, yet seem to struggle in others. Education and educators must challenge our students. That challenging does not stop at getting them to learn 10 more words than the required 5, or to work 4 more math problems than the required 2. It means to challenge them on deeper levels that cause them to want to dig more deeply into and outside of the curriculum; to be a teacher means having a willingness to nurture minds of inquiry.
Now that we have a fundamentalist named as the new Secretary of Education, I can see that my tenure in K-12 education will most likely end with my daughter’s in 2018. I can only hope that as I found myself in college, where liberal heretics like myself were in abundance, where my gifts were finally discovered and nurtured, that hers will be also.