Gifted Children

Diary - Enrichment Day

My son, Theo, attends Paddington Public School which is in the Bondi administration district. As I understand it, one school in that district takes on the task of providing an Enrichment Day each year for gifted students. That school is South Coogee Public School.

So, Theo was invited (through a brochure) to attend an Enrichment Day at South Coogee. He had knocked this back the previous year because he saw it as just more school on a Saturday. At that time, he wasn't identifying at all with this "gifted" thingo.

Being a computer fanatic, Theo chose to do the workshop on the Internet. On the day, it turned out that the Education Department's Internet connection was down (their ISP having taken advantage of the weekend for general housekeeping). The teacher in charge of the workshop knew no way to get around this. In my view, if she'd really known what she was doing, she would have found a way (maybe by routing through another ISP or through another account).

Anyway, she chose to focus the workshop on the MS Office presentation package, PowerPoint, instead, inviting the students to create slide shows on a favoured topic. As Theo reported the event, she was soon learning from him about finer points of this software. She really had nothing to teach him on computers as such. Or perhaps she was simply not an inspiring teacher.

Theo enjoyed the day mainly because it was so different from regular school and because he became better acquainted with his partner in the workshop, another gifted kid from his school in the Year below his. (Theo gets on very well with younger children and loves the company even of toddlers. Many descriptions of gifted children refer to a seeking after of the company of older children. Here's an instance where general descriptions can fail to cover the individual case. Maybe Theo is destined to become a gifted teacher, maybe even a gifted pre-school teacher. Who knows where the acorn is leading in any given instance?)

At the start of the Enrichment Day, after the kids had been corralled into their chosen workshop groups and led away, the parents remained collected together in the school hall, awaiting a presentation on "Your Gifted Child" (or something to that effect). We were spoken to by a teacher specialising in Gifted Education and then, at some considerable length, by the school's counsellor. As she droned on in commentary over her transparencies, a trickle of parents walked out.

To be fair, the poor woman was trying (OK - VERY trying). She had gone to some trouble to gain snippets of info about giftedness. At least she didn't restrict her role to addressing the needs of so-called "problem" kids (who are often frustrated under-achieving gifted kids, anyway). But even I, a first-timer at such a gathering, could sense that she was talking off the point somehow. It wasn't so much the content of her talk that grated, but an implied assumption of the whole social event: that parents of gifted children were in need of the expert guidance of the education "professionals".

No, sorry. You learn something from experience in the role of parenting a gifted child that no amount of theory, definitions, distinctions, IQ/selective tests, etc, can ever hope to compare with. One reason why I like the writing (and definitions) of Ellen Winner is that I have a sense of experience behind her more formal research. I'd be very surprised if she didn't have gifted kids herself. And if not, she's one of those empathetic people who can get into the experience at second hand.

All in all, this workshop was not all that inspiring but it was a most useful social occasion for all concerned, an opportunity for parent/teacher/counsellor dialogue and for the kids to meet each other. So, it's definitely worthwhile to do at least once. Beyond that, it depends on your own experience.