Gifted, creative and highly sensitive children | Heidi Hass Gable | TEDxLangleyED

My name is Heidi, as Maria let you know, and I am

gifted

, not only was I a

gifted

child, I guess I am still gifted because it is something that lasts a lifetime, that is how my brain works, however, I don't feel so comfortable saying that especially. not to a group like this it's a little embarrassing I'd rather deny it I'd rather apologize for it I certainly don't want to brag about it why do you know there's a very powerful word and there's um there's a. There are a lot of connotations that go along with things like you know it's arrogance, I'm bragging, I think I'm better than everyone else and I just don't feel that way, but the word carries with it some of those meanings.

There is also a feeling of you know, even the choice of the word a gift. I'm not sure it's always a gift. Actually, I'm sure it's not always a gift. However, it gives off this idea that I think I am more. special that someone else or you know that everyone has a gift everyone has something to bring to the world yes, however that doesn't mean that everyone has a gift so if I don't like this word and I hate to admit it and I'm kind of shame why I'm here and talking to you about this because about 16 years ago I started a long-term close action research study called parenting, parenting three gifted

children

and they're all gifted in different ways, and I've had to learn about this idea of gifted and what it is and what it isn't so I can advocate for them and understand myself and understand them and try to figure out how to be the parent that they need me to be.

It hasn't been an easy journey, but I've learned a few things. Some of the things I have learned. The gifted are identified. Gifted students are identified by their performance on a cognitive test, typically when students perform at sometimes the 97th or 98th percentile or above they receive this small gift tag and accompanying letter and get an IEP and the Parents can come and eat with the teachers twice a year and hopefully there are some programs or opportunities or things for them. doing that will support the functioning of their mind and give them the opportunity to feel good about themselves, it doesn't happen in every district and unfortunately there are these connotations that gifted are a wonderful thing and sometimes Boards of Education have taken decisions to eliminate gifted programs because you know they'll be fine, so they'll be a little bored, but they'll be fine.

Not so much, my experience has been what I have learned about the gifted, is that I believe that intelligence is just a symptom. or a dimension of what's really happening and it's a bigger picture and it's about intensity and it's actually a physiological difference in the brain where your brain is more intense you feel things more intensely and you want to learn so Dobrowski is a researcher who identified five areas of what he called overexcitability those five areas one is intellectual so it's just a drive to learn things and understand them and have questions about them.

There is also a psychomotor aspect, so the physical I need to move and do things, and you know. sometimes I'm moving or stretching something under my desk or, you know, those little red cheeses that were out there, they would break the wax on my middle son's, all the other kids in the class would pick them up and he would sit behind them from his desk and creating creatures out of this wax, cheese wax, but he needed something to play with. There is a

creative

aspect, so this enormous imagination and the ability to see how things are alike and make connections when you become famous that's why we call you

creative

. genius when you're the class clown you'll probably get in trouble that's why they call you a behavior problem and send you to the principal's office there's also sensory intensity and that's it you know the seam on my shirt is going to drive me crazy or everything It's too loud, everyone please stop singing or your smells, just that hole is being bombarded by it and also emotional, emotional, it's one of the biggest, feeling deeply, deeply, deeply, it's like no Could you handle the lows of the world that you have to change.

Sometimes you turn off the television because you just can't turn it off and that's true throughout life and all of them, if we start watching them, you think about it and you look, you get equipped, that intellectual piece makes sense, but there's also you. I know

children

who are identified as ADHD, there is an intersection with that and even with autism, there is enough, there is an aspect of that sensory that comes in there, so what I noticed when my children entered adolescence was that I saw them getting so anxious and I started to really not want to go to school anymore stomach pains headaches calling during the middle of the day I'm in the bathroom I'm not going back to class come get me please please come get me very, very difficult thing a parent to deal with and have to deal with and what I heard from school was that you have to take them to school every day, otherwise you were allowing the anxiety to get worse and that didn't work for me and me.

I'll tell you why it wasn't random: I'm being a helicopter parent or, what's newer, a snowplow parent. I had been working deeply with my children for years around attachment and knew this from my work speaking with Gordon. Neufeld, working with trained psychologists from Gordon Neufeld, children need trust, relationship and a sense of attachment to develop healthy psychological maturity as adults, they go together and what I knew was that I didn't know what to do with the anxiety and I didn't want to go to school. school, but I knew I would break the bond and trust my children had in me if I forced them to go.

Remember, these are not 4-year-olds you can pick up, hug, and drop off. and leave your teenagers, 100 pound kids, I was going to have to manhandle them to get them out of the house and get them to school, that wasn't right for me so I said no and that was really, really hard because I really wanted to be a partner with the educators and the school, which I noticed around the same time that my children were in fantastic programs with innovative and caring educators doing cross-curricular, project-based learning, bringing in college students and people to talk to the kids and to teach them things amazing projects like wow, I want to do those, it's still emergent formative assessment, they weren't letter grading, they were working with the kids to give them choices about how they're going to show that they are all the right things were happening and it still wasn't working for me. kids, so there was something systemic there that just wasn't going to work for them, so when the time came and they said that's it at different times, my two oldest two said I can't do it anymore and I let them stay home and They stayed home for most of the year each.

We tried to do some online learning. We try to do something even one on one. Hey, come on. We will go down to the park, take some photographs and talk about ecosystems. No, why not, because it's school, so there was something about it that my kids just needed a D school and that's what we did. I had no expectations for them in terms of learning. I didn't force them to do anything. They watched movies. They played Minecraft. They researched how to load mods. My son rebuilt his computer about three times. He learned to load it from a CD and add the dope, not CD, DVD I guess, and AD drivers and load them all. the software worked again, that was his thing, my middle and after a year, you know, at first he didn't want to see anyone, he didn't want to go out, he didn't go to his friends' houses, he didn't want to go to his friend's house. grandparents, people will ask questions.

He didn't want to be in the world. He was unhealthy and scary for me as a parent because I'm doing well, where is this going to go? But I needed to trust him. process and I kept talking to him and working with him and a year later he came back to school, he's in a different type of school, where it's a completely self-directed public school, but the adults are there to carry the learning and provide a lot of opportunities enriching. but the children are not required to do anything, the adults are in the room only to support them, guide them and be a source of any kind of wisdom they need.

The kids have to choose what they are going to do and he loves it and is back. my son is back, he's laughing, he's doing things he learned Magic the Gathering on his own decided he wanted to join a group of probably 19-25 year olds, most of the kids went alone and joined this group in the shopping center where he plays on Friday. Night Magic absolutely loves it. He started a group at school. They had to go through a democratic process to get a place to play. You know he was willing to take those kinds of risks.

He is at his grandparents' house. He is at his friend's house. he's on Skype, he's interacting, he's back, so when I see him it's okay, well, what happened and what it boils down to for me is that, particularly with these intense kids for so long, you've gotten this message, you're too noisy. You also asked yourself too many questions and you know that you don't fit in and you know it, and even if no one tells you that, you yourself have the feeling that you know that people are talking about different things and you. We're talking about and that the assignments that the teacher gives don't make sense and maybe there are things going on in the personal life, anything else that seems like that child's sense of self has been compromised when we look at anxiety, that's different than an existential crisis.

An anxiety would have been that he doesn't want to go to school, we have to show him that it is okay to go to school, there is nothing to fear, but my son had something to fear, he would have had to swallow it, so a lot of himself to fit in and do what he was told, he just couldn't do it, put it together with everything else that was going on in his life, he couldn't do it, we have these kids in all of our schools in all of our communities they are dropping out of school, they are not coming to school. school, they are anxious and we tell them to just come to school and everything will be fine, it won't be fine unless we do something different and sometimes that will have to mean that we put the curriculum second to the children, that we have than abandoning the curriculum and that requires a level of trust that we will be there to train them and that they will take the lead in learning.

The best way for children to learn is from an adult, it is not necessarily true that children do wonderful things on their own when we give them the opportunity and help them do it. And what if we focused on a social environment and a democratic environment where everyone could participate? They participate and can choose what they are learning, it's a little scary but it's being done now in BC at my kids' school, we need to do it. I think that in all schools, all districts give the opportunity to children who are not suitable to find their own path.

I found it very difficult to find a school and an online school, something that would allow children to create their own path without having You have to say you are in 6th grade, therefore you have to learn medieval societies and this in math and in English, sometimes that doesn't It doesn't work for children, we need to use a positive self-concept as one of our measures of success, not exams provincial. I mean, those can be secondary. I'm fine with having that as long as there are options not to have it. but we need to have this idea of ​​what the child's self-concept is and how can I identify when children are moving away from that and they can't know who they are because they need it to create brain integration and be able to mature psychologically and have healthy relationships and healthy boundaries. and good jobs and you know significant roles within our society, there are ways to do it now, you can buy canned reports, there is the Piers Harris student self-concept survey done by a bunch of them and do them with all your high school students identify to the kids who are falling in those areas and even when we don't know what to do figure out what we need to stop doing, that's what I would like to ask of all districts and all educators are here because we listened to Kim.

The relationship is great, but there are some children who need even one more step in freedom to learn the way they want and be supported and discover who they are. Thank you.