Tuesday, March 10, 2009 | The Seminar program is a jewel in the crown of the San Diego schools. The people of San Diego should be so proud to have this wonderful program available to all students who meet the requirements. Gifted education for extremely gifted students is absolutely necessary for their education, not just a nice thing to have. I have attached some quotes to explain this to you.
From Jan and Bob Davidson with Laura Vanderkam, in “Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds:”
Until every gifted child can attend a school where the brightest are appropriately challenged in an environment with their intellectual peers, America can’t claim that it’s leaving no child behind.
There is physical and psychological pain in being thwarted, discouraged, and diminished as a person. To have ability, to feel power you are never allowed to use, can become traumatic.
You don’t have the moral right to hold one child back just to make other children feel better.
All children deserve the right to learn at their own speed and ability.
From Elizabeth Meckstroth:
If we were TV sets, some of us would only get five channels. Others are wired for cable (the general population) and some of us (the gifted) are hooked up to a satellite dish. That makes these gifted children capable of making connections that others don’t even know exist! Teaching those types of voracious minds in a regular classroom without enhancement is like feeding an elephant one blade of grass at time. You’ll starve them.
From Stephanie S. Tolan, author of “Helping Your Highly Gifted Child:”
To understand highly gifted children it is essential to realize that, although they are children with the same basic needs as other children, they are very different. Adults cannot ignore or gloss over their differences without doing serious damage to these children, for the differences will not go away or be outgrown. They affect almost every aspect of these children’s intellectual and emotional lives. A microscope analogy is one useful way of understanding extreme intelligence. If we say that all people look at the world through a lens, with some lenses cloudy or distorted, some clear, and some magnified, we might say that gifted individuals view the world through a microscope lens and the highly gifted view it through an electron microscope. They see ordinary things in very different ways and often see what others simply cannot see. Although there are advantages to this heightened perception, there are disadvantages as well.
Thank you for your time.