Gifted and Talented or Asynchronous Student?

Yesterday I went to a FABULOUS professional development to earn my 30 hours of GT credit. Let me back track here, my block of 4th grade has been assigned the GT students for the 2012-2013 school year. I am so excited, not because I think that this will be easy...noooooooo! I am excited that I get to challenge myself to teach 4th grade math in a completely different way to challenge my GT students and meet their specific needs! Yeah! (Ok, I'm a teaching nerd - deal with it.) This is my first certificate with my new name and I'm still getting used to it. I still have to think when I introduce myself to other people... :-D


SO, to be able to teach GT students I am required to have 30 hours of GT training in 3 areas: 1. Identification and Assessment 2. Curriculum/Differentiation 3. Nature and Needs


!Rabbit Trail Alert!
One of the things that I love about CY-FAIR ISD is that you have to have 25 hours of professional development each year. Now to some, that may sound like a huge inconvenience, but I would spend all summer in professional development if they would let me! I love learning new things to reinvent my teaching!


Back to my PD, here a few very interesting things that I learned:

• The government really doesn't care about the success of gifted students because there are no federal mandates on their education
• Stereotypes of giftedness can be seen in the characters of The Breakfast Club and Big Bang Theory
• We have Texas laws about gifted education, but nobody to enforce it because TEA is so enthralled with STAAR testing (I guess I don't mind someone breathing down my throat about my GT kids, but absolutely no accountability when that's the bane of TEA's existence!)
• The basic trait of giftedness is asynchronous development. Definition: when a students is out of sync with their peers socially, academically, physically, and emotionally.
• Lewis Terman did a terribly flawed, but still popular study on gifted individuals and his subjects were called "Termans Termites". Cute.
• Sputnik started the conversation about educating gifted students
• Chemical similarities between giftedness and ADHD
• Chemical similarities between giftedness and schizophrenia
• There is a ONE SWITCH difference in the brain between giftedness and autism!!!! 
• Smartest man in the world has an IQ of 246-250, avg person IQ = 100
• (Warning: New Personal Soap Box!) Parent's wear their students Gifted and Talented status like a badge of good parenting, but are not concerned with the education of their Gifted student. Maybe, if we changed the label to Asynchronous Students, parents would be less likely to parade their child's educational needs to the public and be more in tune with what their child needs during school and after school.

I would like to end this post with a story that the presenter told us.


An American man, who is a leader in gifted education, was on an international flight and was sitting beside a scholarly man from China. The man from China said "Our students score higher than the US on math, reading, languages, etc, but we have no Nobel Prize winners. Why do you think that is?" The American man replied "Because you don't allow your students to create."