my name's Heidi as Maria let you know and I am gifted not only was I a gifted child I guess I'm still gifted because it is a lifelong kind of thing it's how my brain works however I'm not all that comfortable saying that especially not to a group like this it's kind of embarrassing I would rather deny it I would rather apologize for it I certainly don't want to brag about it why is that you know there's a the word is a very powerful word and there's um there's a lot of connotations that go along
with that things like you know that it's arrogance that I'm bragging that I think I'm better than somebody else's and I just I don't feel that way but the word brings with it some of those meanings there's also a feeling of you know just 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's um it gives off this idea that I think I'm more special than somebody else or you know everyone everyone has a gift everyone has something to bring to
the world yes however that doesn't mean that everyone is gifted so if I don't like this word and I hate admitting it and I'm kind of embarrassed why am i standing here and talking to you about it because about 16 years ago I started a long-term up-close action research study called parenting parenting three kids who are gifted 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 in order to advocate for them and to understand myself and to understand them and
to try and figure out how to be the parent that they need me to be it has not been an easy journey but I've learned some things some of the things I've learned gifted is identified gifted students are identified by their performance on a cognitive test usually so when students perform in sometimes it's a 97th or 98th percentile or above they are they receive this little gifted label and the letter that goes along with it and they get an IEP and the parents get to come in and eat with the teachers twice a year and
there are hopefully some programs or opportunities or things for them to do that will support how their mind works and give them an opportunity to feel good about themselves doesn't happen in all districts and unfortunately there are these connotations that gifted is this wonderful thing and sometimes Boards of Education have made decisions to cut gifted programs because you know they're going to be okay so they'll be a little bit bored but they'll be okay not so much what my experience has been what I've learned about gifted is that I think that intelligence piece is just
one symptom or one dimension of what is really going on 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 intent intensely you want to learn so Dobrowski is a researcher who identified five areas of what he called over excitability those five areas one is intellectual so it's just a drive to learn things and understand things and to have questions about them also there is a psychomotor aspect so that physical I need to move and do things and
you know sometimes I'm twitching or stretching something under my desk or you know those little red cheese's that were out there on the break the wax from those my middle one all the other kids in class would collect it and he would sit behind his desk and create creatures out of this wax the cheese wax but he needed something to fiddle with there's a creative aspect so this this huge huge imagination and an ability to see how things are alike and and make connections when when you get famous for that we call you a creative
genius when you're the class clown you probably get in trouble for it you're called a behavior problem and sent to the principal's office there's also sensory intensity and that's just that whole you know the seam on my shirt is going to drive me insane or everything's too loud everybody please stop singing or their smells just that that hole being bombarded by it and also emotional emotional is one of the big ones feeling deeply deeply deeply deeply it's like you can't handle the lows of the world you have to turn the TV off sometimes because you
just can't take it and those are true all the way through life and all of them if we start to look at them you think about it and look get gifted make sense that intellectual piece but then there's also you know kids that are identified as ADHD there's a crossover with that and there's even with autism there's enough there's an aspect of that sensory that comes into there so what I noticed when my kids turned about will start into adolescence was I saw them become so anxious and start to really didn't want to go to
school anymore stomach aches 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 please come get me very very difficult thing as a parent to try and have to deal with and what I heard from the school was you have to get them to school every day you have to otherwise you were enabling the anxiety it's going to get worse and that didn't work for me and I'll tell you why it wasn't just a random I'm being a helicopter parent or what's the
newest one a snowplow parent I had been working with my kids deeply in for years around attachment and I knew from my work from talking with Gordon Neufeld working with Gordon Neufeld trained psychologists kids need the trust and relationship and the sense of attachment in order to develop a healthy psychological maturity as an adult they go together period and what I knew was I didn't know what to do about the anxiety and not wanting to go to school but I knew that I was going to break the bond and the trust that my kids had
in me if I force them to go remember these are not 4 year olds that you can pick up cuddle carry in drop-off and leave their adolescents 100 pound kids I was going to have to manhandle them to get them out of the house and and into the school that wasn't okay with me and so I said no and that was really really hard because I really wanted to be a partner with the educators and with the school what I noticed around the same time my kids were in fantastic programs with caring innovative educators who
were doing cross-curriculum project-based learning bringing in university students and and people to talk with the kids and to teach them things amazing projects like wow I want to do those ones it's still the emerging formative assessment they weren't doing letter grades they were working with the kids to give them you know options on how they're going to show they're learning all the right stuff was happening and it still wasn't working for my kids so there was something systemic there that just wasn't going to work for them so when it came down to it and they
said that's it at different times my two eldest both said said I can't do it anymore and I let them stay home and they stayed home for the better part of a year each we tried to do some online learning tried to do some even just one-on-one hey let's go down to the park we'll take some pictures and talk about ecosystems No why not because it's school so there was something in that where my kids just needed to D school and so that's what we did I had no expectations for them around 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 learned how to load it from CD and add the drug not CD DVD I guess and AD drivers and load all the software back on that was his thing my middle one and after a year you know at the beginning 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 grandparents house people are gonna ask him questions
he didn't want to be out in the world it was unhealthy and scary as heck for me as a parent because I go okay well where's this going to go to but I needed to trust the process and keep talking with him and working with him and so year later he's back in school he's in a different kind of school where it's entirely self-directed public school but the adults are there in order to port learning and to provide lots of rich opportunities but kids aren't forced to do anything the adults are in the room only
to support and mentor and be a source of whatever kind of wisdom they need the kids have to choose what they're going to do and he loves it and he's back my kid is back he's laughing he's doing things he learned Magic the Gathering by himself decided he wanted to join a group of there probably about 19 to 25 year olds most the guys he went by himself and joined this group down in the mall he plays Friday night magic absolutely adores it um he started a group at school they had to go through a
democratic process in order to get a place to play it you know he was willing to take those kind of risks he's at his grandparents house he's at his friend's house he's on skype he's interacting he's back so when I look at it like okay well what happened and what it comes down to for me is that particularly with these intense kids for so long you've had this message you're too loud you're too you asked you too many questions and you know you're you don't fit in and you know and even if nobody ever says
that to you you have a sense in it yourself that you know people are talking about different things and you're talking about and that the assignments that the teacher giving don't make sense and maybe there's stuff happening in the personal life whatever else that looks like that child's sense of self has been compromised when we look at anxiety it's different than a than existential crisis an anxiety would have been he doesn't want to go to school we have to show him that it's okay to go to school there's nothing to be afraid of but for
my child there was something to be afraid of he would have had to swallow so much of himself in order 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 his life he couldn't do it we have these kids in all of our schools in all of our communities they're dropping out they're not coming to school they're anxious and we're telling them just come to school and it'll be fine it's not going to be fine unless we're doing something different and sometimes
that's going to have to mean that we put curriculum second behind the kids we have to give up the curriculum and that takes a level of trust that we will be there to coach them and that they will take the lead on learning the the assumption that the best way for kids to learn is from an adult is not necessarily true kids do amazing stuff on their own when we give them opportunity and and help them do that so what if we focused on a social environment and a democratic environment where they all get to
participate and they get to choose what they're learning it's kind of scary but it's being done now in BC at my kids school we need to I think in all schools all districts give the opportunity for the kids who don't fit to find their own path I found it very difficult to find a school and online school anything that allowed kids to create their own path not having to say you're in grade 6 therefore you have to learn medieval societies and this in math and in English sometimes that doesn't work for kids we need to
use a positive self-concept as one of our measures of success not provincial exams I mean those can be secondary I'm fine if that you need to have that as long as there's options for not doing it but we need to have this idea of what is the child's self-concept and how do I identify when kids are falling away from that and can't you know cannot find who they are because they need that in order to create brain integration and be able to psychologically mature and have healthy relationships and healthy boundaries and good jobs and you
know meaningful roles within our society there are ways of doing it now you can buy canned reports there's the Piers Harris student self-concept survey by a whole bunch of them and do them with all your middle schoolers identify the kids that are falling down 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 from all of the districts and all the educators here because we heard from Kim the relationship is great but there's some kids who need even one
step further of the freedom to learn in the way that they want and be supported and to find out who they are thank you you
