Nivedita Mukerjee

Issue # 63, 21st September 2021

Is your adolescent child anxious about going to school? Is your child deeply sensitive? Is your child fidgeting? Has your child sometime needed to just take a break and learn on his/her own at his/her own pace? Does s/he enjoy self directed learning? Does s/he enjoy learning ‘how tos’ and not necessarily discrete subjects? May be the child is anxious to perform? May be the child does not quite fit in? May be s/he has the abilities but can’t get around to showing them?

Sometimes we have to give up on structured curriculum. Give them a more democratic environment with voice and choice and find their own path. All children are gifted. We have to believe it, find out how to give them a positive sense of self-worth, help them realise their gift and bring it to the benefit of the world.

Don’t miss this week’s guest author Nancy’s article, on how she has continued learning from her gifted students even after her retirement as a teacher of gifted school and Heidi’s insightful talk. She was a gifted child herself and is now a mom of 3 gifted children.

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Three Images of the Week

Two Thoughts of the Week

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”

Marie Curie

“The winner’s edge is not in a gifted birth, a high IQ, or in talent. The winner’s edge is all in the attitude, not aptitude. Attitude is the criterion for success.”

Denis Waitley

One Video of the Week

Being “gifted” often feels far from a good thing, when you’re the one living it. And yet the myth persists that “gifted” is an elitist and privileged label in education. That “those kids” will be fine without any extra programs or supports. After all, what’s the worst that can happen – they get bored? In reality, many of our most vulnerable learners are those “gifted” kids who know they just don’t “fit it.” In our rush to identify and label children for purposes of funding and organizing our educational services most efficiently, we’re missing the ground level, actionable and everyday needs of an entire grouping of needy kids. Our most gifted, sensitive and creative students are our canaries in the coal mine; they are more sensitive to the world around them and the reactions we see in them can teach us what our education system needs to be, believe, include and stop. As is often the case, what is necessary for some is beneficial to all.

Heidi approaches our education system from multiple perspectives. First and foremost, she is the mother of three amazing, gifted, creative and/or highly sensitive children! Heidi also spent almost six years as president of the City of Coquitlam‘s District Parent Advisory Council, attending countless advisory committees and working to build relationships between parents and teachers. And finally, she has worked with many passionate educators as an edtech consultant – participating in technology planning, facilitating dialogue and implementing technology to support student learning, communication and relationship building. She is an idealist, geek and deceptively social introvert.

Guest Author of the Week: Nancy Devitt Tremblay, Toronto, Canada.

Teaching is an intensive and personal enterprise, whether we admit it or not. A sense of kinship is formed between teachers and students through years of cajoling and worrying, drying tears, facing fears and being silly. I’m referring to both the kids and the grown-ups here. But students graduate and we stay put. And teachers often don’t know what becomes of their students.

I never really liked that aspect of my job. 

So I came up with a plan. 

As I was retiring after twenty years of teaching English and facilitating a Gifted/Advanced Placement program in Toronto, Canada, I decided to find some former students and ask them how they figured out who they wanted to be.

I turned these wonderful conversations into a podcast series. It’s called “Teaching The Teacher” because that is exactly what my former students do. All under-30, they are experts in a wide variety of fields. To say that I’m proud of them can’t really cover the range of emotions I feel listening to their stories of success, failure, resilience and ingenuity. 

I hope the podcast will be enjoyed by teachers and also offer encouragement and inspirational career advice to students and their parents.

Season 1 Highlights:

• Fatin Tawfig, a climate expert at the United Nations in Bonn; she was one of 100 young people given a “green ticket” to the UN Youth Climate Action Summit in 2019. 
• Eternity Martis, a best-selling author, recently named one of the 20 most powerful women in Canada
• Michael Vieira, an executive chef who explains his ADHD actually helps in the kitchen 
• Dr. Josh Koenig, both an education reformer and a researcher who recently published ground-breaking work on peanut allergies
• Dr. Jad Abi-Rafeh who describes his path from “a little village in Lebanon” to acceptance into Plastic and Reconstructive surgery, the most competitive medical residency in Canada. 
• Wise and evocative, Sylvia Mohanraj who is doing a specialized joint degree in psychotherapy and theology after years of “deluding” herself that she needed to go to medical school. 
• Jacob Rumball, based in Hong Kong, investing hedge fund money in sustainable investment in India 
• Tiana DeNicola of She | Shifting Her Experience, a Los Angeles podcast about self-improvement, feminist and LGBTQ issues, ranked top 1.5 percent globally. 

.And there are still more…

What was that school I worked in, you might be asking by now! Was it an elite private school? Oh no, not at all. My school was in a not particularly privileged part of suburban Toronto, an area actually disdained by some.

But I will admit my assignment as a teacher was a bit unusual. In Canada, a category of special education identification is giftedness. Students are given the label when they are about nine years old and depending where they live, they will be given intermittent or full-time enriched programming.

I was responsible for the gifted cohort in my high school. With my colleagues, we ran Advanced Placement courses, dozens of clubs and activities including a debating society, Model United Nations and robotics; we offered PSAT testing and developed personalised acceleration plans. We opened these opportunities to students who didn’t have the official gifted identification label as well. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing but I knew in my heart that these students needed these opportunities.

In 2016, the results of a 45-year longitudinal American study of over 5000 gifted learners confirmed my hunch. The SMPY study, published in Nature, showed that even small things: one AP course, writing a PSAT, accelerating in one subject seemed to make a difference in the life trajectories of the students in the study. More doctorates, more research papers published, more university professors, more patents…the list went on.  This study confirmed for me that what we were doing in our school could make a difference. 

My recent encounters with my former students for the podcast series provides anecdotal corroboration: offering enrichment to students who are hungry for it really does pay off – for the fulfillment of the person and for society at large. 

But as much as I was glad we offered enrichment, I was never completely at ease labelling young humans gifted. First of all, the label can be offensive to schoolmates. Of course, everyone is gifted in their own way.  

I also came to understand that wearing the label exacerbated anxiety and perfectionism. Further, it could be hard to reconcile when maths (or any subject really) suddenly became more difficult and required more work. I always needed a box of tissues at hand the week that half of the Grade 10’s failed their first quiz in quadratics because they hadn’t thought they’d needed to study!  I’d invoke Carole Dweck’s theories about “growth mindset” but sometimes it took a few years before some of my gifted students started doing the hard work. It was easier to say “Oh, I didn’t study for the test” than it was to say “I don’t feel smart anymore.”

Some episodes of “Teaching The Teacher” explore what giftedness looks like in adulthood.

The bottom line is “Teaching The Teacher” is a sentimental journey revealing the deep ties that remain between teachers and students despite distance and the passage of time. 

Find Teaching the Teacher on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, etc. 

Go to the Teaching The Teacher Youtube channel for links to podcast platforms and short video trailers with each interview subject. 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJBE_GITB09bhopYURlqx1Q

Follow @teachingtheteacher on Instagram for episode announcements, links – and to let me know what you think!

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Showcase of the week:

And Finally…

Dear reader,

I have been a research scientist, a journalist, and an educator for over 3 decades. I read and, I write.  With this weekly newsletter, I intend to share what I read, learn and, experience while I engage with students, parents, and teams of teachers across K-12 schools, higher education institutions and, ed-tech organizations.

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