“…the profoundly negative consequences of forcing children to function in systems designed for adult convenience and adult notions of adult-child relationship rather than children’s needs can be seen in our schools everyday, and are most severe for children at the “tail ends” of the curve (those who are gifted…and gifted children who also have disabilities).” The education field refers to the gifted and talented children with disabilities as Twice-Exceptional (2e) or Gifted Talented Learning Disabled (GTLD).
Democratic Education can work for most children. But, as anyone who has read any of this blog well knows my son should have been identified and served as Twice-Exceptional, wasn’t, and developed pathologies leading him to be driven literally mad. Once I became educated to education I searched for the kind of formal learning environment where he would have thrived. I discovered Democratic Education and almost from the beginning I saw this exceptional idea as most suitable. Now, I cannot help my son, but I hope to be able to help other Twice-Exceptional sons and daughters through this means of formal education.
Twice-Exceptionality is characterized by extremes of ability and disability within a single child leading to discrepant development in social, emotional and cognitive aspects of personality. Thus, a child may be beyond his age and grade level performance in school subject matter, such as Math, while socially-emotionally more immature than age or grade level expectations. Or a child may be well beyond age and grade level standards in a subject or two but severely lagging in others, say, well ahead in Reading but well behind in Math. Or a child may present as brilliant but achieve poorly, or a child may present as brilliant, achieve well but develop emotional disturbances and mal-adaptive coping mechanisms. Or, a child may have absolutely no interest in school subjects at all and thus achieve poorly and be disruptive, but be well read and informed in depth on topics of personal interest. Regardless of how 2e children present, their identification as part of student populations, their social, emotional and cognitive needs being understood and the ability of the school setting to meet their individual needs are crucial in developing a healthy life time growth in these children and are vital to their success in our society.
The Twice-Exceptional are in every school and in every classroom. The following case studies form a portrait of their existence, and of the complete failure of our current schooling to identify children in this population, to understand their individual needs and to construct learning structures meeting those needs. More, the forced uniformity of standardization and accountability over time develop pathologies leading to self-destructive behaviors.
(Sensitivity to the feelings of the children and their families requires the anonymity of these students whose case studies are related here. Nonetheless, be assured that the author of this blog post has worked with these youngsters as an educator discharging his professional duties.)
Charlie was a bright, smiley fourth grader. He was highly verbal, having a working vocabulary well above his age and grade. Every day he would engage teachers, especially, in conversation about many things, but he had one subject of great interest, baseball. In fact, he would talk baseball stats, game situations and strategies and individual player and team performances through history even in the middle of winter when everyone else was in basketball mode. However, it didn’t take long for teachers to understand that while his interest in the sport was genuine and deep, as his interest in talking with them, he was respectfully changing the subject. Whenever a teacher would request he be about doing his school work he would engage the adult with his baseball talk. And when finally he saw he couldn’t talk anymore he would do something else, something definitely not school work.
For Charlie the problems were about being made to read dump stories about silly people doing silly things-that was the way he stated complaints about English Language Arts. He complained likewise about being made to do stupid games, “like” cross word puzzles or matching columns, about being made to do endless boring math problems. He had a long list of complaints about “being made to” and all using the epithets, stupid, silly and boring.
He said at one time, all he wanted was to be in a place which “made sense”. At his tender age he couldn’t get beyond that slogan. But he knew being forced to expend his energies doing “stupid” and “silly” nonsense was a waste of time. Yet, in the uniform school the only way Charlie could express his being out of place was to be non-compliant. Countless numbers of times was he escorted to the Principle’s office by one teacher or another. Indeed, the more discipline these folks brought down on this youngster the greater his non-compliance. The amazing thing about Charlie during the early grades was in his ability to keep his anger in check. No matter the provocation, he would remain polite, non-compliant but respectful. However, this lad did not keep that balance. Being out of place with no alternative available continued to exert an ever greater cost: eventually, in seventh grade he turned mean.
David was a brilliant and restless seventh grader. He loved to talk with anyone, especially teachers, who would oblige. But his level of discourse ranging over history, politics, popular culture, was so adult-like that his classmates, and more than a few teachers, couldn’t keep up. David brought a joyous energy to his conversations. The disturbing fact was that most of the time when he was exercising his joyously energy teachers were instructing him and his class. Shortly after the period started, he would rise from his seat and slowly tour the classroom making his way in a grand circular fashion. He would stop to stare out a window but for only a moment, then he was on the move, again. He would engage both classmates and teachers in conversation during these sojourns. He chatted outside the classroom, but unfortunately his favorite moment for conversation was about ten minutes into a lesson.
When he saw he couldn’t stop instruction he would quietly leave the classroom, always without permission. He roamed the halls landing in either the computer lab or the library. There he would make himself busy with whatever he chose. Interestingly enough he was quiet and well behaved disturbing no one in these settings. He would return a minute before the bell rang to collect his belongings.
David had Disgraphia, an inability to write by hand. His hand writing was painfully slow. And with a mind as fast as his, his inability to hand write created great frustration. But, he had developed an aural compensation so all he had to do was listen for a minute to know the intent of instruction for the period, and his genius allowed him to quickly learn the content of that lesson without having to sit through all the teacher talk about it. As it turned out no one took seriously his troubled hand writing because there is this crazy notion in some of the education profession which believes that if you’re highly intelligent you have no problems as problems come only to those far less gifted.
David continued his antics in the eighth grade but his genius did little to protect him when it came to the eighth grade state tests which he passed, barely, and protected him no longer as he moved into the uniform high school where daily full period attendance and serious pen and paper testing trumped the way he learned and reported learning. David in the middle of ninth grade was on the verge of either dropping out or of being severely punished for his continued avoidance of being in the classroom and for his continued inability to write by hand.
Jonathan demonstrated a fine artist’s right brain advantage. He sketched with keen eye and hand even when he was doodling. He also had a great ear, and passion, for music and played a mean guitar. He was a brilliant high school junior but he had been placed in a special education class since his 9th grade year because the administrators of his high school couldn’t figure out what to do with him. Everyone agreed he was very bright. But his long purple hair, his black, Johnny Cash wardrobe, and his penchant for being non-compliant and non-conforming demonstrated to these folks an outright defiance of the uniform school and an adolescent in need of discipline which he was on many occasions.
He would sit in class sullen, disinterested, and at times a bit high. He would sketch rather than pay attention to instruction. Even when his teacher would try a one to one instruction he, politely, played dumb. His grades were barely passable. Sometimes he would absent himself from school for days. But the police brought him back every time. So, he stayed stubbornly a rebellious artist in opposition to being told to be otherwise even though he had been repeatedly threatened by the school’s Principal and Vice-Principal with all sorts of hell and damnation.
One day in the school parking lot, Jonathan was caught smoking a marijuana joint, arrested and thrown in jail for five years.
Twice-Exceptional children exist, but schools, public and private, ignore them to the extreme detriment to the children’s mental health and to their social productive capacities.
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