I was an enhanced student for most of my public school career. I was first picked out by my second grade teacher, who quickly realized something was up when I would stay after school in order to say everything I didn't get to say during the regular hours of school. I would clean the chalkboards, put chairs back, tidy up, just to have the chance to talk not with, but at the teacher. Evidently what I was saying was not what most normal grade two students say, because, when tested by a child psychologist, I was identified as being a gifted student, and, for a 7 year old boy, an exceptional orator. So, I spent grade three missing music class every week to go hang out in a room overlooking the gymnasium, working on independant projects which we presented to the class. Steph, the only other student who attended these sessions, recalls the entire class staring at me, bored, confused, as I used models made out of butterfly pins and cardboard to demonstrate why triangles are the best shape for making bridge trusses out of.
I did of year of this, which was referred to as Mode II, and then, in grade 4, I was put on a bus and shipped across town to the now closed Lyndwood Public School. I remember one evening, towards the end of grade 3, my Dad drove me out to Lyndwood, just to see what it looked like. We ate dinner at Harvey's that night. He remembers me being excited at the prospect of going to a new school. I remember crying myself to sleep that night. But, come a falls day in 2000, I got on the school bus at 8am at the end of my street and went to Lyndwood. In May of last year, we had an orientation day at Lyndwood. I met a boy named Nick. I found out that a boy named Gavin, the son of a woman my Mum rowed with, would also be there. Had I found my place, found a school that had other people like me. It wasn't to be. I was at Lyndwood for five years. Comparing my elementary school education to friends of mine who attended normal programs, I found there to be little difference. We still had our creativity squashed by teachers who mistook creativity for troublemaking, who considered themselves infalliable and did not like it when students attempted to engage them in intelligent conversation.
That is not to say that all the teachers at Lyndwood were bad. I had some excellent teachers, teachers who challenged us, made us think, treated us, if not like adults, at least not like children. I did a 35 minute presentation on cross country skiing. I built a glider with a 2 metre wingspan out of balsa wood and cardboard tubing. I did a graph based analysis of Air Canada's aircraft fleet. I went to the provincial finals of the Canadian Geography Challenge, twice, and on my first attempt, in grade 7, I lost a sudden death tiebreaker to get into the final round and a shot at getting to Nationals.
I got in trouble a lot too. There were plenty of phone calls home, plenty of conversations with my parents that ended with me in tears, at a loss to explain why I shoved a teacher, why I stormed out of class, why I tried to whip a kid with my sweater. I started seeing a social worker, I started spending more time in the office then in class. I was bored. School was constricting, controlling, crushing. The school program that supposedly existed to encourage creativity seemed hellbent on conforming all their students into an oppresively rigid model. I had never heard of Foucault, but if the school library had a copy of Discipline and Punish, I would have taken it with me when I left for highschool.
I am not sure what I am trying to prove here. My experience with gifted education in elementary school did me no favours later on. How much work, or the quality of the work, that was handed in was completely disconnected from the marks on our report cards, no one ever taught me how to study, or even that I should study. The system is broken, and it needs to be fixed.
Being gifted, at least in my experience, is more of a blessing then a curse. I quickly dropped the label, referring to myself in the jargon of educational academia. I was "enhanced", in "mode III", "streamed", "skewed". That didn't help. I was unable to connect with my peers in any real way, I prefer to company of adults, teachers compared to students, camp counsellours as opposed to campers. I remember discussing A Clockwork Orange with a counsellour on the way to camp when I was extremely young. The only children I bonded with, I was only able to partially connect with, through books, chess and checkers, through the creation of fantasy lands and people. I was LARPing before I had any concept of role playing. In my mind, Redwall existed. This disconnect from reality meant I was disconnected from my peers. Ministicks in the school yard was boring. My favourite soccer position was sweeper, because it didn't require working with anyone else, just getting the ball and kicking it away from my net.
Being gifted left me isolated, away from other students, missing out on so many of the skills we pick up at a young age. Learning social skills just never happened to my younger self, as I never seemed to end up in any situation where knowledge of social niceties would come in handy. Until I was in high school, my social skills would allow me to pass for civilized, if barely. But I am getting off topic. It's whatever it was that made me lecture my grade two teacher on three stage rockets showing through.
Gifted students need to be encouraged. The most successful events that happened to me in school consisted of giving us the resources and free reign over how we wanted to use them. We were not teaching ourselves, we were guided, directed, in our manic activities. But we had freedom, to express, to discover. Subjecting children who are intelligent, but skewed, confused, creative, to the machinations of a school system is just cruel. Lyndwood was a meat grinder. I emerged from that school mad at the world, bitter, distrusting authority, confused. We can do better. We need to do better.
