This is Alisa.

February 29, 2012 in Advocacy, Education, Need, Twice Exceptionalities | 5 comments

We are extremely excited to share our completed claymation Public Service Announcement: This is Alisa.

This is Alisa. She is many ages at once — 6 years old chronologically, but 20 when she reads astronomy, 8 years old socially, and 4 when she tries to write neatly. She is asynchronous. Some people call this being a high-potential child. But her potential will never be realized if her extremely intense needs aren’t met.

The fact that society is failing to meet Alisa’s needs is damaging, frightening, and alienating to her. She should have the same right to have her needs met as any other child.

There are thousands of kids like Alisa in the United States, kids who are many ages at once. They are as diverse as the population of our country. They all require support for their intense needs. The Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund aims to use a proven model to support them.

You can make a difference. Donate to the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund today. Thank you for your support!

Why Must We Mass-Produce Education?

February 12, 2012 in Uncategorized | No comments

There are so few original ideas. Modern education is modeled on mass production. We despair of this, because the one-size-fits-all system really doesn’t fit all. This isn’t an original idea by any stretch; besides people saying this in recent years, in particular with dismay about the failures of No Child Left Behind, they have been saying it for a very long time.

I read an excellent blog post today about the idiocy of taking a single element from a reasonably successful school system (Finland), beaming it down into our system, and hoping inanely that it will work out of context. I then came across the recent announcement of Google’s answer to TED talks, “Solve for X.” One of the speakers, Michael Crow of Arizona State University, described how they’ve completely scrapped the artificial construct that is the classification system for educational study at higher education levels, in favor of a new approach that focuses on outcomes like sustainability and exploration. Some of their work encourages extraordinarily creative sci-fi thinkers to envision what might solve various problems humanity faces, and then tackles the practical side of realizing those visions.

And somehow this led me next to Temple Grandin’s 2010 TED talk. Her port was that the world needs to heed divergent minds, because some of those most divergent, like hers, can lead to the most surprising innovations and discoveries.

Meld this all with what we’ve learned about educating (or, to be more accurate, keeping up with) exceptionally and profoundly gifted and asynchronous children, and you have the makings of a major revolution… but not an original one, just the same one people have been having since we began to standardize compulsory education. Children are not homogeneous. They have different, varying needs. Some of them have extreme needs. Their educational system must accommodate those needs, or they won’t learn, much less thrive. And if our educational system encourages extraordinary creativity, married with practical approaches to realizing these creative solutions, mightn’t we be better off than with a system that encourages rote memorization, lock-step thinking, and outdated assembly-line approaches to problem-solving?

The Misdiagnosis of Gifted Children

January 26, 2012 in Advocacy, Assessment, Education, Need, Service providers, Twice Exceptionalities | 3 comments

Let’s visit an imaginary world where you, an adult with substantial ability in your area of expertise (whatever that may be), were forced to sit in a second-grade class all day. Imagine that for some reason you don’t understand, your teacher and fellow students and everyone else in the school sees you as a second-grade kid. You are bored. You are outraged, in fact. Why is this being done to you? Why can’t you have more challenging things to learn? Why does everyone think you’re just like these other kids? You can’t stop your hand from using your pencil to tap against the desk, or your foot from tapping in frustration. You get up to pace. You start snapping at other students. Your attention drifts, and you feel like you can’t focus on anything.

Restraining yourself all day, every day, to tolerate this intense boredom and injustice saps your energy so severely that even when you escape the confines of school to a family who also bizarrely views you as a second-grader, even though they know you’re smarter than that, it’s all you can do to lie around zoning out, reading distractedly, or taking your aggression out on them. And then the next day comes, and you have to do it all over again.

This is what it feels like to be a profoundly asynchronous child. You may have adult-level cognitive abilities, but you are second-grade age, so you are forced to go through the exact scenario just described. You may develop nervous habits from the stress and boredom, things like fidgeting, impulsiveness, inability to focus (because, come on, who can focus on excruciatingly boring material day in and day out, without respite?), and more.

Your teacher looks at these behaviors and tells your parents you have ADHD, or oppositional defiant disorder, or any of a number of other disorders, and that they should take you to the doctor to be medicated. Your parents do, and your doctor writes a prescription after a 15-minute visit, and you are deposited back in school, drugged out of your mind.

Another article today described it more succinctly: “Imagine if someone took away your Big Wheel and expected you to operate a sports car without training at 6 years old. Now imagine being punished and humiliated for wrecking.”

These scenarios sound extreme, and they are; but versions of them are being repeated again and again in endless variation with everything from garden-variety gifted kids to profoundly gifted kids across the country. An organization called Supporting the Emotional Needs of Gifted Children (SENG) made an excellent video about it, aimed at educators and healthcare professionals. But it’s instructive for everyone, and our wish is that everyone see it (and share it).

We have one caveat, the same one the video makes: There are twice-exceptional kids, kids who have advanced cognitive abilities but also learning disabilities. Some kids DO have ADHD, whether gifted or not. But the characteristics of giftedness, the school setting, and a range of other things absolutely must be assessed as part of the diagnosis, and the intellectual needs of the child must be met on an ongoing basis.

By sharing the video, and talking to educators and healthcare professionals about it, you may help change a child’s future. Thank you!

 

Advanced Content for High-Potential Learners

January 20, 2012 in Advocacy, Education, Need | No comments

We came across a brief post on a homeschooling blog we visit from time to time, mentioning that Stanford University’s Nick Parlante will offer Computer Science 101 free online starting in February 2012. Two things (okay, three) about this interest us:

1. It reminds us, and we are thus reminding you, that there are incredible, wonderful, free resources in a vast range of subjects available online for anyone interested. This is exactly what high-potential learners need. Have a kid who’s interested in math? Watch Vi Hart videos, or try Khan Academy, or check out livingmath.net. Have a high-level learner? Check out MIT’s OpenCoursware. Want to learn Latin, but have a visual learner? Try Visual Latin (ok, that’s not free to really learn deep, but the first six lessons are free). Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum has a list of favorite things that covers a great many topics.

Downside: If you don’t have internet access and/or a computer (some sites don’t work on smartphones, for example), you may not be able to access these more than perhaps at a public library. One more vote for broadening access to the Internet for everyone!

2. We love the fact that resources like these make it possible to customize learning to fit your child’s (or your own) needs. Learn better in the evening? Do your work then! Prefer to learn deep, rather than wide? Explore as deep as you like! Have plenty of ideas about how to teach kids math, but don’t know what a sentence diagram is, or why you would possibly want to know or have your kids know? Look it up online!

3. OK, this is maybe just us, but computer science is fascinating. Computers are part of our lives in such integral ways now. Understanding at least the basics about how they work seems valuable.

High-potential learners, particularly very asynchronous children, need to be allowed tackle big concepts before they’ve mastered the small steps along the way. Their brains are thirsty for this depth and complexity. When they’re ready, they’ll circle back and fill in holes. Let them soar!

Feeding kids’ brains at home

January 18, 2012 in Education, Need, Successes | No comments

Note the apostrophe: Though zombie fans might like the title better without it, I’m talking about feeding the brains that belong to the kids. The more asynchronous/high-potential the child, the hungrier the brain.

There’s a wonderful blog post on how to help feed kids’ hungry brains, right in your home: It’s called 9 Ways to Make Home a Place of Delightful Discovery, Part 1, and it beautifully describes what we’ve observed being so incredibly effective for kids who fall into highly, exceptionally, or profoundly gifted categories in particular; but we think that there isn’t a child out there who wouldn’t benefit from doing what you can to create such creativity and learning opportunities in your own home.

Do you have any particularly effective modifications you made to your living space that helped your kids learn?

How We Will Change the World in 2012

January 7, 2012 in Admin, Advocacy, Education, Legislation, Need, Service providers, Successes | No comments

Inspired (belatedly!) by Craig Newmark’s “How Will You Change the World in 2012″ post on craigconnects, we want to share our plans for changing the world in 2012.

But first, the setting:

With all the progress made in many places over past decades as regards helping children with disabilities, children in need, improving education, and the like, most people would think that there isn’t a group of kids who aren’t being helped. It seems like we’re helping kids more than ever before.

But there is one group of children who don’t. Worse yet, these children are very nearly universally scorned, ignored, and even actively hindered because of their very nature. These kids are intense. They have intense needs. They’re extremely misunderstood.

Because of the way these kids are treated, they don’t learn like they should — not just content, but also good work habits, persistence, and trust. These kids constitute as much as twenty percent of all high-school dropouts. Few, if any, reach their potential.

Emotionally, many end up angry, bewildered, stressed, scared, disillusioned, despondent, even clinically depressed at ages as young as 3 or 4. (Yes, you read that right.) This kind of emotional trauma leads directly to severe physical health problems: blinding headaches, nausea, stomach aches, even ulcers. (Again, yes, you read that right. Stress-generated ulcers in small children.)

Socially, many such children founder, because they’re not placed with peers, and have little to nothing in common with those they are placed with. By adulthood, years or decades of this kind of treatment, lack of support, and even vilification by their very own teachers take severe tolls on health, social adjustment, work performance, and families.

Who are these kids, and why is society persisting in doing this to them?

Before I tell you, i’d like you to take a moment and scan your emotions. Do you feel sympathy for these kids? Now I’ll tell you who they are, and check again… still feel sympathy?

They’re gifted. Highly, exceptionally, and profoundly gifted.

I’m willing to bet you are now kind of annoyed. If they’re gifted, they don’t need help, right?

Wrong.

Here’s how we are going to change the world in 2012:

1. We are going to work to spread awareness of the extremely intense educational, social and emotional needs these children have. To help people understand that what they believe about gifted kids is 99% wrong. (The one thing that’s right? They’re smart! But that’s the source of many problems for these kids, instead of being a source of solutions.)

And we’re going to not call these kids “gifted,” because too many people have the wrong understanding of what that means. We’ll call them a more accurate word: Asynchronous.

2. We will continue to raise funds to launch a program to help asynchronous children in need by providing their families with aid for assessments for identification, advocacy, and educational support; supplies, books, and materials; and tutors, counseling, and the like. Our program is based on the real-life, proven effective approach thousands of families have used across this country for decades. Research on meeting the needs of such asynchronous children unanimously supports our approach, despite public misconceptions (and ironically, the misconceptions of teachers and administrators).

By doing these two things, we expect to help a generation of unusual and exceptional children and families, starting in California but as a model for the rest of the nation. We expect to help them grow up knowing what it is to be educationally challenged; to have good work habits and persistence; to reach their educational (and life) potential; and to have a chance to be as well adjusted socially and emotionally as possible.

These are things we wish for any child. Asynchronous children deserve the same.

Bring it on, 2012!

 

Help high-potential children in need!

December 23, 2011 in Advocacy, Need | No comments

The Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund’s year-end fundraising campaign aims to build a core pool of funding to enable us to launch assistance to asynchronous scholars — high-potential children in need — in 2012. Visit our founder’s Fundly page for more information; there are many ways to support us.

  • We’re spreading the word by asking each of our supporters to tell 12 more people about our campaign and upcoming claymation public service announcement. Use Facebook, Twitter, email, or any of a zillion other ways. Our Fundly page makes it easy!
  • Donate $10 (the price of a few lattés in most big cities); $25 (a nice lunch or dinner out); or more. With the power of our social network, this will multiply to help us reach our $5,000 campaign goal, and get us a giant step closer to awarding aid to an asynchronous scholar in need.
These kids don’t get help from elsewhere. Many aren’t identified as gifted because their families don’t have the means to pay for assessments, or their schools misunderstand them. But they have enormous potential, and have the same right to have their educational, social and emotional needs met as any other kid does. Please donate today.
Thank you for your support, and enjoy the holidays!

 

Alisa: A true (anonymous) story

December 22, 2011 in Advocacy, Assessment, Education, Legislation, Need, Service providers, Supporters, Twice Exceptionalities | No comments

 

We are proud to share with you the exclusive trailer of the claymation PSA we’re working on: This is Alicia (Trailer).

The full film is coming in January 2012, but here’s a synopsis:

Did you know that there is an entire class of children in this country who are so grossly misunderstood that no one helps them, not even when their need is extreme?

This is Alisa. She is many ages at once — 6 years old chronologically, but 20 when she reads astronomy, 8 years old socially, and 4 when she tries to write neatly. She is asynchronous. Some people call this being a high-potential child. But her potential will never be realized if her extremely intense needs aren’t met. Worse yet, the fact that society is failing to meet Alisa’s needs is damaging, frightening, and alienating to her. She should have the same right to have her needs met as any other child.

There are thousands of kids like Alisa in the United States, kids who are many ages at once. They are as diverse as the population of our country.

You can make a difference. Donate to the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund today. Thank you for your support!

 

Shifting the Paradigm: Asynchrony and the High-Potential Child

December 9, 2011 in Advocacy, Assessment, Education, Legislation, Need, Research, Service providers, Twice Exceptionalities | 2 comments

The National Association of Gifted Children (NAGC) created a kerfuffle in the gifted education community very recently by recommending that efforts to support gifted children be focused not on identification, but on talent development. We want to go on the record to say that the NAGC has done wonderful things in service to this population, but that they are missing the mark with their new recommendation. Allow me to elaborate:

1. The NAGC notes correctly that “programs… are driven by identification methods rather than service models and rightly criticized for focusing on too narrow a group of learners.” They’re partly right; the goal is to serve the population of children whose intellectual ability and promise is on the outlying end of the spectrum, children who are many ages at once (asynchronous). Focusing solely on identifying kids using the methods used particularly in the public school system has indeed partly failed. The system must include a focus on service models that work for each child.

But the NAGC has the emphasis wrong: The system is failing not because focusing on identification is wrong; but because the methods of identification are flawed:

    • Academic-based performance as a measure of identification of gifted and asynchronous children only identifies those who have managed to perform well in school. This tends to be those who fit in a particular segment, often between 130 and 145 IQ, and those without learning disabilities (those who are not twice exceptional).
    • IQ tests measure general intelligence (“g”), which is incredibly one-dimensional and thus may rarely, if ever, measure the true intelligence, capacity and promise of the most significantly asynchronous (“gifted”) children. (See Karl Bunday’s History of IQ Tests and the “Challenges to g” section of the Wikipedia entry on “g factor”, although I’d love a better link if anyone can offer one in the comments.)
    • Yet worse, every single IQ test in existence today has a ceiling effect that fails to take into account the most profoundly asynchronous children; testers run out of questions, even if extended norms are used; and the only non-ceilinged test (the Stanford Binet L-M) is so woefully out of date that it has substantial flaws in application as well.
    • Add to that the fact that anyone’s performance on a test like this is subject to the vicissitudes of their health and mood that day, their rapport with the tester, the tester’s skill and objectivity, the effectiveness of the individual test taken, etc., and you have a very imperfect measure.

What to do with these flawed methods? We shouldn’t discard them, but rather keep them (and their shortcomings) in perspective. We should educate ourselves using the many resources that exist about giftedness; the Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum has one good list, but there are others. We should also supplement these methods with something that much of the education world ignores or discounts now: the observations of the child’s parents regarding the development and characteristics of their children.

More research can be done on this point. But the observations of parents regarding the giftedness of their children tends to be very accurate, according to the Gifted Development Center and as confirmed informally by a vast segment of participants in online communities for families of gifted children. Questionnaires for parents and families that assess measures like those described by the GDC should be developed and used by educators, healthcare professionals, and others. The results should be given substantial weight.

We agree with the NAGC that talent development in education is important. But a sole focus on talent development ignores development of the whole child, which for exceptionally and profoundly asynchronous children is at least as critical, if not more so. The social and emotional development of these children is the hardest area to address effectively, some say. Many specialists in the field of education and assessment of profoundly asynchronous children believe that when these kids are nurtured socially and emotionally, their educational development naturally follows on its own, unless it is actively hindered by the educational situation in which the children are located.

Kids like this need to feel emotionally safe; have social and emotional support in coping with their extreme asynchrony (having adult-level thoughts about death, life purpose, philosophy, morality, etc., with only 5 or 6 years of life experience and emotional resilience, e.g.).

Equally important, kids need to know there are other kids like them. They need to find them and spend time with them.

And lastly, we argue that it is absolutely critical that the damage that comes from the very word “gifted” needs to stop. The education world in particular needs to leave this word behind. These children are as different from typical kids as typical kids are from those who are profoundly developmentally challenged. Their needs are equally extremely different. We need a marketing miracle-worker to help us find a term that will work, apparently, but the fact remains that the change needs to happen.

We welcome your comments and suggestions!

 

 

 

Helping the High-Potential Child

November 3, 2011 in Advocacy, Assessment, Education, Need | 1 comment

You may have noticed our tagline. Helping the High-Potential Child is simple, but powerful. Children who are extremely asynchronous have extreme needs, but the “gifted” label blinds others to that need. These children are intense, all the time, and their needs are equally intense.

To compound matters, the way giftedness manifests itself — the way it “looks” to teachers, parents, and others — can be very different from what most people imagine. They expect global giftedness, brilliance, even genius. When they see a supposed gifted child “zoning” in class, or taking a long time to answer a math problem, they think, “How could this child possibly be gifted?”

But extremely asynchronous children — children who are many ages at once, with a wide gap between their intellectual age (very high) and their age in years (very low) — often have so much going on in their brains at one time that speed of response drops far below what people expect.

Let’s take the example of a typical early elementary school math problem: a chalkboard drawing of two groups of two orange circles. The teacher asks the class, “We have two oranges here, and here are two other oranges. How many total oranges do we have?” A typical child may ponder briefly, but see that there are four, and raise his or her hand to respond.

But an asynchronous child may be thinking something like this: Why isn’t the teacher using actual oranges? Those circles don’t look much like oranges. And why oranges, not bananas? Or candy? Better yet, why not draw the numbers? If she drew the numbers under the oranges it would help my friend Bobby figure out the numbers faster, because he doesn’t just “see” them like I do. I wish she was doing multiplication instead of addition. Then we could look at the symmetry between 2+2=4 and 2×2=4. I love that. Or better yet, she could do 2 + x = 4 and subtract 2 from both sides to show them that the unknown variable is 2. She could just act that out with the oranges, even, and use a box to cover the two. Then she’d need eight total oranges, but I bet it would be better. Why is the teacher looking at me like that? Why is the class looking at me? Oh, right, she asked me the answer.

And only then does the asynchronous child pop out with the answer: “Two!” — if the teacher hasn’t already moved on.

We aim to help identify these children, point them to existing resources, and provide aid to those who can’t afford to access those resources on their own. These children have high potential. We want to help them have the same chance any child has to thrive.

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