Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential by Marylou Kelly Streznewski

Author:Marylou Kelly Streznewski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-09-05T05:01:00+00:00

Designing Your Own Environment

The crucial third criterion-being able to design one's own environment-often seems to be more important than the first two. Or we might say, it makes it possible to adjust or even create the first two. This may be why so many gifted grownups are found in professions like teaching and law.

Teaching. Teaching positions seem to be attractive because they provide stimulation, constant change, and the opportunity to design one's own environment. Of course, there are those situations where none of these is provided. It is those positions which the interview subjects report that they hate, and usually quit.

What Colin calls his "scatterbrained" approach to teaching science has made academic life a struggle for him. "I liked teaching. I taught beginning programming at a large state school but finding that 5 people out of 500 were real students was depressing. I tried a small school which said it valued `quality undergraduate teaching,' but I was considered subversive. I tried to be inspiring, do things differently, free students from structures by forcing them to define their own goals, basing their grade on what they learned rather than what they did.

"My attempt to free them from structures was regarded as threatening. I was trying to get students in a physics class to consider higher-level ideas, to find meaning in their lives. I taught my programming course straight, and there were no complaints, yet there was very little going on in the students' minds. In physics I made a few converts, but the more I did what was beneficial to those few, the more trouble I got from all the rest ... 90% of students were threatened like crazy! I used to think I really wanted to be a teacher ... I have doubts now."

The level must suit the individual, but all levels are represented in the kind of teaching which gifted adults find enjoyable. Delores reports, "In junior high every day is new ... so much of their energy has not yet been spoiled by the uselessness of going to school. It is a challenge to get the kids to really remember things, not just to spit it back on a test. I am so pleased when they do well."

The structures, and strictures, of an ordinary public school prove to be too much for many, dedicated or not. Rita taught special education classes for a year or two and found, "I hated it. All those bells!" She and her husband, Rudy, run a successful tutoring service. "I need the constant stimulation of designing individual programs for all kinds of kids of all ages. I have complete control of what I do."

A veteran of the Peace Corps and social work in a riot-torn Los Angeles ghetto, Ned eventually returned to his hometown in Pennsylvania to teach in prison programs and public school. "A year of public school convinced me that I didn't want to teach in a public school. Ironically, I felt like a jailer! In my current job at the juvenile detention center I have a lot of freedom to choose curriculum and text.

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