Like Reed’s twisted body, Aldred’s belief in magic was her way of coping with a real world that made little sense to her. Looking back, Aldred wonders if this fantasy represented her own contortion. Aldred had absolute faith the dream world she yearned for was perpetually at hand. In addition to the glasses and fake braces, Aldred wore gowns, crowns and glitter-covered wings to school to be ready when this magic revealed itself. “When I smiled, blood dripped down my teeth.” Eventually Aldred modified her design to include eyeglass frames without lenses and plastic-coated paperclips that didn’t cut her gums.Īldred believed with heart-pounding certainty that her school was the sort of enchanted forest or magic kingdom she read about in the books she loved. “I was delighted with the look,” Aldred says, even though the glasses made her eyes hurt and the paperclips lacerated the inside of her mouth. She traded her eraser collection for a classmate’s cast-off eyeglasses, and fashioned herself a set of braces from metal paperclips she pilfered from her teacher’s desk. For these “twice exceptional” children, emotional intensity is the evil twin of high intelligence.Īldred, too, was an eccentric and gifted child. Another child might be so affected by a piece of music that he won’t be able to focus on anything else the rest of the day. The same 10-year-old who can set up the school’s computer system with the proficiency of a college-educated tech might also throw a tantrum like a toddler if she’s not invited to a birthday party. A gifted student might be so paralyzed by her own perfectionism, say, that she refuses to hand in any assignments. Gifted children are more prone to depression, self-harm, overexcitability, and learning deficits. More serious, though, are the emotional challenges. Parents of some gifted children have to cut the tags out of their kids’ clothing, for example, or buy specially-designed socks with no seams. Gifted children might express heightened physical sensitivities to light, touch and textures. ![]() But IQ scores alone don’t reflect the range of psychological issues that trouble many gifted students. A child is considered gifted with an IQ at or around 130-about 30 points higher than those of us with average brains. Quantitatively, giftedness is rather easy to define. Intelligence test results also fail to tell the whole story. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Part of the problem is simply semantic the word “gifted” suggests an advantage and does not conjure up the intense challenges these children can face. And emotions can ricochet out of control sometimes.” To speak of giftedness as a disability seems counterintuitive. “The gifted don’t just think differently, they feel differently. “Giftedness is a tragic gift, and not a precursor to success,” says Janneke Frank, principal of Westmount Charter School and a local guru of gifted education. The challenge of teaching them is finding a way to nurture their souls and ease the burden of their extraordinary minds. Our most brilliant children are among our most vulnerable. ![]() ![]() His tragedy reveals what can be at stake for these kids. She and her colleagues work to help children like Reed untwist. Reed’s exceptional life and early death inspired Aldred into a career in gifted education. For those who feel weird and wrong and struggle to find like minds among their peers, school itself can be a contortion. Reed’s entanglements serve as an apt metaphor for the school life of severely gifted children.
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