When I was eleven, I took the SATS tests (in England, the tests that children take at 6, 11, and 14, primarily for the sake of testing the education not the children), and got a level five in science.

Six months later, I was working from GCSE textbooks (GCSE is the lowest formal academic qualification in the UK, generally taken at sixteen), and by the time I was thirteen, I was learning from A-level books (pre-university exams) and handing in essays researched into undergraduate level in biology and chemistry.  I did less well with physics due to a lack of the same level of maths.

Of course, I was expected to be totally ashamed of this by most adults and fellow pupils.

For those not familiar with the education system in the UK as it was, I missed out a whole key stage.  Level five is "totally competent in all that is supposed to be learned at primary school,".  To go from primary school to GCSE in one go is to bite off a much larger lesson at once, than a child is "supposed" to.  There is supposed to be an extra step in there, where you learn more detail than level five, but less than at GCSE.  I was, admittedly, perhaps better educated in science than "level five" implies, in that not getting higher may have reflected my peculiar comprehension of questions rather than a real lack of the knowledge.

For instance, when it asked me which animals would be affected in the food web by a change in one place, I answered that it would affect every single one of them.  My logic was, um, at least logical: if the number of voles goes up, raising the number of owls, the number of lemmings will go down due to there being more owls to eat them, and so will the population of the weasel which eats lemmings but doesn't eat voles.  Then the population of mice will go up because the population of weasels has gone down.  I suspect other factors actually mean this is incorrect, and certainly, I would now be surprised if it was the answer they were looking for.

However, the basic point stands: one of the things people rarely understood about giftedness in children is that it does not always relate to doing the same work faster.  In fact, my capacity to complete actual work was always seriously slow, something which much increased my frustration, because educationally pointless work was all I ever had time to do.  It was simply that I did not need to learn to add up all over again merely because someone had introduced a decimal point - the principle of adding with carries is the same all the way across the place system.  The moment I saw a line graph of temperature against energy input during a state change it was obvious what was going on - not because I had ever seen it before, but because if you understand the principles, it's exactly what you'd expect to see.  I didn't need to spend four hours doing exercises on the principle.  It took about four seconds.

I learned to dread the words: "Do it quickly and I'll give you something more interesting," because it invariably actually meant more exercises trying to drum in the same principle more soundly, when it had never needed any work in the first place.  The teachers never seemed to see that a lot of the supposedly different maths exercises were actually exactly the same concept started from a very slightly different place.

Of course, when I did have difficulty with things, it drove me crazy.

For anyone who is getting incandescent remembering how hard they found the work at school: my experience doesn't invalidate yours, nor vice versa!  This was the problem I had.  That people with different strengths had different ones, wasn't and isn't my fault.

There is another side to this, which made it much worse.  I was what the Americans so beautifully call "twice-exceptional" a gifted child with severe dyslexia/dyspraxia.  In fact, more accurately, "thrice exceptional" when my physical difficulties are added in as well.

There are things I learn easily.  And there are things I simply cannot do.

I am gradually learning to garden.  It is difficult because a lot of things in gardening rely on steps which don't have much logical connection.

And I have sequencing problems that come out on a formal test at 3%, and my scores on short term memory start at 2%, with an average across the board of 25%.

Those numbers are well into the intellectual disability range.

I have been able to take a tool and cut down stems or dig out weeds, in the acceptance that they will be left untidily where they fell.

Now, after more than a year, I can often actually manage to pull out at least the most hazardous clippings, such as brambles, and at least put them in a pile, without getting hopelessly confused.

Sometimes things even get onto the compost heap, in an unsorted mismash.

In some distant future, I might even be able to carry a bucket out to where I am working and separate what needs shredding from stuff that can go straight on a compost heap.

And, as I go, I am totally reliant on help to sort out the parts of it that are just too complicated.

Trying to do it "correctly" all at once would merely guarantee I could never do it.  If my experience with maths. and science at school, was analogous to shoving an eleven year old into a class of five year olds, and expecting them to just get on with the same work and routines and be content and happy with it, my experience with sequencing-reliant tasks is like that of having the teacher throw down a book of complicated algebra in front of a child just learning to count, demanding they have finished it by the end of the week.

The worst complexity, as someone who runs to both extremes, is working out what sized mouthful of learning a particular task needs.  The worse difficulty, however, is accepting the reality of the fact that I can never judge how much trouble I am going to have with something by normal categories.

Learning requires response to one's reality, or to the reality of anyone we are trying to teach.  Part of that reality, is the size of the steps, and the speed of comprehension, with which we naturally go on any one subject.  For this reason, I am generally inclined to suggest that a workbook-based model does much better than a classroom teaching model, in allowing much more flexibility to give different students space, not merely to learn things they need to know, but to learn how to learn.

Anyway, an exercise in empathy to finish off with: a simulation of approximately what learning at school is like for a gifted, neurodiverse, and physically disabled child.  If you're dealing with a child who is acting up about education... think how you would feel trying to deal with this every day:

Step one: Take the following reading comprehension exercise and print it out in text of your least favourite colour:

"In this never-never land, humble heroes kill adversaries, succeed to kingdoms and marry princesses."[10] The characters and motifs of fairy tales are simple and archetypal: princesses and goose-girls; youngest sons and gallant princes; ogres, giants, dragons, and trolls; wicked stepmothers and false heroes; fairy godmothers and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or foxes, or birds; glass mountains; and prohibitions and breaking of prohibitions."

(From wikipedia)

  1. What type of hero succeeds to kingdoms in this passage?
  2. List five examples of characters which are mentioned as belonging to fairy tales.
  3. What do animals do in fairy tales which they don't do in real life?
  4. What does the word prohibition mean?
  5. What description is given of the characters and motifs of fairy tales?

Step two: find a really uncomfortable chair, a writing implement of a type you dislike using, and a floppy book.

Step three: place the text horizontally, either in a darkish room with only a flashing strobe light, or in a waterproof folder at the bottom of the bath with both taps running.

Step four: turn on at least three different radio programmes, DVDs, or CDs, in the background, making sure one is playing music you really hate.

Step five: pull up the chair, rest some paper on the floppy book in your lap, and take the writing implement in your non-dominant hand.

Step six: now you have a quarter of an hour to copy out, in perfect handwriting, all that passage, every one of the questions, and a correct, complete sentence answer to each question.  OR you lose your break, for which read - you are stigmatised, isolated, and lose essential down-time which you desperately need*.

Are you frustrated yet?!

Cherry Foster

*I am not, saying this, implying that it is always wrong to keep children in to do work they haven't done.  Children do need to learn about consequences.  However, artificial consequences - rewards and punishments attached to learning - are helpful only under the necessary (though not sufficient) condition, that the task set is an appropriate one.  In the circumstance described, the task is totally inappropriate both educationally (because it is far too simple for anyone who has been through that stage of schooling) and physically.