Siderea

I've been thinking some more about avidity as a personal trait, and I had a bit of a Eureka. (There was a bath involved and everything.)

Sometimes very subtle reframings can have very big practical consequences. I'd like to share one that may be very useful for people who have to deal with issues of GT kids.

Let's start by evoking the standard stereotypes/archetypes of gifted kids here. All of 'em. Bring them to mind so I can point something out about them.

Let's imagine four 5th graders.

Anne is a perfectly normal student. Her grades wind up in the middle of the pack. She is well liked by her peers. When the teacher asks a question, she is somewhat reluctant to put up her hand; she is very self-conscious about the risk of making a wrong answer before her peers. She's into playing with dolls, talking on the phone to her friends, and playing jump rope on the playground. The teacher thinks she's a lovely student; she is the kind of student the teacher imagined teaching when she decided she wanted to be a teacher.

Betty is flamboyantly gifted. She has been measured as having an IQ of 150. She either gets effortless As or blows off her assignments completely. She usually has her hand up first and has even corrected the teacher once. She is academically fearless, eagerly throwing herself into projects which turn out to be way over her head. She gets along with her peers approximately not at all; they frequently charge her with being a "teacher's pet", "know-it-all", and "geek". The hostility of her peers has lately been blossoming into full-fledged interpersonal violence. She reads recreationally. She is always "into" some topic or another, if not several, from dinosaurs to astronauts to medieval history to edible plants to crochet. The teacher finds her very taxing and insecurity-provoking: Betty makes the teacher question her own abilities as a teacher. The teacher finds herself dreading Betty's reaction in class to the new material the teacher presents.

Carol is a quiet student who sits towards the back. She is often characterized by teachers as "sensitive" because she is constantly drawing or writing poetry. Her grades are Bs and Cs. She never puts her hand up in class, and often when directly called on, she was gazing out the window, spacing out. Her fellow students, whom she avoids, call her a "space cadet". She draws a little opportunistic teasing, but mostly succeeds in hiding in the social shadows; she is thought of as "nice" insofar as anyone remembers to think of her. The teacher thinks of her as a perfectly acceptable student, though a little disappointing in that the teacher is sure Carol could be getting better marks if only she tried harder; but that's all right, the teacher feels, because it's the teacher's job to help the flagging students and encouraging Carol is exactly the sort of challenge she expects as a teacher. Referred to the school psychologist, it's quite a surprise when it comes back that Carol has an IQ of 160.

Debby is also a quiet student, though quick to put her hand up. She sits in the front. She comes across as painfully earnest. She often seems out of touch with what is going on in class, not because she's not paying attention, but because she has a bit of trouble keeping up with fast social interactions. Her grades are Ds and she struggles, valiantly, with the material. It matters very much to her that she's a "good kid", and she's scrupulous in following class rules. It crushes her when she feels she's disappointed the teacher by not doing well on her work. She has one abiding interest: she breeds rabbits. She knows everything in the world about rabbits, their care and feeding. The other students have given her the epithet "rabbit girl" and call her a "dork" and a "tool". The teacher thinks of her of a bit of a trial; she's all but written Debby off, except that Debby is so sincere and tries so hard to please her. The school psychologist tests Debby, and it turns out she has an IQ of 95.

I'd like to submit that these four very typical students illustrate something interesting about "giftedness". The problems of gifted kids in non-gifted specific classrooms are often discussed in terms of giftedness. But as many people working in the field of gifted education are quick to point out, giftedness seems to have a bunch of traits and attributes wrapped into it. I'd like to pull one thing out of that package (I'm not about to unwrap the whole thing), and that's the trait of avidity.

Anne has a perfectly normal, typical level of avidity for classroom learning for a 5th grader. Which is to say, very little. In fact, her avidity is pretty low across the board: while she has interests she's not very passionate about them. For instance, she likes dolls, but couldn't see the point in going to a doll convention.

Carol also has very little avidity for the classroom. Her social relations with her peers are weak, but not outrageously toxic. She is not seen as transgressing the social norms of the classroom. The teacher finds her much more personally acceptable than Betty, because Carol is no strain on her resources.

Betty, however, has a very high level of avidity. She is a very avid student. She generally is highly avid, as reflected in her many enthusiasms. The hostility she gets is not for her grades, which are erratic at best, but for acting too avid in the classroom.

Debby also has a higher than average level of avidity. She tries hard in school and has one burning interest. But she's not intellectually gifted. She still gets some of the same sorts of peer hostility that Betty gets, and the teacher considers Debby more demanding of her energies that Anne or Carol so harbors some resentment towards her.

I would submit the hypothesis that IQ is not the social or pedagogical problem with giftedness -- avidity is.

My hypothesis is that kids don't get beat up for being smart, they get beat up for being avid; that teachers resent the more avid students, not the merely bright ones, for being more "demanding" than other students.

Avidity, our stereotypes and archetypes of genius tell us, is a characteristic trait of smart people. It is the "absent-minded" in "absent-minded professor" and the "mad" in "mad scientist". It is so embedded in the idea, that we are surprised when someone who is not highly avid, such as Carol, turns out to have a high IQ.

But avidity is not a uniquely GT trait. It's perfectly possible for people of average IQ to be highly avid. Avidity can have a number of motivations. GT people seem to have a motivation of needing a high level of intellectual stimulation; their avidity is their seeking new input for the hungry engines of their minds. But there are other motivations. The person whose loved one gets cancer may become highly motivated to learn everything there is about that form of cancer and to become very involved in organizations which fight that cancer.

It may also be the case that avidity is usually a function of maturity, and that low avidity children like Anne grow up to be medium-avidity teenagers who are dedicated to their favorite music group or cheer-leading squad or what have you.

These thoughts of mine on avidity are informed by my own experience as a 30-something adult GT attending graduate school with plenty of people who are not GTs and which graduate school, in fact, is pretty unprepared for people like me.

I've generally not had any social problems in classes where my fellow students were more avid than normal. In particular, this meant the special program for returning adult students I was initially in; those students were no more or less intelligent than the rest of the student body, but they were far more motivated and mature. They all and each came with an agenda which they were pursuing. It was not hard for instructors to draw them into conversations; indeed, instructors sometimes has trouble getting them to shut up. It seemed (and seems) that in classes of more traditional (closer to "college-age"), less avid students that social strain is more likely to arise.

What all this suggests to me is the intriguing experiment of "mainstreaming" GT kids with normal students who have been rated by observers as more avid than usual. That is, tracking by avidity instead of IQ. My guess is this would have all the purported benefits of "heterogeneous grouping" pedagogy -- that happy one-room school house stuff -- and little or none of its flaws -- the smart kids tuning out or doing all the work.