parental involvement in gifted education - … · billy tao parental involvement in gifted...

Parental Involvement in Gifted EducationAuthor(s): Billy TaoSource: Educational Studies in Mathematics, Vol. 17, No. 3, Mathematically Able Students(Aug., 1986), pp. 313-321Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3482231 .

Accessed: 17/12/2014 23:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Educational Studies inMathematics.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 24.17.217.206 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 23:21:45 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3482231?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


BILLY TAO

PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT IN GIFTED EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION

Terence Tao is the oldest of three children. His exceptional mathematical talent was recognized at a very early age. In recent years his radical and successful acceleration and his exceptional results in mathematics have attracted much media attention.

Terry was the first eight year old ever to score 760 (out of a possible 800) on the SAT-M. Only 1% of college bound 17 and 18 year olds in the United States attain a score of 750 or more. When he was eight, Terry scored 90% on a mathematics paper produced by the Public Examinations Board of South Australia for year 12 students, i.e. students typically aged 17 or 18.

The following article, written by the father of Terence Tao, should be read in conjunction with the earlier paper published in this journal on Terence (see Clements, 1984).

GILAH LEDER * * *

One of the areas insufficiently covered in the debate about optimum educational provisions for the mathematically gifted students is the family perspective. Parents are often discouraged from voicing their views for fear of being seen as showing off and trumpet-blowing. It is also unfortunate that some of the more vocal and highly visible ones are the more con- troversial people who, although spectacular from the media point of view, often display an eccentric social or educational ideology that is not readily accepted by the general public. What we really need is a good and sensible discussion on the possible roles that parents can actually play in the up- bFinging of gifted children, especially the subpopulation of the highly gifted (i.e. I.Q. greater than 170) who often have more pressing emotional and social adjustment problems than their less severely gifted counterparts. These children also have more problems with uneven development, pressure from adult expectation, intense sensitivity, inappropriate environment, vulnerability to self-definition, role conflict and alienation (Roedell, 1984).

Consequently, I can see at least two areas of gifted education in which parents can help their highly gifted children. Firstly, they can help their children to develop a sound personality that is beyond just intellect, and secondly, they can help to design a more individualised education program that meets the special, often unique need of such children.

Educational Studies in Mathematics 17 (1986) 313-321 tv(', 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.



314 BILLY TAO

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

Many lay people tend to think that high I.Q. is synonymous with high success rate in the society. This is only partly true. The two, in fact, are not necessarily parallel. Hollingworth (1976) pointed out that the further re- moved the children are from the average along the I.Q. continuum, the more likely it becomes that they will experience emotional and social adjustment problems. This is quite understandable because exceptionally bright people are too intelligent to be understood by the general run of persons with whom they make contact, and they are too scarce to find many congenial companions. They often have to contend with loneliness and with personal isolation from their contemporaries throughout the period of immaturity.

I can see that one way of overcoming these difficulties is to help these exceptionally bright children to develop a sound personality, so that by the time they reach maturity, they can actually emerge as people highly successful both intellectually and socially. The ultimate goal of gifted education must be the pursuit of excellence in all performances and endeavours, but a sound personality is the actual binding force that unites all such achievements.

At present most provisions for gifted education have put too much emphasis on acceleration or enrichment in the area of intellectual stimu- lation, and too little on programs which are aimed at fostering personality development given either to the gifted children themselves, or to their parents. To me this seems to be a very significant deficiency. One possible explanation is that whereas it is relatively easy to design fast pacing courses in maths or any other subject, and find someone to give it to a group of gifted children, personality development is a very individualized process that requires a lot of interaction between the gifted children and their environment - parents, mentors, teachers, friends, peer groups and social attitudes. It is unrealistic to ask the educators to provide all the ncessary inputs for the formulation of an individual with a holistic personality. After all, educators are not social psychologists. It is my belief that parents should have a major responsibility here in bringing together the necessary ingre- diantes for-the proper personality development of their children. But parents, as much as their gifted children, also need expert advice on gifted education, particularly on their role. Perhaps a more widespread discussion on the subject among educators and parents might be the first step in the right direction.

The highest level of personality achievement is self-actualization. Not all highly gifted children will achieve such status of self-actualization when they



PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT 315

reach adulthood, but nevertheless, we parents should try to direct and motivate our children towards that goal. Some of the characteristics of self- actualized persons are listed below.

(1) They are realistically oriented. (2) They accept themselves, other people, and the natural world for what

they are. (3) They have a great deal of spontaneity and creativeness. (4) They identify with mankind. (5) They do not confuse means with ends. (6) They resist conformity to the culture. (7) They transcend the environment rather than just coping with it. (8) They are autonomous and independent.

(Maslow, 1954)

Self-actualized persons are generally motivated by task-involvement rather than ego-involvement. In task involvement, learning is more inherently valuable, meaningful or satisfying, and attention is focused on the task and strategies to master it rather than on the self. In ego-involvement, on the other hand, learning is a means to the end of looking smart or looking stupid, and attention is focused on the self, according to Nicholls (1983).

Self-actualized persons always appear to be humble but the humility is natural and comes from a position of strength rather than weakness. They are gentle and modest, and even though their intellect may be beyond the reach of ordinary people, they still appear to be warm and approachable. Their knowledge is honest and well deserved, and their authority well respected. Their success is measured by true achievement in life, and not by the scores of a test, the speed that they can learn, the number of years at school that they had skipped, or the age they started or graduated from University.

DESIGN OF INDIVIDUALISED EDUCATION PROGRAM

it is extremely advantageous for the highly gifted children if their parents can work in close collaboration with the education authorities. These days many teachers and school principals are aware of the existence, if not the needs, of gifted children. In most capital cities of advanced countries, there will be some schools with some kind of gifted education package. The people who deliver the educational goods to the children nowadays are at least more receptive to suggestions from parents. But the generally inflexible programs for the overall population of gifted and talented may still bypass



316 BILLY TAO

the special needs of the highly gifted. Very often, it is necessary to tailor- make some special education program that can be fitted into an existing system but still cater for the needs of the exceptionally bright. My family has actually been through such an experience.

Our son Terry entered a private school at the age of three-and-half. There was not much planning, not much discussion with the teachers and principal of that school. He passed an entrance test and we left everything else to the school. This particular form of acceleration, of course, did not actually meet his needs, and socially he really was not ready for formal schooling. His teacher, who had no experience with teaching gifted children, also could not cope with him. We noted our mistakes and after a trying period of 6 weeks we withdrew Terry from that school and put him into a kindergarten.

After that episode we learned of the importance of parents becoming involved in the planning and designing of individualised educational programs. In particular, with highly gifted children, the delivery of satisfactory education cannot be expected to be the responsibility of the school alone. Parents must contribute their share not only in the teaching of these children outside school hours, but also in the planning of programs.

When Terry was five he started school again. This time I was more thoughtful. I found the appropriate school, with a flexible principal who was receptive to constructive proposals. I proposed my idea of "integrated acceleration" and he accepted. The essence of this particular acceleration concept is to allow Terry to break away from the traditional horizontal lock-step grade structure and attend several grade levels at the same time, taking each school subject at the grade level appropriate to his ability. This kind of acceleration satisfies the need of highly gifted children whose giftedness is not uniform across the board but skewed in favour of some areas such as maths or science. Another beneficial outcome of such a scheme is it permits these children to mix with other children of all ages and ability levels as they pass through the grades.

The program worked well for Terry. By the time he was 6-?-, he was attending grades 3, 4, 6 and 7 for different subjects. Because he was progressing at his own pace in each subject, without formal "grade- skipping", there were no gaps in his subject knowledge. By the time he was seven-and-half we were able to make arrangement with a nearby high school where he attended grade 11 Maths and Physics and grade 8 General Studies (English and Social Studies) for up to 3 hours a day, while for the rest of time he mixed with grade 5 and 6 students at primary school. The idea of keeping him at the primary school was to let him continue to




mature socially in an environment, and at a rate, that was more appropriate for his age. Those frivolous but nevertheless amusing and satisfying children's activities and social contacts are essential in the proper development of a child's personality, and in the case of a gifted child, who has to speed through compacted learning time and mix with much older children, any chance of getting such experience becomes very precious indeed.

Once the integration program had become an obvious success, we found it very easy for us to co-operate with the high school teaching staff. About half way through the year his maths teacher decided to promote him from grade 11 to grade 12, and two months later he sat for the matriculation examination in Maths I and Maths II at the age of eight years and three months. He passed with scores of 90 and 85 respectively, out of a maximum of 100.

At the beginning of 1984, when Terry was eight-and-half, and the new school term began, we decided to send Terry to high school full time, as he seemed to be mature enough to mix with high school students according to teachers in both high school and primary school. That year he studied grade 12 Physics, grade 11 Chemistry, grade 10 Geography, and grade 8 General Studies again. His "home group", the students that he mainly socialised with, was grade 8. He also learned first year University Mathematics first by himself, and then with the help from a lecturer in Mathematics at the nearby Flinders University of South Australia. Later in the year he began to attend tutorials in first year Physics at the University and 2 months later passed Matriculation Physics with a score in the upper 90's. In the same month, finding that he had some time on his hands after the matriculation and internal exams, he started Latin at high school.

In early 1985, before he had turned ten, he spent part of three days a week at the Flinders University taking some second year Mathematics and first year Physics courses. The rest of the time he was at high school studying grade 12 Chemistry, grade 11 Geography and Latin, grade 10 French and grade 9 General Studies.

We have had no major problems with the staff of the primary school, the high school, or the University personnel. We had made it very clear to them at the outset that we had no intention of dictating what they should teach, and we fully understood they were actually the people who taught Terry all subjects. There was no confrontation. We saw our role as mainly facili- tatory, finding the right school and the right teachers who were interested in gifted children.

The above account is a testimony that special, individualised programs can be designed for the needs of highly gifted children, the only requirement



318 BILLY TAO

being that there must be plenty of discussion and planning between the involved groups, namely the parents and the education establishment.

ON TEACHING GIFTED PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

The teaching of highly gifted children before the normal school-age is usually the responsibility of parents. There is no doubt that infants and children under the age of 5 generally learn faster than older children and adults, particularly in such areas as language and music. Nevertheless parents must realise that there are also other important issues that young children must learn in their early developmental stages, above all perception of normal human behaviours, satisfaction of their biological needs, and total freedom from outside pressure. Teaching is best given in an atmos- phere of fun and encouragement rather than force-feeding. I think it is perfectly legitimate to let children play with educational toys, watch tele- vision programs such as 'Sesame Street', look at picture-books and listen to music and stories, but the more pressurising techniques such as showing flash-cards and reading story-books to infants for long periods of time may actually lead to these children losing interest in the pursuit of intellectual achievement later in life. The key, I think, is to let these preschool children develop at their own pace, and make use of PLAY as an integral part of the learning process. Over-assertion by parents of a child's ability right from the time of birth may actually cloud their judgement and put an inappropriate amount of pressure onto the child. Parents must try to be as objective as possible and, if uncertain, should err on underestimation rather than aim for some unachievable goals.

The priority of teaching these preschool children, no matter how gifted, must still be the basic skill of literacy and numeracy, and not sophisticated and abstract concepts such as algebra, topology, or moral issues. One must realise that there are limitations in every person during the natural pro- gression through various stages of intellectual development, and the most gifted children are not exceptions. However, these children must be en- couraged to make use of such basic skills to learn further, generally by themselves with minimal help and guidance from adults, by self-reading and self-teaching. If a child is taught to be self-reliant, he is less likely to be bogged down later in his progress because of the inability to find an appropriate subject teacher.

ON THE TIMING OF TERTIARY EDUCATION

The timing of sending highly gifted children to full time University study is a more pressing question these days because of many highly successful




acceleration programs. My own feeling is that before the stage of puber-ty part-time University study is preferred to full time. I have watched carefully the group-interaction of students at primary school, high school, and at University, and they are very, very different to say the least. What else would one expect, when all persons, gifted or otherwise, have to go through the same biological and psychological stages of development as a function of time and age? It is unrealistic to expect that a child extremely gifted intellectually will be able to skip through some pretty delicate adolescent stages just like skipping through some school grades. From my obser- vations, I think high school and not University is still the best place for satisfying the need of socio-psychological development in pubescent youth. University students generally have already passed this stage, and a gifted yet very immature child wandering on the University campus may feel terribly alienated by the inability to form a group with which to assimilate and identify.

There are also educational reasons for keeping highly gifted children longer in high school and sending them to University for study part-time only. It is my belief, that it is important for all highly gifted children to have a broad, initial education. I can envisage two types of education models. In the first, a "columnar" model, acceleration is directed vertically upwards, in a narrow column. Early progress is very easy and fast, but as the column increases in height, it becomes harder and harder to make further progress, and the base becomes increasingly wobbly. In the second "pyramid" model, initial progress is slow, a large base area has to be built, but as the pyramid grows, further progress is easy. The second model is obviously preferred for teaching all children, whether gifted or not.

Speed in learning is a well known characteristic of all highly gifted children, but it should not be over-emphasized. There is another important quality of learning, and that is depth. In a way this latter quality distin- guishes genius from prodigy. Prodigy implies a very rapid achievement at a very young age. Genius is not related to speed of development. It-requires qualities such as creativity, lateral thinking, the ability to make a break through or an original contribution.

At the highest level of any knowledge, the boundary between science and arts, Maths and philosophy, becomes less and less distinct. A person cannot enter this highest level of sophistication if he is too specialised. Even in mathematics, there will be many problems which cannot be solved simply by applying mathematical techniques. Take Einstein and the Theory of Relativity for example. It required not so much mathematics but concepts beyond computation.

Even if a 10 year old child can cope with all the curriculum and courses



320 BILLY TAO

of full time University study, he would. have little time left to indulge in original exploration. Attending University part-time will allow him to progress at a more leisurely rate and more emphasis can be placed on creativity, original thinking and broader knowledge. Later, when he does enrol full time, he can divert more energy to research or anything else he finds interesting. He may be a few years older when he graduates but he will be much better prepared for the more rigorous post-graduate and post- doctorate work.

Despite all the above arguments, I can still see in the years to come that there will be more and more very young children going to full time University study and graduating at the age of 13 or 14. Does early graduation really mean that much, in the long run? Newton and Einstein are undoubtedly two of the greatest scientific minds of human history. Newton entered Cambridge University as an undergraduate when he was 18. Eight years later he was appointed to the chair of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and people remembered Newton not by the age he graduated from University but by his achievement in Maths and Science. Similarly. Einstein had to struggle through the 4 years at Zurich Polytechnic and he barely graduated without any honours at the age of 21. Yet 7 years later he enunciated the famous equation E = Mc2 for which he is remembered. No one pays much attention to the way he scrambled through University.

A FINAL COMMENT

The world today more than ever needs all the talents and geniuses society can produce to help us solve our escalating ecological and moral crises as well as other pressing problems that are coming at an alarming pace. Eight thousand years ago our nomadic ancestors discovered the science of domesticating animals and plants, thus enabling them to feed themselves in large numbers and at times of hardship. We are now seeing a parallel in the education of gifted children and the making of creative adults in our society. Hitherto, like our hunting prehistoric fathers roaming in the field, we have harvested creativity wild. Social attitudes have generally been vindictive and oppressive to the inon-conforming creative minds, and only a few of the most stubborn individuals have stood up to pressure and left their names in history. We only need to look at Copernicus, Galileo and Charles Darwin for some proof. These three people were prosecuted and derided because their sin was to be ahead of their time and to point out that the earth and human beings are not the egocentre of the Universe. Fortunately, it seems




that we are now entering into a new era, a golden era perhaps, in which the society looks favourably on culturing and nurturing giftedness and creativity on a mass scale. Hopefully the gifted education movement will flourish all the way into the 21st century.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Julian Stanley, of Johns Hopkins University, whose continuous supply of advice and reading material over the years had been of tremendous help and encouragement to both myself and Terry.

NOTE

Terence was selected for the Australian team for the XXVI International Mathematical Olympiad held this year in Poland.

REFER ENCES

Clements, M. A.: 1984, 'Terence Tao', Educational Studies in Mathematics 15, 213-238. flollingworth, L. S.: 'The Development of Personality in Highly Intelligent Children' in Wayne

Dennis and Margaret W. Dennis (eds.), The Intellectually Gifted - An Overview, New York: Grune and Stratton, Inc., pp. 89-98.

Maslow, A.: 1954, Motivation and Personality, New York: Harper and Row. Nicholls, J. G.: 1983 Conceptions of Ability and Achievement Motivation: A Theory and its

Implications for Education, in S. G. Paris, G. M. Olson, and H. W. Stevenson (eds.), Learning and Motivation in the Classroom. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Roedell, W. C.: 1984, Vulnerabilities of Highly Gifted Children, Roeper Review 6(3), pp. 127- 130.

6 Jennifer Avenue, Bellevue Heights, Soutli Australia 5050, A ustralia.

BILLY TAO



parental involvement in gifted education - … · billy tao parental involvement in gifted...

Documents