WHAT ABOUT THE “MERELY BRIGHT”?
Gifted children benefit from expert tutoring.
What about kids not in the top “gifted range,” but
still above average?
Their downside risk may be less because they’re not
as far out of sync with the regular classroom. See discussion of
risks.
Nevertheless, bright kids benefit from superior
tutoring. Where a gifted child may learn
four times as fast as in a regular classroom, a
bright child may learn twice as fast and twice as
much. That’s still worthwhile.
Hang in There: Actions Matter
Then there’s the debate about the mix of innate ability and
real-life effort in top performance.
Was Einstein’s relativity theory the result of some special
brain structure or rather of years of university
study and single-minded passionate pursuit? Mozart
performed for European royalty by age five. Was
this due to pure genius, or because his father,
himself a professional musician, had him practice
three hours a day since he was a toddler?
A well-known study compared the musical ability of student
violinists. By age 21 the best in a
performance class had practiced 10,000 hours while
those in the same conservatory studying to become
violin teachers had less than half that amount.
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. Th. & Heizmann, S. (1993)
Can we create gifted people? In: Ciba Foundation
Symposium 178: the origins and development of high
ability, ed. G. R. Bock & K. Ackrill, Wiley.
Even the notable Joseph Renzulli believes gifted
achievement results from a clustering of traits and
behaviors: above average ability, task commitment,
and creativity.
J.S. Renzulli, “The Three-ring Conception of
Giftedness: A Development Model for Creative
Productivity,” Conceptions of Giftedness, edited by
Sternberg and Davidson, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1986.
According to this view, part of top achievement is putting
in the effort.
What we do affects how we turn out. |
