Why do some intellectually exceptional students fail to excel?
Our hyper-mechanistic, Social Darwinian culture tends to assume — ignoring millennia of evidence — that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong.
Yet we see power held by the patently unfit and riches accruing to people whose primary skill was being in the right place at the right time.
There is no predictable correlation (much less causation) between talent and success.
Yes, some gifted students become highly rewarded adults. But that involves numerous factors, most of them unrelated to ability.
Plenty of exceptional young people wind up with lives that don’t adequately, or at all, reflect what they may be capable of — intellectually, professionally or emotionally.
As I wrote in a previous post on hyperlexia, a form of giftedness strongly correlated with autism spectrum condition, exceptional ability in one area can mask struggles elsewhere, particularly in executive function and social-emotional development.
Moreover, precocious students, with or without additional challenges, are often underserved.
Finn, Jr. (2014) noted:
“In New York City in 2013, almost 12,000 kids qualified for the school system’s 2,700 “gifted…” openings. The same year, Ohio schools identified 254,000 gifted children… however, Ohio public schools can accommodate only one in five of these “identified” youngsters in gifted-education programs or accelerated classrooms.
Mismatches between student need and educational provision can spark misery, mischief or mediocrity.
Some teachers loved my precocious linguistic capabilities and made me a pet; to others, I was opinionated, disruptive, disrespectful. A few were cool and confident enough to see and appreciate my specialness without fawning or feeling threatened.
At least that’s how I saw it as a student.
As a teacher, I empathize with them all: it’s hard not to flatter, or be flattered by, an exceptional student (the temptation to take credit is the fruit of the tree of no-knowledge); it’s equally difficult not to be annoyed by tweens and teens who see themselves as the sole repository of the world’s wisdom.
Teachers in the third category weren’t just cool and confident, they were skilled educators who had the knowledge, time and resources to offer differentiated instruction: privileges not widely nor equitably distributed.
In any class larger than one-to-one, a teacher has to weigh students’ non-synonymous needs, interests and abilities. Differentiated instruction is overwhelming with more than a handful of learners— and many of teachers have 25-30 pupils in a class.
Differentiation means preparing distinct materials which have to be taught, assessed and integrated into the larger curriculum goals. Differentiating in a class is effectively teaching multiple classes with the time, energy and resources allocated for one.
Don’t blame teachers who are unable or unwilling to this. It is an unreasonable expectation in even a privileged classroom, and a wholly unrealistic one in the context of public education.
One-to-one tutoring is an option that is often considered primarily for students who struggle academically; for them, the benefits of focused attention, support and feedback are axiomatic.
Consciously or not, educators and parents might assume that gifted students won’t benefit in the same way, that they will ‘figure it out’. However, there is research to show that high achievers actually benefit more from one-to-one tuition. Zhang, et al. (2021) found that, while all students in a tutoring study improved, “high prior knowledge students tended to benefit more… than low prior knowledge students.”
On reflection, this shouldn’t be surprising. Talented athletes, musicians and artists thrive on intensive, personalize, expert tuition. Why wouldn’t the academically gifted?
If a child were a violin prodigy or an exceptional sprinter, say, it would be strange if they weren’t given significant additional support and resources to develop their gift.
Private, personalized instruction for high academic achievers serves the same purpose: taking a student of exceptional abilities and ensuring they attain excellence.