BOOK REVIEW High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Review by Jennifer Dees Take the most poignant personal stories on the best mailing lists for parents of gifted children, the expertise of leading gifted education researchers, and the perspective of testers who have "found" hundreds of exceptionally and profoundly gifted children over the years, and you'll have the intriguing and informative mix that is High IQ Kids.
If you know that your child is in the upper ranges of giftedness, or you think she might be, you need High IQ Kids. This book should be of interest to any parent of a gifted child, but it is intended for parents and teachers of children at the high end of intellectual ability — exceptionally and profoundly gifted children, those with IQs above 160. If your child does have an IQ that high, you might not know it, but you probably suspect it. It's difficult to determine the limits of intelligence at the upper end, due to limitations of current tests and the interpretation of those tests. There is an outstanding essay in this collection of material that is the most comprehensive, yet concise description I have seen of testing options for extremely gifted children. "Intellectual Assessment of Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Children," by John D. Wasserman, is the place to go if you are trying to sort out the differences in the Wechsler tests, the SB L-M, the SB5, and every other contender for teasing out the advanced abilities of high IQ kids, even while identifying possible learning disabilities and asynchronies.
Long before your child is of an age to be tested, you'll likely know that something is very different about your child. The personal stories in this book let you know that you are not alone, and you are not making this up. In "Calculus, Pooh, and Tigger, Too," Courtney James shares stories about his oldest daughter that will have parents of high IQ kids shaking their heads in recognition. "Our eight year old […] will enjoy a video about differential equations and then delight in a Winnie the Pooh cartoon. She'll discuss with me the significance of the ongoing energy crisis, then fight with her baby sister over a toy." When a child like this was speaking her first words at six months, reading at 18 months, the parents did not need to wait for testing to know they had a very gifted child on their hands. Many profoundly gifted children will be homeschooled for at least some part of their young lives. Kathryn Finn, director of Tagfam.org, who regularly shares her wisdom on the TAGMAX list for gifted homeschoolers, writes about the joys and challenges of "Homeschooling with Profoundly Gifted Children" in this collection. This article was excerpted from the book and published here (scroll down past the Family Times issue cover). Yet there's also a joyful piece by a teacher who learned about profound giftedness from an exceptional six-year-old and his parents. Her article offers encouragement and guidance to teachers who may be encountering a profoundly gifted student for the first time. In "What Makes the Highly Gifted Child Qualitatively Different?" researcher Karen Rogers draws broad profiles of characteristics in a tested population of children with IQs over 160, but concludes "…it is important to remember that not a single child possessed all of these patterns – the uniqueness of processing and personality was perhaps the children's most common attribute." Nevertheless, Rogers makes recommendations for ways schools can tailor programs to fit the learning styles and characteristics of PG learners. For example, many have extremely long attention spans, hate to be interrupted, and resist regular homework assignments. As a result, Rogers advises that "Long-term projects, assigned as an alternative to nightly mini-tasks, will be successfully completed."
Intelligence is often unevenly distributed in a PG kid, and in her article, "An Anomaly: Parenting a Twice-Exceptional Girl," Kiesa Kay explains the educational problems that can result within a normal school setting. When her daughter was tested at the GDC, she writes, "…her lowest score was above-average and a seventy-point spread existed between her highest and lowest scores. " Kay goes on to say that in the classroom, where teachers had twenty-five students to teach, including some who were not performing at grade level, her daughter's needs had low priority. Since her daughter, she writes, "…performed above grade level even on those things that were extremely difficult for her, her needs often did not seem as pressing as the needs of other students. If she had not received testing, it's likely that her talents would have been subdued in a traditional classroom setting. Quite simply, no one would have known that she needed anything extra, because her brilliance covered up her learning problem, and her learning problem dimmed her brilliance just enough to make her appear somewhat gifted, instead of profoundly gifted." In my experience in the gifted homeschooling world, mothers are not usually wrong about their children. If mom thinks her child is gifted, he probably is. If she thinks he is extremely gifted, he probably is. So Marilyn Walker's story, "Too Smart for School?" rings very true. Her son's first experience with testing, using the WISC-III, showed him to be moderately gifted. But his unusual behavior since babyhood convinced her that there was more going on than this test indicated. Retesting revealed him to actually be in the profoundly gifted range.
Several articles in this book state that profoundly gifted children are not just advanced learners, but they actually learn differently than even moderately gifted children. In "Curriculum Issues for the Profoundly Gifted," Joyce VanTassel-Baska, professor at the College of William and Mary and president of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Gifted Children, lays out recommendations for curriculum strategies in all major subject areas, including emphasizing interdisciplinary work. She writes that PG students "…should be provided with work at least two or three grade levels beyond the norm in basic content strands," and that they need "…more intense and more extended learning opportunities, based on their aptitude areas and interests." She adds that "…it may be necessary to engage in multiple forms of acceleration at different stages of development. A grade-skip into first grade and bypassing kindergarten may offer one propitious opportunity, as would early entrance into middle or high school. Early entrance to college by one or two years may also be considered." Yet, she says, "Such acceleration alone will be insufficient, however, because it only slightly reduces the disparity between age and intellectual functioning." Ongoing assessment and revision of a curriculum plan at each stage of development will be necessary, according to VanTassel-Baska.
There are many other valuable pieces in this book, including Carolyn K of Hoagies' Gifted Education on how she became an educational advocate; Sally Reis on underachievement; Christine S. Neville, founder of the Program for Exceptionally Gifted (PEG) at Mary Baldwin College, on "importance, meaning, and success"; Miraca Gross on her famous longitudinal study of PG children; the director of the California State University Early Entrance Program on young students attending college early; Stephanie Tolan on "The Problem of Pain;" and more. This book is a collection of expertise from the Who's Who of gifted education, from esteemed researchers to parents who have lived out the experience, and are here to tell the story. If your child has been tested as exceptionally or profoundly gifted, you need this book. Or if that hasn't happened yet, but you are one of those parents who just feels your child might be one of these High IQ Kids, this book can help you on your journey. I find it very affirming and encouraging and I just want to have it on my shelf in the years ahead, as we make it to each new stage of development in my daughter's life. I'm grateful for the expertise and writings of these leaders, and to Free Spirit Publishing for putting it all together. Because neither the publisher, Free Spirit Publishing, or Amazon.com lists the Table of Contents of this book, and the whole point of it is that it is a collection of different kinds of essays and stories by different authors, I am including it below. — February 2008 High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, CONTENTS Part 1: What's in a Number?
Part 2: Take a Number
Part 3: More Than a Number
Appendix: Resources and More Information
Book review © 2008 Jennifer Dees |
