The Meaning of Gifted

A few weeks ago, I went for my International Baccalaureate interview. Upon my meeting with Mr. Usprech, the IB coordinator at Victoria Park Collegiate Institute, one of the first questions he asked me was "What is the meaning of 'gifted'?" Technically speaking, a child (or adult as well, I would assume) is classified as 'gifted' if they score in the top two percentile of people in their age range on a professionally assessed psychology test. Of course, I didn't tell him that. I gave him my view mixed with what teachers say. Contrary to what many people think, the most important thing about a gifted student is not that they are 'smart', but that they think differently. As vague and unhelpful this may be, it's the truth and I can't really describe it in any other way. As gifted students, I guess we make different connections with the world to help us understand things and we are quite critical of facts, asking things like "But what if we were to add this, or substitute this instead?"

At the beginning of grade eight, our science and homeroom teacher (Mrs. P, for the sake of privacy) gave us a science pop quiz which was supposed to be so easy that it was "common sense." I don't actually remember any of the questions on the test, but everyone found them vague. We asked so many questions that poor Mrs. P started replying with "Just answer the questions! It's not hard! Please!"

An exaggerated example would be if there was this question on the test:

If you saw a homeless person on the street, would you donate to them?

Now, one would probably reply with "Yes", or "No", or "Depends on how I'm feeling". Some questions I would ask: How old are they? How much money do I have with me? Are they watching me? Am I in a hurry? Is this a trick question? How many marks is this worth? Do I need to explain my choice? Then I would probably factor in as many variables as possible in my answer.
Because our thinking is more critical, it is also more in-depth and thorough. When I look at what classmates write and what students in normal classes write, no offense, but I can see a huge gap in the quality of writing and reasoning.

BUT, just because we CAN be more rational and think harder doesn't mean we always do. As a matter of fact, we are more lazy than any other class. See, there are two grade eight gifted classes (8H and 8J). Mrs. P was the teacher of 7J last year and now she teaches 8H, and she comments that 7J was so lazy that they didn't want to bring their math textbooks home. So, this year, she scans the pages of the textbook and posts them on our class conference. (No more tired, aching backs!) From this, you can infer that we use our critical thinking skills to make our lives easier. However, some students in 8J have decided that they were too lazy to do their homework where it should be done, when it should be done, and some mornings you can spot them sitting with their heads down working in the library.

Getting back on topic, I think there were four criteria that we were assessed on. Memory, something, something, and something. (Well, I did score pretty well in memory. Kinda ironic that that was the only thing I remembered.) My test started off with blocks. Each of the six sides of cubes had a different pattern on them. Our challenge was to make the design shown in a picture as the number of blocks needed increased gradually. It doesn't sound very hard, but there are no grid lines in the picture so you can't tell how much of the picture one block takes up. After that was the "odd one out challenge." We were shown a group of images and we had to pick the odd one out and explain why. Then, it was the "making connections" challenge in which we had to find how a list of objects were related. The examiner proceeded with a vocabulary test in which he (for me it was a man) asked us to define some words that got increasingly more difficult. Next, I got the memory challenge. He gave me a string of numbers, with another number added each time and I had to recall it. I think he did that with letters and/or symbols too. Lastly, (as far as I can remember) he gave me a "decode the message" activity with a legend at the top. I had one minute to do as much of it as I could. And just to clarify: you only have to score in the top 2% in one category to be given the status of gifted. Hmmm... I wonder if you can search this stuff up online. In that case, I could have just posted a link, probably to a more thorough and interesting article. Eh.