Will, Emma (SEN)
From:	Riggs [clues@dovenetq.net.au]
Sent:	Wednesday, 7 March 2001 9:58 AM
To:	eet.sen@aph.gov.au
Subject:	Enquiry into Gifted Children's Education
I hereby submit my contribution to your enquiry, in the form of the script
of a talk given on ABC radio in December. This has had a considerable
amount of comment and has obviously rung bells for a range of very
different people who saw what one caller called 'his life experience' in
what I had to say.
	After considerable experience, both personal and professional, I believe
that the Gifted Learning Disabled child is the most disadvantaged of them
all. Brain research has shown us that, in many cases, the factors that add
up to brilliance may also add up to incompetence in some of the very basic
areas of learning. As one mother said to me last week, 'he seems blind to
simplicity'. It can make life very difficult for them in school (as
Einstein found). Therefore, it follows that a surprising proportion of
Gifted Children are likely to be also Learning Disabled.
	As things stand at the moment, all sorts of screening procedures can
remove these children into slow stream classes for remediation - I spoke to
another mother the other day who told me her son is in the seventh group
out of seven at his school. Imagine what that does to an intelligent child.
	There is no real quick fix remediation of the range of focus and
memorising problems that make life so difficult for them and their
teachers. It is unpardonable to remove them into dumbed down streams.
	Instead, they must be taught as the intelligent people they are, given
plenty of challenge and plenty of opportunity to follow their areas of
interest within a general framework of what is considered 'education' - the
curriculum.
	What is needed is that 
	1. these children should not be screened out and dumbed down
	2. 'Einstein friendly' classrooms should be the norm for all (the research
is there to give plenty of 		guidelines)
	3. Spelling and other low-level areas of difficulty (which are just blips
on the screen of human 		intellect) should not be regarded as markers to
intelligence and capability
	4. Teaching and testing procedures should make provision for these
disabilities, allowing special 		assistance in exactly the same way as for
a physical disability (which in a neurological 		sense they are)
	What can a federal government do? Set flexible but mandatory guidelines to
ensure proper provision. Provide some seeding funding. 
	This is not just a matter of equity, not just a matter of humanity,
Australia's future as a clever country depends on proper provision for its
clever children.
	I would be glad to make myself available to you if there is a chance to
take this further.
		With respect and optimism,
			Jennifer Riggs - clues, 3 Gem Rd, Kenmore 4069    07 3378 3873
					clues@ucaqld.com.au

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The Einstein Factor 

Broadcast Sunday 17 December 2000  
with Robyn Williams 

Summary:

Some very gifted children are often condemned as failures in the school system because they learn in a different way to the majority of kids.

Transcript:

Robyn Williams: ‘You will never amount to anything.’ My school teachers implied that to me on many an occasion. One schoolmaster also said those words to another rather distracted lad called Albert when he attended classes in Munich. Fortunately Albert Einstein was encouraged by his family, and they still had money, before hard times fell, to let him have another go at another school.

Now I’m not comparing myself for a minute to the great physicist who transformed the 20th century, but you may like to compare yourself to him, or maybe a child you know. Could it be that we don’t understand those little lateral thinkers, and condemn them to be failures, when they should in fact, be showing exceptional promise.

Jennifer Riggs thinks so, and she should know.

Jennifer Riggs: I met a little boy the other day whose mind ponders problems like: how come if you drop a piece of paper end on, it falls so much faster than if you drop it flat? He’s six. An Einstein in the making, you might think.

Well, yes and no.

His teachers are quite concerned about this child. He is immature, they say, and should be kept down in Year 1. He is restless and should be on Ritalin.

This is The Einstein Factor at work.

The very things that made Einstein a scientific genius made him a less than perfect pupil when it came to learning by rote or even doing simple arithmetic. He barely survived his education. He was told he was an insult to the school, to remove himself, which he did, and went for an educational walkabout in his teens, a drop-out. He was only saved by family friends; he was fortunate in his mentors, who introduced him to popular sciences and to the philosophers, who hauled him back to school and who spoon-fed him before exams. He was also fortunate in the new school, which was ‘progressive’, with a lot of hands-on learning.

What would happen to him today, I wonder.

He might be labelled ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, and put on medication. He might be labelled ‘at risk’ quite early on and filtered out by various means, with the very best intentions, of course. These children can look like slow learners so they are sidestreamed; their whole education dumbed down, chances of excellence gone for good. What a waste!

We need to look at these children much more carefully in the light of recent learning research.

Working with bright underachievers, it dawned on me that they are often unmistakably gifted, not in spite of their dyslexia-type difficulties, but because of them. In fact, neurologist Norman Geschwind described what he called a ‘pathology of superiority’, that is, brains that are wired for lateral thinking, for the big picture, for visual imagination and for abstract thought, but not for the 3Rs. Recent analysis of Einstein’s brain bears this out.

When we honour Einstein, we do acknowledge that spelling and number competence are not more important than insight and vision but when we look at seedling Einsteins in school today, what do we see?

Do we see lateral thinking or do we see distractibility? Strong visual/spatial intelligence, or an inability to focus on words? High mathematical potential, or inability to do sums? Do we totally misread these children?

Instead of weeding them out as slow learners, it might make a lot more sense to promote them into special programs designed to optimise their strengths while at the same time giving them a chance to catch up on some of their weaknesses through their strengths and not through endless repetition of what doesn’t work for them.

Let me tell you about another small boy, not particular popular with the teachers, for just the same reasons that Einstein was not popular with his. He is fascinated by the drama of meteorology and can read and spell all those difficult weather words, and precious little else. He can hardly remember where he left his hat, but he can remember that on Wednesday lunch hour he can come and talk meteorology, and he can get himself up from the sand-pit to do it.

Fortunately his family supports his enthusiasm and provides resources to grow on. But, what if the school could use these children’s passions as a springboard to further learning?

Einstein speaks of ‘loving interest’ and ‘desire for truth’ and ‘that divine curiosity which every healthy child possesses but which is so often weakened early’. ‘For a school … to work with fear, force and artificial authority’, he says, ‘destroys … the sincerity and the self-confidence of the pupil.’

For Einstein and children like him, confidence is an early casualty. Our education systems are (still, in spite of all the research) set up for learning by listening. Fine for some, but Einstein and many others are programmed differently. Their ‘pathology of superiority’ is like a dyslexia, that learns with pictures and ideas and actions, rather than with words and symbols. Because they are not sequential thinkers, they crave the overview before the detail. Because their auditory processing is weak, they are not good at listening or rote learning. There is nothing wrong with their ears, it’s just that for neurological reasons, being talked at sends them into a daze.

When Einstein warned against ‘dead knowledge’ and ‘empty words’ he knew well that ideas get buried in terminology and that much of what is said in the classroom never even reaches the mind.

To help him concentrate, Einstein used to pace up and down twiddling a lock of his hair; a tycoon might doodle or fiddle with executive toys. These children too seem to know instinctively that they need to move to keep their brains alive, to concentrate, and they can easily be helped to find teacher-friendly ways to fidget.

Young Albert was so late in learning to speak that his parents sought medical advice about it. When he did start to talk, he softly echoed all his own words right up to the age of seven. Even at nine he was by no means fluent. Enough to make anyone worry. No-one realised it was a problem of auditory focus.

By his teens his learning was so poor that his teacher burst out with the prediction that he would never amount to anything. It may be laughable now, but it must have been devastating at the time. There was no-one to comfort him by saying ‘You’re very far from dumb, Albert, your brain’s just wired differently. You have it in you to be a great lateral thinker and dream up all sorts of wonderful new ideas. You learn best by seeing and doing.’

His life proved it. When he was not much more than a toddler, his mother was so determined that he should be self-reliant that she set him to find his way home through city streets; he managed it very well.

He played with blocks almost obsessively and constructed card houses up to 14 stories, which must have led him naturally into geometric understanding. He was so fascinated when his uncle told him about Pythagoras that he painstakingly developed his own proof. He fell in love with a book of Euclid when he was twelve: visual/spatial intelligence at work. But he still couldn’t do his sums.

At the very end of his life Einstein recalled the awakening of wonder when his father gave him a magnetic compass to play with at the age of 4 or 5. Here was a needle, isolated and unreachable, totally enclosed, yet caught in the grip of an invisible urge that made it strive towards the north. ‘This experience made a deep and abiding impression on me,’ he said.

His teachers never saw this wonderment and persistence. They never saw this visual/spatial brilliance. They saw only his ineptitude.

But is it reasonable to extrapolate from the great Einstein to children in school today? I believe it is not only valid but necessary, particularly when we consider how close Einstein came to academic extinction.

I’ve lost count of the great creative thinkers who had difficulties of this kind in school. Can it be chance that the mathematical/physical line right back to Newton shows it? Poincare, the acknowledged genius, averaged out as an imbecile on the Binet IQ test, brilliant in some areas but dragged down by abysmal scores in others. Very typical of these children. Lucky for him, he was an honoured scientist at that time, not a schoolchild! Both Maxwell and Faraday are on record as having had such problems and even Newton was said to be ‘inattentive’ and ‘not bookish’, which probably amounts to the same thing. Can this be chance? Is it not more likely that the brilliance of their abstract visual imagination, their capacity to scent out the beauty and order in seeming chaos, and their sheer inventiveness all came at a price?

Do the stereotypes of the absent-minded professor or the ‘mad’ scientist come out of thin air? Much more likely they are derogatory labels for something frequently observed but not understood. The word ‘scatterbrain’ exactly describes these many children; it’s a word charged with meaning: Scatterbrain.

Einstein had plenty to say about education. From bitter experience, from the heart as always, and from his strong sense of altruism. It behoves us to take note, given that the highest outcome aspiration of any teacher or any school might be to nurture a future Nobel Prize winner.

He called for active learning: ‘pleasure in … artist-like workmanship …’

for enquiry: ‘the beauty of the mysterious’

for ‘the childlike inclination for play’

for ‘independent thinking and judgment’ and

for ‘a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good’

Even though we might not have quite his turn of phrase, we’d go along with most of that, but how?

The hands-on learning environment, a lab-cum-studio-cum-library-cum-museum-cum-workshop is there in educational theory but mostly honoured in the breach. Einstein’s concept of the facilitator who is ‘given extensive liberty in selection of material and method’ and who has ‘grown up in such schools’ is a bit of a rosy dream.

That workshop style of learning which can give scope to the whole range of learning styles fulfils the recommendations, but can teachers be expected to transform themselves and school systems overnight? Many of them are hanging onto the life-raft with bleeding fingers as it is. Every few weeks schools are called upon to address this or that social problem. They are not able to do more until they are helped to learn by experience that Einstein-friendly programs can be add in, rather than add on. This they can, most triumphantly.

So much for the optimism, but supposing, just supposing that our wondrously successful screening procedures weed out all our original thinkers of the future, what then? How many are we losing already? Can we come up with new ways to nurture seedling Einsteins?

There’s a postscript to all this: just last night I heard of a school, desperate to lift its ratings, that is starting an extension science course in Year 10. Einstein would not meet the enrolment criteria nor would the course meet his criteria; it was described to me as ‘higher and drier’. Is this the way to inspire science visionaries?

Robyn Williams: Well I think you can guess the answer to that question.

Jennifer Riggs in Brisbane where she works with unusually talented children.

And our next presenter of Ockham’s Razor will be, possibly, the most unusual we’ve had in over 16 years of this program. He’s not only blind, which makes reading difficult, he all but lost his voice in a factory accident.

Zoltan Torey will look sceptically at computers as thinkers next week. I’m Robyn Williams.

Guests: 

Jennifer Riggs
Worker with unusually talented children,
Brisbane, Queensland,