Lesson Four: Using Adversity

It’s not unusual for gifted kids to show unusually intense emotional reactions to things – both highs and lows. (Think Anne of Green Gables and her “depths of despair.”) There’s even a theory, developed by Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski, that explains this phenomenon in some depth. So it is important for these young people (and all young people) to develop skills that allow them to be successful in navigating their own emotions. With this in mind, I picked “Using Adversity” as the next lesson for my students.

I wanted to work on two major things in this lesson: recognizing emotions in ourselves and others, and responding to these emotions in productive ways. For the first concept, we began by demonstrating, in pantomime, a variety of emotions. Students looked at each other and tried to guess emotions from others’ faces. The younger students especially found this a lot of fun. We then brainstormed a list of emotions that you could have, from anger and frustration to surprise and delight. Each student then created his or her own “I feel” board. They drew pictures for a number of emotions, and then cut them out and pasted them on a piece of posterboard, with the name of the emotion underneath. They then cut out a frame and labeled it “I Feel…” – reminiscent of those happy-face posters you can find and purchase. Students chose their current feeling and discussed the reasons that they felt this way. Last year I did a similar activity, but with an “emotion barometer,” in which students listed a variety of emotions on a card, decorated the card, and then used a paper clip to identify their current emotion. I really think that it is important for students to be able to recognize and articulate their feelings to use them effectively, and this activity is good practice. It also helps improve vocabulary and move them beyond “happy,” “sad,” and “mad” to greater precision in their description of their own emotions.

For the second segment of this lesson, I moved to stories. I began with a story of a time that I felt a strong emotion because of a circumstance, and discussed a few possible ways that I could have reacted to this emotion. I then invited students to share their own stories of feelings. They had many stories of feeling excited, or nervous, or angry, or any number of other emotions. They shared the reasons for their feelings and what they did with these feelings. As we listened to more and more stories, I guided students to develop some generalizations: First, there is generally a situation, something that we often have little control over, that encourages a particular emotion, which we also rarely have a great deal of control over. These emotions just come, and they are in themselves value-neutral. It isn’t good or bad to be angry and someone because he pushed you in the lunch line – it’s just the way that you feel. But from an emotion comes a response, and that is something that we do have control over. We drew this out as a diagram and discussed how their stories and mine fit into this diagram: situation--emotion--response.

I shared some passages from The Art of Learning at this point, including bits about the Russian chess competitors and the story of the championship in Taiwan at the end of the book. We discussed how these stories, too, fit into our diagram. There is a situation, a natural emotion, and a variety of choices for a response. We talked about the various consequences that can come from different responses, both positive and negative, and then students listened to the online audio clip about “Using Adversity.” I finished the lesson by asking students to think about a particular situation that frequently brings a particular emotion for them. They wrote in a journal about this situation and emotion, and several possible responses, imagining consequences that might follow each response on their part.

I have continued to use the information from this lesson with my students, encouraging them to identify their feelings periodically and to brainstorm possible responses to various emotions. One recent brainstorm about responses to anger included everything from “exercise” to “blow up Pluto” (we did discuss possible negative consequences, as well as the specialized equipment that would be required for that last one!). Hopefully, as we continue to discuss these ideas, students will be more able to use their emotions for their own good, rather than be controlled by them and wind up in situations that they’d rather avoid.

Lesson Three: Investing in Loss

Perfectionism is, unfortunately, commonly associated with giftedness. It is difficult for smart kids, who have consistently been successful with relatively little effort, to avoid the association that smart equals perfect. This becomes even worse when they develop this idea further, that smart equals perfect without obvious effort. If young people consistently perform perfectly without struggle, they often develop a lack of perseverance; if they can’t do something well when they first decide to try, they’d rather not do it at all. What’s worse, self-confidence is developed through persevering at tasks that are difficult, and eventually succeeding at them. When these children don’t have the opportunity to do this, the students that seem as if they should have the greatest academic self-confidence may in fact have the least. They have simply had no opportunity to develop the understanding that “investing in loss” is necessary to ultimate success at most worthwhile endeavors.

With this idea in mind, this lesson began with an economics lesson. I explained the concept of “investments” to my students. We considered the growth patterns of various investments. I also brought in a piggy bank, and we discussed how savings accounts work. All of these simple economics ideas focused on the idea that you must put something in, generally over a period of time, in order to get something out. Your “rate of return” is dependent on a number of factors, including the amount that you put in and the time that passes over the course of the investment. Line graphs allow students to see these factors, and how they affect the course of the investments.

Using simple economics as a springboard, it is easy to introduce the concept of investment in loss. When students “fail,” they are making an investment. They must “put in” effort and time in order to “take out” new skills and expertise, and failures – losses – can be more effective in teaching than successes, especially those that come without effort. I shared with my students the fact that I still remember the correct spelling of “mayonnaise,” the word that I incorrectly spelled at a district spelling bee in the 7th grade. These “investments” lead to greater skills and greater success later on.

My students were excited to continue the lesson by sharing their own experiences with things that they have learned through loss. They all have stories to share: losing a Tae Kwon Do match, making a mistake at a dance recital, doing poorly on an exam; by considering these temporary failures as investments in the development of new skills, it is easier for my students to see mistakes in a positive light.

I concluded the lesson with a group activity, in which we developed a “Great Mistakes” poster. On this poster I shared some of my own “great mistakes,” my own investments in loss. I also shared a few famous investments in loss, such as Edison’s thousands of attempts to find an effective filament for his light bulb. In his words (approximately): “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.” Students then selected their own “great mistakes,” or “investments in loss” to add to the poster. We hung this on our wall to refer and add to as the year continued.

Lesson Two: Growth Requires Vulnerability

This lesson began with a short video of a hermit crab changing shells. The students watched as the hermit crab quickly made the leap from one shell to another, and then we discussed what they had witnessed. Even my youngest students understood the significance of the quick transition; because the hermit crab is most vulnerable when it is outside its shell, it makes these changes quickly to minimize the time that it leaves itself open to attack. Then I posed the question: If leaving its shell makes it vulnerable, why does the hermit crab do this? We discussed the fact that, if the crab were to stay in the same shell, it could never grow. The hermit crab must make itself vulnerable in order to grow.

Following our hermit crab talk, it was easy to shift the direction of the discussion to the relevance of this metaphor to our own lives. I told my students the story of my first ballroom dance class, admitting to them that I felt frightened and embarrassed when, on the first day, I realized that I was easily the worst student in the class. Everyone seemed to master the steps more quickly than I did! When I returned home, I was tempted to drop the class. It would have been easy not to return. I could have gone back to the things that I felt comfortable with, such as reading and writing, and left this art to those that (I supposed) were born with the natural talent to be successful. However, I really wanted to learn this skill, so I didn’t give up. Instead, I found the best dancer in the class and asked him if he would be willing to partner with me – under his tutelage, I often felt clumsy and slow, but I learned. Even if something took me 50 tries to master, while it only took someone else 5 tries, I put in the necessary time and effort. Four years later, after many more classes, I was no longer the worst dancer in the room. In order to grow, I had to make myself vulnerable. There were no shortcuts. Growth only came when I was willing to step outside of my comfort zone and take on someone that was outside my current level of ability.

After I shared my story of feeling like a shell-less hermit crab, my students were eager to share their own stories. Tae kwon do, skiing, ballet, long division, interpreting poetry … they each described times when they had felt as vulnerable as the hermit crab making the jump to a larger shell. We discussed the kind of self-talk that can naturally follow in these experiences: “Wow, I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was” or “I’m just bad at this, there’s no hope for me.” We brainstormed a list of things we could tell ourselves to change this negative self talk. Class favorites included “I guess I’m changing shells, and that’s a good thing!” or “If I were lifting weights, I’d have to “max out” to make any growth. I guess I’m “maxing out” my brain!” Now, I often remind students that we need to take opportunities to change our shells – stepping out of our comfort zones and going beyond our current abilities in order to grow. Even more powerful, I have noticed students reminding one another of the same thing. Recently, I watched one of my young students start to cry because he was struggling with a difficult math problem. Another student put her arm around him and said, “It’s okay – you’re just a hermit crab changing shells.”

The video that I used in lesson two is available here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jZe_VGLRYI

Lesson One: Two Theories of Intelligence

I introduced my first lesson from The Art of Learning. After a lot of thought, I decided to introduce the principle of incremental vs. entity theories of intelligence first. I felt that this would be a good foundational principle to build upon – unfortunately, many of my students develop an intense fear of making a mistake, or even appearing to work at something, because they wrongly equate intelligence with ease – if they have to work at something, they’d rather not do it, because then people might see them working hard and decide that they’re really not as smart as they originally thought. They end up going into difficult tasks, far too often, with a performance rather than a learning mentality – they want people to see them do well, rather than taking pleasure in the learning of a new skill, which they might not excel at right away. So I set out to teach these two theories of intelligence to my students. I knew that I needed to make this idea fairly concrete. While their abstract thinking skills are advanced for their age, they still need to link abstract ideas with concrete images.

The lesson began with a discussion. I asked students what they told themselves when they did well on a test or assignment, and what they told themselves when they did poorly. My students are familiar with the concept of self-talk – it’s something we discuss regularly. We discussed the different things that you might tell yourself: “I must be really smart!” vs. “I worked hard and it shows!” or “I’m dumb at math.” vs. “I guess I didn’t study very hard for this test. I’ll have to work harder next time.” After our brief discussion, I shared an object lesson with my students, using a wooden dowel to represent fixed intelligence and a ball of Play-Doh to represent malleable, incremental intelligence. We discussed the difference between these two items, and then I used them as a metaphor for the two ideas of intelligence. The malleable Play-Doh is like malleable intelligence – it can be shaped and molded into whatever task you need it for. On the other hand, the wooden dowel is fixed – it can’t be changed. And if a person with this fixed idea of intelligence makes a mistake (here I broke the dowel into two pieces) it is difficult to recover from it. It feels like the intelligence that you had before wasn’t real – you just had less intelligence than you thought you had (showing one half of the dowel, while putting the other half to the side). It doesn’t take too long before you’re left with a tiny little piece of “intelligence” (breaking the dowel a few more times), and you don’t feel confident to try anything new. On the other hand (breaking the Play-Doh and then putting in back together, molding it into a new shape) the malleable intelligence can take a hit when you make a mistake or fail at something, and bounce right back. In fact, you can easily add to it (here I took another container of Play-Doh and molded the two together into a bigger ball) if you need to, by working hard at something and learning something new. Interestingly enough, one of my students told me at this point that she thought she had the fixed view of intelligence, but that she could see why the “Play-Doh intelligence” was better, and that she thought she’d work on changing her perspective through some different self-talk.

After the object lesson, I shared a story with my students about something that I was unusually bad at – ballroom dancing – but that I stuck with until, while not about to win any national titles, I am definitely better than the average person. It was something outside of my ability, but that I developed ability for through effort, time, and the willingness to persevere. I invited students to share their own stories of persevering at something difficult. They had a lot to share.

With my older elementary students, I then shared some of the research that shows that students who have an incremental theory of intelligence actually do better in school over the long term, so they could hear about some real-life applications of this theory. I finished up the lesson by giving each student a sheet of paper on which I’d copied a clip-art style picture of a brain working out with weights. Silly, but I wanted to reinforce the lesson. I told them that the brain, while not a muscle, is like a muscle, and its capacity can be increased by working it, just like our capacity to run fast or lift a heavy weight is increased through physical effort. We discussed ways to increase the brain’s capacity, and I asked each student to think of something that he or she is currently not good at, but would like to become proficient at. They wrote these down on the papers that I gave them, along with a way that they could become good at this thing – increasing their ability in an area where it is currently weak. They put these papers in a place where they would see them regularly to remind themselves of this lesson.

Why teach The Art of Learning?

As I read and re-read passages from The Art of Learning, I recognized the potential of many of the ideas in this book to help my students (and me) to be successful. I teach gifted students in a rural Wyoming town, and I have truly brilliant students. But as smart as they are, some of them struggle even to get passing grades. The statistics surrounding gifted students are unfortunate - for example, research shows that as many as 20-25% of students who drop out of high school score in the gifted range on tests of ability. When I work with my youngest students, I generally find kids who are ecstatic about learning, even if it isn’t about the things that I plan to teach. They have a million questions and dozens of ideas to contribute to every discussion. But as they get older, they too often seem to lose faith in the school system – they develop a cynicism about jumping through hoops to get passing grades rather than actually learning about the things that they care about, or they develop crippling perfectionism that prevents them from taking any classes in which they don’t actually know all of the material already for fear that they will lose their identity as the smartest, or they choose to do mediocre work out of a desire to fit in or the long-term discovery that mediocre is all that they really need to do. Every day, as I approach my job, I am floored by the potential of my students and the overwhelming responsibility I feel to help them reach it, when faced with other, equally bright students who have not. Every day I ask myself if what I am doing for them is actually beneficial – if I am getting the right messages across. Reading The Art of Learning, I felt that many of its ideas are the very ones that I am trying to teach my students. This was, in some ways, reassuring. With the book in mind, I am setting out to teach these ideas to elementary students – gifted learners in grades kindergarten through 5 – in hopes that I can help them to reach for the stars. I know that they can get there.