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.