by Ryan Kok

Created on: April 24, 2009

The concept of "gifted learners" has always troubled me. It's not the nature of the concept so much as it is the general public's understanding of what it means to actually be a gifted learner. For most schools with gifted programs, the term "gifted" is a direct reference to IQ or Intelligence Quotient. Schools are not measuring work ethic. They are not measuring knowledge. They are measuring IQ, which is a measurement of cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is essentially the processing power of the human brain. It includes everything from memory, spacial recognition, recollection and transfer of knowledge, processing speed, and any other abilities that are directly related to brain function. And this is where the problem of public perception lies. The simple fact that a person has a high IQ tells you nothing of how that person actually learns (aural/oral, visual, tactile/kinesthetic, emotional), and it gives you no details as to which cognitive abilities might be this person's strengths...or weaknesses.

To give you a good example of what I am talking about, you need to look no further than your's truly. The first two people from my class to be placed into my elementary school's gifted program were myself and my best friend Jim. We were eight years old at the time and we were excelling in all facets of school. We were particularly both very skilled at math. I have fond memories of our competitions to be the fastest at multiplications tables, or when our teacher would ask us to help out the other students in the class with long division. But a very interesting thing happened toward the end of junior high school. I started struggling with math. In 8th grade math, I actually should have failed out of the course, but my teacher liked me enough to give me a C. Throughout all of high school I was consistently a B or C student in math whereas Jim was an absolute genius. By the time we graduated, Jim had 12 college credits worth of math courses and he had a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT. In college, I took a Calculus course and ended up dropping out before I failed. I realize now that the reason for this discrepancy is because although we are both bright individuals, we share very different cognitive abilities.

I see very well. Not with my eyes, but with my brain. I can see and manipulate shapes in my head. I find patterns in everything. I am very good at reading expressions on people's faces. And I can do complex arithmetic in my head. This is the main

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