Write youIt has long been acknowledged by both the educational field and the psychological profession that the gifted personality is engineered with both intellectual and emotional complexities. Ironically, many gifted classrooms have mirrored characteristics of behavioral units, and I have facilitated several behavioral units that were filled with gifted students. The ability to analyze deeply is often accompanied by a depth in emotional response. The gift of critical thinking yields an innate justice system that forms early in these children, creating a world that is always to be experienced and evaluated. This ensures oversensitivity characterized by seemingly unwarranted fear, anger, depression, and ambition.

I know this all too well as a gifted child who grew into an educator.specializing in metacognitive and affective development. The primary problem with gifted classrooms is that their instructors are trying to meet educational objectives and measure the student's skills; however, Bloom's taxonomy of higher level questioning techniques does not address the interference of emotional needs upon the cognitive process that Maslow identified in his sociological studies. The generic teacher factories from state universities provide teachers with a classroom management model that identifies actions and consequences. This model wills not wok for the gifted child because they have already predicted the desired response from an action and have chosen that action to get that exact response. What they desperately need is not a consequence, but for the authority to understand "why".

To the gifted child, the ultimate punishment is spite. To be given a consequence with no reason or to be given a consequence for the wrong reason interrupts the flow of logic in reality and disrupts all harmony in the emotional system until it is restored by justice. Unfortunately, if the teacher does not facilitate that justice process, the student will empower themselves for their own vindication. Yet, if a teacher can dialogue with that child to promote an environment in which that justice system is monarchy and valued, then the child will always have hope that they can and will be understood. The child generally knows what is fair and will request what is fair far beyond the expectations of the teachers if they will allow that child to be a part of the development of the therapeutic decision making process.

While this will satisfy the intellectual need for the world to be fair and for the student to be understood, always allow and be mindful of the constant need for self expression. Their feelings are very real, even if not always understood. There is a healing element to the merging of the internal world with the exterior world. Their understanding of the world is far more extensive than the sum of quantitative objectives, and if the affective element is not fostered along with the intellectual function, it is possible that irrational thought can become the coping mechanism for dealing with a world of such intense, unvindicated, unquenchable emotions.
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