Giftedness and Intrinsic Motivation

(Thanks to Betsy for getting me on this line of thinking and PJ for giving me somewhere to go with it.)

I first heard the term "intrinsic motivation" when I was in high school. One of our VP's had taken a liking to me and was often teaching me new vocabulary words and other little bits of grammatical information. He used the term one day to describe me in a situation where others were helping out for the reward of a free soda. I was helping out... just because. To impress? Maybe. Something to do? No reason not to? Probably a mix of all of those.

I ran across this article today that uses the term to describe gifted kids, or possibly a specific class of gifted kids. This hit home, because it fits so well with something I have had on my mind lately relating to my own "giftedness", interests and achievements throughout my school years. A question by Betsy in my last post revealed that I was not a very good math student when I was the same age as her daughter, but I had a desire to do better, so I worked at it. Eventually math became my favorite subject, and by high school I was one of the best in the school.

In fact, I've realized recently that much of my life and who I am is, in large part, due to a combination of an intrinsic desire to do better and a tendancy to take anything I do to obsessive levels, without really meaning to.

So the question that I have been pondering over is how much of aptitude in cases like this are actually aptitude, how much is motivation, and how much is a disposition that is stumbled upon because of motivation which has the potential to become aptitude. In other words, did I do better at math because I believed I was good at math? Did I do well because I did have a natural talent for some math concepts, but it was burried deep-down under the tedium of basic numbers and had to be discovered, which only happened because I was motivated to do better?

I can only speak from my own experience, so maybe someone else who has experience with gifted kids can answer my question of whether this is the way it is with all gifted kids or if there are different types or styles of giftedness. I did see other kids on my level in school that seemed to have to try a lot harder to be on that level and some who had to put even less effort into things than I did. I don't know how things were when they were little, though.

I had thought that some of those kids might be from "hot house" backgrounds, where the parents pushed them from a very young age to do better. I remember one girl in particular who always seemed to have to work much harder to stay on that same level, and she had the pushy kind of mom I could see as a hot house mother (you know those pushy moms - her speaking out would get a program shut down that everyone but her liked - not that I'm bitter or anything). However, this interesting article I read this morning indicates that hot house children tend to level off with their peers around third grade.

This explains why gifted testing is often held off until around third grade. I had been under the impression that it was because gifted traits were difficult to ascertain before then, but I find it easy to believe that educators hold of instead for the reasons listed in the article. Here is the problem with that, a problem that the article points out - if a child is truly gifted, not being allowed to learn at his own pace from the very beginning can be detrimental to his learning and natural abilities. Kim Moldofsky's son was already on the path to forced mediocrity in the first grade. What if she had waited until the prescribed third grade time to have him tested? What would this have done to him emotionally and motivationally?

Another angle to look at this at is the fact that we usually measure kids by what level they are on (ex. - he is reading on a third grade level) rather than the pace they are learning at. But the more I think about this, the more I think that maybe it would be beneficial to pay attention to the pace a child is learning at. It seems that the same child might go through stages of acceleration and slowing down in learning that are natural, whether "gifted" or not. A child may have difficulty with the current math concepts and need to take a lot of time on them, but once they overcome that, the next step may come easily. It would be important, then, to be careful with labels such as slow, gifted, good at math, not so good at math. Rather if each child could be taken through at exactly the pace he is learning at the time without labeling...

The question of how to do that in a classroom of thirty kids is even more difficult than the question of how to cater to the academic level of every child in the class. My first instinct is to answer that montessori allows each child to learn at his or her own pace, but my good friend Elsie would remind me that even montessori isn't that ideal if the teacher does not pay attention to the individual needs of each child and adapt the program accordingly. So is homeschooling the only answer if you want a system of learning tailored exactly to your child's needs? Elsie actually posed a similar question to her homeschooling readers of whether they could think of a public school ideal, something they would be willing to send their kids to intead of homeschooling them.

Even homeschooling moms struggle with the question of exactly how much they should let the child lead. I have been following several series of posts on this topic at different homeschool blogs lately. My favorites include Theresa at LaPaz home learning pondering over whether her son is an "unschooling poster child", Starry Sky Ranch's posts here and here about why "unschooling" doesn't work for them, and Elsie again about differentiating between child-led learning and child-manipulated parenting.

I realize this probably sounds like a lot of random information and thoughts that may or may not be related, but to me it is the coming together of many trains of thought that have been circling in my head for a while now. They still haven't quite come all the way together yet, but they are getting there.

There is one question that I still wonder about despite all of this. How much of this really matters in the end? Don't most of us still become productive and relatively happy adults, despite public schooling? I believe there are at least a few cases where the difficulties with the system are so great that they can cause lasting emotional and motivational damage if not dealt with. However, for most kids, is it good enough to just go through the system, as long as parents are paying attention - supplimenting education and looking out for signs that things are not all well with their child? Do we need to fix a broken system, or do we need to focus more on simply being the parents our children need us to be?