Years after she went through the Gifted Education Programme, CNA’s Davina Tham finds out the impact of being given great expectations at a young age.
New: You can now listen to articles.The maths and science lover went through with the GEP screening and selection because he was doing well in his studies and wanted to test himself. He didn’t expect to get in.
Their approach was to give Ayden as much information as possible and let him decide. They took him to an open house and laid out the pros and cons – the rest was up to him. The GEP used to continue into secondary school, but this stopped in 2008. Select secondary schools still run school-based gifted programmes that GEP students and students who do well in their Primary School Leaving Examination can join.
“What we are born with is not fixed. The potential depends on the environment for it to be realised and for it to be stretched,” she told me. Ms Mariya Angelova, a senior counsellor at Sofia Wellness Clinic who specialises in working with gifted children and adults, told me there is a distinct difference between being gifted and being high-achieving.
This means that gifted children, who tend to come across as highly intelligent, mature and “smart enough” to figure things out on their own, can also be perceived as not needing support in their emotional and social development.My time in the gifted programme followed the script at the start. Lower primary was easy and when the GEP offer came, there was no question I would transfer schools to take it up.
School didn’t interest him as he felt it relied on rote learning. He got full marks without studying and came to expect that he could just breeze through exams. In the past, he was showered with praise for showing natural abilities in his studies and sports. Now, he started to brush the bad grades off by telling himself he hadn’t tried.
He spent his time hanging out with friends outside, reading books in the library and most of all, playing video games. While he shared an intellectual wavelength with his classmates, he could not connect with them socially. With his parents or other friends, he felt he could not talk about how he felt.
After coasting through primary school, she relished the intellectual challenge posed by her new curriculum and her peers, yet never found it too stressful. The search for community also extends to the parents of children with high IQs, who network and find each other through Mensa. There seems to be a particular draw for youths, whose membership has risen steadily in the past three years.
“It’s more of realising not just one way to realise a kid’s potential, and it’s not just that point in time.” Dr Sum, the former MOE divisional director, noted that parents may still compare their child to others and question why one child is admitted to the GEP, but not the other. He immediately felt the weight of expectation from the school’s advanced curriculum and alumni’s achievements. “I do feel like they have that kind of messaging where … you are one of the country’s best, and you should go on to big things.”
“So I am loved as a child, I have attention and people like me, want to be with me, only if I demonstrate something or only if I can show my abilities,” she said.This inculcates a fear of disappointing teachers and parents, leaving less space for experimentation and failure. I still made it to university, at which point I realised I had been relying on membership in exclusive programmes to prop up my self-esteem for years.
At this new school, not much changed for him academically. But emotionally, he experienced “a very drastic change” as he finally found people he could connect with. His teachers were encouraging and receptive to his questions.Although he was a transfer student, his classmates made efforts to include him, and he made good friends.
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