Marylou Kelly Streznewski - Gifted Grownups

For Grasshopper and for my sister, too late.

If you think that gifted children are a misunderstood minority in American society, try looking up "gifted adult" in a good library; but do so only if you enjoy watching librarians twirl. I have written, as far as I can tell, the only book by and about gifted grownups that is intended for a general audience. It includes the children, but the focus is on you, the adult. How you read it will depend on who you are.

If you already know that being gifted is your special blessing/ burden in life, or if you have wondered about the strange reactions other people have to things that seem perfectly ordinary to you, you may laugh a lot in the coming pages-recognition laughter. Hopefully, if you see yourself in the mirror of these interviews, you will find practical help in negotiating the maze of this world.

This book is also designed for people who are reacting to, and interacting with, gifted people in their daily lives, either personally or on the job: the construction worker whose girlfriend scares him when she uses big words; the parent with a high school education who is trying to raise a child with a 160 IQ and jokes that the genes must have come from the milkman; the employer who wonders why that bright young worker just quit; the sincere teacher who doesn't understand that the "pest" in her classroom may be desperately trying to tell her something.

Gifted Grownups began with me, as an outspoken advocate for a gifted program in our senior high school. I was a mature woman, mother of four bright adolescents, a writer, an educator with years of experience behind me, and I was frustrated. I could not get others to see what was obvious to me: that some of the students in my advanced placement English class needed special help. Year after year, a significant number of them arrived in my class at the end of a long road fogged with what they called boredom. They complained of inability to concentrate, lack of motivation, feelings of failure, and were obviously wasting a great deal of talent. The decision to write about this problem was made when I realized that many of these young people were managing to achieve reasonable enough grades to keep their parents and other teachers happily unaware that anything could be wrong. Was the damage and waste I saw a temporary phenomenon of adolescence? Would my talented charges "bloom" in college the way all the adults assumed they would?

Specific research on the gifted has concentrated almost exclusively on educational development and how parents and teachers can help children in schools. What could gifted adults tell me about the world that awaited my gifted students? The complexities of adult life in the twenty-first century would certainly stimulate, but would it nurture them? Would society have the benefit of their many abilities?

I began to look around me, asking about what happens when smart kids grow up to be gifted adults. Within a two-week period I had, literally, the same conversation with three very bright people who described lack of stimulation in their work and feelings of isolation and loneliness because, "There is no one to talk to-no one reads the same weird books I do!" Common enough problems to hear from gifted kids, but the ages of these three were 17, 55, and 79! Any book about gifted people could not stop at high school graduation. A smart kid becomes a gifted grownup.

The research problem I set myself was based on the following questions: (1) If I were to speak to a broad cross-section of gifted adults, would they say the same things I had been hearing from my students? (2) If I were to choose those adults according to the informal criteria my own observations had developed for spotting gifted students in the classroom-speed, sensitivity, complexity and sophistication of thought, energy, and humor-would I turn up high IQs, people who were in fact smart kids grown up? (3) If their problems as students remained the same when they became adults, what did that imply about society's understanding of how it is possible to waste one of our most precious resources? (4) What could be done to change things? To answer these questions, I decided to take the academic knowledge of experts in the fields of human learning and gifted studies and interweave it with the experiences of those I interviewed. Thus, the major portion of this book presents the voices of real people talking about their lives.

In all, I interviewed one hundred gifted grownups from 18 to 90. They were diversified by sex, family background, education, occupation, geographic location, ethnic origin, social class, and race. The first forty were selected by my perception of the personal characteristics I had used to spot gifted students over the years. These were such qualities as mental speed, sophistication of thought processes, sensitivity, drive, and sense of humor. My purpose was to educate the public about ways in which they could tentatively identify gifted persons (including themselves). If my thesis were correct, that such informal identification by friends, parents, lovers, teachers, and employers is both possible and necessary, then statistical measures such as IQ would not be helpful in choosing the interviewees.

Some of the remaining sixty people were recommended by professionals who knew about the project. The interviews for Chapter 8 were arranged by criminal justice professionals. Many came from the interview subjects themselves, who passed me on to a college roommate, a colleague's husband, or the landlord's niece. Some contacts were made by mentioning the book on a computer network.

The volunteers were given a set of index cards that contained statements from gifted students, quotes from the literature, and my own observations and questions. These cards covered topics such as selfimage, family life, education, jobs, dating, marriages, metaphysical experiences, and obligations to society. The gifted grownups were asked to respond only to those cards that interested them; thus, threatening questions were avoided. Some responded to over one hundred cards (the set contained 104); others only to ten. However, almost all of them talked for a two- to three-hour period.

What emerged from the hundreds of hours in which these grown-up smart kids talked about their lives? I found people who had indeed been part of gifted programs, or who had operated like gifted children-in both positive and negative ways. In all cases, they had some sense of themselves as "different" at an early age. Where IQs were known, they fell in the range appropriate for giftedness. What they reported was consistent with what the research on children says about the problems and pleasures of being smarter than 95% of the population. They revealed that the process of managing a high-powered brain/mind can create difficulties in school, work, and society, and can make finding friends and partners a challenge. However seeing the complex relationships between things and always questing for more stimulation, more information can make for a rich and rewarding life.