Track 10

Unit 2

Child psychology

The genius within

Pages 16 and 17

Listen for main ideas and listen for details

Let me begin by asking you to think about someone you believe is exceptionally talented, someone you were in school with or someone in your own family. Okay have you thought of someone?

Now my question to you is how did that person become so talented? Were they born that way? Were they fast learner? Did they seem to love learning? Were they unusually alerts and curious?

My guess is that your answer to most of these questions is, yes. Well, today I’d like to talk about children who are very talented, children often referred to as gifted. And I’ll talk about three points concerning this topic. First I’ll explain how these gifted children identified. Second I’ll talk about some of the personality characteristics of these children. Third I’ll talk about how these gifted children approach learning. They have very good learning strategies that all of us can learn to use.

All right, let’s move on to the first point. Now how would you identify a gifted child? Think of when you were in elementary school or high school. I’m sure that you knew some students who exited exceptional talents. Maybe they were particularly good at sports, mathematics or arts. They were easy to notice, right? Well, see if these ideas make sense to you.

First, giftedness is partly the result of untrained natural abilities. You could call this an aptitude for something. So when we see a very young child who shows above average athletic ability, for example, we often conclude that the child has an innate ability for sports.

Now I just said above average ability and that’s the second thing that we notice, the quality. The child’s performance is special because it’s surprisingly good, particularly when we consider the child’s age. For instance, a six-year-old who could play Mozart Sonata in D major, would be considered gifted.

The third way we can identify children is by the speed at which they learn. They generally learn faster, make fewer mistakes, make the same mistake fewer times and need less practice than other children. Some psychologists believe that this third point, speed of learning, is perhaps the best indicator that a child has special abilities.

Now I’d like to highlight some personality characteristics of gifted children. Of course, gifted children have many types of personalities. So what I’m going to describe here are characteristics that are often but not always found in gifted children.

For one, gifted children are often very intense. When they do something, especially something they enjoy, they devote all their energy and determination to it. They can concentrate for a very long time.

Secondly, they tend to have high energy levels. When they are young, they are constantly moving. And this degree of physical energies often match by a similar amount of mental and emotional energy. Their mines are always in motion, always thinking, always looking for the next interesting puzzle to solve.

A final predominant characteristic is that they are often idealistic about the world, the people they know and their environments. They can be perfectionists, specially where their own work is concerned.

Okay, now let’s look at some of the ways that gifted children approach learning something, practical strategies that you and I can try. The first approach is related to motivation. Gifted children appear to be intensely curious about any and every topic. They typically don’t care whether the knowledge or skill is useful or not.

A second trait is that they are observant and they notice many details about things. This allows them to thoroughly understand what ever they are studying and to notice any inconsistencies.

Finally, they want to know the inner workings of things. So they are very interested in causes and effects. In other words, they want to know the underlying principles and use those principles for making generalizations and predictions about the thing they are studying. I might also add here that they enjoy using their imagination.

Now, let’s pause a moment to think of what I’ve just said here about approaches to learning. Gifted children are motivated, they are alert and observant. They concentrate intensely. They try to understand cause and effect relationships and they make an effort to think creatively. How well could you and I learned to do something if we approached it like I just described. My guess is that we could do pretty well.