August 4, 2004
Mother, I Come Bearing a Gift. I'll Give You a Hint: It's in my Diaper and It's Not a Toaster
(That quotation is from Family Guy, specifically Stewie)
I just received an e-mail from my pre-major advisor/STRIDE professor; it turns out she just received funding for a pilot program to look at how parenting and family variables affect perfectionism in children. I sent her back an e-mail telling her how excited I was to work on the research and also explaining the root of my interest:
I'm guessing you probably know next to nothing about me, so maybe it would help if I told you a little about my background and how it influenced me to want to select this project (feel free to skim, I tend to be loquacious when storytelling). I've been in gifted programs since the second grade, when they were first available to me. I always enjoyed the programs themselves, but not necessarily how they were set up with my other classes. At my elementary school the gifted kids would leave class for E.P.P., the Extended Projects Program; we had E.P.P. Language and E.P.P. Math; sometimes we left regular Math class for E.P.P. Math, but many times we left during spelling or some other class not related to our area of "expertise." In some cases we simply had double the workload of the other chlidren, and maybe this is where the first seeds of perfectionism were planted.
I don't consider myself to be a perfectionist, but others have disagreed. In my freshman year drawing class we were assigned a self-portrait, but it had to be figurative rather than a simple reproduction of our faces. After talking to my instructor about myself and the project, she started telling me things like "You know not everyone tries to get straight A's", etc. Then she ran out to her car to give me an article on perfectionism and its pitfalls.
I didn't really think about it anymore after the project ended until my junior year in high school, when budget cuts threatened the gifted program. Convinced that the program helped me tremendously, I worked on articles for my school newspaper advocating for the program or simply covering the concerns of other gifted parents; I read all I could about gifted education, its positive and negative aspects. I attended every school board meeting and public forum discussing the issue; in the end the gifted program remained intact, the issue had mostly been raised to rally support for a new levy.
Still interested in the issue, I continued to research it further for my high school Speech class. Before giving my speech advocating for gifted education, I arranged for my teacher to give my class a pop quiz of repetitive, easy questions with a time limit and partners to simulate (as accurately as I could) how gifted students feel in many normal classrooms: frustrated with busy work and slowed down by group members.
Connecting gifted education to perfectionism, I think many gifted children can be perfectionists; I do not know if it is something born in them or if it is something that parents set as an expectation upon learning that their child is gifted. One of the most interesting pieces of information I found when researching the topic discussed how the label "gifted" bears a responsibility to help others in ways that are often unfair, especially for young children; some people do not even hesitate to assign this burden to children, thinking that the "gifted" child should not look a gift horse in the mouth by not stretching their talents as far as they can go.