Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This November 1980 Classic looks at Baylor’s pioneering efforts to solve one of education’s challenges of how to nurture gifted children.
Gifted children are puny little things who sit off in the corner by themselves reading through glasses as thick as milk bottles and never needing any help whatsoever from the teacher. In fact, the teacher can spot her gifted students before they ever show up for the first day of class. All she has to do is look at her future students’ IQ scores.
Right?
Wrong!
In fact, if spotting the gifted were that easy or if educators could count on them to be self-motivated, there would be no need for Dr. L. V. McNamee, dean of the School of Education, to be setting up the program he began at Baylor this fall.
A Center for the Education of Gifted and Talented Students is no longer a McNamee dream, thanks to a $10,000 gift from Baylor trustee Gus Glasscock Jr. of Columbus, Texas. Long-range plans call for the establishment of a $150,000 fund to endow the operation of the center and its programs on a permanent basis.
That the special education of the gifted is an idea whose time has come can be seen by a quick look at the budget of the Federal Office of the Gifted and Talented, created by Congress in 1972. This year, the budget will almost double, rising to $6.28 million. In addition, other federal education agencies will spend another $10 million on the gifted.
(Such sums are trifling, however, compared to the $1 billion the federal government spends annually on special programs for the physically handicapped, the culturally disadvantaged or those with learning disabilities.)
With federal money flowing into the education of the gifted, why does the Baylor School of Education need to spend a dime? For one thing, Baylor is one of the leading private schools in the nation in teacher education, certifying about 500 students each year for the teaching profession. To remain a leader, Baylor must turn its attention to getting future and present teachers ready for the education of the gifted. And that is a complicated process.
Just spotting the gifted child is a difficult problem. When you add a search for the gifted and creative child, the difficulty more than doubles. That’s what Dr. Bill Lamkin, associate dean of the School of Education, said in a lecture to area teachers and parents who are enrolled in a unique colloquium offered for the first time this fall on meeting the educational needs of the gifted and talented. The colloquium, led by thirteen educators, is structured to complement the new center.
“The extremes of potential are easy to identify,” Dr. Lamkin said. “It becomes difficult when ‘gifted’ overlaps ‘normal’.”
Teacher judgement is one of the most reliable methods of identifying gifted children because teachers generally prefer conforming students, Lamkin said. The gifted and creative child will often spend an inordinate amount of time on an assignment just to prove to the teacher that there is another way of doing a project.
Sometimes he or she will throw an unusual thought into a class discussion, completely disrupting the direction in which the teacher is trying to guide the class. Often the teacher, knowing the child is well ahead of her, reacts in fury.
“The most gifted student I have ever taught was a Waco High School boy who would never, never do an assignment as it had been given to him,” Lamkin said, grinning at the memory. “But when he accidentally discovered Balzac, that same young man was so excited he had to call me in the middle of the night to discuss what he had read.”
While you can’t depend on teachers to identify the gifted, neither can you depend on an IQ score, Lamkin said. If IQ alone had been a determining factor, in performance, we would have had to do without the services of John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, Cervantes and scores of others whom society has labeled “genius.” A researcher has estimated the IQ scores of the men to have been between 100 and 110.
“And Robert Fulton’s probable IQ was such a low level, we would have had to tell him that he could not possibly be an inventor,” Lamkin said. “In fact, if we relied entirely on IQ we would have to throw out half of our geniuses.”
Incidentally, Einstein was so slow developing verbally that he probably could not have gotten into a first-rate college.
Tests for measuring creative ability developed thus far are as suspect as the IQ test for spotting the gifted. In the first place, the tests assume that creativity can be turned on and off at will, without allowing for any “fermentation” time a creative person might need. When the test asks the elementary child to do such things as list as many uses as he can think of for a junked automobile the score rewards quantity rather than quality. Thus the student who might come up with one great idea which would empty the junk yards might find himself completely eclipsed by his peer who named forty worthless ideas.
So where is the yardstick which measures the gifted and creative? There is none. But there are several combined methods which the Baylor program is exploring. With the petals of a flower to illustrate the many factors in identify¬ ing the gifted, Dr. McNamee threw in a surprise. The petal marked “commitment” was as large as all the rest.
And yet the Baylor professors would be the first to assure teachers that the search for the gifted under-achiever is the hardest search of all — and probably the one our society can least afford to fail.
Psychology Today (“Going for the Gifted Gold”) says several studies have suggested the gifted account for up to twenty percent of high school dropouts, a figure which causes U.S. Commissioner of Education Sidney Marland to tell Congress that we are “increasingly stripped of the notion that a bright mind will find its own way.”
“On the contrary, intellectual and creative talent cannot survive educational neglect and apathy,” Marland said.
Ironically, while the nation has argued and procrastinated about doing anything special for its future leaders, the physically gifted have been provided time during the school day to work with a teacher specialized in the field. To compound the irony, that teacher is usually paid above the norm.
“And the physically gifted are not assigned according to age, either, which is what we are trying to do with our intellectually gifted,” Lamkin said.
So that, then, is the ballpark Baylor has entered, out on the cutting edge of educational, and thereby social, change. First and foremost, the new center will promote better methods of educating teachers and administrators for the gifted and talented. A resource center will also be set up for teachers and parents.
Anticipated projects include educator seminars and workshops, convocations conducted by nationally acclaimed consultants, tutorials led by Baylor professors for gifted senior high school students, special enrichment activities for gifted elementary students, visitations by Baylor students to public schools with exemplary programs for the gifted, and awards presentations for innovative proposals concerning the teaching of the gifted.
But the project which brings a gleam to the eye of Dr. McNamee is, as far as the dean knows, unique in the nation. That project is the establishment of a counseling service for parents of gifted children. Thus, the man whose doctoral dissertation reviewed research and experimentation on a proposed enrichment program for the gifted is seeing his study come to flower with a new idea in a highly creative field.
Glasscock, the former Baylor student who made the program possible at his alma mater, has previously donated funds to establish the Glasscock Environmental Studies Building and the Glasscock Energy Research Center. A ranch owner and operator in Texas, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Missouri, Glasscock has also been an oil and gas operator and drilling contractor in Corpus Christi and Denver, Colorado, for more than thirty-five years. He is also director of the American Solar King Corporation and Vanderbilt Energy Corporation.
With such a background, there is little wonder that Glasscock would put his money in innovative, but can-do programs.
