Gifted

My lack of motivation was born in 5^th grade at El Monte Elementary School. Mrs. Werner would announce after lunch, “Time for the achievers to leave.” They stood up and filed out the door.

The “Gifted Program” * left me ashamed. I had to stay in the classroom with the rest, studying with the new-fangled learning tools. The underlying suggestion was that the rest of us needed extra help. Tall cardboard towers stood near the front of the room. We would get up from our seats, choose which subject to work on from the many-colored options—geography, math, English, etc.—and return to our seats and work quietly by ourselves with the cards.

What happened in that room down the hall? What did they discuss? Why did they need a special teacher, all eight of them? They all lived up on the hill near the school, while I lived in the flatlands, bussed up with the kids in my neighborhood, all African Americans. Not one of them belonged to the special program either. And, coincidentally, everyone in the program were high-achievers. I didn’t know boundaries then. Did not have questions about I.Q., race, or psychological damage. I was just a child.

Until then I perceived myself as normal. My teachers were mother figures and learning was game-like, even with the atmosphere of natural competition. But school had been more than learning. The relationship I had with my teachers was central to how I received the subjects they taught. Mrs. Brown, my First grade teacher at my old Elementary school, Stege, back down in the flatlands, was the most motherliest of them all. Warmth radiated from her lovely brown skin and softly curled hair, and her thick-framed glasses spoke of intelligence. She did not hesitate to envelope a child in her skirts, nor did she have a problem with telling someone who was misbehaving to sit at the back. My parents had me bussed up to El Monte in Third grade because they were not happy about the quality of education at Stege, or perhaps because of the roughness children displayed on the schoolyard. Mrs. Emerick, at my new school, had reddish-blonde hair, also treated us warmly, and wore glasses. At the new school, I saw less African American children than at Stege, but there were now some Asian faces, among a predominance of White ones. El Monte benefitted from bussing, but diversity or special programs escaped my young eyes and ears, how adults were manipulating us into our present and future lives.

The relationships I formed with my teachers was of equally importance to those friendships I formed with my classmates. The ranking among peers took place in the classroom, where it was whether we raised our hand or knew the answer that identified us as being higher or lower in some way. We formed our own cliques at recess, away from the teachers’ eyes, each of us finding a place in the society of children which would mark us forever, as a leader or a follower, a joiner or a dissenter, as loud or quiet, pretty or plain, tough or wimpy.

If not Mrs. Werner, it would have been some other teacher who said those words heralding the secret group to go down the hall to another room, to separate, like cream from the top of the milk, the best part. I didn’t feel any different than those other kids until that moment. I played with a couple of them during recess, off in the corner of the field near the fence, right up against the school wall of the last classroom. There, we could see the steep streets the bus had driven up on, and below us, the flatlands spread out like an apron. Petite with a sweet, gentle smile, Jill had pale skin with freckles and wavy dark hair framing her face. Wendy’s frame towered over us slower developers. She would bring her Steiff animals to school, larger ones like the brontosaurus with orange, green, and purple colors. As equals, we played quietly and happily together. I did not feel different than Jill and Wendy, the gifted program sliding under my consciousness while at recess. They did not choose to enter the program, and they, along with other friends, cannot be accused of separating themselves from the rest of us let alone participating in it. Yet it changed us all. For some who were chosen, it meant getting more attention, which in turn may have helped them become clearer about their interests or learning styles.

What the program meant for me in the long term was that I would consider myself a less-than smart student for the rest of grade school, and through junior high and high school, and even into college. I dropped out of college, another indicator of lack of self-worth, in addition to lack of direction. When I returned to complete my college education twenty years later, it was with a consciousness about what I was worth. Because I had not withdrawn from a number of those initial college classes and those grades had turned into Fs, I had to petition to have those grades stricken from my record in order to restore an acceptable grade point average, in order to be accepted back into college.

That school happened to be San Francisco State. Proof of my self-worth, I did the considerable paperwork, meeting with a counselor there and then going to each department asking for signatures. At each juncture, I teetered on the bridge of humiliation and pride, not knowing which I felt at any given time or how some of these new department chairs perceived me. The music chair gave her entire support, as I wanted to apply to Mills College for the following fall, her alma mater. She said that she did not want to get in the way of my completing my degree and moving forward in life. I never even met the English chair, as the secretary disappeared into his office and then magically returned with the desired signature. The Sociology department similarly presented an enter-and-exit proposition. The P.E. teacher rejected my petition outright. Unfortunately, the same teacher still worked there, so the petition could not just go above him to the chair level. But I was shocked. P.E.? The other teacher who still remained was my Philosophy professor, with whom I took four classes, all in existentialism. She stared at me with her huge blue eyes.

“Sartre would not approve,” she said, her full lips with light pink lipstick clamped together, her short blonde hair see-through with the sun in back of her. She still wore the same pink shirt and dark knit skirt. “You know what he said about denial.”

It had taken years of working at a bookstore job where I was valued and where I benefitted from challenges to give me self worth. I grew personally and professionally. When I returned to school, it was this experience and knowledge that raised me up and gave me a voice. I could speak instead of cowering quietly as I had my whole youth. I had talent and ideas. I had traveled, read, and written. Returning to school, I became the star of all my endeavors.

The gifted program has changed, and now, in the 21^st century, at the grade school level it embraces both high-achieving and under-achieving students, with the idea that economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds are represented. Sometimes change happens too slowly. Did evolution of the program had to happen, perhaps, for this new incarnation of it to happen? Or could we just have jumped into representing more styles of learning? I still don’t understand how I.Q. is a valid assessment tool, in determining who is gifted. And then, what does gifted mean?

I now teach English at a community college, so have yet another perspective on students and their abilities. I find it clearly evident that all students have a gift of some kind or are talented in some way, whether they have advantages or are disadvantaged, whether they are “traditional” students entering from families who have already gone the college route, or from families who had been disenfranchised by higher education. How well a student does on a test or how well he or she writes does not yield any information about what could be teased out from within.

* The gifted program was authorized by an Education code in California, and therefore institutionalized. In the 1960s and 70s, when I attended grade school, the program was based on I.Q.