|
Four boys and ten girls pile out of vans at Duke’s Lemur Center and rally quickly in a mobile trailer, leaving an impression of braces, acne, and plaid. Most have a limegreen badge holder identifying them as students in Duke’s Talent Identification Program (TIP); a few sport electric-orange badges, signifying longevity in the program. The youngest is fourteen; all are considered gifted according to their performances on standardized tests normally reserved for much older kids. “How was your weekend?” demands instructor Erin Ehmke, a primatologist. “We ate a Vermonster in four minutes—that’s twenty scoops of ice cream,” explains a girl proudly.
In short order, their written hypotheses and conclusions from last week’s research are returned. Feet are jiggling. Uh-oh. “Okay,” Ehmke says briskly, “Tell me about scan sampling. How does it differ from focal sampling and ad lib sampling?” Hands shoot up, voice tumbling over voice. “Great,” she continues. “Today we’ll be using a combination of these techniques to assess inter-observer reliability. Pick a new partner.”
Class has been meeting six days a week to study primate biology by doing what primate biologists do. A week into living and studying together day in and day out, this cadre of students knows one another well. Yet they have to be prodded into switching partners, which is relevant when you’re going to test inter-observer reliability, a measure of how well two scientists’ research data jive in the field. And if such a concept seems advanced for eighthgraders— well, you haven’t met these kids.
Armed with clipboards, off they troop to the lemur cages in teams of two, ungainly primates at an awkward adolescent threshold. Now they stand rapt, the icecream eater with one bare leg akimbo, foot on knee in a gesture familiar to flamingos and homo sapiens juveniles. With perfect balance, she remains motionless, silently jotting notes while before her a graceful adult lemur cavorts and leaps half a dozen body lengths to get food. Around her, cicadas rise to a slow crescendo, then relax, and the North Carolina heat begins its inexorable climb. She stands almost beyond time, concentrated, intense, perched.
Over on East Campus, economist John Kane watches half a dozen small groups of teens hammer out the pricing implications of supply and demand curves. One kid with an orange lanyard (it’s his fourth summer at TIP) explains a graph to two companions with the help of much gesticulation and a chalkboard; another group discusses Frisbee grips and technique; a smattering of individuals write quietly alone.
Shortly, Kane rounds them up. “Now let’s talk about diminishing returns,” he says. Soon he has a gangly guy racing across the room’s diagonal to see how many balls can be moved from one box to another in thirty seconds. Kane adds a second runner, then a third, keeping track of their totals as the crowd shouts out advice. One of the runners trips and sprawls on the floor, getting in the way of the other two. Everybody cracks up. After a certain point, it transpires, more runners don’t help the totals. They need more baskets, not more people. Voilà: the law of diminishing returns.
The class will go on to use its new analytical tools to examine the problem of scarce resources as it plays out in minimum- wage laws, farm subsidies, rent controls, trade protectionism, pollution, and welfare programs. One of TIP’s articles of faith is that its students can soak up an entire semester’s worth of college-level material in three weeks. During a break in the action, I ask Kane if he really covers that much. “Actually,” he laughs, “we cover more.” A professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, he has spent every summer at TIP since 1987 and has the T-shirts to prove it.
Meanwhile, in a class called “Big Screen, Little Screen,” students are using improv to generate ideas for movies. A girl wraps a boy’s head in a sweater, and a costume is born. “I feel like doing an interpretive dance!” exclaims another, and off she goes. As the groups review their scenarios, screenwriter Rick Dillwood, their “producer,” laughs aloud: “The number of skits that end in mass death is a concern.” This group is mastering idea development, experimenting with story, character, dialogue, and setting as they work on their scripts. Soon the class will vote on which to cast, shoot, edit, and screen at the end of its three weeks.
Through its residential program at Duke and related programs at eight other sites, TIP offers dozens of courses, spanning topics from the molecular biology of cancer to how material properties change at the nanoscale. The material is tough and edgy, representing some of the trendiest fields in higher education. And the kids are up to the challenge, eighth-graders ready for college material. These campers have emerged from a region-wide talent search that began with a pool of some 70,000 students who accepted an invitation to take the SAT or ACT as seventhgraders. TIP annually honors the 25,000 highest scorers in state and regional ceremonies and invites an even more select group of about 2,000 for a special recognition ceremony on Duke’s campus. It’s this group—the top 3 percent of the top 3 percent—that receives an invitation to TIP’s three-week summer programs.
Experiences targeting the gifted are important in ways that many people don’t think about. As intellectually robust as these students may be, at some level every fourteen-year-old is delicate, and the precocious, talented, and brilliant are no exception. In fact, they may have it worse. As long ago as 1926, when Columbia University’s Leta Hollingworth codified her pioneering research in the book Gifted Children, educators have known that in mainstream school settings extremely bright students can fall idle. According to a 2003 study by Case Western Reserve University psychiatrist Sylvia Rimm, children testing as gifted comprise 10 to 20 percent of high-school dropouts—who may be bored, hypersensitive, depressed, misunderstood, ridiculed, frustrated, isolated, unpopular, or socially inept.
There is contemporary research on adolescent substance abuse and giftedness, underachievement and giftedness, aggression and giftedness, depression and giftedness. And yet barely half of America’s gifted learners are getting the services they need to stay engaged in the classroom, according to a 2002 report by former teachers James Delisle and Judy Galbraith.
Part of the problem is that giftedness remains a controversial subject. Battles have raged over whether to test children for achievement or potential (e.g., SATs vs. IQ tests); over whether to test them against a body of knowledge or against each other; over “treatments” favoring enrichment or acceleration (e.g., field trips vs. skipping grades); and over performance gaps in gender, race, native language, and socioeconomic status.
|
