My name is Andrei and I am 20 years old. I am a jovial guy who makes friends easily. I study in Berlin, in the field of business and innovation. Now I’m happy with who I’ve become as an adult, but it wasn’t easy during my school years.
When I was little, I was very restless, sleep was not a priority, I always wanted to make something, and if my desire was not fulfilled – due to the lack of time or the perpetual fatigue (that’s how I felt) of my parents – I got very frustrated. I wasn’t the type of guy to spoil the cars I received, but rather I wanted to create one as I imagined it, not as I saw it ready to buy. It wasn’t until I was 3 years old that I started to speak, which brought me additional reasons for intense negative experiences. In kindergarten I was a gentle and quiet child. I was very focused on the work task, sometimes separating myself from the rest of the team, even losing track of time. I silently admired my restless and fickle colleagues. I was always seen as the small and wise one. I noticed almost everything around me, I didn’t talk much, but when I did I knew exactly why I was opening my mouth. When something boring to my concerns was discussed at length, I used to draw.
I used to do this as a refuge when I didn’t like certain subjects. My mother was very careful to find me a nice teacher with a calm temperament who would understand me. It was a kind of preoccupation with proving to her and her friends (she had many) that she was doing everything in her power to make up for her constant absence from my side. Up until the age when I entered school I was somewhat fine, with few exceptions. My parents seemed, from the outside, very attentive to my needs, but they had very high demands, which always gave me the feeling that they were dissatisfied with me at the time. They were always comparing me to other more confident boys. This bothered me a lot, which led me to be an introvert for a good part of my childhood. When I was at home, with the nanny, I would have her read to me from all kinds of encyclopedias, knowing that this invariably caused her to fall into a deep sleep, commensurate with her preoccupations, which enabled me to do what I pleased. I was saving the questions for an interesting discussion with Dad. While the nanny was resting, I was making all kinds of constructions: from paper, from cardboard, from lego – I didn’t have lego kits to build robots – I was reading comic magazines; I worked alone, on my own initiative, all kinds of logic games with fairly high degrees of difficulty; I drew a lot and imagined all kinds of scenarios with characters I invented. I was not yet old enough to master the art of the pen, so I had a notebook that was divided into chapters, and each one had an illustration, so that I would remember later what I was going to write. I got a lot of inspiration from my impressive comic book collection. I was analyzing everything, planning, strategizing from a very young age.
When I was 10, my parents took me for a psychological test. The result was surprising to everyone. I turned out to be a little genius on the logical-mathematical dominant (158), with very good processing speed (134), with a good memory capacity (127) and with a satisfactory linguistic intelligence quotient (112). From a psycho-emotional point of view it turned out that I am a kid open to new experiences, balanced, empathetic, altruistic, assertive, productive, determined, persistent, resistant to stress, disciplined and curious.
I can tell you that until then my parents didn’t understand why I did everything according to certain patterns, algorithmically, but I couldn’t perform in mathematics. I was finding all kinds of novel solutions to everything that was in 3D (space), but I was stuck in 2D (flat form). I needed the overall picture, to understand from the beginning the space, the goal I was heading towards, so I could see the meaning of things, but I found it more difficult to argue in words or in dry, meaningless notions, such as standard proofs in geometry, for example. I did very well when the learning was experienced by me, not exposed by someone else. Curriculum design in our case needs to be rethought. It must be designed taking into account the principles of Kolb, Zull, Renzulli and the stages of psychological development of children and adolescents. It seems difficult, considering that at the moment everything is designed without logical coherence, without impact studies, but rather out of inertia. It becomes even more difficult knowing how the teachers are trained in the faculties. It only teaches about the field of study, not about curriculum design or working methods for different age stages.
The discrepancies between cognitive and emotional intelligence deepened into adolescence, when my parents started looking for special programs for people like me. Naturally, at 14-15 years old, I had reached the point where I no longer believed that I was good in any field, that I would be able to succeed or that I would be able to find my way. To my surprise, most of the group had much the same confusion. Two of us had a different self-possession, a different self-assurance that I envied, in a positive way. They had taken it earlier with the development of the fields of passion, with the work of emotions, with the assumption of responsibilities in a team. You could feel this difference between us, even if the others also had interesting and original answers to various problems. The rest of us didn’t have the courage to speak our mind, we didn’t find our voices, we didn’t trust our intellectual capacities. For too long we have been pointed at. For too long we have been seen as misfits or as weirdos, with fixed and “curly” ideas.
I can tell you that in this program, specially designed and developed for children with high abilities, I gradually came to rediscover myself, to become again, to believe in my potential. To learn to relate to who I was and to those around me. I came into contact with extraordinary trainers, with mentors from whom I learned in a one-hour meeting when I didn’t learn in a whole semester, I got to know the stories of many personalities who faced the same challenges we faced in school and us – Mircea Eliade, ThomasEdison, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller, Walt Disney, Charles Dickens, Princess Diana.
Are we surprised that most of us enter with a thirst for knowledge and end up not wanting to go to school anymore?! Do we wonder why so many of us stop performing?
At first we are all curious to be shown, to be read to, to discover, to try to imitate writing, as in the example of adults, to discover the universe, to travel the globe, etc. Gradually, our eyes become sad, the first signs of success anxiety appear, we are devastated. Already, from the age of 8-9, we are all linearized, and those who do not succeed, because we are threatened with punishment, we refrain in the school environment, raving wherever we have the opportunity. After the age of 12, the fruits that the adults planted in the previous years begin to be seen. And hence our decline, of the many, emotionally abandoning school.
Our challenge increases the higher the IQ, appearing that gap (asynchrony) between the development of the limbic brain and the neocortex. (Steven Pfeiffer, Director, SENG- Social and Emotional Needs of the Gifted). Hence the trilogy of ages: cognitive, emotional and social. (ex: you can talk to a 6-year-old child with, say, a 9-year-old intelligence, but with 3-4-year-old emotional needs). How are you prepared, as an adult, to relate when the transition happens in split seconds? For these colleagues, the risk of emotional abandonment sets in much faster.
Text written by Simona Mitrea, PhD student at Educational Sciences, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Bucharest.