Conversation with CAGT - Mark Hess

Mark Hess is a board member and the editor of the SENG Library. He is President-Elect of the Colorado Association for Gifted Students and serves as the Gifted Programs Specialist in a large, urban school district in Colorado Springs. Mark also serves as an advisory committee member for NAGC’s Teaching for High Potential. His 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade Gifted Social-Emotional Curriculum books are available from Prufrock Press. As Portable Gifted and Talented, Mark has shared over 24,000 free resources for teachers and parents of gifted children. You can visit his website at www.giftedlearners.org
Title: Is Your Gifted Child Thriving?
Virtuosity is your true and transparent talents, and thriving is an exchange between a person’s virtuosity and vulnerability-that place inside ourselves where we are truly assailable and susceptible. Yet perfectionism taps your shoulder and whispers in your ear, “Are you trying as hard as you can? You could have done better. Don’t disappoint me. Enjoy it while it lasts, because you just got lucky.” If thriving is recognizing one’s own virtuosity while being open and vulnerable, then our Generation Z gifted children may rarely be thriving. Is Generation Z a generation wrapped in bubble wrap and safety goggles-overprotected and under prepared emotionally? What happens when perfectionists fall off the wave of wonderfulness? Let’s explore our GenZ gifted kids tendencies together and begin to learn how we can nurture our children through inevitable cyclones of perfectionism.

[@Rowboaty]

Omg I'm 8 minutes in and I had the same experience with that film! We watched it at school, and I was in floods of tears at the end - the only kid to have that reaction - I remember the teachers being really concerned and I was just so embarrassed!

[@WingZeroSymphonics]

Yes, at such a high speed of processing, things can get out of control. This work here can help get the most out of our worlds profoundly gifted. We now know, thanks to the patient and kind understanding of researchers, what one may be going through. And that such a gift makes a difference in others lives.

[@TheDannyddd]

Great analogy with the savannah cape story about not wanting to disappoint and by hiding anything perceive as a bad abnormal trait even misconstrued “talent”

[@scottjackson163]

This is some stunning stuff. Virtuosity and the addiction to the thrill of the high wire act - a theme that resonates deeply with me. Across my life, I see peaks and troughs plotted as a sine wave across time, scabrous behavior trending to bathos followed by prodigious spikes in performance, spikes that occasionally border on the fictional. Example: I spent a fair portion of my high school years attending rock concerts, riding a motorcycle (at age 14 and without a license), living shacked up with my girlfriend, and paying little attention to my academic work. I was fortunate to get into college, at all, yet three years from my 18th birthday, I had a graduate degree from Stanford University and I had been accepted into law school. Somewhere along the way, I took (under timed, proctor-supervised conditions) the Terman Concept Mastery Test (form T) and I scored above the 99.9th percentile of the general population. I flunked out of law school, then earned a M.S. in Information & Telecommunication Systems from Johns Hopkins University.

[@ValezkaMacDonald]

Thankyou so much for this podcast.

[@noellecuisine8912]

Oh my goodness…..
Thank you for the wonderful sharing !
You speak me, as this morning frozen natural country beauty almost made me burst into ✨….
Greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱

[@williamholder2020]

Have you seen where the children overthink a simple problem because of the way they think?

[@M-dv1yj]

In 6th grade our science teacher asked us to calculate how much air a room in a ship could hold. I froze really terrified and walked up to him and said sorry I have no idea how to account for air compression and also are we assuming a perfect seal on the room?
He looked at me puzzled and said. No 😂… I thought then why ask such a flawed question🤷🏽‍♂️

[@Music4EverKanekavi]

Why does this sound like you’re describing bipolar ?

[@M-dv1yj]

I would assume because profoundly giftedness pushes the brain and especially emotions to extremes towards the limits of our human capacity to handle them. Same for the raw data bandwidth and the connections being made.. that causes some funny and challenging behaviors which can present like other things that break or push the brain which express some similar patterns (at the surface) like bipolar and autism.
😊

[@redefinedliving5974]

Can mimic each other. A PG person can all have these so-called disorders and can actually turn them into their favor. It can be a continuum I'd say. A lot of Bipolar people are creative and a huge chunk of giftedness is creativity