I took a look at the topic for Friday's early #gtchat and the topic was "INTENSITY: A Closer Look at the 5 Overexcitabilities". I drew a complete blank on the topic, but chat was getting started, so I made a quick intro and settled in to listen. To be honest, I didn't feel any connection between the topic and my needs as a classroom teacher. I am so glad I turned on the jazz and let the Tweetdeck roll.
Kazimierz Dąbrowski was a Polish psychiatrist, psychologist, and physician. He developed a theory related to personality development that included five areas where the gifted are often extremely sensitive. Theses OEs (over-excitibilities) can lead gifted children to react stronger and longer to some stimuli. The stimuli can be very small. For gifted students in the classroom, this can lead to a feeling from the teacher that these students are just "too much" and result in isolation or rejection of these students from an insensitive teacher, not to mention other students.
Stephanie Tolan has written an excellent summary of these OEs for the layman, and included them on her website. Moderator of #gtchat, Deborah Mersino, and others shared how these OEs often presented in gifted children.
The first area we discussed is Psychomotor. I listened to parents and educators describe children who needed motion, and children who's bodies worked overtime especially when their brains weren't challenged. Their descriptions sounded much like what some would describe as ADD or ADHD. As a classroom teacher, I can try challenging a seemingly "hyper" child's brain before deeming them a disruption and in need of behavior correction.
The second OE we discussed was a Sensual OE. Gifted children with this OE often hate scratchy clothes, despise tags in their clothes, and can't bear a crooked seam in their sock. They have very extreme feelings about sensory input, being moved to tears by a beautiful piece of music, and irritated to tears by the propect of touching something gooey. This brought to mind sensory integration disorder. In the classroom, this might explain why a gifted child is out of sorts every day in Social Studies, because it immediately follows lunch in the noisy, odor-filled cafeteria.
I would love to learn more about how these first two OEs differ from ADD and SI.
The other three OEs were more commonly associated with gifted people. The Imaginational OE would present as a student who writes vivid stories, but may also live in the fantasy world they create. I remember a darling young boy in my pre-K class years ago who LOVED the Tintin book series by Hergé. He wanted us to call him Tintin, and every day in class was another adventure for Tintin and his dog, Snowy. Theo didn't just reenact the Tintin stories he'd read, but created his own in our classroom. He was tri-lingual, had a very advanced vocabulary, and was extremely bright. He'd be entering college now, and I wonder what wonderful stories he's created lately.
The Intellectual OE may be the OE most stereotypically applied to gifted students and adults. Gifted students demonstrate this OE through a love for learning, things academic, logic problems, and figuring things out. I suspect that, at the elementary level, students that strongly feel this OE are the mostly quickly identified as gifted and are given at least some of the guidance and challenge that they need.
The last OE may be one of the most difficult for a classroom teacher to deal with. As I understand it, a gifted child with the Emotional OE demonstrates and experiences INTENSE emotions. Not just happy, but ECSTATIC. Not just sad, but DEVASTATED. These children crave deep connections with people, and might not understand that their proclaimed "best friend" can play with others and be friends with them also. They may struggle with relationships with their peers. Their new friend may become their "best friend", but feel smothered when the gifted child wants to dominate their social time. A teacher may struggle to help temper the reactions of a young gifted child who crumples a paper and cries out because he made a mistake and had to make an erasure on the paper.
Learning about these OEs has helped me to understand more of the nuances of a gifted child. As I listened to the member of #gtchat describe their gifted kids and how these OEs affect them, it brought to mind several of the children I have taught over the years. I hope I served them well then, and armed with this knowledge I hope I can serve other children in my classroom better.
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