I’ve mentioned before that my father’s mother lived with me the last nine years of her life. That was from 85 to 94.  She taught me that learning never ends.  My favorite things about her include the fact that she learned Spanish so that she could teach it to my kids the years we home schooled, that she continued to go to women’s Bible study almost right up to the end, and that she read a Psalm every morning so she could begin the day with praise and a Proverb every evening so she could be convicted of her transgressions that day.  I loved discussing the Bible with her.  I know she had it memorized.  Yet, she and I could discover something in our discussions that neither of us had ever considered.  The most important concept that she taught me, though, was that the end of learning is the end of living.  Oh, we can still be alive, but we’re not really living.

   But teachability isn’t just about learning new concepts.  It’s about the willingness to learn from others.  I think most of us are pretty choosey about who gets to teach us lessons.  We are quick to put those we deem less experienced in their places. To truly be teachable, we must be willing to learn from anything and anyone… a friend, an enemy, the smallest child, a bit of history.

   There are very few gifted children who will allow themselves to be taught by Mom or Dad without a fight.  They declare they understand when they clearly do not.  They fight the method with phrases like, “That’s not how the teacher explained it” and “I don’t know how I do it. I just don’t do it that way.”  The parent often wants to just leave them to their own understanding and watch them fail. And that’s okay.  Failure is a great teacher. 

   For years now, I’ve called myself a self-taught pianist.  The reality is that my mother tricked me into learning how to play the piano.  Oh, I wanted to learn; I just didn’t want lessons.  I wanted to do it myself.  So, at the tender age of five, my mother, a piano teacher to some of the finest pianists I know, bought me piano books and let me work out my own understanding of how the piano was played.  If I was struggling, she’d find a way to help me without me realizing she was teaching me.  By the time I was in junior high, I was accompanying my school choir at practices.  It wasn’t until high school, though, that I learned a very basic skill. 

   A friend and I had been asked to play the scale and the starting pitches for singers trying out for an honor choir.  My friend had been taking lessons for as long as I had been playing, but she was mortified when she saw how I played a scale.  See, under my own instruction, I had skipped all the scale playing and arpeggios and such.  She graciously showed me the correct (and much easier than mine) method to play the scale, and I became intensely aware that I still had a lot to learn.

   Your gifted child will catch on to skills very quickly.  He will do math in his head and make puns like a night-show host and catch on quickly to concepts well-beyond what he should.  It is very tempting to gush over his abilities.  We teach kids every day who have been bathed in praise, and no one has ever criticized them.  We have lost fantastic students who could not stand the fact that we pushed them to grow.  They were comfortable in their little worlds where everything they did drew ooh’s and ahh’s.  We had just seen it before. It didn’t impress us.  It was, in fact, all around us. 

   When I get a gifted student such as this, I remind him that he is not there to impress me with all he already knows.  If he knows everything I have to teach him that year, I will just make the lessons more advanced.  I want him to be willing to stretch his mind beyond his comfort zone.  I want him to explore possibilities beyond the absolute world he has created.  More often than not, these students leave the school.  Why wouldn’t this child favor an environment where every word and deed are applauded as genius over one where we push and struggle to get him to think outside of his box?

  How does one teach his gifted child to be teachable?  I would say the first step is to let him fail.  Don’t let your child always win.  Do some competitions he can honestly win and do others at which he will have to work to beat you.  The second step is to not allow quitting.  Gifted children are the world’s worst for backing out if they sense danger of looking foolish or inept or just not “the best.”  Whatever your child begins, make him finish.  Just for the season… not for forever.  He needs to see it through.  Show him the “opportunity cost.”  What will he give up should he choose to quit?

     And the third step would be to help him to trace his path from where he was to where he is now.  Hindsight is the best teacher.  When he looks at how far he has come, he gains confidence to try something new the next time.                                        - Michelle