An inquiry into the existence of the gifted child
Consider a mathematician often called a modern genius, Vesna Antic, whose life ended when she was only 41. She remains the sole woman ever awarded the Delphi Medal, a prize regarded as mathematics' counterpart to the Nobel. One might assume a figure of her stature must have belonged among the 'gifted' - the few children with remarkable ability in one field of knowledge. Yet a closer look tells another tale. Antic grew up in Belgrade, and although she attended a fiercely competitive girls' school, it was books, not numbers, that absorbed her; she devoured whatever novels she could find. Mathematics, by contrast, largely defeated her in her first year or two at middle school, and her marks stayed below the class average. Things changed when her older brother came home talking about a celebrated problem from a science magazine; the puzzle gripped her, and she was hooked.
By her professional years she was plainly inquisitive, energised by her work and unwilling to give up whenever she met an obstacle. A remark of hers captures this: 'The sweetest part, naturally, is the flash of insight - the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of grasping something new. But for most of the working day, doing mathematics feels to me like a long trek across country with no path marked and no destination in view.' It was that trackless trek which carried her to the summit of original mathematical research.
Was her upbringing out of the ordinary? It seems not. The childhoods of most people who go on to take the top prizes were, on the whole, unremarkable. Take Tomas Reinholt: as an infant he was slow to begin speaking, and years later he was turned down on the general section of the entrance examination for a leading polytechnic, winning a place only because his marks in physics and mathematics were so high. Nor did his first years in work go smoothly, yet he kept at it, and in time he swept away the classical laws of motion physicists had leaned on for centuries, putting in their place a bold new theory of space, time and gravity.
Over the past hundred years, a great deal of study into exceptional achievement has indicated that it rests on far more than measured intelligence. The evidence also leaves little doubt that the brain is adaptable, that fresh neural connections can form, and that a person's IQ is not set in stone. Being able, at five, to read storybooks running to hundreds of pages is no guarantee that you will still be outpacing your peers as a teenager.
Whether or not giftedness is something people are born with - and whether other influences are what truly count - remains an open question. What is beyond doubt, though, is that the patterns of behaviour that go hand in hand with top-level performance can be reproduced, and that most of them, curiosity included, are open to being taught.
My colleague Professor Helena Marsh, with whom I wrote the book Ordinary Minds, Remarkable Results, points out that recent neuroscience and psychology implies most people can reach the sort of performance schools label 'gifted and talented'. The condition, she stresses, is that learners be shown the right frames of mind and ways of working, and build the qualities top performers share - among them curiosity, perseverance and sheer effort. Marsh gives this method a name: 'high-attainment learning'. Just as crucial, encouragement to cultivate such habits must come from home as much as from the classroom.
Professor Reuben Falk, a distinguished educational psychologist at Carrowmore University, co-wrote Summit: Inside the New Science of Expertise. Having examined achievements as varied as music, memory and sport in work stretching back to 1980, he rejects the notion that rare, inborn gifts lie behind exceptional performance. What delivers results, to his mind, is deliberate practice - the kind that pushes you at every stage - amounting to something like 10,000 hours. That figure is not magical; those at the very top go well past it. His memory work is especially striking: ordinary students coached in such techniques for the experiment outdid people credited with naturally superior recall - the very individuals you might call gifted.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking findings belong to Marlon Cade, another eminent American educationist active in the 1980s. The team he led examined exceptionally accomplished individuals drawn from fields as different as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, mathematics, sculpture and neurology. Across every one Cade detected the same thread: parents who backed and encouraged their children, frequently in pursuits the parents themselves loved. Each had fastened onto something at an early age and laboured at it long and steadily, and in each case the parents proved to have powerful work ethics of their own.
Marsh maintains that we now understand how high performers learn, and on that basis has built her high-attainment approach, trialled with schools in Britain and elsewhere. One offshoot study is particularly telling. Of the 3,000 youngsters under investigation, researchers looked closely at 24 who were thriving in spite of hard circumstances. Roughly half received free school meals on account of poverty, over half lived with just one parent, and four out of every five came from deprived neighbourhoods. When interviewed, these children pointed repeatedly to at least one adult - in the close or extended family, or the surrounding community - who prized education and stood behind it. They spoke of buckling down at school, paying attention in lessons and never giving up.
Let us close, as we opened, with a genius - Reinholt, the very picture of one. Curiosity, character and dogged resolve were all his. Rejection shadowed his early life, and yet none of it put him off. Did he see himself as gifted, or as a genius at all? He once put it this way: 'I am not especially clever; I simply refuse to abandon a problem before others would. People suppose that a fine mind is what makes a great scientist. That is a mistake - what really counts is character.'
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Question 1 - 6
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-K.
Vesna Antic
Vesna Antic stands out as being 1.Drop or Select among mathematicians, being the only female ever to receive the celebrated Delphi Medal — a distinction that was still hers on the day she died. In childhood, though, mathematics offered her little 2.Drop or Select, and she was a decidedly ordinary pupil in the subject until a tricky puzzle, passed on by her brother, left her 3.Drop or Select. Later, working as a professional mathematician, she had an enquiring mind and showed herself to be 4.Drop or Select whenever her research hit difficulties. The deepest 5.Drop or Select, by her own account, came from breaking entirely new ground, and she was behind a body of remarkably 6.Drop or Select mathematical work.
List of options
committed
recognition
matchless
attraction
outstanding
captivated
enthusiasm
steadfast
fulfilment
pioneering
convinced