No Easy Boxes

Children like Bracha have enormous potential. Their love of learning and powerful intellectual abilities can lead them to make great contributions to society — and school, which is all about learning, seems like the perfect place to nurture them. So what went wrong along the way?

In today’s school system, a great deal of attention and resources are given to children who have trouble keeping up with the pace of an average classroom. But kids like Bracha have the opposite problem. While children who are intellectually gifted may struggle just as much as those with learning disabilities, dealing with issues such as under-stimulation and social isolation, their challenges are often under-acknowledged and misunderstood.

What is school like for an intellectually gifted child? How can parents, and schools, help these children develop their gifts without sacrificing a normal childhood or creating feelings of arrogance and superiority? And are frum schools equipped to give these children what they need?

For a child in the average school system, being intellectually gifted is challenging academically, socially, and emotionally, according to Dr. Shmuel Mandelman, a neuropsychologist who has devoted a large part of his life to advocating for gifted children.

Most Orthodox Jewish families in America today send their children to dual-curriculum private schools. “The truth is that because there is inherently less rigidity in our private schools, particularly in yeshivos, it allows there to be more flexibility to meet the specific needs of gifted students,” Dr. Mandelman says. And that sounds like a good thing. “But there is an important misnomer that needs to be corrected,” he continues. “What we consider in our system to be a metzuyan is really an above-average kid who’s highly compliant. There isn’t much room for those who are truly intellectually gifted to be able to conform within the system.”

While it’s an urban legend that every Jewish parent thinks his child is a genius, most people don’t really have an accurate picture of what intellectual giftedness is, says Dr. Mandelman, who holds a doctorate from Columbia University in Educational and Developmental Psychology as well as a specialty in Clinical Psychology/ Neuropsychology.

His personal working definition is “a display of a high level of intellectual potential across multiple domains or within a single domain of human performance.” This might sound vague, and there’s a good reason for that — giftedness isn’t one easily measurable variable, and it can manifest in many ways. For example, while some gifted kids are early readers, others might struggle with reading but exhibit incredible mathematical or spatial reasoning.

In reality, giftedness is a “constellation of traits,” says Dr. Mandelman, who completed his clinical training at Weill Cornell Medical Center and conducted research at the Yale Child Study Center on the individual differences in cognitive ability. Gifted children, he says, tend to be observant, highly verbal, quick learners, and deep and flexible thinkers. They understand complex concepts, are persistent and focused when interested, and can think outside the box.

Besides their brainy abilities, gifted children often share behavioral and emotional patterns. They tend to be individualistic and critical of themselves and others; they may question authority and be socially dominating. They have highly developed senses of justice from an early age. They’re often unusually sensitive to their own and others’ feelings and expectations, which can lead to enhanced compassion and oversensitivity.

These qualities can propel people to greatness. Gifted children might go on to become Nobel Prize winners, world leaders, and accomplished experts. In the frum world, their remarkable abilities can be channeled into becoming great talmidei chachamim and poskim or inspiring moros. But for a developing child, these traits can often be hard to manage. And as a minority in a world built for “regular” people, gifted kids often feel profoundly alone.

Misunderstood

Is the average frum school equipped to educate gifted children?

Mrs. Sharon Schloss, principal of the General Studies Department in Bnos Bracha of Passaic, New Jersey, a girls’ school with about 1,000 students from Pre-1A through eighth grade, admits that gifted children often fall through the cracks.

“We’re always focused on the majority, which are the kids who fit so nicely into the average range,” she says. “Then we worry about our academically challenged kids. And there’s so much money pumped into that: federal, state, even the schools that open up their own resource rooms.”

But when it comes to children who are extremely intellectually talented, things get more complicated. “To educate a child who is gifted in a particular area is very challenging,” she says, “because it means that the schools have to provide educators who are specifically trained for that. You can’t just take a teacher and say, ‘Here’s a group of gifted kids, just give them harder work.’ That’s not what gifted education is.”

That’s why, as a ten-year-old, Bracha Klein felt stifled by the slow pace of the curriculum in her classroom. “Everyone always told me, ‘You’re so smart, you’re so smart,’ ” she says today. “Okay, but then what?” She’d read the entire social studies book on the first day of school, then sat in miserable boredom the rest of the year. The school switched her from teacher to teacher, trying to find somebody experienced enough to handle her.

“They made me feel like I was the first person to have a child who struggled in school,” says Mrs. Klein. “A lot of the challenge was that the teachers just didn’t know how to expand the curriculum for her. It’s easier to pare it down than enrich it.”

Socially, a typical school environment can also be tough for a gifted child. Rabbi Moshe Gertner is the principal of Yeshiva Yesodei Hatorah in Brooklyn, New York, a chassidish elementary school servicing over 350 boys in the Vien community. Over the years, he’s often seen gifted children struggle to fit in.

“Gifted kids are unique,” he says. “Their active working memory, how they work with information — they get it right the first time. So what should they do in class for the rest of the time? They don’t appreciate being in class, and so they start misbehaving. And sometimes they’ll try to be over-smart and show off. And then socially, they can’t always connect to the other kids, who have no appreciation for their level on one hand, and might also feel jealous. And if they can’t connect, they can’t mingle socially.”

Emotionally, the side effects of giftedness can cut even deeper.

“I see some of the most complicated cases in my office,” says Dr. Mandelman. “When gifted kids are not identified or challenged, their entire self-concept becomes impacted very negatively. And we end up with kids who think there is something fundamentally wrong with them, because no one can understand them, they’re viewed as troublemakers, they’re viewed as oppositional, instead of them actually understanding what sort of capacities and abilities they have.” The long-term damage in terms of self-understanding and self-image, he says, can be huge.

Dr. Mandelman remembers one student in a well-known yeshivah in New York. “His bar mitzvah pshetl was on the International Date line according to all of the different shittos. It was a masterpiece. But before that, he was kicking the menahel in the hallway, hiding under the lockers…. Once the rebbi understood what he was actually looking at, it transformed the boy’s life.”

In frum schools today, children with learning disabilities are often met with an army of special ed teachers, modified tests, and after-school tutors. Yet this level of resources and attention doesn’t exist for children with advanced intellectual capabilities — even though their needs are just as unique. And when children know too much or try to go ahead on their own, some educators actually get upset, claiming that it’s unhealthy or unfair to the rest of the class.

Mrs. Michelle Cohen*, a mother in a large out-of-town community, noticed that her youngest daughter had taught herself to read at age two. By the time her daughter was five, Mrs. Cohen had taught her how to daven from a siddur every morning. But then she went to parent-teacher conferences, and the first-grade teacher was furious: “Why did you teach her so much?”

Dr. Mandelman says that this frustrating lack of understanding is experienced by gifted children across the frum spectrum, from the most chassidish to the most Modern Orthodox schools — and it can have lasting repercussions.

“When we look at the population of at-risk teens,” Dr. Mandelman says, “I would say we have equal proportions of those who have significant learning disabilities as we do of those with intellectual giftedness that was unidentified and not actually utilized.”

He’s seen gifted children who were misdiagnosed with personality disorders, who were being started on antipsychotic medications, and even those who were borderline suicidal.

“They’d failed every therapist,” he says. “Once they were identified as gifted and appropriate accommodations were made, they were able to function… it changed their whole world.”

Split Personality

What is it like to be a gifted child in a frum school?

“I thought I was a little better than everyone,” Bracha admits today. It was an easy trap to fall into, considering, for example, that in fifth grade, she knew more than her 20-year-old teacher about the solar system. “But she didn’t have a respectable way of expressing that, or holding it back,” says Mrs. Klein. “She would say, ‘This is the dumb way to learn, why are we doing this?’ ”

“It’s really frustrating for a kid who can’t keep up, but it can be equally frustrating for a child who’s on the other end, who’s really not being stimulated,” says Mrs. Riva Stern, a mother of two gifted children in a large out-of-town community.

“At one parent-teacher conference, the teacher told me, ‘You know, I don’t think that your daughter is able to pay attention.’ And I thought to myself, ‘It’s okay. If she paid attention in your class, she might pass out from boredom.’ ”

Mrs. Stern remembers going to parent-teacher conferences when her son was in first grade. “The teacher said, ‘He’s so good at math!’ I said, ‘Yeah, he likes to figure out the rate of speed and distance when we’re traveling.’ She said, ‘Ooh, we’re going to be starting subtraction soon, he’s going to be so happy!’ ”

“Look,” Mrs. Stern says, with no small amount of sympathy for the teacher, “I get it. Many schools are overburdened.” Even so, she wishes schools were more understanding of how hard life can be for gifted kids. “People say things like, ‘What are you complaining about? You’re lucky.’ But it’s like people telling you you’re lucky to be rich when you’re living in a world where you can’t use that currency at all….”

For a child with elementary-level coping skills and university-level thinking skills, school can feel like torture — and many gifted kids don’t have the self-regulation necessary to handle it. This, explains Dr. Mandelman, is called asynchronous development: when some aspects of a person develop much faster than others.

One Shabbos afternoon in Lakewood, a few weeks before Purim, Mrs. Sarah Rosenblum’s* first-grade son decided that he wanted to learn Megillas Esther. “His friends were knocking on the window, his siblings were eating candy in the playroom, and he sat down and read it from cover to cover for an hour,” she says.

This was super-impressive. “But the head doesn’t always control the maturity level of a kid,” says Mrs. Rosenblum. She’s gotten her share of phone calls from her son’s rebbi for misbehavior. “The minute you put together a normal, regular kid who has energy, who happens to be very bright, and his temperament is like this is so boring — that equals a kid making trouble,” says Mrs. Rosenblum.

Mrs. Schloss remembers one five-year-old girl from many years ago. “She was in preschool. She used to throw tantrums that were off the charts. But at the same time, her vocabulary was at least ten years older than she was. So I would be on the floor, holding her so she wouldn’t run away, and all the while having intense conversations with her that were on a very mature level. That dichotomy is incredible.”

Twice Exceptional

For some children, asynchronous development means that their social and emotional skills lag way behind their mental abilities. For others, the discrepancies are much more surprising: They’re both gifted and learning disabled at the same time. These children — known as “dual exceptional,” “twice exceptional,” or “2E” for short — are often poorly understood.

Mrs. Cohen knew her third daughter was smart from an early age. Her oldest two daughters were always in the honors classes in their large out-of-town Bais Yaakov, and two-year-old Tehilla was already precocious. But she quickly realized something was different about Tehilla. “She had a speech problem, and I saw her reading lips,” says Mrs. Cohen. “I wasn’t sure what was going on.”

It turned out that Tehilla had a central auditory processing disorder, which still affects her. When Tehilla turned four, Mrs. Cohen felt she was ready for kindergarten — she was way ahead of most other students in the year above her. But the school administrators didn’t believe Tehilla was ready. After all, she had trouble answering their spoken questions.

Mrs. Cohen was undeterred and enrolled her in an after-school enrichment program instead. Eventually, in fifth grade, the school agreed to skip Tehilla. And despite her processing disorder, Tehilla, who is now in ninth grade, thrived in the higher grade, and has been in honors ever since.

“We had a student who couldn’t spell for anything,” says Mrs. Schloss. “She loved to write, but the teachers couldn’t read anything she wrote. Everything was misspelled, every single word. She didn’t space between the words. The mother wanted her to be skipped. I looked at her and said, ‘Oh, no, not this kid.’ Yet after she graduated, she landed in high honors and eventually went into the field of engineering. So that was a learning curve for me.”

Bracha’s mother learned the term “twice exceptional” from one of an army of psychologists Bracha met during her 12 years of education. “First grade math was completely obvious to her,” says Mrs. Klein. “But Chumash and Navi were exceptionally difficult for her, because she didn’t know Hebrew. And she didn’t feel the need, or even know how, to make the effort for something that didn’t come easily to her.”

Whenever Bracha took standardized tests, she tested in the top few percentiles. But she hated physically writing, and she’d throw tantrums when forced to put her thoughts on paper. “Her highs were so high, and her lows were so low, that she qualified for support,” says Mrs. Klein.

“The fact that the child has intellectual giftedness doesn’t mean that it’s in all domains of cognition,” says Dr. Mandelman. “And when we don’t deal with it — when they show ability in one area and we neglect the other areas — they’re not being serviced at a basic educational level in the way that they need to be, and that is very unfortunate.”

How to Nurture Potential

What’s the best way for educators and parents to help make school a positive, beneficial experience for gifted children?

Dr. Mandelman says the most common approaches to supporting gifted children in a mainstream classroom are acceleration, where the child learns the curriculum at a faster pace than his peers or skips to a higher grade, and grouping, where children with similar academic capabilities are placed together.

A report entitled A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students, based on a 2003 national university summit in which educators and scholars from around the country were invited to help formulate a report on acceleration, found that although acceleration is the most effective curriculum intervention for gifted children, most schools today are too afraid to implement it.

The same stigma applies to grouping, says Dr. Mandelman: “It’s become highly political. People are uncomfortable with it.”

There’s a long history behind this discomfort with gifted education in America. Although programs for gifted students boomed in the 1950s and 60s in order to compete with Russian innovation, by the 1970s and 80s, these programs became targets of a political agenda. Liberal activists argued that they perpetuated racism and inequality, creating a cycle in which well-educated children benefited from even more privilege. By the early 2000s, funding began to dry up, and many gifted programs have now been shut down.

For many kids, though, these interventions can be enormously helpful. Dr. Mandelman explains that a child’s chronological peers may not be his intellectual peers. “We’re trying to make it work because they happen to be the same age, while in reality, their areas of interest and their capacities are so markedly different. It is very unfair to them to have those expectations of their same-aged peers.”

Some schools do a fantastic job with this. Dr. Mandelman mentions that one educator for Torah Umesorah’s Diverse Learners Initiative, Mrs. Devorah Pinkus, ran a gifted program in Yeshivas Tiferes Tzvi in Chicago for several years called Al Pi Darko. “She opened it partly because of her own children’s giftedness,” he says, noting that such programs can have tremendous impact.

But what if a school can’t, or won’t, provide acceleration and grouping? Dr. Mandelman stresses there’s still a lot of potential. “The most important piece is understanding,” he says. “Giving them independence and leadership opportunities, and an ability to explore areas of interest while having a different set of privileges and responsibilities. Matching them with content experts or those who will help facilitate what they need. Supporting them, even within a class.”

When Mrs. Rosenblum’s son was disturbing the class, his principal arranged to regularly take him out of class and learn with him b’chavrusa. Because he already knew how to multiply in first grade, his math teacher arranged coloring sheets and activity pages to keep him busy.

“It’s not always a matter of resources,” Mrs. Rosenblum says. “It’s a matter of willing and creativity. Not every school is equipped with big budgets or resources, but with my son’s Lakewood cheder, we’re very happy and very grateful. They might not necessarily have the most sophisticated resources, but the principal has the will, and if there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Mrs. Schloss strongly believes in keeping children with their chronological age group, “in order to ensure they develop normal social abilities. The challenge is,” she says, “how to keep them engaged when they know it already? Right now, I have one seventh-grader who is exceptionally talented in math. We have her working on an independent program that keeps her engaged. But we also have her working with a first grader for fifteen to twenty minutes at the end of each day, whose home situation does not allow homework to get done. It’s turned out to be a win-win situation — the child loves it, and the girl loves it. It’s truly amazing.”

Extracurricular activities can be helpful, too. Mrs. Schloss says that Bnos Bracha offers multiple after-school clubs, including E2K (a science and math enrichment program), a chess club, and a robotics club. These programs don’t take away from class time, but they give children a group of likeminded classmates and a chance to learn something new.

Rabbi Gertner says that the rebbeim in Yeshiva Yesodei Hatorah believe strongly in helping children to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, and to appreciate their friends. They’ve come up with a hybrid grouping system: For the first two weeks of each year, students are grouped by level, and afterward, the groups are mixed.

“Gifted kids can be very useful and helpful with other kids,” he says. “Rebbeim can have a good talk and help them understand how to utilize and appreciate their gift from Hashem.”

But he agrees that, “there has to be some kind of flexibility” when it comes to gifted children. “If they need some extra work, for example. Or if they finish earlier, they can have more library time to read something more at their level.” He’s had several students supplement their regular learning with independent projects: some designed their own books based on their research, while others created science projects.

Mrs. Stern’s son was lucky to have a teacher who allowed him to go ahead on his own in the math textbook. Another option she recommends is project-based learning, where kids work on an independent project, sometimes checking in periodically with a supervising adult.

“I know of several parents who hired a tutor to check in with the kids twice a week for the project they’re working on,” she says. “Not all gifted children are able to learn independently, but for the ones who are, it’s a real boost.”

She says she’d love to see more resources for frum teachers to become trained in differentiation, “where you’re taking whatever you’re teaching the class, but you’re giving the kids who are able to something higher to work on or think about, within whatever the material is.”

Mrs. Schloss encourages teachers to learn more about what makes gifted children tick. “The most important question when working with children,” she says, “is to ask the question ‘Why.’ We don’t label — the child is not lazy, chutzpahdig, overtired, or resistant. We don’t know what drives the child, so we ask why. And the more questions we have, the better we start to understand the child, and then we can start talking about what we can do.”

Mrs. Schloss says that the field of gifted education is changing. On the one hand, the effects of school closures during Covid are still being felt. “The amount of really bright kids who are showing their brightness through achievement testing has dropped tremendously,” she says. But on the other hand, “Education has moved away from that traditional lecture form. And when we move into more student-engaged activities, the opportunity to be able to give to each student according to their particular needs increases.”

Into Adulthood

There’s a common misunderstanding, says Dr. Mandelman, that if a child is gifted, “they’ll be fine anyway.” But like children with learning disabilities, gifted children are also a population with unique needs.

“We can look at it from a human capital standpoint,” says Dr. Mandelman. “We end up underutilizing these kids, and they become very bored and frustrated. They’re also able to see through many of the inconsistencies that may exist within our educational system.”

Bracha remembers that she was in sixth grade when she broke down and lost respect for the system. “They weren’t doing anything for me, so I wasn’t doing anything for them,” she says. “And then they didn’t care — as long as I was quiet. So then I started making trouble.”

Bracha went on to bounce between three high schools, including a stay in a residential program. Though her journey hasn’t been easy, today, she’s a successful and beloved preschool teacher.

What would she tell her younger self, if she had a chance? “Care about yourself and advocate for yourself, even if you think nobody’s going to listen,” she says. “I felt like nobody would have cared. But maybe somebody would have.”

It can be a challenge for educators to give extra attention to intellectually gifted students, but the effort can help these children grow into thriving, well-adjusted adults.

“Do I think it’s the school’s responsibility? Absolutely,” says Mrs. Rosenblum. “The responsibility of a school is for a child to walk out with content knowledge, but that’s not the first priority. You’re trying to create a mensch. That means that students with disadvantages, special needs, should be given tools, and those who have advantages, who are really also special needs, they have to be given tools to deal with their extras. That should be the focus of school: dealing with everybody.”

Mrs. Stern recalls her own school experience as a gifted child herself. “I grew up in smaller towns and went to small schools where they were much better able to differentiate,” she says. In seventh grade, she was placed in a small group of three girls who were basically self-directed; in eighth grade, when her family moved to a new town, her Ivrit skills were far above those of her classmates, so the school put her in the tenth-grade classroom. At some point in high school, she remembers taking three math classes at once, just to keep busy.

“I don’t think my childhood was traumatic,” she says. “I was a happy kid.”

Dr. Mandelman often gets asked why he devotes so much time in his lectures to the subject of gifted children. His answer: Because every teacher who hears him will immediately identify one of his or her own students as gifted. And when an educator understands, it can make all the difference.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1027)