Clara Schumann: Five ingredients for a child prodigy (+video)

4. A nonconformist streak

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
The Renzulli Academy for Gifted and Talented in Hartford, Conn. read about the US Civil War.

Ellen Winner notes that one of the most salient characteristics of gifted children is that they insist on marching to the beat of their own drummer. They generally don't need people to model tasks for them, engage their attention, provide motivation, give them advice, or offer other kinds of the instructional "scaffolding" that most pupils require "The discoveries they make about their domain are exciting and motivating, and each leads the gifted child on to the next step," writes Winner. "Often these children independently write rules of the domain and devise novel, idiosyncratic ways of solving problems."

Later on, Winner describes the gifted as "inveterate nonconformists."

As the Monitor's Amelia Woodside notes, Clara's husband, Robert Schumann, attempted to persuade her to give up music to become a full-time wife. Much to the benefit of her audiences, she would have none of it.  

Ellen Winner cites studies showing that, while academically gifted boys tend to be more popular than average, gifted girls tend to be less popular. 

"What is seen as leadership in a boy is seen as bossiness in a girl," Winner writes. "Perhaps this is because the traits of independence and achievement displayed by the gifted violate the stereotype of the girl so much more than that of the boy."

Life is clearly more socially difficult for the gifted girl, but most gifted children report feeling some degree of social isolation. What's more, school psychologists often mistake their gifts for mental illness, most often attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, or various mood disorders. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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