The Gifted Teenager's Survivalguide

By Jessica Colins

As a gifted teenager you're different from others. Teachers, classmates, even your parents don't understand you. Sometimes you don't understand yourself that well either. This book is full of tips to get through secondary school. How do you deal with fear of failure and hypersensitivity? What if you're not motivated? How do you deal with bullies? And what to do if you know better than the teacher? Jessica Colins is an orthopedagogue and expert in the field of giftedness. She has a private practice, where she works with gifted children and adolescents. This guide has been created in collaboration with some of them. They provided the book with their vision and anecdotes about the topics discussed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uitgeverij Pluspunt
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005400712

Jessica Colins

Jessica werkt met kinderen die het thuis of op school moeilijk hebben. Ze hebben bijvoorbeeld ADHD, autisme, hoogbegaafdheid, dyslexie of faalangst, of groeien op onder bijzondere omstandigheden. Voor deze kinderen schrijft Jessica haar boeken: zodat zij ook eens een boek kunnen lezen met een hoofdpersoon die op hen lijkt. Ze kunnen zich in de hoofdpersoon herkennen en zien hoe deze met zijn of haar problemen omgaat. Humor en avontuur worden hierbij natuurlijk niet uit de weg gegaan, want een boek moet vooral leuk zijn om te lezen!

Book preview

The Gifted Teenager’s Survival Guide

Tips for the interaction with

classmates, teachers, parents and yourself

Jessica Colins

Copyright First Edition 2015

Copyright Smashwords Edition 2021

All rights reserved

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: When teachers don’t understand you

What if you know better?

You must have been cheating!

What a waste!

Boredom

Chapter 2: When classmates don’t understand you

Nerd!

Different

Interests

Bullying

Chapter 3: When your parents don’t understand

Interests

Homework

Career choices

Feelings

Chapter 4: Underachieving

Fear of failure

Not wanting to stand out

Studying? How?

I just don’t feel like it

Chapter 5: Highly sensitive

Empathy

Criticism

Not fair!

The world upon your shoulders

Chapter 6: The benefits of being gifted

Creativity

Speed

Be what you want

Pride!

Thanx

Preface

Being a teen is not easy. Under the influence of hormones teenagers become more selfaware and start taking more interest in how other people view them. Classmates’ opinions are especially important. The parent-child relationship changes. The teenager wants more independence, while the parents are not always convinced that their teen is ready for that. School starts at an unchristian hour, even though the teen tends to go to sleep late, and once at home there’s homework to be done.

Gifted teenagers have an additional problem. Their classmates simply don’t understand them sometimes, just like their teachers and parents. And often, they don’t quite understand themselves. All this can lead to depression and bullying by classmates. This survival guide aims to help gifted teenagers out a little, by offering tips to deal with school, parents and themselves.

Chapter 1:

When teachers don’t understand you

In teacher training there is relatively little attention for giftedness. As a result, most teachers are not sufficiently aware of the problems gifted teenagers can face. They don’t recognize the teen as being gifted, but regard him as cheeky or hyperactive or don’t notice anything unusual in the incognito Einstein. Although more attention is now being paid to differentiation, many teachers in secondary education still work from the principle that everyone is equal in their needs.

Quite often gifted youngsters have lost a big part of their motivation in primary school, but when secondary education is in sight their expectations rise: finally they will be able to learn something. They expect to enjoy all the different subjects, teachers and classrooms. Still, it is possible they learn nothing new in the first two years of middle school. And in the subjects they didn’t have before, like French or Spanish, they have to cram long lists of vocabulary into their heads, which is usually not something gifted kids enjoy. First of all, they think it’s boring. Second of all, they never learned how to cram. Boredom and fear of failure can rise (again). When the kid gets a bad mark, because of fear of failure, the teacher can think it’s because he didn’t study, which can lead to major frustrations in the teenager. The teacher may not be very appreciative of the fact that the teen rather doesn’t study and gets an F (because if you don’t study, you can’t fail), than works hard and gets a lower mark than he wished for. An A instead of an A+ can be a huge dissapointment for a perfectionist and he’d rather not answer a question at al than risk getting the answer wrong.

Asking many, many questions seems to be natural to gifted kids. Not because they don’t understand the subject matter, but because they want to know more. They want to understand exactly how something works. Teachers can interpret these questions at relatively simple subjects as a lack of