Gifted and 2e Education

Hello and welcome to Twice Exceptional Teens Exploring and Living with Neurodiversity. My name is Kate and I am the host of this educational podcast. I am currently 18 years old and I have been diagnosed with ADHD since I was 10. Additionally, I was tested for giftedness as a child, making me twice exceptional. I started this podcast because living with ADHD can be difficult, and I wanted to find a way to reach people and share some information about neurodiversity from someone who is currently dealing with it in their everyday life. Not only am I neurodiverse, but my brother is neurodiverse also, meaning I have seen how symptoms can be portrayed differently in different people. In this podcast, I discuss my own experiences and interview others on their experiences and share research on neurodiversity. In this episode, I spoke with Manisha about educating gifted and twice exceptional kids.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

It's so great to be here, Kate. Thank you for having me.

So, to start, would you please introduce yourself, including your name and your occupation?

Absolutely. I am Manisha Snoyer and I'm the founder of Teacher Kids, which is a podcast and online homeschooling community. And before that, I was a teacher for 20 years.

That's very cool. And when you were a teacher, what types of grades or subjects did you teach?

Great question. I really taught all over the place. I taught in public school, private school. As a private tutor, I've taught 18 different subjects in three countries. My youngest kid, I guess probably was when I used to babysit, so zero. And then the oldest student I ever had was 84 when I started my own French language school in New York City. So I've seen the whole spectrum of learners.

That's super interesting. And so what is your experience with.

Gifted or twice exceptional kids?

Yes. So when you work in the New York City school system, you definitely see a large variety of learners. And I think personally I had a lot of resistance to the term gifted when I first heard it because I think every child has really amazing and unique gifts and there are many different ways of learning. But when I started to become more interested in the homeschooling community and talking to parents, I learned about this diagnosis of gifted and twice exceptional children and how it was such an important framework for parents whose children weren't thriving at school. One often thinks about a gifted child as a straight A student, but that's not actually how it often manifests. Sometimes the children are bored at school, or they might be doing well academically but have very strong Emotional reactions or an attachment to perfectionism. And so I became very interested in giftedness and twice exceptional students, because of how I saw that diagnosis, was able to support them. Yeah.

And so that kind of leads into my next question, which was kind of like, how would you at least define giftedness? Is it kind of just being smart or is it different or. Because I feel like there's a lot of confusion because it's thrown around all the time.

Yes. I mean, it is such a challenging question. And every student who has been given the label gifted is also a unique kind of gifted. It's hard to find a typical gifted student. So when I think about giftedness, I think about it as markers that help you support a student. For example, in a homeschooling environment, there's a lot more freedom to customize a child's learning. A gifted student in a traditional school environment, some signs you might see are that they're very bored at school, or they might be throwing a lot of temperature tantrums, or, you know, it can be the case where they get really upset if they don't get an A. Or they might be doing really well at math, but not so great at English language arts. So those are some of the markers that you often see. A lot of parents will say, you know, my child needs constant intellectual stimulation. And so I. When I think about giftedness, I don't really think of it as, yay, big celebration, my child is gifted. But, okay, here's a problem that's interfering with their learning. And how can we build the learning around this new knowledge of how they think and how they react? And one. One person described it really well is there's an institute called the Davidson Institute, and they talk about gifted kids as their neurons are just firing so fast and they're just absorbing so much information so quickly. And that can be exciting, but also.

Challenging because I feel like people have different definitions for it, for sure.

And I've been thinking recently about how people have a lot of anxiety about status. And I think that's why sometimes when people hear their children are gifted, they might be excited. Or alternately, if they hear someone else's child is gifted, they might feel resentful. And so I think that it's really important if we kind of step outside the status symbol and think about what are the skills we need to lead to lead happy, healthy lives. And gifted is just another navigation marker for certain students, then we can start thinking about it in a different way.

Yeah, for sure. And one of the things I wanted to kind of Discuss was how sometimes being gifted can kind of otherwise either you or the kids who are not gifted.

For sure.

Sometimes I feel like. Like what have you kind of noticed with how people, especially parents, when the kid is younger, kind of feels about the separation of them?

Yes. I mean, there's a million different reasons that that can happen. One is that people might be unhappy that one student is performing better in school than them, and they might get labeled as a nerd or a geek, and the other students don't really want to connect with them because they. It's not cool to do well in school, unfortunately.

Right.

You know, so that's one aspect of it. But I think also there's all the social, emotional issues that can make it challenging to be gifted. Right. The strong emotions, the perfectionism, all of these can be challenges for a gifted student.

So there's a term that I've heard thrown around a lot, especially on the Internet, which is about, like, gifted kid burnout syndrome. So I wanted to kind of hear what are your thoughts on kind of what that is and whether it's something that, like, exists or.

Yeah. So, I mean, I can speak from my own experience in that when I. And I think this can happen for a variety of reasons. But just if we take the typical case of a perfectionist, I know that when I was in high school, I was just so attached to my grades and doing well because that's how I had received affirmation in the past that being successful, doing better than my peers was what made me great, was what helped me receive love from the people around me. And so I would work until 3am or 5am every single day and then start school at 8am and I went to a boarding school, and I convinced them to let me opt out of lunch and have no free period so that I could take classes straight from 8am to 6pm every single day. And my last semester of school, I got rejected from every single school I applied to, except for one, for one college. And my identity was so wrapped around, you know, going to Harvard or Yale and. And, you know, and so in the combination of having no sleep because I was trying to get these grades, no weekend time, no friends, I had a complete emotional breakdown and I had to leave school for a week.

So.

So I think that if that perfectionism spins out of control, it can be really detrimental to a student. And as parents, we have to remember that if we're constantly praising our kids for getting good grades or doing well in school, if our teachers are doing that, they're going to start to identify that way. And then I would say another aspect of it is just really strong reactions. You know, there's a lot of challenging things happening in the world that we hear about every day. Climate change, suicide and depression among youth, starvation. And as a young person who is gifted and feels things more strongly, you might have this impulse to want to do something about that and be very frustrated that no avenues are given to you, or just have a really keen sense of injustice. And sometimes things aren't always just in a typical school environment. So that can be really stressful. Especially as a young person, you have very little agency over your own life. You know, when, once you're Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg and you've opted out of the system, then you can start doing amazing things. But when you're just 15 or 14 or 8 years old, you have much less control. And when things don't make sense and there's nothing you can do about it, it can be completely overwhelming.

You mentioned parents. So what do you think parents can do to help their gifted child, Especially when the child is younger?

Right. So first of all, what I like to remind parents is that they have this gut sense of what their child needs that's been developed over billions of years of our ancestors raising children. And so rather than jump to asking a specialist what to do, it's really important to look inwards and, and ask yourself, what does my child need? And even more importantly, ask your child what they need, because a lot of times children have a great amount of wisdom. So I'll give an example. There's a bestselling author, Nir Eyal, and his daughter was going to a very elite private school and every day they just, she was bringing home pieces of cut paper because. And they asked the teacher, what's going on? I said, oh, well, she finishes the work before everybody else. So I just have her cut paper. And he said, well, can you give her something else to do? And the teacher said, no, we're the best school in the area. And so that family made the decision to homeschool their child. And you know, I know a lot of people might feel like homeschooling is not an option for them, but, but I've seen people do it with no money at all. Single moms. It's really a question of, you know, finding a childcare solution if you have a full time job or changing your job. So that's kind of one big solution. But I think on another side of it is you can intervene in your school and you can ask, you know, the teachers to, to give your child more different activities to do. And along with that, I would also bring up this idea of growth mindset, where rather than praising a child's trophies and grades, you're praising them when they encounter a difficult problem and push through that. That way the child becomes less attached to getting those perfect grades and more excited about being in that process of challenging themselves where the learning really happens and they develop a sense of grit. So like, wow, I really love that you are frustrated, but you push through that problem anyway instead of like, you're so pretty, you're so smart, you know, and just giving that praise over what the child is capable of. They're not, they don't have control over the fact that they're gifted, but they have control over the fact that even though the problem was hard, they kept going, you know. And so I think that is really key to supporting your child. And part of that starts with looking at yourself as a parent. Because often gifted children and twice exceptional children are the children of gifted and twice exceptional parents. And so the parent might be modeling a lot of perfectionism in their work environment. And so it's really important that the parent models doing tasks that are hard or challenging and pushing through them to the child.

That's what parents can do. But as the child gets older, some of the decisions are more up to them. So what would you recommend that like teenage kids that are twice exceptional or like young adults that are gifted do to advocate for themselves?

Great question. So one thing that was a challenge for me and we didn't touch upon this talking about gifted kids was the sense of an imposter syndrome. So in my case, I was two years ahead of math. I was in advanced calculus, and when I took the math SAT two, I thought, oh my gosh, this is going to be a no brainer. And I barely got a 500 on that test, which I don't know if the test has been updated, but the top score was an 800. And I was just devastated and felt really stupid and like I didn't know anything at all. And I felt that way through a lot of my career until, you know, I realized that the way things were graded in school was very different than the way they were graded in reality. And I had a really wonderful mentor who said to me, you know, the way that you build confidence is not by coming to some conclusion that I'm great or I'm bad. It's not by figuring out where you are on that status ladder. You understand yourself so you understand what your strengths are and what your challenges are to the best of your ability. And you work to cultivate yourself so that the challenges get better. And if you want to start a business or if you want to get a job or whatever it is, you realize, okay, here are my strengths. I'm going to make a plan. This is the best plan that I could make given my strengths. I might be wrong, I'm going to make mistakes, but I'm going to move forward in my plan step by step. So that has been really important to me as I work towards building a business. You know, I have these seven years of experience working with homeschoolers. I've been a teacher for 20 years. I know that one of my weaknesses is I can get really scattered on all over the place. But I do well when I focus. And then I build a financial model and I read all the books I can about business and I make a plan and I move forward with that plan and I find mentors to support me. And I stop thinking about am I good or am I bad? But all I'm thinking about is that plan and moving forward with it. And I. And I think that's really helpful because often we just jump to character and being really self absorbed about am I good or am I bad? Instead of just really focusing on the mission and what we want to achieve in the world. But I will also say there are things like getting good nutrition, getting enough sleep, you know, those are really important that are, that can just change your whole worldview when you're really nurturing yourself and taking care of yourself. But also just to know, I mean, imposter syndrome is really common among twice exceptional children especially. We have an education system that really values well roundedness. And so when you are not well rounded, when you have like this strength and this weakness, you can feel like everything's broken and just know that, that that's not true, that you have something special and unique to offer the world. Yeah.

So now I want to get more into twice exceptional itself versus gifted and twice exceptional. So as you are aware, but I'm not sure everyone else is twice exceptional kids basically are gifted and have a learning disability. So in your opinion, what types of challenges could face those kids that don't face like normal kids or just gifted kids?

Right. So as I mentioned, a lot of self doubt because you're getting these conflicted messages of you're so smart, oh wait, actually you just are completely incompetent, you know, and it's just who are you in that. That mix can be. Can be a real challenge, especially as sometimes the learning disability you discover later in life, or perhaps it's the opposite, that your learning disability was diagnosed very early, but you're actually incredibly gifted in all of these different areas. So it's just a lot of confusion. But I think if you have appearance, who can help customize your learning, or if you yourself can try to understand the tools that can support you, it can really be a gift because you're able to break out of the traditional learning mold because you have to, because you can't learn in the way that other people learn. But you know that you have these extraordinary gifts to offer to the world.

So this is a question I actually got from one of my friends, which is, what are some of the most popular strategies that you implemented to help teach neurodivergent kids? And did some of these strategies differ from what you do with neurotypical kids?

Wow. So my experience, and I will say I've taught at this point, over 2,000 children of all grades and levels. And right now, one in five children has a diagnosed learning disability. And you take that number and you realize that there are many more children who are under resourced who have not received any diagnosis. So it's very rare to come across a student who doesn't have some kind of learning quirk that fits. Typically, what you see is that. And this might have been because I tutored kids, they were struggling when they came to me, or their parents were like, wow, they're really smart. They need to do extra well. Mm. So what I would say is that these learning disabilities that we've identified, I think, have come about as a framework because the current education system is not personalized at all. It's a. It's completely homogenous, and it works for almost no one. So one thing that's nice about not being neurotypical is that you probably get more individualized attention because that system isn't working for you. And I would say, honestly, the people who are the most interesting, the people who do the coolest projects, the entrepreneurs, the innovators, I mean, I have never met one who didn't have a learning disability or a personality disorder. It's. It just. It's almost unheard of among the innovators in the world. So just know, you know, high school is hard, middle school is hard, elementary school is hard. But once you get out into the real world, you're the one who's going to be doing cool things because you're able to Think differently.

So do you have any tips for, I don't know, like, learning information for school.

In turn for a twice exceptional student, how they would accommodate to a school system? Well, first of all, I would say the number one thing is ask for what you need and try to inform your teacher about what you need. It's you can advocate for yourself as much as you want, and that's a skill that's going to come in handy a lot in the real world. So if your teacher gives you an assignment that's difficult for you to complete because you're dyslexic, can be so helpful to tell your teacher, I have really great ideas. I've won writing contests in the past, but the actual act of writing is interfering with my ability to complete this assignment. Hopefully, if you present this information in a caring way, the teacher will make accommodations for you. So first of all, just like ask for those accommodations and really intervene on your own behalf as much as possible.

I have kind of a unique opportunity to talk to a lot of kids who've been gifted because I'm in an advanced math class and since I was writing some of these questions during my math class, I got to hear some of their different thoughts on different topics and stuff. And one thing that I learned a lot about is some of the gifted programs that exist in different public schools and how they work, because some of these kids did not live in Arizona their entire life or went to different schools at different points and stuff. And so there's apparently a lot of gifted programs, at least where I live, for, in public schools for younger kids. Like, what are your thoughts on like, those types of programs that like, take kids out of the normal classes to go teach them something different?

Yeah, I mean, I'm always in favor of individualized learning. There's a lot of research on mastery learning which shows that when a student is able to learn at their own pace, there's almost nothing that they can't accomplish. One of the challenges with gifted programs is they're often separated between the students who are privileged and the students who don't have parents who are supporting them at home with their homework. Rather than really being for students who I would diagnose as gifted because those neurons are firing so fast, or they might be twice exceptional and need to learn. They might want to be writing a book, but for some reason handwriting is hard. Right. In the case of a dyslexic student. Or they just process information differently or, you know, might even be non verbal in the case of an autistic student. So I just think it's, it's very tricky and I, I don't necessarily know how effective the programs are. The most effective programs I've seen are ones that allow for some type of one on one tutoring. Whether that's through community members getting involved or using some of the ESSA funds that have been given by Congress post pandemic to allow for that one on one intervention. I think those programs have been really effective.

Yeah, it was interesting to me because I went to a private school when I was younger. I'm currently at a public school, but so I didn't really have programs like that. I kind of just had to skip grades in math at least because I didn't want me to skip an overall grade because socially that can affect you. And so it was a different experience.

Right.

And what can be challenging is that your social skills might be developing at a different level than your academic skills. So it can be really weird to be a little kid in an advanced math class with everybody teasing you. And so, you know, I can certainly see the value of it because you're moving at the faster rate, but you're still not really moving as fast as you would if you had a block of time to study independently or, or if you were working with a tutor. So the pace is still kind of constrained in a way.

And then one thing that I heard a few times is about like when you hit that wall. So like sometimes it's kind of if you're used to like getting things really easily and then you get to a topic and you don't automatically know how to do it, how would you recommend approaching that? Because that tends to be at a point where you're like, what am I supposed to do?

For sure. Well, it took me a really long time to celebrate those moments and I think it was only when I entered the tech world and started hearing about this concept called grit. Angela Duckworth has a great book on the topic which I think every twice exceptional gifted kid should read. And the idea is that it's those moments that you get when you get to something hard and you try and you fail, and you try and you fail. And then you move past that moment, you're that much further ahead than everyone else. And it's kind. Another analogy might be training at the gym. Like if you're just lifting weights that are easy for you, you're never going to build any muscle. It's actually when that moment when you're like really pushing to lift that weight that you're actually Going to build a muscle. So if you can keep that in your mind, it's helpful. And you know, school is just a really artificial environment. I mean, obviously you need good grades and good test scores to get into college, but a lot of that is about negotiating with your teacher, kind of figuring out what they want. These arbit, well, I find them to be a bit arbitrary, like state standards. But once you're in the real world, if you do want to start your own business, which a lot of not neurotypical thinkers do want to do, you're going to have to be able to push through those hard moments. So if you can learn to love them and say, oh my gosh, okay, if I push through this, I'm that much further ahead, then you can really go far. And you know, for me, that was just a huge breakthrough that I didn't even get until my 30s. I would just give up. When anything I was like, oh, I put out this new offer for a class and no one signed up. And instead of trying to modify the offering or get feedback, it would just be so sad that I would walk away or I wasn't even able to collect feedback from my customers because I was just so scared that they were going to say something negative and it was going to crush me instead of, you know, now I get excited when people say something negative because I know where I can improve to become the best company. And it's just a totally different way of looking at the world. And if you realize if you start looking at the people who are successful, you will see that they all embrace failure. They all love critical feedback because that when they get a criticism, they know how to grow and be that much better. So I think if this is, if this is tricky for you, if you're a perfectionist and you just feel like, oh, it's hard and so I don't want to go forward. I'm stupid. One thing that's helpful is just thinking about your life mission and what you want to offer the world, whether that's helping children or women or climate change, and realizing like, if I figure out this tough problem, I'm going to be that much closer to helping other people. Because I think when you put it just on yourself, it can be like really overwhelming. You get really self absorbed about whether you're good or not. But if you see that as a way to be of better service to the world and the causes you care about, I feel like it takes away some of the tension around those tricky moments for us perfectionists.

Yeah, that sounds like, good advice to me. So there's one final topic I want to talk about, and it's a little bit different. But one thing I've talked about before with ADHD is kind of the gender things that come into play because it's a lot harder to get diagnosed as a girl than a guy. And one other thing I've noticed in school is there tends to be less females in some of those higher academic classes, especially like my math class and science classes sometimes and things like that. So do you think that giftedness plays a role in that, or is it just like general life gender issues?

So interesting. I just did an episode about the gender achievement gap, which actually shows that many more women are getting college degrees and even higher salaries at younger ages than men. So women are really taking over in that regard. But I will say, you know, I mean that often boys tend to be a bit louder and more boisterous when they're having problems. And so I think when somebody is disruptive, that gets noticed and people feel like we have to do something about that. So I would say that, I mean, it happens in homeschooling. There's just so many more boys who are homeschooled than girls. And so part of this is just, you know, boys brains are developing later than girls brains from a neuroscientific perspective. And so there's a lot of evidence that holding boys back in kindergarten is really better for them in the long term. But I think that it can be frustrating as a girl, especially when you care a lot about social relationships and teachers, to really advocate for yourself. And so I think that's important. And then I would also say that, you know, there's another, you know, and if you can understand what it means to be twice exceptional, you can talk to people at your school about getting into those classes, and you get practice on advocating for yourself, which can be very hard for women. But then there's a lot of really good stuff out there for adhd. There's great podcasts. I mean, Andrew Huberman at Stanford, he does a ton of podcasts about ADHD and how you can support your adhd. Um, we didn't talk too much about anxiety, but that can be a huge thing for gifted and twice exceptional kids. And there are great apps like Headspace that do meditation, three minute meditation every day. Getting sleep is also just so critical for teenage brains. And, you know, people kind of say, think, oh, if I don't sleep, I'm the best student. But actually, you're not going to perform as well. If you don't sleep. So I would really encourage students to look at those podcasts, meditate, eat the foods that will help calm your anxiety. And in terms of gender, just really start practicing advocating for yourself. You have to start somewhere. And why not now?

Yeah. So is there anything else you would like to say?

I would just say that it's wonderful that you're creating this community because especially when we talk about issues like being twice exceptional, it can feel very lonely. And I certainly didn't have anyone to talk about it when I was your age. And so if you are trying to figure out how to advocate yourself or have the confidence to advocate for yourself or get over some of your anxiety, just connecting with a group of other people or other women who are going through something similar is so important. And if your parents aren't supporting you, there's so many specialists out there, people like me, like my friend Jade Rivera. She writes a lot about chewy students who are just happy to help and give advice. So you really, the best thing you can do is just reach out. And I will just give one more resource that I just thought of. It's Binaural beats and my mom advises pre med students. She's gotten students into all the best medical schools in the country, Harvard, Yale, Stanford. And it's just you put on headphones and you listen to these Binaural beats and it just helps calm your brain waves. And you can do it. You don't have. You can do it while you're studying for a test or doing some other activity. And then when you get to the test, you'll find you're just a lot more calm and focused.

That's very cool. And where can our listeners find you on social media or online?

Thank you for asking. So the website is teach your kids podcast.com and we have a podcast and a YouTube channel. It's Teacher Kids. So very easy to find. And I'm also very easy to find. So if you go to Teacher Kid teach your kids pod.com and sign up for the newsletter and you just reply to the welcome email, I'll answer. I'm happy to help you with any questions you have. Especially I know as a teen just the emotions are so big. So I always love to support anybody who needs help.

Thank you so much.

You are so welcome, Kate. It is just a delight to speak to you. You're so intelligent and compassionate and we need more people in the world like you.

Thank you again, Manisha, for coming onto my podcast. If you would like to share your thoughts or your story with me. Feel free to reach out through email. It's a twiceexceptionalpodcastmail.com or message me on Instagram or TikTok. Weicexceptionalpodcast Consider following the podcast on social media or sharing it with others to keep spreading the word about the complexities of neurodiversity.