Living With Live Wires

Tamara Fisher is a K-12 gifted education specialist for a school district located on an Indian reservation in northwestern Montana and president-elect of the Montana Association of Gifted and Talented Education. With Karen Isaacson, she is also co-author of Intelligent Life in the Classroom: Smart Kids and Their Teachers. Her hobbies include drawing, hiking, fourwheeling, and building houses. (She lives in a house she built herself.) In this blog, Unwrapping the Gifted, Fisher discusses news and developments in the gifted education community and offers advice for teachers on working with gifted students.

She concludes the article with “Take a moment this week to tell a gifted child in your life that you don’t expect him to be perfect. Take a moment this week to tell a gifted child in your life that you know being a gifted kid isn’t the cakewalk others seem to think it is. Take a moment this week to tell a gifted child in your life that her intellectual growth and hard work ethic are far more important than perfect marks, even if it means a B in a challenging class. What we assume that others know about our views of them can be out-of-sync with reality. Tell them you know they’re only human. You very well could be someone’s hero for saying it.”