Living With Live Wires

Nancy Robinson, former director of the Halbert and Nancy Robinson Center for Young Scholars at the University of Washington, is the keynote speaker at the Oregon Association for Talented and Gifted’s annual conference, which will be in Salem on Friday and Saturday.

Now retired, Robinson continues to be active with gifted education. Her husband founded the center in 1975, and it has become a national leader in gifted education. Among the ways it seeks to serve gifted students is by identifying them and reaching out to educators on how to best serve them.

Question: What should talented and gifted programs accomplish?

Answer: A good education for any child is what my husband used to call an “optimal match,” the sweet spot where they need to stretch a bit to learn, but not so much that it’s subversive, but not so little that it’s totally boring. That’s true for every single child. More…