• From the 2009 Davidson Fellow Laureates site :

A 17-year-old young woman from Vancouver, Washington, Nicole Rhodes created a portfolio, The Dictionary of Distance, to explore different facets of distance in writing.

She considers the space between the author and the work, the distance between a piece’s narrator and characters, and the space separating characters and other elements to determine how distance alters memory.

A student at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, Nicole is particularly interested in the interaction between language and the brain, especially linguistics which merges her interests in mathematics and language.

• From a Reuters news story (Top Student Achievers Defy “The Norm”) :

Each 2009 Davidson Fellow has worked tirelessly to obtain the resources that enable them to make advances in their fields. Unfortunately, not all gifted students get the support they need according to the Fordham Institute’s study, “High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB.”

The findings show that top pupils have “languished” academically. In addition, a national teacher survey found that while most teachers believe all students deserve equal attention, advanced pupils are a lower priority in their schools, receiving dramatically less attention than low-achievers.

“Our goal is to not have any student left behind,” said Jan Davidson, Ph.D., co-founder of the Davidson Institute.

“We applaud the tenacity of these and other profoundly gifted children, who often take it upon themselves to gather the resources they need to succeed.”

In addition to starting the Davidson Institute in 1999, Bob and Jan Davidson are co-authors, with Laura Vanderkam, of Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds.

gifted teens, supporting gifted students, supporting high ability, high aptitude achievement

In the film “Towelhead,” Summer Bishil plays 13-year-old Jasira, a Lebanese-American girl navigating through her adolescence, including challenges with identity, sexual awakening and self-esteem.

In our interview, Summer, who made the film at age 18, and is now 20, talks about a number of her perspectives on her work.

“Acting is a way for me to just kind of work through whatever I’m going through,” she commented. “You do it in front of a camera, and it’s an art, so it’s constructive. But it’s also therapeutic.”

Listen to podcast interview at Inner Talent Interviews.

“It is important to remember that just because something bad happens to you, it doesn’t mean you are bad. You are still entitled to every possible happiness in life.”

Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted and imprisoned in 2002, is now a 20-year-old music major at Brigham Young University.

A drifter named Brian David Mitchell kidnapped Elizabeth, then 14, at knifepoint from her bedroom. He and his wife Wanda Barzee held her captive for nine months.

Mitchell was a polygamist who believed it was his religious right to have more than one wife, even by force. In 2004, Mitchell and Barzee were found mentally incompetent to stand trial on charges including kidnapping and sexual assault.

In a new People magazine interview, Elizabeth Smart talks about what has helped her heal and grow from the experience:

“I always knew that no matter what, I’d still be part of my family. They could change my name, change the way I look, starve me to death. But they couldn’t change that I am Ed and Lois Smart’s daughter. That was a very powerful thing to me.

“It’s just not worth holding on to that kind of hate. It can ruin your life. Nine months of my life had been taken from me, and I wasn’t going to give them any more of my time.

“Before, I was just your average Mormon girl. And since everything I’ve gone through, there’s been a lot of learning and growing. I’ve learned to listen and not jump to conclusions. I’m not sorry this happened to me anymore, because it made me grow up.”

She emphasized, “It is important to remember that just because something bad happens to you, it doesn’t mean you are bad. You are still entitled to every possible happiness in life.”

Her perspectives and attitudes are great examples of resilience and applied positive psychology.

Clinical neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., elaborates the ideas of “Stress Induced Growth” (SIG) and adversity inspired creativity in his book The Beethoven Factor: The New Positive Psychology of Hardiness, Happiness, Healing and Hope.

In an interview, Dr. Pearsall comments, “I’ve long ago learned the P’s of dealing with bad news and toxic people. I don’t take criticism or adversity Personally, and do not view setbacks in one area of my life as Pervasive to all other areas, and most of all, I know that that nothing is Permanent.”

Related:
Positive Psychology articles
Healing and art

From news article, Los Angeles Times :

Photo: Evelyn Espinoza, 17, reacts as she is named winner of Merrill Lynch/NFTE Greater Los Angeles Regional Youth Business Plan Competition, by Garrett Gin, right, Director Communications and Public Affairs, Merrill Lynch & Co.

When she was 8 years old, Evelyn Espinoza sold bubble gum and other candy door-to-door in her Los Angeles neighborhood to earn money.

By sixth grade, her mom was buying the enterprising 12-year-old toys at a wholesale mart to resell at school.

Now 17, Espinoza is still hard at work. Her latest business venture, Hippie’s Candles, was named the winner last week of the Los Angeles regional business-plan competition, and a $1,750 prize, at the event sponsored by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and the Merrill Lynch Foundation.

“Entrepreneurship is excellent,” said Espinoza, who is in the NFTE entrepreneur-training class at Soledad Enrichment Action Girls Academy, a charter school in downtown Los Angeles.

“Money rules the society,” she said. “Everyone wants money, and it’s only right to learn how to make it in a legit way and to be your own boss.”

From news article Nationwide contest rewards young entrepreneurs, By Cyndia Zwahlen, Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2008.

Related section: The Inner Entrepreneur

From Now magazine [UK] :

Christina Ricci says she sought medical help in the past to help deal with an eating disorder.

‘I’ve had my own share of problems, including anorexia and depression,’ she confesses.

But the actress, 28, says she overcame her problems with the help of a psychiatrist.

‘These are things you can’t always deal with alone, so I went to therapy,’ she tells The Independent.

‘Sometimes people need to seek professional help. Along the way I discovered that you can choose to be happy.

‘If you choose to let go of your self-consciousness and insecurities about physical appearance, then you’ll get to a place where you are present to see the world and enjoy yourself.’ [nowmagazine.co.uk 14 May 2008]

Related Talent Development Resources pages:

Body image….Pg 2..Pg 3..Pg 4
Body image : books / sites
Depression…Pg 2..Pg 3..Pg 4…..
Depression : teen/young adult….
Depression : teen/young adult 2: articles books.
Depression articles……..
Depression relief products / programs……
Depression books

“I have never been a fan of learning in a classroom. Inside a laboratory or a garage, I always wanted to know more, but never inside a classroom.”

That quote is from Caltech physicist Caolionn O’Connell, PhD, from the site for the PBS program Einstein’s Big Idea.

Speaking of Einstein: he was expelled from school (in 1894) for “undermining the authority of his teachers and being a disruptive influence.” A teacher described him as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.”

From my article Getting out of school alive.

Our self concept, recognition of our talents, appreciation for divergent thinking, respect for high sensitivity or other aspects of being exceptional — all of these can be guided and nurtured, or corroded and corrupted, by our school experiences.

In her article Are gifted students getting left out?, Carla Rivera (Los Angeles Times) notes, “Highly intelligent, talented students need special programs to keep them engaged and challenged. But experts say too often they aren’t even identified — especially in low-income and minority schools.”

She writes about Dalton Sargent having “lousy grades in many subjects. He has blown off assignments and been dissatisfied with many of his teachers. It would be accurate to call him a problematic student. But he is also gifted.

“Dalton is among the sizable number of highly intelligent or talented children in the nation’s classrooms who find little in the standard curriculum to rouse their interest and who often fall by the wayside.”

Rivera also presents California statistics showing ethnic disparities: “Latinos, who make up 48% of total student enrollment, represent just 28% of students enrolled in gifted programs. African Americans represent 7.6% of students and 4% of students enrolled in gifted programs.

“On the other hand, Asians make up 8% of total student enrollment and 17% of gifted enrollment; whites make up 29% of total enrollment and 43% of gifted enrollment.”

Another dimension is how teachers encourage or discourage student thinking.

Wall Street Journal writer Joseph Rago describes a telling example in his article Dartmouth’s ‘Hostile’ Environment, about an Ivy League professor “threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their ‘anti-intellectualism’ violated her civil rights. . .

“Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument.

Rago quotes her: “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful. They’d argue with your ideas.”

He adds that “even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s.

“The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about ‘interrogating heteronormativity,’ or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in. . .

“Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade.”

[Image from book Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds, by Jan Davidson, Bob Davidson.]

In his book Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement, psychologist Kenneth W. Christian, PhD describes patterns of thinking and behaving that can result from not being challenged appropriately.

He writes about “Self Limiting High Potential Persons” who “etch enduring pathways over time by repeating their characteristic self-defeating methods… this tendency can evolve into a general self-limiting style.”

[From my article Tripping ourselves up with blind spots.]

A recent Associated Press article talks about actress, singer and songwriter Miley Cyrus and her “controversial photo” at age 15 in Vanity Fair as presenting “a great opportunity for parents to discuss how seemingly innocuous photos posted to a blog or social networking site can be misinterpreted.”

“Miley has said she is ‘so embarrassed’ by the photos and has apologized to her fans. But it may not be that much different from what regular girls are already putting up on the Internet, says M. Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect.

“It is pretty routine these days for girls to post provocative pictures of themselves online,” she says. “The sexual objectification of young girls is so normal in today’s media environment.”

From Miley Cyrus: A Cautionary Tale.

But acclaimed author Germaine Greer points out in an article of hers, “Kate Moss has been able to earn millions only as long as she could continue to project the body image of a 13-year-old. The appeal of her nude portraits derives from the heart-breaking curve of her narrow hip-line and the tautness of her barely perceptible cleavage, not to mention the sulky innocence of her unfocused gaze.

“The icon of the 34-year-old mother qua 13-year-old virgin is even more disturbing than the sexy image of the 15-year-old Cyrus, because it is so much rarer and weirder.”

Greer continues, “Sexually knowing 15-year-olds are normal. No matter how much energy Disney – which makes the TV show Hannah Montana, in which Cyrus stars – might put into denying the obvious, 15-year-olds are sexually aware.

“Any schoolteacher coping with a heaving mass of 15-year-old women knows that whatever their tribal culture or their religious affiliation, they are fascinated by sex. Girls’ magazines pay lip service to health and friendship issues: their real subject is boys.

“We train female children to be manipulative and to exploit their sex. From the time she is tiny, a girl in our society is taught to flirt…

“One thing we know about the Leibovitz photograph is that Cyrus saw nothing amiss in clutching a satin sheet to her apparently naked bosom, and looking at the camera over her shoulder. Girls are taught to look at the world in that sidelong fashion from the time they come to consciousness.”

From We like our Venuses young, by Germaine Greer, The Guardian, April 30, 2008.

Greer’s new book is Shakespeare’s Wife.

“The girl I’m playing is an intellectual and she’s sexy and has to find a way to balance those two things.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal added, in an interview about her role in “Mona Lisa Smile”, “And those are contemporary issues that myself and a lot of my friends struggle with.” [From the page Sexuality : teen/young adult]

In her article Sex and the Highly Gifted Adolescent, Annette Revel Sheely (a counselor associated with the Gifted Development Center in Denver) notes, “Many parents find it difficult to acknowledge their adolescent’s emerging sexuality. Yet they are the very people who can be most influential in guiding their teen towards a positive adult sexuality.

“In any family, this emergence can be quite a challenge. For families with highly gifted adolescents, however, it can be especially confusing.

“Some characteristics innate to the highly gifted can complicate an adolescent’s developing sexuality. These include asynchrony (either early or late sexual development), social isolation, sensual overexcitability, and androgyny.”

But gifted or not, and whether we are adolescent or older, sexuality is a central part of our identity, and impacts how we interact with others and make use of our creative talents.

Asked about her choices of characters in her movies including some “bad girls,” Evan Rachel Wood commented, “One of the reasons I fought for those roles is that I think there are so many things about them that are just human, but people like to label them as weird or bad or wrong because they’re scared of them.

“I don’t consider them bad – they’re girls [laughs]. They’re going to make mistakes, but the films show the repercussions and show that they’re going to learn.”

[Interview magazine, May 2008; photo: Evan Rachel Wood left, with co-star Nikki Reed in "Thirteen" (2003)]

She continues, “A lot of people are made to feel bad for being sad, so on top of already being unhappy, you’re gonna hate yourself for it. I have my own demons, my own pain and darkness, but I choose to embrace them and look at them head-on and deal with them. Then it doesn’t hurt, and you learn from it.”

Asked about her relationship with musician and artist Marilyn Manson, Wood said, “I had been in a place where I was letting too many people dictate who I should be and what I should be, and I was trying to make everybody happy to the point where it was just killing me. I’d completely lost myself.

“It’s kind of funny now that people think I’ve completely changed myself for him, when this is actually the first time in my life that I took a stand and said, This is who I am and this is who I’ve always wanted to be, and I’m finally with somebody who lets me be who I want to be.”

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Relationships : teen/young adult
Self concept / self esteem articles
Social reactions : teen/young adult

Alia Sabur, at age of 18, has been recognized as the youngest college professor in history, breaking a 300-year-old record. She was hired as a professor in the Department of Advanced Technology Fusion at Konkuk University, in Korea.

As profiled in a Today Show bio, “She made the jump to college at age 10. And by age 14, Sabur was earning a bachelor’s of science degree in applied mathematics summa cum laude from Stony Brook University — the youngest female in U.S. history to do so. Her education continued at Drexel University, where she earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering. Sabur has taken up teaching math and physics courses at Southern University in New Orleans. She has been playing clarinet with orchestras since her solo debut at age 11.” [From article posted on www.aliasabur.com]

In an interview in 2005, Sabur said talked about her achievement attitude: “Things have been not exactly smooth along the way, but that’s how it is when you do something that no one else has really done before… not honestly so much with the actual work and the class work and practicing and performing, but with everything else along the way.

“I mean, there are a lot of people who told me that I couldn’t do what I’ve done. And if I had listened to them, then I wouldn’t have done any of it.

“I would say that if you have a goal, you should fix it in your mind and not let anything stop you on the way. Because no matter what you try to do, people will tell you that you can’t or you shouldn’t. And especially for other girls, who are really discouraged in the sciences, that you can be just as good at it or better than boys.

“You can’t let people bring you down. That’s basically all there is to it.”

[CNN SUNDAY MORNING April 17, 2005]

That word “good” may have some negative overtones, but it is still convenient to talk about people who are pursuing their dreams and talents in positive ways. Below is an excerpt from a Back Stage blog:

Where Are All the Good Kids?

It’s always a pleasure to interview child actors and their parents for our annual Spotlight on Young Performers. Most of the child actors we meet are bright and courteous, and the parents work hard to provide the best for their children.

It’s such a contrast to the stereotypical child-stars-gone-wrong stories we hear about almost every day. The tabloid travails of Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears, Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins, Brad Renfro, Mischa Barton, Gary Coleman, Danny Bonaduce, et al., feed the impression that all child actors are destined for lives of addiction, depression, and even early death.

The truth is that most child actors grow up just fine — even happy and successful. Of course, the entertainment industry is full of stars and behind-the-scenes pros who began as child actors: Jodie Foster, Natalie Portman, Brooke Shields, Ron Howard, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Connelly, and Christopher Walken to name a few. There’s also Peter Billingsley (Ralphie from A Christmas Story), executive producer of the upcoming superhero flick Iron Man and other films, and writer-director Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter), who was nominated for a best adapted screenplay Oscar this year for Away From Her.

And what of those who’ve gone on to success in fields beyond show business? Shirley Temple Black — arguably the most popular child star of all time — has served as a delegate to the United Nations, was ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Ghana, and was the first female U.S. chief of protocol. California state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Los Angeles) — an outspoken advocate for the civil rights of children, women, and gays and lesbians — was once best known as Zelda Gilroy on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. And let’s not forget Little House on the Prairie‘s Melissa Gilbert, former national president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Many child stars go directly from early stardom into classrooms at Yale (Foster, Claire Danes, Kellie Martin), Harvard (Kuehl, Portman), Princeton (Shields), Columbia (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anna Paquin, Julia Stiles), and Stanford (Connelly, Picket Fences‘ Justin Shenkarow).

Danica McKellar, best known as girl-next-door Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, not only graduated from UCLA with a degree in mathematics but also co-authored a paper proving an original math theorem (the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem). Dubbed a math “superstar” by The New York Times, she penned Math Doesn’t Suck, a best-selling nonfiction book that encourages girls to cultivate an interest in mathematics. Blossom‘s Mayim Bialik is also a UCLA alumna with a doctorate in neuroscience.

>> Continued on BlogStage.

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Acting: teen/young adult
Books: acting
Danica McKellar on the power and beauty of math
Gifted / talented arts celebrities