Susan Baum || To Be Gifted & Learning Disabled

It's great to have Susan Baum on the podcast. Doctor Baum is the director of the Twoey Center for Research and Professional Development at Bridges Academy, a school for twice exceptional children. She's also Provost of the Bridges Graduate School

of Cognitive Diversity and Education. She's the author of many books and articles, primarily focusing on understanding and nurturing the needs of special populations of gifted underachieving students, including the award winning third edition of her seminal Work to Gifted and Learning Disabled. Her research and experience in the field of twice exceptional education have earned her much recognition. Oh boy, I could listen all the awards, Susan that you've won.

You've won a lot, But I just want to say thank you so much for being on this podcast. It's such an honor to have you here. Well, thank you for asking me. I look forward to talking with you. As you know, I'm a big, big fan of yours and love the work you've done to pioneer this field of two ey twice exceptionality. Let's talk a little about how you got interested in this topic. What was your

dissertation on in graduate school. It was looking at students with superior cognitive abilities and how being gifted or learning disabled made them different populations. So I think it was trying to see if there were statistical differences among kids who were identified as learning stay both with average ability, kids too were identified as superior with an IQ of one hundred and twenty or more without a disability, and those who had both they were identified with learning disability

and their IQ was in the superior range. Cool not a big fan of the labeled superior. I know neither was I, but at that point we didn't want to use the word gifted. Oh I don't know which is worse. That's a good point. So around that time when you're working on that, first of all, who was your advisor Zuli Jovinzuli was your advisor. Now what year was this, nineteen eighty five? So around this time, it's nineteen eighty

five and you're doing this this foundational work. What were like, what was the landscape of the field at that time within gift education? How much did they appreciate the fact that you could be both learning disabled and gifted. It was just beginning. I had trouble convincing my committee during my doctoral program that I should even be looking at

this population. They felt that, Yeah, they said, you're talking about such a very few kids, and you know, I don't know if it's going to be worth your time or energy looking at them. Maybe you're talking about one percent of five percent of the population. And why were they wrong? There were some people doing some work in this field. Joanne Whittmore June Maker, some amount of work coming out of Johns Hopkins, but it really wasn't catching on,

not yet. Yeah, no, I feel you. I don't think it still hasn't caught on in the education in two thousand and twenty. It's kind of caught on with people who are not in education in ways that it hasn't caught on with people in education. Well, so can you tell our audience what that means to be two E? What does that mean to you? To me, it means

that you are a puzzling paradox. There are so many things that you do very well better than most people that people just look at you and say, gee, you're smart. And they are very simple things, perhaps like spelling or knowing your math facts, and things that other people seem to have little difficulty with that you just can't do. So it presents this paradox of behaviors that are difficult

to live with. Yeah, and everyone to a certain degree show strengths and weaknesses, all right, So there's a specific population two E where you're extreme on both the gifted side and the disabled side. Yeah, and sometimes it seems more subtle, but the discrepancy makes it difficult. That you know, if you are capable of high intellectual conversation and can't put anything in writing, that's hard for people to accept in themselves and for others to say you must be

just lazy. You know, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to write out your ideas so to speak, or do well focus better in areas that you are uncomfortable or understand the social climate when you're so smart, right, No, I hear you. And I'm just thinking because you've talked a lot of about how a person's learning disability can and suppress their giftedness, and so it's not so evident

or so obvious that a students gifted. How do you tell the difference between a learning disabled ungifted student and a learning disabled gifted student? And does that question even make sense to you? Well, it makes sense in the fact that I think about kids who have been identified because of a learning disability and they might be receiving

special at services. You know that profile, and people aren't looking for what's special about that child in terms of their interest levels, their ability to be creative, their interest areas. They're just not looking and no one is thinking that those areas are important. So they're hard to figure out if you're not looking for those things. Rather, why aren't you reading better? Why aren't you telling better? Why aren't

you able to process information? And no one's paying attention to the wonderful engineer that you might be building with these extraordinary things, you know, building extraordinary monuments with a set of legos, And so there that child is, they say, oh, yeah, he can build with legos, but just can't read, and no one cares that he can build with legos. But

that's important. That's very important information, much more important than paying attention to the fact that, yes, he needs reading support right now, unless what they're doing requires reading exactly right. And then if it does require reading, like reading the directions to build whatever they're building with Legos, somehow they seem to be able to compensate and reading works in that situation. Somehow they know enough about Legos that they

can decode. But if you have them read their textbook, not so much. How do you what do you? What do you put within the purview of giftedness? What counts as gifted? Here? It is? It's hard. I am very liberal in my definition of gifted. It may show up in an IQ profile if you're looking at subtests. But more importantly for me is the kinds of interest that child has and the depth that they have in that

interest area. Is high levels of creativity. It's shown by knowledge they have about a certain topic that most people don't have. It's the ability to think critically about something, argue with people with a coherent argument verbally. There's so many behaviors that don't translate into grades in school or scores on an IQ test, but much more behaviorally how they're navigating the world. And then the other thing that I pay attention to is that sometimes their giftedness is

seen in their ability to circumvent their problems. So they become very good at coming up with excuses why they can't do something. They might come up with twenty five reasons why they didn't do their homework, or why you shouldn't do the math problem that way, and they might come up with twenty five reasons why it's stupid to learn history. But people think about that as making excuses, and they don't say, what a great divergent thinker that

young person is. Well divergent thinking, you just brought divers thinking so different thinking is? What is that? Is that a form of creativity that's really important. If you can't think divergently, it's going to be you're going to have a hard time coming up with something original or new. You have to that out of the box thinking is such a strong characteristic of creativity, and so many of these cases are such out of the box thinkers, but

they use them to survive a system. Sometimes instead of something that people are looking for. You find that to sometimes students from minority populations, I think racial minority students when they creative, is it viewed differently than when someone else is being creative? Like, are there's any research on that.

I don't know of research about culturally diverse people. About the research other than the fact that if we're trying to identify these kids as gifted, we need to be looking at performance of these kinds of kids, especially giving them a task that involves divergent thinking, and we identify

many more kids as gifted through their divergent thinking. I don't know that it's better than kids who are not Caucasian, but they do seem to have that wonderful ability to problem solve and to use things in ways that they weren't intended because they don't have those tools that for instance,

playing with toys, they don't have the toy. I don't know if this has to do with cultural diversity or if it's about poverty, but when you are having to invent things because no one gives you the things, that's certainly as trade that shows creative potential for sure, and it's not doesn't seem to be too terribly appreciated when a teacher wants you to pay attention to their lesson

plan and all you want to do is read something new. Yeah, because you've got the ability to do that, and because it holds your attention, and because you see a use for it. And too often we don't use enough creativity in the curriculum so that people could recognize this as a potential for high levels of creativity. You've done work on creativity, You've done well. You've don't work on everything, You've don't work on multiple intelligences theory? Is that right?

And did you do a book with Howard Gardner? You edited a book with him or something that? Yeah, he asked a team of us to write a book that he was asked to write, but he didn't want to write it, so he would edit. You know, he would be our editor if you will, but he didn't want

to write it. And it was trying to use his theory more authentically in school because a lot of people misused that theory and made it seem like everyone was gifted and made it seem like you needed to do things in eight different ways when that was never ever his intent. Okay, what was his intent. Do you think intent was to be able to understand that the brain

deals with different contents or inputs differently. Not about modality, but some of us deal with numerical symbols, some of us can deal with music the content of music, Some of us deal better with words, and some of us deal better with spatial input. So it was kind of what area of the brain deals best with numerical content, and maybe some brains do that really well, where others deal with verbal content in a better way. So, beginning to look at I guess we should call them talents,

but he chose to call them intelligences. Probably got him into trouble, right, He would not not have gone in trouble if you just said multiple talent theory, exactly right, exactly right. He wouldn't have been as controversial. But he wanted to. I remember him saying, if I call it multiple talents, nobody would buy the book. I call it multiple intelligences. It's more intriguing. He wanted the idea to

get widely disseminated. Yeah, but it's been very helpful in us understanding kids who are twice exceptional, because it gives you a way of looking at what these kids can and cannot do in a more concrete way, right, Yeah, And you've developed your own assessment tools for this, right am I? Right, you have a strengths finder sort of thing. Yeah. We do look at trying to find out kids abilities to what they're interested in, where their talents lie, and

begin to look for patterns and so. And what we try to do is say, you know, with these patterns of talents, these kids are our future philosophers, These kids are our future lawyers, because boy do they argue well, and they have the great vocabulary and they can argue anything.

And they might not do well on an intelligence test in mathematical reasoning perhaps, but we do get to see that in the real world are all kinds of talents made up of different patterns of abilities, and our tool kind of tries to find what are those talents of abilities that's defined by perhaps their personality, their interests, the things they like to create. So it's trying to be a little bit more concrete than using an abstract or

to predict what these kids may do in the future. Yes, well, you know, I love that, but some students are really good at abstract stuff. So there still needs to be a place for those who scour sky high even on the traditional measures, right, Right, So for me, I don't prefer one way over another. If you can put together some evidence that shows that what you can do needs to be nurtured and and need services that other kids may not require, you know, I think that's the definition

of gifted. These kids are showing different potentials in ways that their peers do not show it, which requires us to provide ways for that talent to be developed in ways that may be different than what we're offering these kids. Right, Yeah, now I hear you, and we're not just talking about

ability or talent. Can you tell me more about this program assessment you came up with to help people understand personality aspects and themselves as well, because you go beyond intelligence, right, we develop something we call the suite of tools that

has some assessments within it. So the suite of tools is trying to gather information about who this child is in terms of their strengths, interest, talents, and part of the assessment is something called clues, and that is where we try to collect information that's from existing IQ tests from this thing we call the learning print, and the learning print is working with a child, where that child identifies the best ways they like to learn, the things

they're curious about, things that they're hobbies, what they like to do outside of school, what kinds of lessons they had that they've absolutely adored. So we put that together, and then we have another tool called the quick Personality Indicator, which we have four different personality types that are similar to people's like the Meyers Briggs. One are the fours, well,

the four that we use. The practical manager and this is your sequential learner who's great with details, who loves to think in a very linear way, and these people are great programmers, and their creativity often is shown by making anybody else's idea better. They have an attention to details that far exceeds my attention to details. And so one that we call learned expert, meaning these are your scholars.

These are people who are great at arguing. They love to give their opinion, they like to challenge theories, they like to create their own theories. And then there's another type that we call the creative problem solver, who are the inventors, who are the out of the box thinkers, who are the tinkers who just you know, they can be great entrepreneurs and they or they can be great inventors or just great new ways of doing old stuff.

They're really good at that. And then there are people the other styles, people persons who have wonderful ways to be ambassadors, to get people to work harmoniously with each other, to use an emotional their emotions, to become artists or poets. But we're never one thing. We're really all four of them. So what we try to figure out is what's your profile? Because when I have to be linear, I can be really linear, but it's not a place I like to be.

And if I have to be in that place every day twenty four to seven, it really does damage to my psyche yourself. I can use that those skills or that part of my personality when I have to, but I can't live there. I really need to live in a place that's more like to create a problem solver and the people person. I'm a happier individual if I could work from that perspective. But truthfully, we're never one thing. But I know that if I have a job, I better have I do a better job if it aligns

to what my personality strengths are. Where I can use those strengths more of the time than being stuck in this more linear mode. For instance, right now, we're putting together at papers for accreditation and I can do it, but it's driving me crazy because I don't want to deal with those details and I can't every single day fill in all those details. You know, it's just not a happy place for me. You're not going to get

the best out of me there. So well, then tell us a little bit about what you're trying to get accreditation for. In other words, tell us about this new cogniversity degree graduate school. It's very exciting. I'm very excited about it. So that that fourth tool, let me go back finish up. You know, what we do with these tools, We try to collect what we know about kids from

existing information and their learning print and their QPI. But then, and this is what the school is going to become known for, using those to come up with a strength based talent folks is approach to their development. And so when we really understand who these kids are, we can better understand how to leverage their strengths. We can better understand how to use what their personal best to engage

them in learning. And also looking at those talents that beg for development to give them all a talent plan? What is your personal talent plan? What kinds of experiences you need to go a law to navigate that journey? And so it's a different way of looking at development, intellectual development, emotional development, social development. And so our graduate school has three programs to help professionals work with families, schools, adults. How do we help you become the best that you

can be? Even if you have these cognitive differences that people see as deficits, we see them as strengths. Well, I love that you'repplying the strengths based approach to a field that hasn't really traditionally focused on it, especially the field of special education. I feel like gifted education focuses on strengths because that's all about giftedness, but special and not so much. Well, so, can you tell us then about this graduate school? Yeah? So do you want to

talk about the graduate school? I always want to talk about graduate school because now it's been in existence about eighteen months and we're seeing such great results. It was kind of a dream, a vision, but what we're beginning to see is a group of dedicated professionals and some are parents as well who see that this is the way they would like to begin to look at their own children and to change the field many different fields.

So we offer a certificate program in twice exceptional education, which is a fifteen credit program, and when and people in our programs, everybody ends up with this certifical certificate because it is the foundational courses and how we begin to look at kids differently, how we begin to embrace neurodiversity, How we begin to understand that you may have the challenges of ADHD, but because you have an ADHD wired brain, you tend to be more creative, and you tend to

be better in certain fields and better careers. And to begin to bring those two pieces together, and how we can begin to look at instruction in a way that brings out the best in you. All right, So we

have that program. Then we have a master's degree program in Cognitive Diversity and Education, and that is a thirty credit program where you know you begin to be able to bring to your own say you're coordinator of Gifted, well you can do it better because you'll be able to take those kids who also have challenges and embrace them and bring them into your program, or you can sit at a team whether trying to come up with an educational plan, and you can offer different perspectives about

what's best for that child. Or you can be a counselor and look at these kids differently, or even an educational therapist who adds a different dimension to your program. And then our most exciting part, of course, is our edd program. And you can focus on social justice where cognitive diversity needs a more positive spin. Or you can look at it in terms of developing curriculum and instruction that uses kids strengths, talents, and interests as a way

of developing curriculum. Or you can become a leader, a director of a school, someone who wants to start their own school, and a lot of schools for two week kids popping up and the leaders. We have several of people who are the heads of schools who really want to make a difference and have models of schools that can work better for these kinds of children. Well, what if you can't get access to this graduate program. You're an educator who wants to identify these kinds of students,

serve them. What can they do in their public school system or private school system? Just a teacher listening to this podcast right now doesn't have all these resources you're talking about. I think all of us have to begin to look at what the child is doing well other than what the child is not doing well. A good teacher is one who knows how to deal with the child's these a gift in the child's strengths and interest. A superior teacher is one that can see the gift

in their fall. Well maybe it's a great teacher. Not like the word superior by the way you said it, but that's what I mean, because you can see the promise in that child and to begin to notice when the child is having a good day, and what did you do as a teacher that allowed that child to

have a good day? Just do more of it. Maybe you did orgamy that day in school, and this child who's always been problematic, who's always made you worry about what you're not doing for that child, but that day, the day that you did orgamy in your classroom, this child was phenomenal. Well, then you have to figure out,

how can I use oregamy more in the curriculum. Or that child might be very spatial, how can I have more assignments and options for that child that allows them to be the builder, to allow them to use their ardability in my math curriculum or in my science curriculum. And if we just begin to think that way, we'll serve many more kids, and then we'll begin to look at them and honor and value what they can do, which brings other kids in the classroom to begin to

look at those children differently as well. All of a sudden, they want that child to teach them how to do origamy, or teach them how to be great in drama or whatever it is that you're doing in an area in which that child can excel, rather than always find a way to help the child do what he can't do. Oh yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You have this metaphor about the complexities of green, So does it mean to be green as opposed to yellow or blue?

Our metaphor says that these kids have these paradoxical behaviors. So there's this gifted side, the side that shows their high abilities, the side where they excel and that we call yellow, and then there are those challenges that make them blue on any given day, but they're depending on the environment, they're both yellow and blue. They really are green. Now are they blue green? Are they yellow green? Now,

there's different shades of green. But when they're green, it means you can't leave their giftedness outside while you deal with their challenge. And so, for instance, if they are having trouble reading or having trouble decoding, and you're trying to water down the curriculum so they're trying to read or giving a linguistic approach, a man can fan, well, maybe they can decode those words, but they have no

interest in those words. They have these bright minds. But instead if you use poetry, for instance, my favorite one, and maybe Robert Frost, whose woods are these? I think? I know those are first grade words? Whose woods are these? I think? I know those aren't hard words. But the message is complex as we go on with that poem, and poetry is written perceptually in a way that these kids can decode because there are not a lot of

words on the page. And if you took that poem and you took it out of a picture book of Robert Frost poetry, then we see some beautiful works of art that a lot of these kids could relate to, and they can read those words and they can talk about what does that poem mean? Miles to go before I sleep? And we've got all the pieces together, and that yellow could come out because the environment is in putting them in something to read that they're so overwhelmed by the words on the page that you see the

darkest side of them. You see them do behaviors to avoid the task. You see them rubbing their eyes and being overwhelmed. But they're green. They need to make sure that they're yellow. Part of their brain can work as you're trying to get them to become better readers. They're very complex and to look at them as two different people. They have the gifted side, let's work on that and the challenging side. Let's just work on that. You can't

separate them. They're always together. And so it behooves us to what we call dually differentiate the curriculum. So let me get this right. So the yellow is the giftedness and the and the uh, what's in the wearing disabilities? Blue? Blue? Okay? Why why do you blue could have been giftedness? Why do you associate it doesn't matter? It's arbitrary, right, Yellow with everything good in the world, and blue is you know, kind of a if you're saying that I'm so blue today.

So then it worked out very well to have green as a metaphor go go go, because we always say then Kermit the Frog would say, it is an easy being green. Oh yeah, that does Regod, did you come up with us? Yes? Hell did you? Were you? Just like it was an epiphany. I knew that Twoey was the whole was greater than the some of the parts. So I was actually talking to my friend Rachel mcnellan, who does a lot of who's known as miss Math. She's a good friend of mine. I said, I think

this is mathematical. You know, the whole is greater than the some of this part. So she start we start talking about colors, and so she we were talking about, yeah, it's just when you mix colors together, so if you mix more blue than yellow, you're going to get deeper green and you know, and so we were just fooling around with the mathematics of color, and then it borred to then we began to think about, well, you're right.

If I take yellow to be giftedness and blue to be the challenging part, and we start mixing them together, we're going to get green, but the environment is going to determine, you know what, the shades of green, because we know that in certain environments you hardly notice the disability. The child just absolutely shines because the environment is right. Put the same child in an environment that's demanding they use skills and airs of their weakness. It's a really,

really hard hill to climb. And so if we can get the environment to tip towards yellow by using their gifts, the child is in a better position to be successful. And that's great orientation. I mean, you and I have talked about that. If you can pick a career that keeps you that where the demands are more of the things you're good at, then forces you to be always accommodating and trying to get around your weak area, you

know life is going to work better for you. And so as part of your own way of making decisions about the kind of career in which that it's going to keep you, it's going to become a passion area and where you have to get around your disabilities to a much lesser degree. In recent years, the idea of learning styles has come under fire, as you know, how do how does how does strengths differ from warning styles.

I think learning styles for me grew out of the special ed movement when we were trying to find out if these kids were auditory learners or more visual learners or kinesthetic learners. We know that we can learn in all any of those modalities, and we probably have a preferred way of learning given the choice. But no one is saying that the only way anybody can learn if they're a kinesthetic learner, the only way they can learn

is kinesthetically. I am a Brunarian. I love me too the work of Jerome Bruner, and I really liked him his modes of learning, the enactive mode, the iconic mode, and the symbolic mode. Right. So, when you're little developmentally, most of what we learn is store muscle is through understanding things experientially. But let me, I don't care what stage of your development you're in. If you're learning to ski, you're going to learn better and actively then you are

about reading about skiing. Right. Oh yeah, but for some so I like the idea if we can start off in the inactive mode and then visualize it. And everyone says that if you're going to understand something, you're better off if you can visualize it. You should have a picture in your brain. And then when you get on into a discipline and you're really well versed in it, you can learn it symbolically. What is the symbols of that discipline? You know, if you have that scientific mind,

then you can look at chemical formulas. If you are really extraordinarily you're great psychologists. Understanding you know, how emotion impacts the brain is something that's very comfortable. You don't need the enactive mode anymore. I like that way of looking at learning, not all your visual learning or an act. It depends what you're learning. If it's better to learn

skiing kinesthetically. But so I kind of think Bruner very much influenced Gardner way of thinking about You know, there's just different symbol systems in different times, depending on what you're learning, that make you better at what you do. And so I think it's more complex than just saying figure out their learning style. You know, it might be more of a learning preference for that particular thing you're learning, regardless of what quote unquote multiple intelligence you have, flash

tense talent or learning style or et cetera. You have talked about in your book the importance of working memory, Like there are certain abilities that cut across all intelligences, which is why I personally think there's such a thing as a general intelligence. Maybe not, it doesn't exist in the world. It's a lead invariable or it's an emergent property. But there are some basic cognitive limitations that will impact

your learning across multiple fields and multiple symbol systems. And you talk up a little bit about that in your book, which I thought that was really cool. In a section of two YE Students and learning, and you talk about long term memory and working memory. So talk a little about two WEE learners and how working memory might be a bottleneck for some of them. It's a bottler for most of them. But the research does show that if you're an expert in a domain, your working memory is

can hand more information. So it used to say, you know, it's you have five to seven elements that you can remember, but not if you're the expert. So that led me to believe that if you're really an artist, the working memory for visual details in a work of art might function better than when we're talking and we're using linguistics, and if we take information from working memory and code it into long term memory as an image or as or verbally or some linguistic snaps occurs. I think that matters.

I think that depending on where I think, you might have working memory for music that might be amazing that you don't have for verbal language. And this came. This occurred to me when I was doing some grant work in New York City and we had a grant to look at children who were advanced in either music or dance. The steps that they could remember in dance when they couldn't remember the steps to a math problem because the working memory didn't process that way was very meaningful to me.

There's got to be something about They could do it kinesthetically it's the same working memory, or they could be playing a piece of music and it was Afro Caribbean music. It was very complex with different kids coming into that piece of music at different times and their role was different with the drums and the person next to them on the symbols. Why could they focus? Why was their working memory okay for music and it wasn't okay for reading?

And one child told us that my music is helping me learn to read better because in music it has to flow. If I'm going to decode a word. I can't keep sounding it out. It has to just flow. And so I am really interested in how does the working memory work with different symbol systems, with different content, and if it does work better musically, and I use music to help that child read better, And that's what

we began to think about strength based. I want that child to read, I want them to be more fluent with linguistic symbols, and they can do it in music. I want to understand this better. How can we use music then to get that child to read more fluently? And that's kind of what's behind that conversation in the book about let us understand that information processing model. And I don't find many people talking about it in that way. No, it's a very fascinating and rich research area that you're

talking about. When I was an undergraduate a long long time ago, and I did my honors thesis, I was curious at the extent to which musical expertise. I was interested in the psychology of music and IQ and the extent to which people who have expertise in music can override some of the working memory limitations, the domain general

working marory limitations and they could. And you know, I think honors Erickson, who passed away recently, but honors Erickson's work showing that experts can circumvent some of these limitations. I think is just shows the power of expertise and mastery. Yeah, and I don't think there's enough research in it. Or wasn't Forstein looking at music helping with their cognitively delayed individuals?

Was it his work I'm trying to think of for Rubin Forrest, you know, the work that he did with cognition. He was looking at people very challenged, and I thought music was part of what he was looking at. Might not might that might not be right, It might not true. I'm sorry. You could be right. I don't know, but it's not. I mean what Howard Gardner says, We're not talking about putting music on in the background. That's that's personal preference of how you like to learn. That's not

helping your cognition. But it's very different that if you if you think about there's there's music that plays in your head when you see certain characters under stress, or when you're understanding the psychology of a people by looking at their music, their resilience comes out in the kinds of music they write. I just think this is very fascinating. I don't do enough for my own research in it, other than read about others looking at those kinds of things.

But I really think that's what the basis of strength based education is. We work with a program with William Syndrome students who happened to have a strength in music and they have a weakness in math. That's their cognitive pattern. And we worked with these kids teaching them. They understood up and down in music and they were beginning to

but they didn't know graphing. But by teaching them musical scales and that the musical scale was nothing but a graph, they were able to get them to begin to graph things like the weather. Nice because they understood up and down musically and we were able to bridge it to make them then understand it quantitatively. It's beautiful. It's such an innovative, progressive way of thinking about education. And I

can't say that all all teachers are there yet. No, No, I don't think they really get strength based talent focus. They think it's going back to just simply learning styles, which is not getting a good press at the moment or growth or growth mindset or growth mindset, right, But I do think you know, as you know, and if we even look at Vagotsky, I think there is a way to offer instruction if we understand how best that particular child's brain works and what symbol systems seem to

align with that brain wiring. So I want to end with the fact that it doesn't just take one teacher, takes a community. Look, I love your book, you know, I love it. People should buy it. That's called to be Gifted and Wording Disabled, and I recommend the new edition. The first second editions are great, obviously, but the third edition is a little different and updated. I'd like to end my podcast today in the same note in which you ended your beautiful book, and that's on the importance

of a community of support. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, how parents can help, what community resources might be available these sorts of things. That's one of the reasons that we started the graduate school, because we do need a community of support. And so if your child was going to need a neuropsych we need people neuropsychologists who understand the two week child so they can look at a

risk profile. They can look at these correl it tests and come out with the idea that there's this gift decide that needs to be nurtured as much as this other side that needs to be fixed. We need people in the community who could be models for these kids. If you have a young gymnast to be working with jymnasts in the community. We need parents to be opportunity makers for these kids, you know, and to be able to hook them up with people who could be role

models for these kids because they have similar brains. We need to have your neighbors who have the similar interest to these kids interact with them over lunch sometimes. And we definitely need teachers to work in collaboration with families to come up to become a team to support this children emotionally, socially and intellectually. Wonderful, sud thanks so much for the legendary work that you've done in the field and for supporting me so much and me wanting to

make a contribution to the field. You've been so supportive, So thank you so much, and thank you for becoming a new leader in the field, because we need, we need to move this field for forward to the next level we need all these gifts to transcend us. Thank you so much, thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's

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