Dame Gillian Lynne was an English dancer who was known for her choreography for Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. When Lynne was 7 years old, she could not sit still or focus in school. Her mother took her “hopeless” child to a specialist who carefully listened to what she had to say about her daughter’s poor attention span and inability to stop moving. But instead of diagnosing Lynne with a learning disability, the doctor asked her mom to talk to him privately outside and left Lynne in the room by herself with the radio on.
They watched through the window in the door as Lynne immediately jumped up and danced to the music. The doctor turned to the mother and said- “There is nothing wrong with your child. She is a born dancer!”
Trusting her doctor’s “diagnosis,” her mom took her to a dance school where Lynne saw a full room of people just like her- “people who couldn't sit still, people who had to move to think - who had to move to think!” Lynne started there and successfully developed a career in dance, rising through the ranks of The Royal Ballet.
An education system may or may not be able to accommodate your child, whether your child has a special need or is gifted. In fact, I believe every child is gifted in her/his own way and may have special needs in other ways. While not everyone is vocal or expressive of their needs well, we must observe and follow the child’s leads carefully. While it is important for everyone to learn and master basic academic subjects provided in the K-12 education, we must also make sure to identify and nourish individual gifts and interests.
For highly gifted children, it is extremely important to identify their true passion since they can master almost anything. I often joke that if Yo-Yo Ma’s parents had been engineers instead of musicians, we would have an engineer instead of an extraordinarily talented cellist playing his moving music to the world.
My husband and I almost made that mistake. We both graduated from UCLA with our engineering degrees. We taught our daughters to appreciate the beauty of math and successfully developed their intuition in math and science. As a consequence, my older daughter, who has loved and appreciated the arts from a young age, chose to major in physics, which to her was the closest science to the arts, at UCLA. Now she is back in the arts where her true passion lies, and she is working ardently to reach the level of excellence she envisions for herself.
Children are children. Their gifts can surpass their age, but they still need our guidance so they are not discouraged and can develop the confidence to pursue their destined futures. We as parents and teachers must make time to explore with the children, so they can live a happy and fulfilled life.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2014/10/04/353679082/dancer-needed-to-move-to-think
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