yaman88 IN FOCUS: Labelled 'gifted' at a young age, they took different paths to realise their potential

SINGAPORE: When Ayden Ang was nineyaman88, he turned down an offer to join the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) in favour of staying in his primary school.

The maths and science lover went through with the GEP screening and selection because he was doing well in his studies and wanted to test himself. He didn’t expect to get in.

“But the reason why I ended up not going for it is because it just felt like a very sudden change,” the now 18-year-old told me in his home in early October.

The thought of changing schools – the GEP is not available in every school – and leaving his friends was scary.

“It’s quite an intimidating change, and frankly, one that I was not prepared for,” he said.

Quiet by nature, Ayden struggled to make friends in his first two years in primary school, his father Kelvin Ang explained. In Primary 3, he had just started to settle in.

So when he gained entry to the programme meant for the top 1 per cent of students in Singapore, his parents were happy but mostly fearful about whether their son could cope in a new school.

Their approach was to give Ayden as much information as possible and let him decide. They took him to an open house and laid out the pros and cons – the rest was up to him.

Ayden’s decision is an example of how emotional and social intelligence shape the futures of high-ability children, not just their academic performance and intellectual precocity. This has become more noticeable in recent discussions about giftedness.

Education Minister Chan Chun Sing made this observation after noting the GEP’s good outcomes and the significant contributions its alumni have made to society over 40 years.

"However, there are also some students who felt weighed down by the expectations to excel, or could not cope with the rigour of the programme and lost interest in learning," he said.

"There were also students who were selected for the programme but decided not to join."

In the revamped GEP that will apply from this year’s Primary 1 cohort, selection will involve holistic assessments of students’ academic abilities and “socio-emotional readiness” – which Ayden was already attuned to at his young age.

I wanted to look more closely at the emotional and social implications of being identified as gifted or having high ability at a young age.

What does that label mean for these children as they go through school and grow up?

I went through the GEP, and even now, far into adulthood, I’ve been trying to make sense of the impact the "gifted" identifier has had on me.

Related:FAQ: What you need to know about Singapore’s revamped Gifted Education Programme Regardless of Grades: How does the obsession with grades affect parents and children in Singapore? WHAT IS GIFTEDNESS?

Started in 1984, the GEP provides an enriched curriculum for intellectually gifted students at nine primary schools. At the age of nine, students in Singapore who pass tests over two stages are invited to join the programme.

The GEP used to continue into secondary school, but this stopped in 2008. Select secondary schools still run school-based gifted programmes that GEP students and students who do well in their Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) can join.

What is giftedness? Beyond intellect, are there emotional and social traits that are associated with it?

When I asked Dr Sum Chee Wah this, the former divisional director who oversaw gifted education at the Ministry of Education (MOE) from 2004 to 2011 responded with American psychologist Dr Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.

Singapore’s GEP focuses on linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities. Dr Sum stressed that these exist as potential skills that can be developed. 

“What we are born with is not fixed. The potential depends on the environment for it to be realised and for it to be stretched,” she told me.

Dr Sum, now an associate professor at the Singapore University of Social Sciences’ (SUSS) S R Nathan School of Human Development, also laid out the traits of high-ability students.

These include the ability to learn new things very quickly, a capacious memory, abstract and critical thinking, the ability to reason well, a high degree of curiosity, a vivid imagination, having many academic and intellectual interests, and a tendency to get absorbed in them.

Then she mentioned some qualities that surprised me. 

These seemed unrelated to intellectual giftedness, but were nonetheless observed in students – emotional intensity, a “very unusual ability to empathise with others”, and a heightened sense of fairness and social justice.

This last attribute is why GEP students are given more opportunities for community involvement projects, along with the desire for them to have a more holistic education, she added.

Ms Mariya Angelova, a senior counsellor at Sofia Wellness Clinic who specialises in working with gifted children and adults, told me there is a distinct difference between being gifted and being high-achieving.

High-achievers are usually motivated by outcomes, focused on achievement, and take practical steps to succeed. They balance working hard and playing hard.

But gifted students are “more up and down” in this balance. They may be highly capable in some areas but not in others, and lack consistency in their efforts. They may have hyper-focus for a subject that interests them, but then lose focus when it comes to studying for grades.

Ms Angelova, who spent about eight years as a counsellor in a local school, also said that gifted students tend to experience more self-doubt and find interpersonal relationships more difficult.

What is the common thread that runs through all these challenges?

“I have a feeling that giftedness has been viewed as a ticket to success for life. And so once a person is identified as gifted, the adults around them, and including the person themselves, feel like in every area of life, they should be already capable,” she said.

This means that gifted children, who tend to come across as highly intelligent, mature and “smart enough” to figure things out on their own, can also be perceived as not needing support in their emotional and social development.

DISMISSED, SCARED AND ANGRY

My time in the gifted programme followed the script at the start. Lower primary was easy and when the GEP offer came, there was no question I would transfer schools to take it up.

I enjoyed the expansive curriculum, the literature we read, and the trust our teachers put in us to handle more complex ideas. 

In secondary school, I felt our quirks, interests and points of view were respected and given space. And I made dear, lifelong friends.

But I knew this wasn’t true for every “GEPer” (as we called ourselves). 

The programme was difficult for Reuben Yee, now 32. He was in the GEP around the same period as me.

As a kid, Mr Yee was a voracious reader who would use up his and his mother’s library loan quotas. He was often late to class as he preferred playing football.

School didn’t interest him as he felt it relied on rote learning. He got full marks without studying and came to expect that he could just breeze through exams.

He accepted his GEP offer without hesitation. In 2002, he transferred to a boys’ school that his family would not otherwise have been able to afford to send him to.

The programme was an “equalising measure” in that sense. 

“It was one of the reasons why we were happy initially when I got in,” Mr Yee said, although he still felt the gap with his richer classmates.

Once in the GEP, he expected it to fill his “thirst for knowledge”. 

But he felt there was little change from rote learning. When he asked questions to try and understand more, he felt that his teachers dismissed his queries in order to get through the lesson material.

“Math was the real issue, because at that level, you’re supposed to remember all the formulas, all the theorems. And then for me, (I) was always trying to understand what these symbols, what these numbers represent,” he said.

Disenchantment set in, and he scaled his efforts at school down to a minimum. He also had the mentality that “because I am capable or brilliant enough, I will just wait until (the) last minute to catch up”. 

His grades started to fall.

“When I saw my grades dropping, I think I was also scared, but I never admitted it,” he told me.

In the past, he was showered with praise for showing natural abilities in his studies and sports. Now, he started to brush the bad grades off by telling himself he hadn’t tried.

“You don’t want to tryyaman88, because you’re like, what if I try and I’m not as brilliant as people think I am, or I think I am?”

Reuben Yee carrying his younger sister as a teenager. (Photo: Reuben Yee)

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