While I’ve had 2E students in my gifted classes going back into the 1980s, the numbers of 2E students in Highly Capable classrooms are increasing as identification processes become better. In addition, we’ve seen an increase in the severity of the second identification, which can make it more difficult for the student to function in a self-contained, accelerated, academic, Highly-Capable classroom. Nevertheless, once students are identified and placed in my class, it’s my job to work with other staff to make sure their needs are met.

HC who get speech services. This is more common than you might think. Combine speech issues with typically high rates of introversion, anxiety, and perfectionism in the gifted population, and you might understand why I work so hard on public speaking skills with all my students.

According to his third and fourth grade teachers, a child I’ll call Lisa never spoke in class. The September she entered my fifth-grade class, I had the students read an article on introversion, and then I asked the students to define introversion. Lisa put her hand up, stammered for a bit, and finally blurted out, “I am an introvert.”

I said that was a perfectly good way to define something. Some definitions use words, and some just point to an example. We went on discussing the article.

Lisa received speech services throughout the year. When I required my students to do poetry readings, I allowed Lisa to do hers on video. She played the video in class to great acclaim. Unencumbered by her introversion and concerns about her speech, she did a great job with a wicked sense of humor.

HC with Tourette’s. It’s not as common, but I’ve had several. We can be working quietly in the classroom with a variety of little noises, including whistles and humming. Yes, it can be distracting, but it helps me to remember that the children aren’t doing it deliberately.

HC and language processing disorder. A boy I’ll call Hank was a very gifted and well-behaved student. But the minute the class started any writing assignment, he froze. The sound of all those other pens on paper panicked him. Everyone else was already writing. They already knew what they wanted to say. The more he saw and heard everyone else work, the less he could do any writing himself. His head went down. He turned red and started to sweat. It was clear he was in distress.

I finally figured out something that helped. After I had the class start a writing assignment, I immediately went to Hank’s desk and told him to go walkabout, to wander up and down the halls of the school for 15 minutes or so. He did. Once he came back, I asked, “Are you ready to write yet?” Usually he said no, so I told him to go walking again. After half an hour or so he was ready to begin. We followed that plan for the rest of the year and wrote it into his 504. (By the way, the last I heard, he’d finished an MA.)

HC on the spectrum. I’ve had 2E gifted students on the spectrum in my classes going back to the 1980s. One boy announced emphatically that he was from Mars. It didn’t faze any of the other students in my class. Most of them were happy to claim their own interesting place of origin, right alongside him.

One boy had to check the soles of his shoes repeatedly for gum every time he entered the classroom. His contributions to class discussions were far from normal. Was that a problem? Not really. His peers loved his quirkiness and creativity.

Recently I’ve added seating at the edges of my room. While I’ve told the whole class that anyone can use the extra desks and chairs as needed for extra privacy, I figure the kids on the spectrum are the ones who are most likely to need it.

HC with severe behavior issues. All the training we’ve done on ACEs helps me keep these children in perspective.

I just read about research that demonstrated how rats raised in a stable environment respond to minor changes in the environment with optimism—expecting positive outcomes. Rats raised in an unstable environment respond to the same changes with pessimism—expecting a negative outcome. For students with behavior issues and students on the spectrum, it helps so much if I can create and sustain a stable classroom environment.

What about students with fulltime para support or students who spend part of the day with me and part in the resource room?

We work hard in the HC classrooms to teach our students to treat all their classmates with respect and kindness. It really helps to have the whole class helping me surround each student with compassion.