Promise Newsletter
October, 2021
Section 6: NJAGC Student Contests
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Cultivating Gifted Minds
by Kavya Venkat
Work Created:11/24/2020
The mind is like music, capable of transforming its surroundings with renewed perspective and meaning. With each step you take towards your growth, your mind plays the role of a conductor in executing the musical notes and helping you create beautiful sounds in your life. To continue achieving your goals, nurturing your mind is very important. The ability to self-educate, work with discipline, and harness your creative thinking can enable you to strike the kind of powerful chord that will make the whole world listen to you.
Cultivating a gifted mind is like composing and performing a musical piece. First, you develop a positive vision with intention and purpose. A vision acts like a key signature of a song and provides a framework for the sequence of notes that follows. With a story for your composition to tell, you can then break this down into smaller tunes and translate these melodies into musical notes. This is like deriving small goals from your dream and crafting plans of action to help you reach them. As you set and work towards these goals, it is important to be realistic and thoughtful while keeping time at the forefront of your mind.
The next step is to nurture and strengthen your mind with discipline. Discipline is like the beat of the song, which integrates each and every note to form a coherent composition. Without a beat, the notes would all be cluttered, but discipline brings clarity in a composition through rhythm and steadiness. Ultimately, discipline takes practice and can only be achieved through small, consistent habits. These habits may seem to yield an inch-by-inch improvement, but they will have a compounding effect on your endurance to stick to the beat no matter what happens during the performance.
With a strong foundation set for your growth, you can now move on to harnessing the creative power of your mind. Creativity is important in shaping a gifted mind because it activates your brain to apply your knowledge in meaningful ways and approach challenges in an unconventional path. In music, there are many artistic elements like dynamics and vibrations that maestros add to enhance the expressiveness and depth of the composition. These innovative ideas enable musicians to bring more life and strength to a performance. We can follow this strategy in our own lives by challenging our minds to think beyond the boundaries and repurpose our skill sets in unique ways.
This brings us to a key step, which is the willingness to learn. The road to achieving your goals is definitely a bumpy one. But, these obstacles are the opportunities that truly allow you to learn, reinvent your thinking, and build your resilience. In the middle of a performance or concert, one may stumble on a note. The best thing to do is to learn from the moment and just keep moving forward because if you stop performing, the music ends. By persevering through, you will keep up the momentum that motivates you to continue fine-tuning your skill set and knowledge through these experiences. Learning is also possible through inspiration and insight, which are the two drivers of any form of growth. Especially since we live in a digital world where all knowledge is just one click away, there is a vast multitude of resources like articles, webinars, and workshops one can leverage to find a problem, person, or perspective that stimulates curiosity. This can provide you the intellectual courage to explore those new avenues and bring your own unique touch in your symphonies.
Whatever interests you, strive to keep learning and building on your forte.
All of these four steps are instrumental in the cyclic process that is behind every masterpiece the mind orchestrates. Through consistent effort and dedication, you can create powerful and meaningful melodies that will forever reverberate in the lives and hearts of people! So, cultivate your mind to be the maestro of your growth and the conductor of your symphony!
Kavya Venkatesan received first place in the 9th-12th grade category of the 2021 NJAGC writing contest as a 9th grade student at Old Bridge High School.
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Cultivating Gifted Minds
by Nicholas Cirelli
December18, 2020
“Jeremy! You're going to be late!”
“Coming!” Jeremy ran down the stairs with passion and swung around the shiny black marble top counter in one swift motion. He grabbed his brown paper lunch bag and tucked it safely in his backpack. He looked at his mom, who smiled.
“Have a wonderful day, sweetie. Don’t forget your notebook!”
Jeremy turned around and grabbed the red velvet book from his mother. He then jumped out the door and ran towards the street.
“I love you!” she called.
“I love you too!” Jeremy answered.
Soon after, the big yellow bus arrived around the corner and Jeremy hopped on. He went to his usual seat, one at the very left in the very back. Most kids on the bus were screaming and yelling, goofing around and messing around. Many were eating and left mounds of crumbs on the floor for the poor bus driver to clean up. Jeremy wasn’t like them, however. He wasn’t interested in chewing gum and eating, or screaming and yelling, but instead, the second he arrived on the bus, he opened up his book. Books, to Jeremy, were as special and close to him as a family member. He read from the second he arrived on that bus until he got to school, and when he got home he made sure to continue where he left off. His mom had a hard time keeping up with the rapid speed that he went through books so she went to the library once a week to grab a bunch. Giant books took Jeremy a week or two, while smaller ones were finished in as little as a day. He closed page 156 of Harry Potter and looked up, just as his bus arrived at school.
Being a first grader was tough for Jeremy, but not because it was too challenging. It was tough because it was too easy. He sits through class every day and draws his favorite characters in his notebook, and only looks when given an assignment which he completes with ease. Today, however, would be different.
Jeremy enters school with the other students as they pool into their classrooms. Jeremy goes to his usual seat, and after a few minutes of waiting, class begins.
His teacher, Ms. Smith enters, a bright smile on her face.
“Good morning boys and girls! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! This weekend I went pumpkin picking with my family, but I couldn’t carry them; they were too heavy!”
Everyone in the class laughed while Jeremy stayed silent. She continued. “Today boys and girls, you will be taking your math test that we studied for on Friday. I hope you all are prepared. I will begin handing them out now.”
She circled back around her desk and grabbed a pile of papers. She then walked over to each student and placed the test in front of them. Slowly she went, making sure each student was equipped with a pencil and paper.
When she arrived at Jeremy’s desk, she smiled lightly. “Before you take the math test, can you complete this other assignment and return it to me?”
“Uh, ok.” Jeremy said uncomfortably as Ms. Smith handed him a different paper. This assignment was not like the ones he was used to being given. He was not easily able to complete this one and had to think outside of the box. This challenge excited him! When he finally finished the assignment he turned it into his teacher with a smile on his face because he knew it was difficult and he enjoyed the challenge. He also felt a sense of pride and relief. Pride that his teacher recognized that he was bored in class and relieved that those days would now be behind him because he knew Ms. Smith was going to continue to challenge him and school would no longer be boring.
Nicholas Cirelli received first place in the 6th-8th grade category of the 2021 NJAGC writing contest as a 7th grader at East Hanover Middle School in East Hanover, NJ.
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Cultivating Gifted Minds: A Forest of Talents
by Gavin Pagano
December 6, 2020
Deforestation is the process of trees being cut down, and eventually entire forests can be eliminated. This is a major reason why many animals are extinct. Their habitat was destroyed by deforestation and other harmful human activity. Many of those animals were animals that are harmless, or even helpful, and they’re precious to the ecosystem and to our special world. Is a child’s gifted mind a treasure in a forest that must be protected? I believe a gifted mind is just as important as a precious tree or animal! We have to care for the gifted minds in our ecosystem by supporting them. This way we can build a healthy world with creative ideas, not a world where gifts and talents go extinct.
It matters that humanity bands together to stop deforestation for the sake of the whole planet. It’s important to have a balanced ecosystem where everything fits together in a healthy way. The consequences of deforestation are very serious. First of all, many forest animals would go extinct and would become missing from the food chain. Also, climate change would quicken. Global warming is caused when too much carbon is in the air because the trees that are supposed to turn carbon into oxygen are missing from deforestation. What will we breathe? With global warming, the ice caps would melt, flooding the land. Where would we live and plant crops if the world is a giant ocean? Now I ask you, how will the world be if our gifted minds are not encouraged to blossom? Especially gifted children need to be able to learn and grow in an environment that doesn’t cut them down or tell them to give up on being special. Gifted minds are part of an important ecosystem where people should support each other so everyone could be their best or we will have a dangerous imbalance.
Trees don’t just help us, they also help other plants by giving the soil more nutrients. Trees help to prevent soil from getting eroded. Their leaves provide important support for other living things. In a similar way, gifted minds of the world also offer some of the most important contributions for the whole planet. A gifted mind that is supported comes up with ideas and makes them happen. For example, Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing had amazing ideas for computing to help the rest of the world, but they were prevented from doing everything they could have done. To me, this is as sad as deforestation. Will we ever know how many gifted young minds were stopped before they got to create things that would have helped so many people around the world? Cutting down trees is like chopping down the potential of gifted minds and destroying the hopes of improving our planet.
A gifted mind is like a rich forest. It must be protected and cultivated so it can thrive. Gifted minds are the trees that create ideas and provide nourishment for the world just like trees produce oxygen. If we don’t cultivate gifted minds or if we destroy them by ignoring them, what will happen to our world?
Gavin Pagano received first place in the 3rd-5th grade category of the 2021 NJAGC writing contest as a third grade student at Village Elementary School in Skillman, NJ.
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Cultivating Gifted Minds
by Gregory Teske
October 3rd, 2020
Hi. I think this is to teach me about cultivating gifted minds?
Yes. First question: Have you ever been good at something that you really weren't good at from the beginning? Ummm. Maybe? Art is definitely one of mine. I rather think I was quite hopeless at art at first, but now I'm rather good at it. I really think I am getting to the gifted level, and sometimes I really just want to give up. My sister/art teacher encouraged me to keep going, and never give up. She is gifted at art because she practiced a lot, and wanted to be gifted at art.
Well okay, I want to be good at a certain skill! I don't think you can just want to be good at a certain skill. What do I need?
Well, all right, just what do you need to be a gifted person?
Whenever you want to be gifted at something, you have to have certain things and qualities:
• Knowing what the skill is, such as art, math, writing, and so on.
• Knowing the basic facts for the skill.
• A yearning for learning - wanting to learn.
• Knowing that you aren't perfect, however good you are at this skill.
• Never give up, even if it's too hard for you right now.
Well, okay, what is gifted? You've been talking about other things and I don't even know what giftedness is!
Right. What is gifted anyway? In the context of learning, gifted is a word that represents becoming better and better and better until you are very good at a certain skill that you choose to learn about. Gifted may also be born with the skill, and always like it from the beginning. It's always nice to be good at something! :)
I want to know how people will react if I am gifted. I don't want to be bullied.
Well, being gifted is nice, but people can get mean to you. Sometimes, people get jealous of you because you're so good at the skill you're learning, but people also can understand why you're good at it. Like people will understand that it's just simply easy to do math, writing, reading, and other things if you are a gifted student, but still, it's pretty normal for some people to get a little darker towards you if you're good at something they're not. Sometimes, though, people just really don't like you, and they just simply don't want to see you, and they can make it really hard for you to do anything, what you are gifted at or other.
This is also where, when you're a kid, having a teacher, or a parent around who understands what you need can be great. They should be able to get the other kid to back off, even better if they can get them to understand gifted kids and find their own gift. So they help make a good environment for learning, like a person really just in a place with no bullies, nobody to threaten you. That is always what people want.
How do you cultivate other people's gifted minds, then?
You can't just learn by yourself. Even historically famous gifted people, like Sir Isaac Newton, corresponded with others in their field. You need a teacher, or a mentor, or someone who has a good experience with what you're learning. You have to get past different challenges, maybe take a few breaks along the way. But you can also work hard to increase your skill and face more difficult challenges, and a teacher can really help you with things. Still, maybe a teacher won't directly help you, but encourage you instead, and you eventually get past a problem. It's way harder, isn't it? You still get past it, though, right? It just takes longer. That is why people learn things. They face challenges and pass them, and look for their next challenge.
Gregory Teske received first place in the pre-k-2nd grade category of the 2021 NJAGC writing contest as a second grade student at Parkway Elementary School in Mount Laurel, NJ.
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How to Enter the NJAGC 2022 Student Contests
Entries are now being taken for the 2022 NJAGC Art, Writing, Video, and our new Music Composition Contests. Click each of the contest rules images to view a printable pdf version of the contest(s) you may want to enter, along with the parental permission slip. You can also view information and submit entries through the contest page on our website at: https://www.njagc.org/contests.html.
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