ABSTRACT
The first year that I (Holly) taught the “Introduction to the Education of the Gifted” course at the University of Virginia, I imagined it as a course in which students’ knowledge and understanding about gifted education would be expanded and refined. Their burning questions about “What is giftedness? How do we find it? How do we serve it?” would be answered and summarily put to rest. It was, of course, the classic case of a teacher forgetting what it was like to be a student. Because when I really think about it, I remember that during my first year of doctoral work, I walked into Carol Tomlinson’s “Introduction to Teaching the Gifted” course wide-eyed, full of certainty from my own teaching experiences about what giftedness was and how to ignite and fuel it. That was September.
