ABSTRACT
This chapter creates a context for understanding gifted students' lives in school. It highlights how gifted students deal with the mixed messages they perceive from their environment and try to make a connection with these messages to the tragedy at Columbine High School in 1999 or Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Authors have used surveys and questionnaires; made observations; interviewed students, teachers, parents, and administrators; visited numerous schools and classrooms; and read students' journals-all in the quest of understanding gifted students' lives in school. Their research into the social and emotional development of gifted students, their experiences of giftedness, their social cognition, and their social coping strategies and behaviors also have helped inform this chapter. The lesson of Columbine is not that gifted students are homicidal; rather, it is that the children who killed other students had certain qualities, histories, and experiences.
