An anonymous philosopher once wrote:  "If you chase two rabbits, both will escape."

Our lives are full of choices, but our children may not know that yet.  We all need to be reminded from time to time that we can't extend ourselves in too many directions.  We have lots of ways to describe it in American English: I'm being pulled in too many directions at once. She's jumping through too many hoops. He's a  multitasker. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. ​But, whatever metaphor you want to use, we understand that we can, and in some cases shouldn't do everything we want.

Children need to be aware that they see decisions being made every day - in literature, in movies, and, most important, in real life.  These choices - and the consequences they produce - can be chewed, swallowed, and digested, such that each time students make a decision of their own, they can use the knowledge from the sum total of the decisions they have witnessed to help them choose the best path.

Sadly, teaching children the skill of making decisions often involves facing unpleasant realities.  In school, well-meaning teachers encourage kids by saying, "We're all winners here."  It's a beautiful thought, but it's not always true.  People lose all the time.  Actions have consequences, and those outcomes are not always pretty.  It is necessary for young people - in their studies, but even more so in real life - to examine decisions made by others that have led to awful results.

In the final analysis, exceptional kids make good choices when facing the toughest of decisions.  And many of these decisions are made under less-than-ideal circumstances.  Peer pressure is hard enough to deal with.  When the demands of societal norms are thrown onto the scales, it is no wonder very few kids have the strength to be true to themselves and their beliefs.  It is so hard to be different, which often requires standing up to the ridicule and judgment of others.

For most children, lack of focus is not a medical problem.  They are often bored and unfortunately are living in a society that fuels their lack of concentration with countless distractions.  This inability to focus can lead to disastrous results in the classroom as well as in life.  Students who reach great heights have learned how not to be easily distracted.  If a child can concentrate on school tasks, and, more important, on his own dreams and goals, his life will be better.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It seems that we live in a "bottom line" society, where the final score or final grade is all that matters.  Exceptional children grow to understand that the journey is everything.  It's wonderful to get an A on an exam, but even better to reflect on the studying and learning that led up to the grade.  It's exciting to perform a play or concert and hear the cheers from a live audience, but extraordinary children know that the thousands of hours spent rehearsing are actually more meaningful and joyous than the performance itself.

These days, many well-meaning school districts bring together teachers, coaches, curriculum supervisors, and a cast of thousands to determine what skills your child needs to be successful.  Once these "standards" have been established, pacing plans are then drawn up to make sure that each particular skill is taught at the same rate and in the same way to all children.  This is, of course, absurd.  It gets even worse when one considers the very real fact that nothing of value is learned permanently by a child in a day or two.

There is so much rich content in this section of the book, Making Connections:  positive attitudes, making connections, creativity, and teaching to the top. I'll begin my comments with this quote from the book: Two stonecutters...were engaged in similar activity.  Asked what they were doing, one answered, "I'm squaring up this block of stone."  The other replied, "I'm building a cathedral."  The first may have been underemployed; the second was not.  Clearly what counts is not so much what work a person does, but what he perceives he is doing it for.  (Wille Harman, Global Mind Change​, 1988)

Like all professionals, teachers must assimilate basic procedures and strategies and then implement them in a way that reveals personal artistry.  One of the reasons some methodologies work very well for some teachers and not for others, we suspect, has to do with the sense of artistry of different teachers and their innate but often unrecognized ability to integrate different elements of experience.

Knowledge becomes natural when it is sufficiently connected with what else is already known.  These patterns of interconnectedness are what we call maps.  To help students create sophisticated maps in the brain, teachers must not present subject matter in isolated, meaningless pieces.  Rather, the student needs to experience a sense of wholeness. Crowell (1989) calls it "dynamic Unity."  As Houston (1981) says, "Why is that Johnny cannot read, spell, or balance his checkbook?  How could he, when his education is so fragmented?"

Teachers often seem to fear that the use of real-life activities and large-scale projects will interfere with the coverage of the prescribed materials.  In effect, they often feel that invoking locale memory will jeopardize the treatment of taxon information.  Our experience is directly to the contrary.  The proper use of complex activities makes it possible to deal with substantially more material than would otherwise be the case.  The teacher of students may model or demonstrate the subject, bring in experts, engage in genuine problem solving, interview authorities, and create learning games.