- Perfectionism: Positive or Negative?

Week Six - Perfectionism: Positive or Negative?
Perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by a person's determination for faultlessness and a person’s will to set extremely high performance values. Many educators and parents view this as negative when their students or children must be perfectionists. Our society has even viewed perfectionism as a negative term. Research has stated that schools and educators have applied pressure to gifted students to attain high outcomes. Silverman stated students see that they are valued for what they do, not for who they are. I do believe educators, schools and parents have been guilty of this at some time in the student’s life. Can a student’s perfectionism be turned into a pursuit of excellence? After reading the articles and viewing the power point, there is research that states students can channel their perfectionism into “pursuits of excellence”. With educators’ and parents’ help, we can help perfectionist children see that being a perfectionist is not a negative trait, but a positive one.
Jack (made-up name), a former student, reminds me of Sherman in the case study article by Jill L. Adelson. Jack is a gifted student and a mathematical wizard. I worked with him in math groups to accelerate his math skills with above grade-level problem-solving tasks. Often he would get so frustrated trying to solve a challenging word problem that he ended up wringing his hands, rocking his body against the table, and sometimes crying. Because he viewed math as his strength, when he was challenged in this subject and couldn’t solve a problem quickly, he often shut down and became frustrated. Although he considered himself a strong math student, he also read and comprehended above grade level. Yet, he perceived reading as being his weakness because learning math came so easy. (He saw reading as being hard.) Before a reading benchmark he was already telling me he was not going to do well. Like the article