TPP 284: Maria Kennedy on What's Needed & What's Next in the Movement to Support 2e Students
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
50 min
2 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 6 hours ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
If we never talk about the strengths of a child, we miss out on more than half of our human beings. We are not all the things that are wrong with us. We are not all the things that we cannot do. We are all the things that we can do and they need to be celebrated.
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Rieber. My guest today is Maria Kennedy, Director of the Bridges Educational Group at Bridges Academy and host of Crucial Conversations on Cognitive Diversity, produced by the Bridges 2E Center for Research and Professional Development. Maria is also a speaker, author, and advocate, and has been featured on Bright and Quirky and has received several awards for her teaching and leadership. Maria is passionate about working with twice exceptional students and training teachers to tap into the strengths of their gifted and challenged students.
During this conversation, we will talk about how the definition of giftedness in some countries keeps gifted students from getting into Gifted programs, the importance of appreciating every child's unique strengths and value, and ways parents can advocate for their children's learning profile, even within their existing school systems that may not be designed to support or understand neurodivergent learners. Maria likens the work she does to being on a crusade and I just have to say I am here for it. But before I get to that, I want to give a quick shout out to Lindsay McFadden, Elizabeth O'Tuckermanty, and Helen Hughes. Thank you so much for being a part of my Patreon campaign and helping me cover the costs of producing this show.
If you get a lot out of this podcast and want to join Lindsay, Elizabeth, and Helen in supporting it, you can sign up with Patreon to make a small monthly contribution. To learn more, visit patreon dot com slash tiltparenting. Also, if you are newer to Tilt Parenting, I want to be sure you know about my book Differently Wired, Raising an Atypical Child with Confidence and Hope. Differently Wired is part manifesto part how to navigate the unique journey of parenting a neurodivergent child. If you haven't read it yet, I invite you to download the first chapter on my website at tiltparenting.com slash book. Thank you so much. And now here is my conversation with Maria. Hello Maria, welcome to the podcast.
Hi Debbie, thank you so much. It's such an honor to be able to hang out with you today.
I know, I wish we could do this in person. I think we'd have a lot of fun, but we'll have to be in our respective coasts for this conversation at least. I would love if you could as a way to get started just tell a little bit about your story and maybe your personal why for doing this work and and how you got into doing the work that you do.
So yes, most definitely. So um I'm an educator by profession and um I got into education because I wanted to be a lifelong learner and my mother encouraged me to do it. Um I've always worked really well with children and had worked with children with special needs. Um Down syndrome children is where I had started originally. And then I got into elementary ed and then I had a small person of my own. My amazing young man Aaron. And what we discovered was, like his mother, he's gifted. The age of three, he was doing single-digit edition with carrying. Uh he was obsessed with numbers, wanted to know everything there was to know about everything, and had an amaz an amazing memory. So if you read a book to him once, he would read it back to you verbatim.
So this amazing young man goes to school and gets into trouble at school. And I'm going. The child's three. What can he possibly be doing to be getting into trouble and being sent out of class at the age of three? He was sent out of class at the age of three because he refused to sit and draw circles around the number three. And I said to the teacher, I'm not understanding what we're doing here. She goes, Well, they're all three, so they're circling three bats, three balls.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
2 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
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TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
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