What is Abstractness

This chapter tells the story of one GATE educator's early quest to satisfy what poet Wallace Stevens called a “blessed rage for order.” It describes the patterns she discovered and turning points she experienced as an undergraduate student, a Peace Corps volunteer, a first-year teacher in a diverse Title I high school, a doctoral student of curriculum and instruction, and an advanced student and teacher of underrepresented gifted populations. At its heart, it is an ethnography of the catalysts—the individuals and experiences—that helped transform a troubled, high school dropout's raw gifts into talents, enabling her to use her creativity, intensity, and love of complexity to do the one thing she swore she'd never do: teach.