Back To School

I just finished reading Time Magazine's article Are We Failing Our Geniuses? that discusses America's disregard for its brightest youngsters. The article notes that programs for mentally retarded school age children get a full 10 times the funding that programs for the mentally gifted receive. John Cloud, author of the piece, reports that although conventional thinking may justify such inequities by the suppostion that bright kids will do OK on their own, the reality is that highly gifted youth (IQs in the 145+ range) drop out of school at the same rate as their less advanced peers, and have just as much difficulty forming relationships and adjusting to an adult world. Cloud profiles the Davidson Academy of Nevada, a public charter school founded by philanthropists Janice and Robert Davidson; some of its 45 students have moved from across the globe to attend. The students are prodigies, some of whom have exhausted the University of Nevada at Reno's entire undergraduate math curriculum in their middle teens. They are national chess, spelling bee, and science award winners, and they seem to be in the perfect environment, as many of them tell of being routinely beaten up by public school classmates for their precociousness.

Cloud also talks about multiple grade skipping as a solution to public school's failure to adequately address the needs of its "genius" students, and points to research challenging the notion that a child is best off with classmates of his or her exact age. In one study, extremely advanced students who are allowed to skip more than three grades fared much better in later life than a different group of similarly gifted kids who stayed in their own grades.

As I read this article in the doctor's office, waiting to find out if the mole he removed from my lip was cancerous (it wasn't, hurray! And since biopsying the mole removed it from my face altogether, well, that's just a happy byproduct), I was getting pretty emotional thinking about my own gifted kids, just into the new school term, and what the next few years have in store for them. Now don't get me wrong, my kids are bright, but they're not candidates for the Davidson Academy. Even so, knowing that bright, beautiful children often end up on dark pathways as they negotiate adolescence scares the shit out of me. To think that all we have to do is parent these gifted kids "correctly" to stave off those dangers is a foolhardy notion.

Josie, five years old and youngest in her first grade class, doesn't worry me...yet. Her morning tantrums during dressing and teeth brushing are somewhat predictable during this early September adjustment period, although that doesn't make them any more bearable. She's smart, funny, creative, beautiful, and popular, but I don't think she's in danger of getting beaten up for leaving the rest of the first grade in the dust academically. Since I don't feel like I need to worry about her yet, I don't. Her time will come. Also, I pray she doesn't peak in first grade, which I think can be the fate of popular kids.

Henry, eight years old in the third grade, worries me most of all, but he's still entrenched in innocent years. One of his classmates from first grade skipped straight to third the next year, and he was a bit jealous. Although he has the raw brain power to do much more advanced work than the standard third grade curriculum, his selective mutism and social anxiety have led us to conclude that the best situation for Henry is almost always the most comfortable one. For some of us, decisions based on comfort level can mean stagnation and acquiescence; for Henry it means survival. Although he's been identified by the school district as "gifted and talented," I can't imagine sending him to the district's GATE school, with its diminutive, petty-minded, punitive principal, its prison-like obsession with security, its lame dress code, and its decided lack of inspiring teachers. My older son, Vincent, attended that school for grades two through six, as a couple of Henry's peers are doing now, so I know of which I speak.

However, despite my intense dislike of the local GATE school, and as much as I hate to admit it, it was probably the perfect environment for Vincent simply because he was surrounded every day by other gifted students. These kids pushed each other academically, and in their own geeky ways, reinforced the notion that "to be smart is not to be uncool." But Henry remains at the neighborhood school without any official program for gifted students, because this is where he's comfortable. We are three houses down from the local school, so if need be the eight and five year old can walk on their own each day. Sending a kid to the GATE school screws this all up. It sounds self serving, I know, but there is nothing in our family of five's daily routine that require us to drive a car. Part of our kids' education, in our mind, is to model sustainable living and shrinking our environmental footprint. Our family has a long way to go in this regard, but living, working, and going to school within walking, bicycling, or transit distance is very important to us. So the local school it is for Henry and Josie.

And it's a good school. It's where the gates stay open to parents, where teachers have hugs for their former students and parents alike, where the community comes together - many on foot - twice daily for dropoff and pickup, baseball, soccer, and other neighborhood activities. It's where Henry knows by first name all 60 kids in the three third grade classes, where he remains very popular despite his frequent unwillingness to talk to anyone else.

But I admit that I wonder if he'd be better off at the GATE school despite transportation concerns and my personal dislike of the administration. I wonder if we're coddling him too much. What little I know about parenting can be summed up by this: Be open minded, but trust your gut. And my gut knows that some kids need to be pushed, while others, when pushed too much, break. It's almost impossible to push Henry without him breaking, which he does loudly and often. When he's gently guided, he does much better. This is a kid whom I can see spinning off the planet in a whirlwind of fear, anger, and anxiety, or settling in to a happy, healthly existence with the right amount of nurturing and support. I hope we're doing right by him.

Vincent, 12 and starting seventh grade right now, seems to have his head on pretty straight, but my anxiety about his adolescence sometimes overwhelmes me. Entering the fourth week of middle school, my seventh grader is flourishing. I think he was more than ready to leave his insular grade school, where his entire class of gifted peers stayed together in the same group year after year, into a world of multiple teachers, classes, new kids, P.E., speech and debate, lockers, homework, riding the bus, buying lunch at the snack shack, and all that good stuff. I hated seventh grade, and everything about school between the ages of 9 and 20, but Vincent is eating it up.

Nevertheless, I worry about him, mainly because he has my DNA.

Although, like my kids, I was identified as gifted by the school district when I was young, I come from a long line of alcoholics. By the the time I was Vincent's age, entering my fourth week of seventh grade, I was already smoking weed, cutting class, and getting in trouble with the law. By eighth grade I had seen the wrong side of the city jail, by tenth was stumbling home with broken teeth after blackout drinking, and by 11th, was expelled from school. Later that year, a drug overdose hospitalized me, and by the grace of God I found my way to a rehab program that worked, and I found a new way of life without drinking and drugs. 21 years later, I still haven't had a drink or a drug, but I know how uncommonly lucky I was. Despite a personal commitment to ruin my life as early and quickly as possible, I was spared by hitting a hard bottom early, by having the gift of understanding parents and the support of other recovering teens and counselors. Life hasn't always been rosy since then, but it has been a life of meaning and learning. I continued to make mistakes and bad decisions, as everyone does, but eventually found a way to learn from them and move forward. Somewhere along the way I started making good decisions, and I wouldn't trade my life now - with the job, house, wife and kids - for anything.

But watching Vincent, the exact same age I was when I started my downward spiral, freaks me out a little, and not only because he looks just like I did at that age: long hair, smart, goofy, short. However, unless he's hiding it really well, I don't see any signs that he's straying from the straight and narrow. He gets himself out of bed, dressed, breakfasted, and out the door to the bus stop by 7:10 sharp...with time to spare. He's home promptly after school, and hits the books hard. He joined the speech and debate club, and is beside himself with how cool it is. He has a good group of friends, but they don't log a whole lot of time together outside of school hours, which maybe isn't a terrible thing (whereas my friends and I at that age roamed the city endlessly, with no supervision, looking for - and always finding - trouble). Where I was desparate to be cool, needed the long hair, slip-on Vans, flannel shirt over black rock tee, Vincent could care less. His only line in the sand is his long hair, which he allows us to trim only rarely and reluctantly. Other than that, he's not wrapped up in what he wears, what kind of music kids are listening too, and has almost no clue about who's who and what's what in pop culture. And I love all these things about him; so far, he's allowing himself to develop into...himself, purely and freely. I hope he keeps it up.

So, while none of my kids are going to apply for the Davidson Academy any time soon (and neither will 99.9999% of the nation's youth), I'm hoping to get a pass for one more year without experiencing first hand the pure hell I put my parents through. I'll keep struggling along, learning as I go, like everyone else.