I freely admit that, as of right now, I don't have any kids. My wife and I have talked about having kids a few times, but we're not real sure about when the "right time" is. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that there is ever a right time to have kids, but that's a separate issue. As I've thought about kids (and what having kids would mean to me and my life), I've had a potentially horrifying realization. Namely, what if my kids are as smart as I am (or even, heaven forfend, smarter)?
The public education system in the US seems to be well-geared towards dealing with children with learning difficulties. At the very least, it seems to make an attempt (ignoring the usefulness of that attempt) to deal with those kids. Unless things have changed dramatically in the 14 years since I graduated high school, the education system is ill-equipped (I would even go so far as to say unequipped) to deal with children who are "gifted".
I was a gifted child. [I'd claim that I'm still a gifted adult, but you probably don't care about that.] In many ways, I was a fairly typical gifted child. My hunger for knowledge was practically boundless. I could almost literally absorbe information as it was fed to me and process it. To this day, I believe that one of the reasons I got sick regularly during school was just so that I'd have some level of challenge from trying to catch up after being out of school for a month.
I can vividly remember coming back to high school after missing a month of class. Now, understand - I went to Academic High School in Jersey City, NJ. This was a school that specifically geared itself towards the cream of Jersey City. [No snide remarks, please...] There was an expectation that, if you went to Academic, you were going on to college - not an expectation that's placed on most high school students.
So, here I am, coming back to school, not really having done much work while I was away. I sit down in Math class where the teacher has spent the past week trying to teach everyone else how to do logarithm interpolation. [If you don't know how to do this, don't work - it's not important to the story.] Not only did I manage to pick it up, while she was describing it for the slower students, but I then was able to do the problems faster than anyone else in the class.
I'm not even going to go into the level of ribbing and outright hostility I faced in school. By the time I got to high school, I was two years younger than the rest of my classmates. [I'd skipped 5th and 7th grades in grammar school, and that only because my mother got me tested and proved to the pricipal that I didn't even really belong there.] I was 15 when I graduated high school and 19 when I graduated college.
"So what?" you may very well ask. Well, the upshot of all this is that, as mentioned in my previous entry, I was a nerd, a geek, a know-it-all who actually did stand a good chance of knowing it all. I was also horribly socialized. I'd suspect that children raised in the wild by wolves have better skills when it comes to being with other people. The social skills that people pick up when they're teens never happened for me. I was shunned, an outcast.
Lest you think that I'd go back and do anything different, please do not be mistaken - given the choice, I don't see how I could have chosen differently. The potential damage to my psyche from being held back with my age group would have been worse than just being poorly socialized.
To bring this back to my (potential) kids - I'm left with the faintly horrific thought that there's no way I could subject my children (who I hope will be at least as smart as I am) to that kind of situation. I can't believe that it wouldn't be as terrible for them as it would be for me.
So what are the alternatives? I think there are two primary ones - private school or home schooling. The problem with private schools is that they're not necessarily any better equipped to deal with the truly gifted than the public schools are. I know that, for me, what I really needed was one-on-one instruction by someone who could let me go at my pace, not at the pace of others.
Does that leave me the only alternative being to home school my children? And if so, how does that synch up with needing to hold a full-time job? I don't know. What I do know is that the choice between acceleration and socialization is a terrible one and one that parents of gifted children (and the children themselves) shouldn't be forced to make. There should be some way to allow the really smart kids to proceed at their own pace yet still develop the "normal" socialization skills that will make them able to hang out at a party.
If you've got any experience with either home schooling or alternate approaches for teaching gifted kids, please feel free to let me know. This is one that's going to puzzle me until I've got kids (and probably long after, in fact).
Author: ben@tmk.com