On Education

Jon and I are struggling.  I feel as if we are in a busy train yard.  There are dozens- hundreds if we squint to look into the distance- of trains taking off in different directions.  Each one looks different, each one is different.  But none look right.  They are all moving and some are picking up speed.  They seem impossible to catch, even if we knew which one was our train.  Except we have no idea which train is ours- we have no idea where each is going or why or how it will get there or if we want to end up at its destination.  So here we are, lost amongst the rush, and I'm losing hope of ever finding our train and losing even more hope that if we find it, we will be able to catch up and jump aboard.  It is nearing the end of May and the mad rush to board the preschool train is about over.  Granted we don't live in New York City where the mad rush is quite literally a mad rush, but I still feel like we have stood here idly- out of fear, in denial- and now we are scrambling to make sense of our world.  When you take into account that for us, the preschool train is more than just preschool- it is the beginning of a very steep uphill climb, our heads are literally spinning and it feels as though someone has greased our wheels- making an impossible ascent feel all the more impossible.

Over the course of the last year, Jon and I have had a large part of our world turned upside down.  Much of what we thought we knew no longer makes sense.  Entire schemas that were built from our own childhoods and had withstood the test of time for the entirety of our lives thus far have been dumped upside down faster than the boys can empty a 300 piece bucket of Duplo's- and on more than occasion I've considered calling the Guinness Book because I'm sure we can set a world record for that.  The building block analogy aside, I'm not talking about scattering children's toys on the living room floor.  I'm talking about the schemas Jon and I have in our minds about education- and all of a sudden those are scattered all over the floor as well.  We have been faced with some seriously deep and troubling questions, made even more troubling by the fact that our family's livelihood revolves around traditional education.  It is Jon's job.  It is how we feed our family.  We had not expected to face these questions at all, much less this early, and despite devouring as many books and articles as I can get my hands on, we feel wholly unprepared to answer them.  To answer the questions like- What is education?  What does it look like?  What is its purpose?  What is a school?  Is it formal?  Informal?  What is a classroom?  What is a teacher?  What is their job?  When does schooling start?   What do we expect to get from all of these things combined?  Why do we do things the way that we do?  Is it really the best practice?  If not, what is?  What are peers?  Are they age mates?  Intellectual mates?  How many does one need, and of which kind?  When ones social, emotional, and intellectual development are on three vastly different levels with vastly different needs, which do we meet first?  Which do we let lag behind in importance and even possibly let suffer?  What sacrifices do we make- time wise, money wise, emotion wise- to meet which needs?  And the toughest of all- Why does it all matter?

I feel like we will never find our train until we can answer these questions.  Which feels just about near impossible.  And even if we answer all of them, maybe our train isn't out there.  In my unending quest for information, knowledge, and understanding, I stumbled upon an article yesterday that rocked my world.  The irony of it was not lost on me- as we prepare to leave for our trip to Houston, Texas where the boys have been invited inside Mission Control of the Johnson Space Center for the live launch of the Souyez 35 that is taking three astronauts to International Space Station.  I realized that maybe we're standing in this busy train yard trying to find our preschool train when in reality, maybe we should be in astronaut training preparing to climb aboard a rocket.  At least when one is searching for which rocket to ride, there are far fewer options- and all will surely be the trip of a lifetime.

I'll finish by sharing the concluding statements of the article.  You can find the entirety of the article here- but I should note two interrelated things.  The article was written in 1985.  I wish much had changed since then when it comes to educating gifted students. It has not.  The only difference today is that the IQ scores she discusses are different.  The IQ scores nearing 200 that she talks about are the true ratio scores of our old testing system.  Today we use standard deviation scores and they are quite different.  It is my understanding that the 180-200 scores are very roughly equivalent to the 140's and 150's of today- and after deeply contemplating whether or not we want to know this valuable piece of information about our own boys, we decided that we needed to- and this is exactly where they fall.  Aside from the changes in how the tests are scored, her points could have been written yesterday, not 28 years ago.  And with our own children right smack in the middle of her discussion, it is quite literally heartbreaking.

Here are her concluding thoughts about educating gifted students.  Much to our dismay, she is speaking about us.  About children very similar to ours, in presentation and in testing profiles.  About us as parents of such children.  By Stephanie Tolan on exceptionally gifted children:

"By age 12 children can take the SATs and may finally be able to work with people who have long known what to do for minds like theirs. But they have had to wait for too long and suffer far too much damage. There are young children out there about to embark on the same agonizing journey and parents who are going to have to learn the lessons for themselves, making the same mistakes the rest of us have made. It can't be said too often or too strongly that these children inhabit another dimension. They can't be allowed to be different only when their differences are convenient or safe. After six years, I know all too well that those who predicted catastrophe were closer to the truth than those who claimed our children could survive anything. No matter how strong or physically fit our astronauts are, we wouldn't send them naked to the moon; we protect them with space suits and oxygen. It's high time we provided protection and sustenance for our finest minds. We know how gravity limits the distance a man can jump on earth, but we don't expect the limits to be the same on the moon. It's high time we took the artificial limits off our children's minds.

The exceptionally gifted child is unique. What kind of educational adaptation each child needs must be decided after a careful study of that child's individuality. But the certainty that adaptations must be made can be based on what our children have in common, on the rules of their own special world. We must provide educators with maps and guidebooks of that world so they can begin, with a degree of confidence, to let go of the rules they have been taught to follow."