"Gifted"

My wife got a post/email on the local homeschool board about a lady that thinks her kid is "gifted". I just happened to sit down in front of her computer and see this silly post sitting there. My number one response: this lady needs a blog... that's the perfect platform for bragging about this sort of thing. Come to find out that it is a piece for a newspaper column she writes. So the somewhat pointlessness of the article is forgiven to a certain extent, viewing it as an article, and not a message board post.

But the whole thing is still silly. Her fundamental question is this: "Is my son gifted or just really smart?" He's reading at this grade level, and mathing at whatever grade level, and so on, but is he "gifted"? To me the whole concept of "gifted" is just stupid. It serves no real purpose, except perhaps to single out the "gifted" one. I mean everyone has some sort of "gift", right? Besides, there's a lot more to success than merely high academic performance.

It might be relevant to say here that I was labelled gifted in elementary school, and it is a hard label to shake. We even had a gifted program, called SWEPT, where all the gifted kids could get together and have learning about stuff that presumably the masses were not capable of understanding. From what I can remember, we did a lot of dinosaurs and stuff, or maybe it was more independent study - where the kid picked the topic, and I just chose dinosaurs...er, rather paleontology. I do remember even in first grade being carted off to this special class with two other kids, both from second grade, where we did mathy and sciency things, like using litmus paper. Sadly, I struggle with litmus paper to this day. Though I think I did get a fair sense of scientific method along the way - maybe it started in this pre-SWEPT.

One thing I really remember from the gifted program was in middle school, the gifted room was this little room off the cafeteria, and one day we all found access to the IQ scores of all the kids in the gifted group. That was fun - I was one of the highest IQ. But the funniest thing is that the kid with the lowest IQ of all of us ended up at Harvard, and works for like Warrenn Buffett or something now.

Forget about Harvard, the kid that was a drug dealer (not in the gifted program) in high school is part owner of a restaurant now. Some of the smartest kids in my class now are stuck in uninteresting jobs for big companies. Some have found peace serving God. Some just get by doing art. Some of the rest are making their mark. I haven't seen a high correlation between "gifted" status and life happiness.

Labelling doesn't do anybody any good. It is a convenient tool to make it easier for schools to determine how an individual should be treated, based on the labels that are applied.

So in the end, this reads more like a rant, but I think I'll let it fly. The point is that it doesn't matter if a kid is gifted or just really smart or whatever any of that is supposed to mean. What matters is a person finding a thing to do that they love, and making the most of it. What matters most above all is a person being happy.

Preschool Mental Health Screening

This came across my inbox a few weeks ago (thanks Aimée), and as I was cleaning out, I found it again, and realized I hadn't drawn any attention to it.

Let me start by saying that I can indeed see some benefit to the concept of preschool mental health screening. I could see the idea that since the child is going to be in a forced social situation with many other children and little direct supervision (what's that student:teacher ratio again?), that some parents might want to know the mental health state of the other kids in the class.

One major problem is the way that our system handles these labelled "mentally ill" children. The main and often only real course of treatment is medication. I have written about this before, but we have the most incidence of "mental illness" and the most medications given for this problem. In other words, the medication isn't working. People are taking medication but not getting better. Kids are known to have increased suicide risk with the stuff, and here goes the government trying to put more kids on the medicine. How corrupt is the influence of the big drug companies in Washington?

As if the poor treatment options aren't bad enough, the government wants to make these diagnoses and treatments without parental consent. So if you have your kid in preschool, they may try to label the child with a mental illness and then give dangerous and ineffective treatments to your child - without your consent. I feel sick thinking about this - I need to stop. But I am thankful that my kids aren't in any sort of compulsory public education system! I can sense the return of the commune - off the grid living in the US!