From the Beginning

I have a couple of things I would like to put out there before I start reminiscing. First, obviously I don't remember my early years. I don't have any personal memories until school started. The school calendar gave me something to hang my memories onto, I think. So the early part of my story is only as good as my memory of the stories my mother has passed down to me. Second, it's very awkward to talk about one's own giftedness as well as one's child's giftedness. It's considered socially inappropriate to talk about one's talents and gifts. Giftedness does not make a person better than others. I had problems dealing with that as a child, but I learned things the hard way, and I'm okay with that. Being gifted to me is the same as being blue-eyed. It's part of who I am. I have always known about my gifted status, and it's a large part of my identity. On the other hand, I am very aware of what I do know and what I do not know. When I write about my giftedness in this blog, I am not trying to be arrogant. That's not really who I am. I am seriously trying to get over some of my own baggage so that it doesn't spillover and affect Dermot's education.

I have not heard any family stories about anything about me that made me look unusual until I was three years old. In fact, my mother was always worried that my brother and I were late talkers. My mother was a grade school teacher (grade 1 and 2 before I came along, I think) and she quit working and stayed home once I was born. Because of that I think that she provided cognitive stimulation to my brother and I before I was in school. The first incident that pointed to my giftedness was that I could read at three years of age. My mother, I assume, was reading to me everyday, as we did with Dermot. One day she noticed that I was reading the newspaper out loud to myself. At that point, she knew that I wasn't just spitting out stories that had been read to me a million times. I was actually reading new material, and if I remember correctly, newspapers are written at the fourth grade level. I don't think that my mom thought much of it other than that she was happy that I could entertain myself with books instead of her having to read them to me. I read everything I could get my hands on. I don't know if my mom realized that what I was doing was special, or if she figured that it was just because I was exposed to reading and my older brother's reading. I know that he did not read at that age, but I do not know when he started reading. My brother is gifted as well, but he was labeled at a much later age than I was. He has also had a different struggle than I have with what giftedness means to him.

Because my birthday is in December, I turned 5 in the middle of the school year. The policy in place in my town in 1974 was that kids had to be 5 by December 1 to start kindergarten. I missed that deadline by two weeks. My parents were really torn about what to do. I was smart and ready for school. In fact, I was dying for school. I grew up around schools because my mom used to volunteer and bring me around. I knew that schools were where you went to learn, and I couldn't get enough of learning. I also knew that my cousin and all of my friends who were my age were going to start kindergarten in the fall. The only way around the firm birthday date was to be tested. My parents didn't know if I would pass the test. It was also $100 which was a lot of money back then, especially for young parents with only one working. My parents decided to take the plunge and I spent a good chunk of one day at a psychiatrist's office. I don't remember much of the testing. I know that they gave me at least one IQ test, and my mom says they gave me some social tests too to make sure that I could handle the social and emotional requirements of kindergarten. I know that I needed an IQ over 130 to be allowed to enter kindergarten. My mom says that she was never told my actual score other than that I passed. So I got to start kindergarten a year early. Thank goodness. I cannot imagine how miserable I would have been if I had to wait one more year to start school.

When I started kindergarten I was reading at a very advanced level, and the curriculum did not involve much literacy at all. We weren't expected to even know the alphabet at that time. A lot of kindergarten was spent listening to the teacher read and learning the alphabet. To a child who was reading beyond a fourth grade level, this was torture. Of course, since this was the days of 2.5 hour kindergarten, it wasn't all that bad. We actually took a nap during my session since I ended up in the afternoon session. Even worse, my mother was yelled at for teaching me to read. The teacher was seriously angry at my mother and told her that she might have taught me how to read incorrectly. First, my mother didn't really teach me to read. Second, my mother had a degree in elementary education and was certainly trained and able to teach me to read. Third, there isn't really a wrong way to read if a child is really reading.

Because of my advanced reading skills, I was exposed to the first of many inadequate band-aids to deal with my abilities. While the other kids were having literacy lessons, I was sent down to the library, by myself - with no chaperon - and that's scary for a 4 year old, to work on System 80. It was a pre-computer self-teaching device. Basically I think it would tell a story and then ask a question about the story. I had to push a big button that was under different pictures to show that I understood what was being read. I actually didn't mind the System 80 except that it was way too easy. The worst part was the isolation. I was weird. I wasn't like the other kids. At 4 I had to navigate a huge school all by myself. Part of it felt like punishment, which is a common theme among gifted kids.

I just read what I have written. I realize that I haven't mentioned math skills. Math was a weird world for me. Apparently I was really good at math as a preschooler, but no one really seemed to care. My mother is very bad at math, and my father honestly wasn't around all that much. He's an accountant who loves math, but I wasn't really exposed to that. If anything, I got the sense that girls weren't supposed to be good at math, but I'll hit that theme much later when I get to high school. I do know that when I was taking the IQ test, they were going to leave out the math (addition and subtraction) because they thought I was too young for it. My mother told them that I could do math and that they should leave it in. I ended up successfully doing more math on the IQ test than they expected, but again, I don't really know details. I do know that I was adding and subtracting before I entered school and that math in kindergarten only involved counting. I hit a point where I was "borrowing" my brother's math books without him knowing it and teaching myself math from three grades ahead of me. Also, since my mom was a teacher, she used to go to the teacher's store and buy me all sorts of reading, phonics, grammar, and math workbooks. She remembers that I was always doing workbooks for 2-3 years ahead of where I was when I was little. I loved workbooks.

How does this relate to Dermot? I thought we dodged a bullet when he ended up born in February. He's nowhere near the cut off for kindergarten. He's smack dab in the middle. Dermot was not reading when he began kindergarten, but he on the cusp. He was also doing addition and subtraction before kindergarten. So I knew that he was already ahead of the kindergarten curriculum, but maybe not all that far ahead. It turns out that he was barely ahead in reading, but math consisted of counting, patterns, and shapes. He would come home disgusted by what they were having him learn. I ended up having a meeting with his teacher and all I got was the Dermot was socially immature. She would not admit that he bright or that he was bored. She was only concerned that he was still touching other kids. Again, this is a common theme among gifted kids. A lot of educators do not want to see giftedness. It's easier to see all kids as equal. Also, a lot of gifted kids, especially boys get seen as socially immature because they have attention problems in class. I know it's boredom. I got in tons of trouble myself for inappropriately spent energy. But that's on the teacher. It's not on the child. His teacher refused to focus on his strengths and always focused on the negatives with us. I was convinced this was probably going on in the classroom as well. Again, I thought, kindergarten is only 4 hours in our school district. Things will get better when he's in first grade. And it did. A little. What drives me crazy is that Dermot does look socially immature when he's acting with his agemates. He acts older when he's with older kids. He thinks that his agemates are little kids because they are not his cognitive age mates. Many gifted kids have trouble interacting with kids their age because they just aren't like kids their age. Dermot went as one of the Mythbusters for Halloween and it was awesome, but not one single classmate knew who he was. Dermot's school is all about sports and he doesn't like sports. They don't like math and science and he did at that age.

What fascinates me is that Dermot has a need to be like the other kids that neither Ethan nor I really had. I had no problem being different if it was tied to my intelligence. My looks and weight are a totally different story - I hated being different in that way. Dermot, I think, has already learned to hide his intelligence from his classmates a little bit. I am shocked by this because you don't usually see the stigma of giftedness appear until middle school. He's much more socially sensitive than Ethan and I were. He knows what the other kids will make fun of and why. He has a much stronger need to fit in than Ethan or I did. I was fine with 2-3 friends. Dermot needs the whole class to like him, and that's not going to happen. He's well liked, but no kid is liked by 23 others. He's so emotionally intense that he thinks that kids who don't play with him hate him. There's no middle ground with Dermot. I'm trying to teach him about apathy. Most people who don't like you, just don't have any feelings toward you and that's fine. One of the hardest things about gifted kids, and I know I did this to my parents too, is that they tend to be very stubborn, very black and white, very concrete, and very emotionally intense. Why be a little mad when you can be a lot mad? He's just like his parents in this case because gifted kids become gifted adults. We may have coping mechanisms that Dermot doesn't have yet, but they don't always work. Dermot has the conviction of his beliefs like Ethan and the easily hurt, sensitivity of his mother. Poor kid. He's such a mix of us.

Next post - First grade, for me and Dermot.