Talents
Duchess took the screening test for Talented And Gifted services last week, along with every other second grader in the district.
This year I've been thinking more and more about her academic needs. Her first two years of school, she seemed to be learning so much useful non-academic stuff that I really didn't bother to worry about what was missing. Plus, Duchess is bright, and very teachable, but it's not like she's sitting in the back of the class reading Foucault or teaching herself Mandarin or anything. She's sitting in the back of the classroom giggling over fart jokes, gossiping over who's being mean to whom, and doing mostly solid but often sloppy academic work. She's curious and pays attention, but she's not burning with intellectual passion, and she shows no particularly strong aptitude for anything other than talking incessantly.
This year, though, I'm starting to feel itchy about her school experience. So much of what they're doing is hammering on language skills, which are Duchess's bread and butter, and it all seems awfully easy. She's acquiring knowledge* and that's good, but I don't see her acquiring a lot of skills. And because so much of school is easy for her, she's grooving deeper and deeper into the habit of thinking that if something is hard for her at school, it means she's Not Good At It. She's having very little experience of tackling a challenge and working through it to mastery, so whenever she runs up against a challenge, she gives up. That really bothers me.
I volunteer at the weekly Homework Club at her school, and the kids who participate are all struggling in various ways with their academic work. One kid with whom I often work seems to be a lovely person - friendly, pleasant, well-behaved - but she struggles so hard to grasp ideas that I find it almost impossible to help her. I nudge her along in small increments, which is the way I'm accustomed to tutoring, based on the assumption that at some point she'll make the jump across the remaining gap, but she never makes the jump. We get to the answer, but only because all the tiny increments added up, and it makes me crazy that I can't figure out how to help her meaningfully. I can't figure out if she's just straight-up really limited in her intellectual capacity, or if there's something else going on here. Working with her reminded me of an interesting article I read recently, about doctors prescribing ADHD drugs to kids who don't have ADHD, but who don't have the resources to improve their academic performances another way. It's like spending your dollars on research to develop new cures for cancer instead of on preventing cancer in the first place - a very American approach to solving a problem, and it's really, really sad. I would guess that Adderall would make my frustrating Homework Club kid at least somewhat more likely to be able to grasp and master new skills, and since her academic experience isn't going to improve any other way, why not?
I imagine what it would be like to have Duchess in a class alongside this kid, and trying to teach them both. I don't know how you even begin to do that, but I can tell you that neither kid is being particularly well-served right now.** And while I'm looking into the kinds of services TAG-identified kids can get***, I'm also thinking about what it costs a school district to serve kids who are ahead of the game or who have potential to be really ahead of the game, and what those services cost the kids who are behind the game. I haven't yet heard any good solutions. And I have all sorts of cascading ethical questions, too, like what does it mean for the community as a whole if we decide to pursue transferring Duchess to a magnet school?**** What if every kid who was bright and/or advantaged transferred out of Duchess's school?
Then I remember that kids extract from life all sorts of things you don't expect, and fail to even notice some of the stuff you expect them to pounce on. Duchess is learning a lot, and so am I.We'll figure out some kind of jury-rigged solution for her, and continue to try to contribute to efforts to retrofit a system that serves every kid.
In other academia-related news, today I taught Skipper a few things about trees, and then felt very proud a few hours later when she shouted "Mom, that tree is DECIDUOUS!" She may stand around in public picking her nose with two fingers, but the kid knows her conifers.
*For example, one of the books in her book box now is about Area 51. She has many theories about aliens. For example, it's silly to think that aliens would inject people with anything, because how would they know about human biology?
** I do not mean to disparage teachers here. I don't think it's possible, when you're teaching 28 kids by yourself, to meet all their needs, even if you're some kind of superhero.
*** While remembering that Duchess isn't necessarily going to be TAG-identified, because she isn't, in fact, a genius. And being TAG-identified in Portland doesn't actually mean you get any services - it just means that the teacher has to come up with a plan to meet your needs, which, depending on the teacher's interest level, could mean a little or a lot.
**** It's also worth noting here that one of my biggest objections to having Duchess attend a magnet school is that it would be a pain in the ass to get her there every day. Ethics, schmethics - I'm just lazy.
This year I've been thinking more and more about her academic needs. Her first two years of school, she seemed to be learning so much useful non-academic stuff that I really didn't bother to worry about what was missing. Plus, Duchess is bright, and very teachable, but it's not like she's sitting in the back of the class reading Foucault or teaching herself Mandarin or anything. She's sitting in the back of the classroom giggling over fart jokes, gossiping over who's being mean to whom, and doing mostly solid but often sloppy academic work. She's curious and pays attention, but she's not burning with intellectual passion, and she shows no particularly strong aptitude for anything other than talking incessantly.
This year, though, I'm starting to feel itchy about her school experience. So much of what they're doing is hammering on language skills, which are Duchess's bread and butter, and it all seems awfully easy. She's acquiring knowledge* and that's good, but I don't see her acquiring a lot of skills. And because so much of school is easy for her, she's grooving deeper and deeper into the habit of thinking that if something is hard for her at school, it means she's Not Good At It. She's having very little experience of tackling a challenge and working through it to mastery, so whenever she runs up against a challenge, she gives up. That really bothers me.
I volunteer at the weekly Homework Club at her school, and the kids who participate are all struggling in various ways with their academic work. One kid with whom I often work seems to be a lovely person - friendly, pleasant, well-behaved - but she struggles so hard to grasp ideas that I find it almost impossible to help her. I nudge her along in small increments, which is the way I'm accustomed to tutoring, based on the assumption that at some point she'll make the jump across the remaining gap, but she never makes the jump. We get to the answer, but only because all the tiny increments added up, and it makes me crazy that I can't figure out how to help her meaningfully. I can't figure out if she's just straight-up really limited in her intellectual capacity, or if there's something else going on here. Working with her reminded me of an interesting article I read recently, about doctors prescribing ADHD drugs to kids who don't have ADHD, but who don't have the resources to improve their academic performances another way. It's like spending your dollars on research to develop new cures for cancer instead of on preventing cancer in the first place - a very American approach to solving a problem, and it's really, really sad. I would guess that Adderall would make my frustrating Homework Club kid at least somewhat more likely to be able to grasp and master new skills, and since her academic experience isn't going to improve any other way, why not?
I imagine what it would be like to have Duchess in a class alongside this kid, and trying to teach them both. I don't know how you even begin to do that, but I can tell you that neither kid is being particularly well-served right now.** And while I'm looking into the kinds of services TAG-identified kids can get***, I'm also thinking about what it costs a school district to serve kids who are ahead of the game or who have potential to be really ahead of the game, and what those services cost the kids who are behind the game. I haven't yet heard any good solutions. And I have all sorts of cascading ethical questions, too, like what does it mean for the community as a whole if we decide to pursue transferring Duchess to a magnet school?**** What if every kid who was bright and/or advantaged transferred out of Duchess's school?
Then I remember that kids extract from life all sorts of things you don't expect, and fail to even notice some of the stuff you expect them to pounce on. Duchess is learning a lot, and so am I.We'll figure out some kind of jury-rigged solution for her, and continue to try to contribute to efforts to retrofit a system that serves every kid.
In other academia-related news, today I taught Skipper a few things about trees, and then felt very proud a few hours later when she shouted "Mom, that tree is DECIDUOUS!" She may stand around in public picking her nose with two fingers, but the kid knows her conifers.
*For example, one of the books in her book box now is about Area 51. She has many theories about aliens. For example, it's silly to think that aliens would inject people with anything, because how would they know about human biology?
** I do not mean to disparage teachers here. I don't think it's possible, when you're teaching 28 kids by yourself, to meet all their needs, even if you're some kind of superhero.
*** While remembering that Duchess isn't necessarily going to be TAG-identified, because she isn't, in fact, a genius. And being TAG-identified in Portland doesn't actually mean you get any services - it just means that the teacher has to come up with a plan to meet your needs, which, depending on the teacher's interest level, could mean a little or a lot.
**** It's also worth noting here that one of my biggest objections to having Duchess attend a magnet school is that it would be a pain in the ass to get her there every day. Ethics, schmethics - I'm just lazy.
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