Oh yikes, I’m tired. I had to get up early today to drive Brett to work. We only have one car and he just got a new job that isn’t on the busline. It will be eventually (November) but meanwhile we’re juggling. Our car has been driving longer than I have (it’s an ‘84 and I got my license in ‘87) and is about to die. Our plan is to get a second car and pray that Old Betsy makes it to November. If she doesn’t, we’ll have to replace her and then I guess we’d be a two car family. We haven’t been a two car family since before we became a family. Let’s see, I guess I sold my car in ‘92 right before Brett and I moved to Portland. Then we sold his car and we relied on the excellent Portland public transportation system.

Noah is grouchy, too, having been woken up two hours earlier than usual. This week he’s very interested in maps and mummies. He drew a map of “bear caves and bat caves” on his chalk board and we built a pyramid (Noah fondly calls it a tomb) out of his legos with one of his lego guys stuffed in the middle.

(Warning: self-indulgent post follows)
I’ve been re-reading unschooling books because I have a severe case of formerly gifted child syndrome. It manifests itself as a panic that I’m not teaching Noah enough and am holding him back due to my laziness. But my philosophy really is one of letting the child lead so I am constantly reminding myself to LAY OFF. This is hard.

I have no idea if Noah is technically “gifted.” My philosophy is that all children are gifted — really, I believe that — and so I assume he’s gifted, too. I’m not sure if he’d be called gifted if he was in school and it bothers me that I even care. I try not to care. It’s not like being gifted is correlated with a greater likelihood of being kind or being compassionate or being more successful in one’s personal relationships or even life in general. I know that I want those things for Noah more than I want him to be smart.

Being smart is over-rated.

One of the reasons I don’t want Noah in school is that I don’t want him to know how he compares. I don’t want him to know if he’d be in high or low math or if he’s a better reader than that kid stumbling through the paragraph while the rest of the class rolls their eyes and the teacher sighs impatiently. I also don’t want him to know if he *is* that kid. I want him to trust that he can figure things out effectively in his own way. I want him to trust that his own way works.

I knew that I was gifted by kindergarten. My teacher used to set me up on this high, squeaky stool to read to the class while she took a smoke break. I hated that. I was afraid of falling off of the stool and I also had a hard time holding the book up so that the whole class could see the pictures. In third grade they had my brother, my sister and me tested. I remember sitting in the office and the psychologist had a sheet with a hundred circles drawn on it. She circled ten and said, “Your brother and sister are in this group.” Then she circled one. “This is you.”
Now why would anyone tell an 8-year old this? Congratulations, you’re a freak. Then they skipped me a grade for good measure. I didn’t handle the pressure well but I clung to that “gifted label” because it was my claim to fame. Another boy in our neighborhood skipped a few years later and I hated him. I hated the kid with the fishing pole on the Oscar-Meyer commercials because he could spell “bologna” and everybody thought he was so cute. I had headaches and insomnia in 5th grade because I had missed a year of the times tables and couldn’t catch up. Like many children who would grow to be punk rockers, I had a severe inferiority/superiority complex that I am only now getting over.

My husband on the other hand was also gifted and he has no angst about it. I think it’s because his giftedness is less showy. Early reading is something that people can actually see and make a fuss over. In talking to other alumni of the T.A.G. (Talented and Gifted) programs, having some kind of stunt giftedness definitely made things a little more strange. Freaky math skills, chess championships, novels written during the tender years. These things all tended to do more harm than good. At a recent playgroup potluck we all sat around and lamented how hard it was to be a child genius. Interestingly, not one of us has done anything spectacular with our lives but you wouldn’t know it to listen to us whine.

OK, I’m making fun but I shouldn’t. It did suck. It wouldn’t have sucked to be smart if none of us knew that we were smart. I mean, here we are more than two decades later and we all still clench our fists and fight back tears when we talk about whatever angst came with our T.A.G label. And we’re all still clinging to the damn label.

I ran into an ex-boyfriend (also a formerly gifted child) a few years ago and he said that his four year old was reading. Reading Huck Finn to be exact. His son started reading at two and by preschool had read the entire Narnia series. Noah was a babe in arms at the time but I remember clutching him and thinking, “What if Noah isn’t reading by four?” It was the same exact panic I had when I used to see that stupid Oscar-Meyer commercial. It was, “Ohmygod, if I’m not the smartest — if my kid isn’t the smartest — what will we do?”

Well, he’s five and a half and he’s not reading. So far my world hasn’t caved in. Actually, I think it’s a blessing that whatever Noah’s gifts are, he’s keeping them for himself right now because with a mother with a tendency to lose her cotton picking mind over labels, being normal is probably the best thing he could be. It would be way too easy to get a wee bit pushy with my young son. I read Searching for Bobby Fischer recently and the whole time I was thinking, “Jeez, dad, lay off! Let your kid play chess without you hanging over him in a sweat!” But at the same time I was saying to myself, “Hmmm, wonder how much it would cost to get Noah a chess tutor.”

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