Having heard that I am the world’s foremost authority on genius 10-year-old girls attending high school, Blamer S recounts her disheartening tale:
Twisty,
I’m sending this in your direction, not so much because I expect you to break off photographing wonders of Austin wildlife to read my issues, but because even being in the cybervicinity of a brain that understands will help keep me from driving into Luby’s cafe- with high school boys attached to the bumper.
I have a daughter. That alone is enough to make the world of patriarchal peril keep me up at night.
Last year, as a nine year old, N started attending the local high school and found the honors classes to be a good fit. The child who never found a place to fit in started singing over her chemistry equations. I, having been to high school, nodded happily and sent her to karate class where she learned how a tiger’s claw to the groin can be a useful move.
Something happened this year, now that she’s 10. You caught that, right? 10? Because it seems that every creep in the school has decided that 10 year old girls are just their thing.
She was asked to prom. She was stalked in the library until the librarian set up a sign-in system to nab the cretin. She was asked out to the school dance, and had little balls of crumpled paper thrown at her until she opened one up and saw it was covered with hearts.
Guess what the counselors’ responses were. “But she’s sooo cute!” “She’s adorable.” “Wow! She’s a heartbreaker.”
No. She’s 10. She likes cats, dogs, and ponies. She does not like sausage talk, date talk, or rape videos posing as music videos. She has a prepubescent body and a heart to match. And she’s sure as hell not responsible for male reactions no matter how fucking “cute” she is. 10. Jailbait.
Yesterday one boy cornered her and spewed vile stuff during a day long classroom and field trip. While the teacher removed him from the classroom three times he did not stop the next time he came back in. We’re talking gross, sexual stuff, nonstop. He has Aspergers and didn’t pick up on the subtle cues like, “Get out of here until you control that mouth.” Oddly enough, I don’t feel that’s my problem. The idea that kids get to go to school in a harassment free environment doesn’t have an asterisk with fine print saying “except in cases of cute 10 year old girls and older guys with issues.”
Yet the upshot is that N is supposed to deal with having this kid around, because removing him would disrupt his education. Plus, he can’t help himself being a male with impulse control issues. And don’t forget, she’s so cute and all. She just needs to learn to deal with it because she’ll be getting that response all her life.
This morning the counselor asked if I wanted to talk about it some more, as though talking was supposed to relieve some feminist tension I have about her beauty. I want a restraining order.
Thanks for listening, or at least not letting me know if you just deleted this.
S
I’m confident that the Blametariat will have some trenchant remarks on this development. For my part, it seems an ideal moment to plug my highly unpopular views on the American public school system. Those views are:
Smash it!
Public education in this country is a hideous joke. The American public school system is nothing but male dominant culture’s incubation system. It is purposely designed to imbue its inmates, through equal measures of patriarchy-centric curricula and atavistic social structure, with chauvinist doctrine.
The result? An underclass of docile, barely-literate labor drones who will serve the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy. If the system, with its permanent ‘underfunding,’ inadequate instructors, politicized curricula, and perpetually ‘improving’ test scores, did not precisely meet the demands of the megatheocorporatocracy, it wouldn’t be compulsory, and it wouldn’t exist (note that for upper class elites, it doesn’t).
Unfortunately, it works perfectly as a delivery system for culture-of-dominance brainwashing. Products of this indoctrination emerge* with no thought but to replicate the insidious nuclear family model, which locks down their dependence on women’s unpaid domestic labor, on cheap crap from China (i.e. ‘Third World’ oppression), on foreign oil, on genetically-modified, drugged, tasteless, and crappy food, on bleak, depressing jobs, on religion, on ‘the government,’ on porn, on drugs, on ‘medicine’, on xenophobia, and, by happy coincidence, when their kids are old enough for it to be a godsend, on the public schools.
Not only that, but the bizarre conceit that imprisoning children in concentration camps for 6 or 8 hours a day somehow ’socializes’ them** can only proceed from insanity, and taxes to the utmost the obstreperal lobe’s highly unstable containment field.
The end.
Oh hell, I forgot to offer a solution. I’ve been told that if I don’t come up with happy-ending scenarios to counteract the dispiriting hopelessness of my depressing posts, I am nothing but a nattering nabob of negitavism. So here it is:
Home-school those kids!
Can’t home-school?
Overthrow patrirarchy! ¡Vive la revolución!
____________________
* If they emerge; those who don’t are sucked underground, to populate the megatheocorporatocracy’s equally lucrative criminal branch.
** See post title.
I’d be happy to have my husband homeschool my kids when somebody dies and leaves me a verrrrry large trust fund.
And who, exactly, usually gets to do the homeschooling? The same people that get to do the home care of elders, the home care of small children, etc. of course!
This is why teachers need the summer off. Between indoctrinating children to be barely literate labor drones on one hand and brainwashing them into radical socialism on the other, we’re plumb worn out.
That being said, S should strongly consider the legal route. The school administration is ignoring a clear-cut case of sexual harassment so a restraining order and at least the threat of a lawsuit would be completely appropriate.
That is obscene. 10 years old and those guys think she’s fair game.
Child molesters and perverts; just because they’re high schoolers doesn’t mean they’re not pedophiles.
S,
WHAT
THE
FUCK?!
What is WRONG with those school administrators? How can they possibly find it acceptable that your daughter is stalked into the library? So much so that it became apparent enough that the librarian took action? Is there any way that you can press charges, either within the school system or outside of it?
How can ANY teacher or counselor consider sexually approaching a 10 year old acceptable behavior? I don’t give a rat’s ass about Asperger’s. That boy should be suspended.
Twisty, unfortunately home schooling doesn’t take in the need for one or two paychecks within the home. We have no idea if S is a single mom or not.
Good luck, S.
As the mother of a 10-year-old, I know what I would do:
Have my attorney set up an in-person meeting that includes:
- the school counselor
- the principal
- the school board member who’s responsible for the geographical area where I live
- the school board president
- the teacher
And I would invite my attorney to explain to them the dreadful expense and publicity that a sexual harassment suit would cause the school.
If that doesn’t work, I would quietly contact a reporter at the local newspaper and/or TV station and explain to them what an interesting story idea this is, with broader implications than just my own child’s issues.
But quietly just expect my child to deal with it? Oh hell no. NO 10-year-old is emotionally or socially equipped to deal with this. I know grown women who would have difficulty in dealing with this situation. There’s no reason the child should have to develop a dislike of school, ulcers, or other signs of stress just because the school system fails to provide a safe, neutral learning environment. It’s inexcusable to let the disruptive elements run the school.
Where does this child live? This definitely falls into the “shit I would not put up with” category.
Interesting how a local school enrolled a boy with Aspbergers. They caught the boy with a knife, and didn’t tell his parents. The boy had a history of violent outbursts, and was highly obsessed wih guns and knives and murder methods.
Earlier this year, he went into a restroom and murdered the first person who came in with a huge knife.
So tell me about his right to an education again? Why does that right have to include unchallenged harassment of other students?
He has a right to an education that should be guiding him toward being able to function in society. That may or may not mean a mainstream classroom. My husband has a kid in his classes that really cannot handle the environment but is still there and NOT learning what he needs to learn academically or socially because of the level of denial among the parents and administration. His presence doesn’t even serve HIS needs, yet he is free to destroy the learning environment without sanction because his particular brain damage problems mean he is not capable of understanding the “I do something stupid and get punished” equation.
I think restraining order or lawyer meeting is the best route - there is precident for harm by obsessed kids, and it will certainly get the school’s attention. Having a lawyer contact the school about a restraining order might have a similar effect.
This girl is a child and the boys who are stalking her are just plain sick. That this very obvious fact is not recognized by the school counselors is just more evidence (as if we needed it) that society is a very dank, rotten environment for children to be raised in — or for anyone to live in, plain and simple.
Sick, sick, sick. I am so tired of children not being allowed time to be children before they’re expected to become dutiful slaves of the pornocracy. Cats and ponies are much more healthy interests.
I second the idea of homeschooling, but I’m all too painfully aware of how much time and energy that such a solution would require on the mother’s part. It just may not be possible, althoug if you look around online, there are groups that pool their resources to homeschool. Then you have to worry if their methods agree with what you want for your child, of course, but at least the molestation problem is lessened. (I won’t say vanishes, because it never does for women.)
And Twisty is absolutely right about school. Why anyone thinks that setting children into dark, nasty-smelling schoolrooms and sitting them in rows while a boring grown-up drone on about things that do not interest them is an effective way of teaching eludes me. There are some good teachers out there; I’ve had a few in my time. But they were always the ones who broke the rules, threw out the books, and addressed the students as if they were people and not puppets. Education in this country is a sham. I’d rather we go back to some sort of system of apprenticeship — without the built-in patriarchal heirarchy, of course. That way children could actually try things out and learn practical skills, maybe even learn to reason out problems and think logically. I suppose that’ll have to wait until after the revolution.
There are men who don’t have “asperger’s”?
Dear Blamer S:
I agree with Carolyn above, though I have another option for your attorney, if you wanted to pursue it. The local school district has some rather stingent requirements about the types of services they are required to provide your child: protection from sexual harrassment, particularly at her age, is certainly one of them, as are educational opportunities commensurate with her abilities (thus her advanced placement, I imagine).
If they are unable to provide appropriate services for her, you can obtain those services privately and pursue funding for them from the local district. It will probably require a court hearing, but my understanding is there are attorneys who actually specialize in this type of case. Though it’s another example of monied people having a greater range of options (not everyone can afford an attorney), it is something I’ve seen people with less means succeed at as well.
Not pursuing these options in a case like this enables the school district to keep on providing the least amount of service, protection and education they can get away with. At the very least, the threat of such an action will probably result in moving the asperger’s kid to a more appropriate venue (or setting him up with a one-on-one, or something). I’d have a hard time sending my daughter back regardless.
Anyhow, this sometime lurker just thought to mention it. Good luck.
Actually homeschool can be done in a two paycheck family. Home education can be done in so many creative ways–once you get out of the public school formula you will find kids can get all their daily education in just a few hours. There is also online schools that families can use. That’s the beauty of home education–it can be molded to fit your family’s needs. It may be harder than just sending them off to someone else to educate, but then why have kids if you just hand them over to someone else to raise and educate.
And yes I do homeschool–mainly because having gone through the System–I know I could do a better job. Not to mention keeping my kids from the insanity the PS system seems to enjoy dishing out to young, impressionable minds.
However, I do belong to a nuclear family and I do not work outside the home (although I am working on opening a business that I can do from home—and no it does not involve jobs you find advertised on hand written signs or in classifieds)–so it IS easier for me to homeschool with out having to rely on child care from an outside source. I think if enough two income families got together they COULD work out situations for child care during working hours, esp. if shift work was available. In any case, I do think it’s workable if one thinks outside the box.
I’m not a parent, and I sadly sympathize to some degree with everybody involved, so I don’t really have anything useful to add to the general blamery.
However, some all-girls private schools with very high academic standards offer scholarships. S, is such a thing available for your little girl?
I believe in inclusiveness and giving everybody a chance; I do, really. But I think in your shoes, I’d be looking around for this option rather seriously.
The governments of Nunavut and some areas of Australia have complete home school curricula which isolated families have been using for years.
Whenever anyone tells me my little girl is beautiful I shudder. Because most people measure beauty by porn-worthiness rather than something higher.
I think she’s not beautiful enough to draw too much attention. I hope and pray. She’s not blonde, which is an American signifier for slut - thanks, Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe! And she seems very strong willed.
But the way things are going, I expect by the time she’s ready to go to school that gang-rape will be compulsory as gym classes, and grade school girls will be graded on their porn skills, rather than book learning.
Sniper, I trust you’re not indoctrinating anybody. Maybe we can bring it down from the inside!
This is one of the many, many reasons that I plan to homeschool my boys. I don’t want them being “socialized” in an environment where this kind of behavior is considered acceptable. They are young yet, but if you want to call preschool years homeschooling then we are doing it. On a single income. And that single income being my own as I am a single mom.
I am lucky in that I have pieced together an income from a few different sources that do not require me to pay for much childcare. I can take my kids with me to one job (as an in home CNA) I have some work-at-home writing gigs, and then I take care of a little boy too on the side. And then we don’t live on a whole lot of money. So, it is possible, though not easy to homeschool on one income. I can’t gurantee that I will be able to do this forever, but I am going to try as long as possible. Perhaps by offering my services to other families who want to homeschool but can’t. (I am a certified ex-teacher who has worked in the public schools. This being the number one experience that brought me to homeschooling. There are a lot of us ex-teachers out there doing it.)There are a variety of ways to homeschool and still have some kind of income.
There are a lot of excellent teachers out there. Well meaning and highly skilled and really trying to work miracles in a system that doesn’t support them. But I agree with Twisty, the over-all assembly line approach to education that we provide here is not about getting the best out of each child, it is about producing worker drones in cheapest way possible to tow the megatheocorporatocracy (did I get that right?) line.
As for this little 10 year old girl, I agree about getting the lawyers involved. And then the press if need be. Nothing scares the school system more than a parent who knows their rights and is willing to fight for them. Good luck.
I’m here on a mission of mercy from the folks in question, who want to let you know she found a VERY responsive counsellor who is taking this most seriously indeed. This particular incident is under control. However, not wanting to lose the opportunity of gaining all the collective wisdom of the blamers, said parties would like to redirect your brains to the following questions-
1. What is up with males that they feel entitled to view every female in their visual range as mating material, regardless of age?
2. How do they stop #1 so she can live a regular life?
3. Seeing as #2 is about as likely as Dawkins finding God, what should they do from here on out? Shall they make up a standardized form to send home to the budding pedophiles’ parents? Shall they hire body guards?
4. WTF?
Blamer S,
I have to wonder what state you are in (assuming you are in the US). My partner is a behavioral therapist that actually works with boys like you describe, and she would _never_ tolerate the dismissive attitudes of the school in this case. Even the most developmentally disabled person can learn to control and manage their own behavior. In California you can request that the boys counselor set up an IEP (Individual Education Plan - that’s what it’s called in Calif) with the school to address his behavior problems. I assume that no matter what state you live in, this boy has a counselor that is paid for by federal and state funds, therefore you can demand that the school contact the counselor and set up a plan for how they intend to manage his behavior.
BTW, Ms. Kate, disciple is effective, punishment is not, especially for people with developmental disabilities. They have to learn that their actions have consequences, but positive behavior support is the most effective way to truly change behavior.
No matter what, good luck S!
Dear Whoknows,
There is no ‘regular life’ for female persons, if by ‘regular’ you mean ‘free of male oppression’. Our position on the sexbot continuum precludes it. This is why I always suggest revolution. It is the only thing that will eliminate the sex class.
Hi S,
Throwing in some encouragement for homeschooling here.
I had to withdraw my daughter at the age of 10 from public school, and for the very same reason as what you are now experiencing.
She was being violently stalked and harrassed by male schoolmates *of her own age*. Now, this was back in the 70’s. 1978.
I was then a single mother living in poverty. At that time, homeschooling was a very marginalized phenomenon, restricted to a few hippies and “eggheads”- academic types. It was also illegal except under very particular circumstances. (I’m in Canada).
Since then, I have observed that homeschooling in the USA has become massively popular with the Xtian Right because of what they denounce as the sinfulness and liberal bias of the public school system. This leads me to seriously imagine that you will not face the obstacles that I did in implememnting homescooling. In fact, there are vast networks of support and interaction in the realm of homeschooling.
Our daughters have a right to their childhoods, and an unmolested journey through puberty. At 15, my daughter opted to re-join the mainstream world, and spent the next 10 years discovering to her sorrow what that world was all about.
The time that she was able to spend in peace, privacy and safety in her own home during the years from ages 10 to 15 have served as a bedrock upon which she has been able to build her life, and to survive many harrowing experiences along the way. (She is a bit of an adventurer). She often thanks me now for having done that for her.
Don’t think that she is home-free when she gets to University. That’s where my daughter encountered the worst of her experiences.
I bless you both.
Sniper, I trust you’re not indoctrinating anybody. Maybe we can bring it down from the inside!
I’m pretty basic with the reading and writing and whatnot, but I try to devote as much time as possible to the Godless feminazislamosociohomosexual agenda.
I was finally brave enough to say out loud, to anyone that would listen, that the American public school system is highly overrated and based on an archaic industrial model created only to make more efficient factory workers (now known as modern office drones in cubicles).
People were shocked, bothered, infuriated, and I was accused of being a bad mom. So exhilarating was THAT, that I furthered my conviction by allowing my daughter (14 at the time) to leave school. Just leave and stay home. I had to sign a form saying I was homeschooling, but I am lucky to live in a state with pretty lax homeschooling criteria (NM — they’re just happy if the kid doesn’t end up in the juvie system).
I don’t homeschool; I work full time. She is free to do whatever she feels like doing, go to the library, rent videos, read, ride the bus from one end of town to the other. She is home by 6pm every night and as a family we honestly enjoy each other’s company, she is media savvy and has not been mentally sexualized like other girls her age (she is now nearing 16). She is still very much a goofy funny kid that gives me glimpses of mature adulthood more and more these days. And although the powers that be do not allow her to take the REAL GED test until she is 16 years old, she took a couple of preliminaries last year and got above 90% in both.
Fuck the school system. I work in academia and the patriarchy is alive and breeding here, believe me.
At 10, this little girl is still young enough to buy into the messages that this is something SHE causes, especially if those are the messages she’s getting all day at school. Kids believe that they make things happen in ways that adults realize aren’t actually possible, so adults don’t always notice a child taking on personal responsibility for a situation she finds scary or threatening. That’s why child victims of trauma are given constant messages that nothing they did caused the traumatic event and that nothing they might have done could have stopped it.
She needs to be encouraged to externalize all of this; to realize (1) that she’s being forced to deal with things that are other people’s garbage, and that (2) that is an unacceptable thing people to do, and that (3) adults will address the problems because (4)a 10 year old can’t be expected fix them on her own and “getting used to it” is not an option (see #2).
If there’s a college or university near S, she may be able to enroll her daughter as a special student. As a homeschooling parent, I’ve found that even community college is a much less dangerous learning environment than high school for girls of any age.
Happy to hear you sing it for homeschooling, Twisty! After our older daughter’s first day at kindergarten, which occasioned her tragic overnight conversion from adventurer to minx, her dad and I concluded exactly what you’re saying: “The American public school system is nothing but male dominant culture’s incubation system.”
Maybe I’m an elitist pig, but as time went on, we were shocked to realize that we were worried not just about the warehousing, the brain-numbing curriculum and the exhausted guards — er, teachers — but the smallest victims: the kids. Most of ‘em were so soaked in toxic gender-typing, religiosity and consumer-crap worship that they truly constituted that most stereotyped parental terror: The BAD INFLUENCE! We winced to think of our two tender sprouts having to slog through all that toxic sludge quite so early on.
So of course after happily homeschooling through elementary school, the older girl suddenly got sick of being “weird” and chose to go to junior high and high school — to our chagrin. But those early years did help, I think. At 22 she works as outreach and education coordinator for a pioneering feminist women’s health clinic (Plug: Check out Women’s Health Specialists for an inspiring story of 30 years of radical feminism in action, speculums and all).
And every kid’s different: Our younger daughter homeschooled all the way through and loved it, including her fights with the fundie kids.
But class counts plenty: In our poor, rural small town, 95% of the homeschooling parents (they are legion here in Jesusland) are fundie Christians with a huge social network as backup; the rest are wives of the few professionals in town.
Being neither, Ed and I were lucky to cobble together some part-time and at-home jobs to stay afloat over the years, but most people aren’t so lucky. In America today, homeschooling is largely the domain of the religious fanatic and the wealthy. I’m leery of the charter-school voucher solution because it could sap funding from inner-city schools that need it the most. It’ll take a revolution to create the social structure that enables homeschooling to be a viable alternative for every parent. For that, as for a lot else, IBTP.
This a tough one and something my wife and I have been struggling with here in Austin for the last couple of years. We’re not the only ones. We hear the same things from a lot of parents.
The public school system is definitely f’ed. I went to private school until attending UT for college and my wife went to public school in the DC area.
We can’t afford private school for our own kids (a boy and a girl), so we’ve tried out a couple of charter schools as alternatives and ended up at a public school. They’ve all got problems. We’ve considered homeschooling, but aren’t sure that we could pull it off. The jury’s still out on that one.
I did want to point out the the upper class elites avoiding the lowest common denominator public schools by going to private school gets them a better education, but doesn’t save them from the patriarchal indoctrination. I’d say it’s as bad or worse at private schools from my own experience.
This does seem to leave homeschooling as the only viable option if you want your kid to get a decent education these days and many more people seem to be turning that direction.
One thing’s for sure. If you are in the system, you have to advocate and push like hell for your kid b/c the system isn’t going to look out for them. They’re not going to protect them from the advances of mental defectives and they’re not going to go out of their way to challenge the bright kids.
As a professional in education, I’d go for the revolutionary route. It really is the only way to go about it.
In the current system (damn the patriarchy!) it is very difficult to access an educational environment that is not what Twisty so aptly describes OR to have the resources to homeschool. Of course, money always seems to be the solution for these kinds of problems. IBTP!
As for blamer S and her daughter, I say raise some hell, put a restraining order and sue the pants off the school administrators and counselors. Every time that happens, your daughter’s sense of self is being stolen- fuck the boys educational opportunities! We are talking about something so personal and fundamental as one’s humanity. All these years later, I still remember the sexual harassment I went through during my own schooling- your daughter (and any and every other woman on this planet) does not deserve to have those. In fact, all of us have the right to be protected from that.
Once again, the Twisty Law would prove useful.
I agree with Carolyn Bahm, above, who suggests legal intervention. I might also consider including the boy’s parents so that they know that they could suffer legal consequences for the actions of their child. If that doesn’t work, I would second the homeschool and girls-only school options. (Depending of course, on your financial situation and personal beliefs.)
It must be difficult, now that your daughter has found some small bit of peace and happiness, to consider moving her out of that space. I’m so sorry that you are in this situation.
Klutch, I also went through the NM PS system. I agree wholeheartedly with your solution for your daughter. I learned nothing in high school, except how to combat boredom with drinking and drugs. Anyway, if you’re near a CNM or even UNM campus, you might consider enrolling your daughter in a class or two that she’s interested in. Even a continuing ed class would be helpful if you’re interested in keeping her college-tracked. (A big assumption, I know.) That would’ve saved my life at that age, but my parents, both HS dropouts, didn’t know enough about the university system to exercise that option.
Although he wasn’t specifically talking about patriarchy, Louis Althusser was spot on some 30 years ago when he pointed out that “the Church has been replaced today in its role as dominant Ideological State Apparatus by the School. It is coupled with the Family just as the Church was once coupled with the Family.”
I’m skeptical of institutional education, but just as much I think one throws the baby out with the bathwater when they categorically reject socialized education broadly conceived. I don’t think Twisty is quite going down this alley though, as she admits: “Can’t home-school? Overthrow patrirarchy!”
I know people with Asperger’s. That is not Asperger’s. That is something else in addition to Asperger’s.
The people I know with Asperger’s are female, and they would never act like that. Meanwhile, there are lots of men without Asperger’s who act like that all the time. The kid’s particular syndrome is irrelevant.
“I did want to point out the the upper class elites avoiding the lowest common denominator public schools by going to private school gets them a better education, but doesn’t save them from the patriarchal indoctrination. I’d say it’s as bad or worse at private schools from my own experience.”
No shit. I didn’t mean to imply that prep schools are patriarchy-free. I should know; I went to one for 12 years without ever coming into contact with a single book written by a person of color. But the cafeteria food was definitely better!
I was homeschooled. Secular homeschooled. Very important distinction to make: there are many godbags who are not to be trusted with homeschooling. I heart John Taylor Gatto, too - recommend “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher” as follow-up reading to this post.
Yeh sure Erin. Except it is ADULTS who are causing this child’s problems. Adults.
Having three daughters who have struggled through the patriarchy that is the public school system, I can empathize. My youngest daughter has been told by countless high school boys that they want to fuck her. Nice. We are constantly hammering home in our lesbo-centric family that this is unacceptable behavior. We have reported one boy to the high school administration who explained to him that he was not to be seen near her, and to his own mother who remarked that “he couldn’t help it if she was so pretty.” This particular 15 year old boy already has a baby by a 13 year old girl who has since dropped out of school to care for this child with whom the boy has no contact.
Here’s my assvice: take legal action against anyone and everyone who refuses to protect your child.
My (and many other peoples’) fantasy: Voluntary learning centers, where people of all ages can meet to hear lectures, work in groups, meeting with teachers & tutors…
“How can ANY teacher or counselor consider sexually approaching a 10 year old acceptable behavior? I don’t give a rat’s ass about Asperger’s. That boy should be suspended.”
Yeah, I have aspergers, I don’t sexually harass people of any age.
“Sick, sick, sick. I am so tired of children not being allowed time to be children before they’re expected to become dutiful slaves of the pornocracy. Cats and ponies are much more healthy interests.”
No-one should be a dutiful slave of the pornocracy. Can we please not use “protect teh innocence” type language? I would have liked not to be sexually repressed during childhood, stalking is an entirely different matter, what is happening to this child is stalking and objectification.
If someone had done this to me at the age of ten I would have insisted that the school get them away from me and the other children. In fact there is someone at my college now who harrasses people, they always walk up to women and talk to them when they haven’t met before and have no interest.
Remind me again - why do people bring children into this violent, miserable world?
I will admit, public schooling for me beat child labor or having my mother kill me.
I was homeschooled between the ages of 9-11 and I loved it. My mother was terrible at enforcing an education so I spent all my time reading- I lived opposite the public library. When I got to high school age my parents decided that I needed to go back to school as my mother (who was our educator) barely had a highschool education herself and didn’t think she could give us a decent standard of education. This is actually a serious consideration for some parents, especially if you have ambitions for your children to ‘have a better life’ (i.e. go to university, get a graduate job, be middle class etc).
On the Aspergers issue, my partner worked in a public school in Scotland which had a unit for children with autism (many had aspergers). The idea was that the autistic children would be mainstreamed over time and had special support in supporting this goal. It was the school’s strict policy that children could only be in mainstream classes if they did not hurt or harrass other students.
“As for this little 10 year old girl, I agree about getting the lawyers involved. And then the press if need be. Nothing scares the school system more than a parent who knows their rights and is willing to fight for them. Good luck.”
They are the child’s rights, not the parents’ surely?
“I was homeschooled. Secular homeschooled. Very important distinction to make: there are many godbags who are not to be trusted with homeschooling.”
Precisely, the difference is a deeply important one, homeschooling must never be a veil for inescapable religious indoctrination.
You’d think the rule of not hurting or harassing other pupils should apply to all pupils, not just those with Aspergers/Autism, FA.
How about reducing the size of schools? Large schools with large classes are very impersonal and alienating.
She’s still got to know that there are adults on her side (family, friends, attorneys if it comes to that). Kids are used to accepting things from adults without question. If a scared or traumatized kid doesn’t learn that there are both responsible and irresponsible adults — and she learns to distinguish between the two by learning to question authority — the world is a much more threatening place.
To be able to question authority at that age (particularly in an environment in which she is the youngest and probably the smallest and least strong), she’s got to know that there are adults who have her back. A lot of grown-ups get mad when kids don’t automatically accept what they’re told, and the anger of adults in authority can be terrifying to children.
You give the same messages to children who are raped by adults: that adult/those adults hurt you, which is wrong; there are adults who will actively work to protect you and keep you safe. The comfort for the child is in the distinction between adults/groups of adults, which takes her out of the equation of who is in charge and who is at fault. Her only other option is not to believe that any adults can really help her, at which point she’ll take on the responsibility by herself. No 10 year old can adequately care for her own safety AND her own mental health at the same time.
This reads to me like a case of “you don’t belong here” suppression harassment. I don’t think it’s about attraction as much as the fact that skipping ahead grades threatens these boys’ ideas of their own intelligence. It sounds as if the other girls in the school are only dealing with the normal level of harassment, whereas this is above and beyond what’s normally pater-approved.
This is not better, though. If anything, the fact that these boys are clearly threatened by the presence of someone who is younger, female, and clearly much smarter than they means that this is an actively dangerous situation. I wish I had advice beyond “make the school do something”, but the description of the situation makes me frightened and makes my skin crawl.
Hubby and I were both identified as gifted. We have 2 gifted boys. I hate the whole “gifted” label thing. My favorite quote is that normal is a setting on a clothes dryer. It’s difficult to rear a gifted child. Gifted girls (and women) have an especially hard time in our society.
There is nothing that the antiquated public school system hates more than accleration. School administrators grant accleration only grudingly, then blame the accelerated student for any problems, including their own omissions. It sounds like that’s going on here.
The situation is further complicated because gifted education is not federally mandated. Most states fail to require and fund gifed education. When public gifted education does exist, it is typically underfunded and underutilized. Parents are forced to fight for any accomodations. Often, acceleration is the only option.
My own parents refused to accelerate me. I was a small girl and already a year younger than all of my classmates. They realized the situation and tried to protect me. Instead, I was stuck in a working class public education system until I was 17, which I hated.
If hope that you have some local resources, If you need more resources, try:
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/
You can contact me privately if Twisty would pass on my info.
Good luck!
my fave memory from my public education days was in middle school choir when the music teacher/choir director would make 6th/7th grade boys dress up like women and stuff balloons down their shirts while performing some stupid-ass song I can’t remember. It was horrific, and after telling my mom about it, she raised enough of a stink to have the performance dropped (the teacher had been doing this schtick for years). The choir director was a woman by the way, and this was the early 1990s. Looking back, it was even more fucked up than I thought it was while it was happening. Gar.
I taught art for a few years in a large urban school district, and while I am trying hard to devote my career to poor kids, i’m not sure if doing it via public education is the best route anymore. Though I know more than a few people who went to school to be teacher because they wanted to start a revoultion. we’ll see about that…
As the adoptive mother of a teen boy with multiple behavior issues I’m here to tell you that it is possible for boys like him to attend public school and be safe but it takes loud, continuous, strident advocacy on my part, with liberal amounts of threats from my lawyer. Every state has to provide every child with a free and appropriate public education (fape law) and every school has to come up with a plan. The schools don’t want to because plans are costly. My son’s school told me when he was in first grade to just keep him home - he wasn’t ready for school. I had my lawyer call a meeting and he’s been in school ever since. He has a safety plan that the school staff are required to follow and it says in his iep that staff are responsible for keeping him safe. I’ve told staff repeatedly that I consider them at fault if he hurts another child because the safety plan works great — if they follow it. As soon as they get lazy, he goes out of bounds and hurts someone (in his case, very mild - for instance, he’ll grab a kid’s arm or throw a pencil or fall down in front of someone to try to trip them — but neverthelss, not ok behavior in school or anywhere else.)
Get a lawyer on your team, call a meeting, put everything in writing. As the tax payer employer of public school personnel, you and your child have rights. And you have a responsibility to exercise those rights, imo — not ok to just let it go — stand up and make a BIG NOISE!
Too true Delphyne.
I didn’t send my boys to school, and I worked, so we never sat around the kitchen table doing workbooks or anything. We did what’s called “unschooling.” I just surrounded them with books and art supplies and musical instruments and interesting people, gave them a library card, computers, and bus fare, and said go find things you feel passionate about and learn what you need to know to do them; holler if you need help from me. Long story short, the older one graduated from UC in two years, Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors, and is now supporting his fiance while she attends grad school. The younger one opted to go to high school but dropped out, graduated from Harvard, and is now teaching self defense classes to women and doing volunteer work at a sexual assault center. Both excellent young men.
But back to ten year old girls. It’s funny because I’ve been on a kick lately, watching movies with strong smart defiant rebellious pre-teen heroines, mostly in the 9-12 year old range. Because I’ve decided I want them to be my role models, girls who’re still at an age where they are passionate about their own lives and interests because they haven’t yet been indoctrinated to believe that their worth lies solely in their ability to be desirable to males. Movies like Whale Rider, Carol’s Journey, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Antonia’s Line, and that hippie homeschooling classic (actually they all contain some degree of homeschooling), Off The Map.
So anyway I’ve been watching and watching, and the gentle Netflixians send me new recommendations every day, and I watch. And here’s the thing that just bowls me over: here are these feisty, smart, amazingly resourceful young heroines who know exactly what they want to do, but inevitably they’re forced to spend 95% of their time and energy fending off a deluge of patriarchal bullshit. Wars, rapes, imprisonment, restrictions, men who can’t treat them like human beings. Every single one of these kickass strong girl movies is really about how she has to bang her head repeatedly against the damn patriarchy in order to survive, much less do her thing. It is to despair.
Please, Blamer S, keep us posted on your daughter’s situation. She is my new hero du jour.
Thanks for that smack down of the current state of public education, Twisty. Delphyne astutely proposes a great solution–smaller classes. Of course, that requires funding and more teacher. While we’re at it, let’s pay the teachers what they’re worth.
It doesn’t matter if you propose the perfect solution, Twisty, because society (a/k/a the patriarchy) doesn’t want to fix it. We’ve got to funnel the $$$ into war mongering.
As a disclaimer, I’m a former math teacher.
Nick says:
This readsThis reads to me like a case of “you don’t belong here†suppression harassment to me like a case of “you don’t belong here†suppression harassment.
EXACTLY!!!
I have 2 minutes, being a stressed-out single mom - my son is “on the Asperger’s continuum” and I have been really troubled by the villification of Asperger’s. Asperger’s is expressed in many ways. My son has a very hard time reading people, but he’s aware of it and works very hard to figure out the appropriate responses to different situations. He’s one of the sweetest kids ever. Doing the right thing is incredibly important to him. (I explained political lobbying to him recently and he was horrified that it was legal.) He’s only just 13, but has spearheaded several fundraisers at school in the last 2 years to benefit Kiva and Heifer. He’s brilliant, and full of compassion, and is easily moved to tears by injustice. Why people are cruel to each other is mysterious and confusing to him. He’s been bullied horribly by non-Asperger’s boys.
Asperger’s does not equal asshole. I’ve known lots of total asshole men who do not have Asperger’s. Quit with the Asperger’s crap.
a great soundtrack to this discussion could be rage against the machine’s “take the power back”
the public school system, secular private schools, and religious schools ALL include mandatory patriarchal brainwashing on the curriculum, and what happened to that 10 year old girl coulda happened at any school. (although at an all-girl school, at least a girl could avoid being sexually harrassed by boys her own age)
the disgusting thing to me, in this situation, was the negligence on the part of this little girl’s public school to take any action.
oh, and to add something new, no one else has pointed out yet that home schooling, other than sometimes being economically unfeasable, is also a bad situation for children whose parents specifically want to brainwash their kids with religious doctrine.
i agree with twisty’s bottom line. the only solution is revolution!
Nick: “I don’t think it’s about attraction as much as the fact that skipping ahead grades threatens these boys’ ideas of their own intelligence. ”
By the time high school rolls around, boys have had ample time to interalize the message of the pornocracy: attraction = nail that = dominate it. There’s little distinction between aggression and sex in our culture, of which S’s kid’s situation is a case in point.
In not any particular order:
My journey through public middle and high school was the most miserable time of my life.
My mom read to me and my siblings for years, and my dad showed us math or looked things up in the encyclopedia when they came up at the dinner table. That gave me a head start; home schooling on that level is within reach.
I learned some math, chemistry, biology, latin, computer programming, and carpentry in school. That part was good.
This site helps me deconstruct what I learned about gender there and everywhere.
Beavis and Butthead are real.
“Asperger’s does not equal asshole. I’ve known lots of total asshole men who do not have Asperger’s. Quit with the Asperger’s crap.”
Hey Patti, for what it’s worth, this is an Asperger’s-friendly blog. If anyone has villified Asperger’s, I must have missed it. Is it possible that you take exception to S’s inclusion of Asperger’s as a descriptive detail about her kid’s harrasser? I give S the benefit of the doubt and trust that she alludes only to that one kid, for the purpose of illustrating the competing interests of the two special-needs parties; nowhere does she suggest that Asperger kids as a class are psychos.
None of the pyschos I have known — and I’ve known plenty — have had Asperger’s.
No argument here. I’m just pointing out what I think is expressing itself through harassment here, that the equation is running the other direction: dominate it = nail that = attraction. The impetus is domination.
Of course, I may not be telling anyone here anything that they didn’t know.
Also secular homeschooled! Up until I got to college (at 21, when I was good and ready to leave home, and grown-up enough that I had mimimal response to peer pressure).
Like Klutch, my parents had stuff to do, and essentially taught us (my sisters and I) by telling us where the library was, answering our questions and letting us generally do what we felt like doing. We didn’t have ‘class time,’ ever. We had some chores, and occasionally my mom would collar us and insist that we learn basic math, but honestly, looking back we mostly just did whatever the hell we wanted, almost all the time. (With, again rather like Klutch’s situation, understood policies of always being home by dark, looking after the younger ones, not burning down the house, etc.)
And somehow we all turned out to be functional adults, some of whom have graduated from college and some of whom chose to pursue other things, and all of whom are doing OK and can manage to hold our own in a conversation despite tragic early lack of ’socialization’.
You don’t necessarily need formal schoolin’! Not even formal homeschoolin’!
The impetus is domination.
Expanding on myself here, this is a repudiation of the counselor, “But she’s sooo cute!†“She’s adorable.†“Wow! She’s a heartbreaker.â€
It’s not happening because she’s cute. It would almost certainly be happening no matter how pedophile-attracting her looks were. It’s a matter of these boys trying to show her that her place is not here.
A 17-18 year old boy asking a 10 year old girl to prom is, if not harassment for intimidation, then pedophilia that needs to be addressed clinically–or both.
Man. The school district wanted to skip me several grades when I was young and my parents forbade it. I always sort of resented them for that, but no more! BTW, gifted high schoolers are allowed to take classes at colleges and community colleges here (California) are especially welcoming– or at least they were a decade or so ago when my youngest sister took almost all her main HS courses at a junior college. You might check that option out, and at least get her out of the classes in which she suffers the most.
High School is a nightmare that most teenagers have a hard time getting through. Enrolling a 10-year-old in one is child abuse to begin with.
A moment’s recollection will remind anyone that the net impact on anyone’s life, caused by all levels of schooling, is more social than educational. So you’re eliminating a curricular mismatch for a far more damaging social mismatch.
Skipping kids ahead is a dumb idea. What is it in aid of? So they can make a million dollars and retire before they’re 30? I say leave the kids in an age-appropriate grade, and let them satisfy their curiosity at the library.
I have to agree that the academic achievement at all costs is a patriarchal idea. I’d have been terrified to be put in a secondary school when I was ten. It was pretty damn scary at twelve.
They have to learn that their actions have consequences, but positive behavior support is the most effective way to truly change behavior.
1) my brother is Aspy. He NEVER did this shit. That sort of harassment isn’t a feature of Aspbergers per say, but fixations are common. I do remember my mother sternly lecturing my brother about “not bothering Francy any more because he liked her”. If the little girl in this case is a fixation and the boy’s only role models are inappropriate, guess what happens? Add in the “he’s disabled” cop out and things get fun.
2) I’m sorry if I equated discipline and punishment. I don’t in practice, nor does my husband. Many baby boomers with kids older than mine seem to have made that mistake big time, resulting in neither discipline nor punishment and now their teens are horrendous! I remember when I was pregnant seeing the kids of people I know and standing around with friends my age and saying NEVER! and “the word NO works okay!”.
My husband disciplines his students, he doesn’t punish, but one student with brain damage is incapable of making that fundamental connection between action and consequence. Positive behavior building would be a nice thing to be ABLE to do, but try to pull that off in an already disrupted class of 25 students, many of whom scored
a small note for schools and school adminsitrators, though. I’ve seen the inside of school workings, too, and every student has a right to be there with an education plan that works for them. if a school is trying to get out of this, it is in some real sense illegal. But its not that they are just being cheap, trying to skimp on helping out kids who obiouvsly need it. Give the people in schools enough credit that on average, they also see that someone needs this kind of help, and that an expensive educational plan would accomplish this. but for every extra dollar they spend on that, they are literally taking money away from some other ids’ education. there isn’t enough to go around, and so taxpayer or not, at least recognize the dilemma of doing right by one kid in the case where that entails having to do wrong by one (or three, or five) other kids. they don’t get enough funding.
this is by no means a defense of letting any high school kids treat anyone like this, much less a tenyear old. and other commenters are right, this is not a case os asberger’s causing it, and even if it is, letting him get away with it only compounds the problem for him, too. but the school system is imperfect in a way that asserting one’s rights to have extra considerations and procedures in place for one child means there are literally a couple other kids who lose their rights to get basic features of their education. the money is a zero sum game.
(continued) less than the 5th percentile on standard exam and several others of whom have obvious but unidentified and unaddressed developmental issues and NONE of whom have parents who want to deal with it. That’s why they put them in a Catholic school because MaryMagic will solve all their problems!
And monkeys will fly out of Mary’s butt!
3)My children are in a (horrified gasp) Public School where this shit is NEVER tolerated. They were hassled on the bus and in the bus line because my elder son comforted his younger brother with a small kiss. The homophobic little dipshits who harassed them lost bus privileges for a week and their parents had to come meet with the principal for a little talk about innappropriate behavior likely seen at home not being tolerated at school. The teacher who was supposed to be supervising the line was also disciplined for not intervening in an obvious teasing situation.
Well, as a faithful blamer currently working at an inner-city public school, close to getting my license to teach high school social studies, I sort of want to cry right now after reading some of this. I honestly don’t think the answer is giving up and everyone home schooling. Very few of the parents in my district could even begin to consider that as a viable option. I’m going for option #2 - staying and fighting. Smashing the patriarchy from within!
Am I the only one here who actually had a positive, relatively trauma-free PS experience? K-8 I went to tiny private Jewish schools; my largest grade before HS was 17 kids, and until I switched schools for 8th grade, there was no “dating,” no dances, no separate activities for boys and girls. Perhaps the fact that the school sought to create a gender-equal environment in which to impart a traditional religion led the school’s founders and staff to more closely examine the messages they sent about gender and equality than do most schools.
When I started a public high school, I thus had far less exposure to the terrifying gender socialization that most schoolkids (including my younger siblings) get in PS, but I managed to avoid being too caught up in it by 1) being as obnoxiously obvious about my feminism as the football team was about their footballism, and 2) being a rabble-rouser who got 2 teachers suspended for sexual harassment of other students and got in students’ and teachers’ faces when I thought they were out of line or wasting my educational time.
I was lucky enough to be in a good school (high grad rate, high college attendance, low violence), where many teachers actually responded to students’ intellectual interests, but I think the most important tool that I had for surviving HS, and later law school, was an understanding of the systemic nature of patriarchy. This understanding helped me to separate what happened to/near me from how I understood myself, and it gave me a context in which to view my activism as part of a massive struggle, thus reducing the sense of isolation that I sometimes felt.
So how about we infiltrate public schools and instead of the “sex” or “abstinence” lessons that kids get, we replace them with lessons on the systemic nature of patriarchy?
Smashing the patriarchy from within is all fine and good (and I would also pick that option) but when the battering ram you might have to use is a 10-year-old girl, well, I’d opt for what’s best for the girl and not what’s in the best interest of eradicating the system. The first concern should always be for the safety and well-being of the child.
That said, I would like to ask the writer of the letter if she’s spoken to the child about these options. I mean, I know she’s ten, but perhaps she’d like to have a say in her defense–that is, whatever tact you decide to take in defending her.
And, geeze, while I’m at it, get off the gifted and skipped ahead kids already. I am one of those gifted, skipped ahead kids, and, like delphyn, began HS at 12. It wasn’t that scary for me, and I was glad to be finished with the system and living on my own and supporting myself financially when I was 16. Not skipping ahead kids who can deal with it is really just damning them to extra years in a hellish system. “Age-appropriate grades,” my shiny gifted ass. I was reading at a third-grade level in kindergarten, so tell your story walking.
I’m a huge proponent of the homeschooling/unschooling/deschooling movement myself. Barring that option though you should definitely take out a restraining order.
Another vote for John Taylor Gatto - his essay “Against School” comes up if you google it. I’ve had great discussions about it with my community college students.
This is why I am going to be a high school teacher. (if they let me)
A social studies teacher at that. I only have one more semester before I work on my credential.
I am going to unbrainwash as much of the brainwashing as I can.
Teach them youngins a thing or two.
“Smashing the patriarchy from within is all fine and good (and I would also pick that option) but when the battering ram you might have to use is a 10-year-old girl, [etc]”
If you’re alluding to my response to Sniper, Virago, you misconstrue my meaning; I was suggesting that radical feminist teachers subvert the public school system from within. Not little girls. And I was also joking.
Ah, I now see, Virago, that you were responding to HistoricUpstart. Sorry.
I have two ‘gifted’ daughters, on of whom is advanced in grades. I’ve been wondering about the home school options, in part, not because of the other kids but because of the teachers who admit to being threatened by a smart girl. One thing I can’t emphasise strongly enough is that your daughter needs to know that she has advocates and champions all around her for support. She’s only 10 (mine also) and needs to feel the pressence of a safety net.
Also I strongly agree with Carolyn; you need some hefty legal muscle and possibly (though I hate to say this) publicity muscle. I’ve found that sympathetic reporters with their head where it belongs can be very powerful allies.
You are in a very unique situation and it may call for some very different approaches to your daughter’s education but there are tons of excellent web sites for support of very advanced kids. My first instinct in reading your note was get her the hell outa’ there and begin legal action immediatly. Hell, if she needs to go private because of what the school has allowed, let the bastards pay for it.
Charles asked: So they can make a million dollars and retire before they’re 30?
No, I don’t want my kids to be adults at 16. There’s a local community college that they can attend while I guide them.
It may seem freakish to some, but by the time my kids are 30, tney may have multiple degrees. I have 4 degrees and hubby has 3 degrees.
The goal is not $$$. In fact, many so-called gifted people choose to pursue academic pursuits rather than more profitable careers.
Freakishly yours,
LB
I would also like to point out that I’m not promoting elitism here. My parents both dropped out of high school. I am the first person to graduate from college in my family, let alone the first person to earn a doctorate. I’m the product of the public school system, too.
When you encounter teachers and administrators who think it’s appropriate to teach 5 year olds to sing songs about sucking the eyeballs out of little birdies and drinking their blood through straws, well homeschool can look like the only viable option.
In my experience, you can persuade them to stop this week’s outrage, but for sure there will be another one next week.
It took far more time and energy for me to fight the school system than it did to homeschool. If you start early, before the school system convinces your children that learning is a chore, homeschooling is not that difficult. The kids do most of the work.
In the ideal world, schools would be drop-in centers instead of prisons, if they weren’t great places, no one would drop in.
Twisty, thanks for one of the best assessments of the state of our schools that I’ve seen.
I am currently in shock at S’s story.
A 10 year old girl?!?!?!
A fucking 10 year old girl?!?!?!
What the fuck is the matter with the fuckwits in this world!
It is inexcusable that her “cuteness” is used to legitimise that crap.
What about disrupting HER education?!?!
Although, I guess, if she’s pretty or whatever, that’s all she’ll ever need, huh. Psch!
It’s all bollocks.
Grr.
I think I didn’t like the association of Asperger’s with the whole scenario - it seemed irrelevant to the real story, but like it was significant to the teller - like when people mention how old and wrinkled someone is, or how fat. I’m sure I’m oversensitive about it.
I’m often led to think about my raising sons in the context of this blog. There was a recent “all men are assholes, end of story”. My older son is often an asshole, very similar to his biological father (my college professor), who was not involved in his raising. My younger son has pretty much no asshole in him. I think of the adult men that I consider to not be assholes, and they’re all men who very much have not fit in to the general scheme of things, men with learning disorders who have been brutalized by the “real” guys while growing up. My younger son goes to private school, as my ex can afford it and has agreed to pay for it. The school has a no-harassment policy, is supposed to be a place to be safe to be who you are. They’ve achieved this for the girls, but not yet for boys like my son. The other boys would never treat the girls like they have treated “N”.
Feh. I went to public school and all I got out of it was the ability to read, write and operate a pocket calculator. I had to do jr. college and community ed to learn to type and other marketable skills.
Just teach everyone to read, adults, too, and whatever else they want to learn. 12 years of slavery is stupid and stupid-making.
“Why anyone thinks that setting children into dark, nasty-smelling schoolrooms and sitting them in rows while a boring grown-up drone on about things that do not interest them is an effective way of teaching eludes me.”
Ahh…but as Twisty has so eloquently pointed out, it is a *very* effective way to teach them to be drones which is exactly what the public schools are designed to do.
In addition to John Taylor Gatto, I highly recommend Grace Llewellyn’s books on unschooling or non-schooling or however you want to term “allowing your kids to learn what and when they want.”
Making learning a chore is a sure-fire way to kill the human’s natural love for it. That’s exactly what our schools are for and they do it extremely well.
All of this does not address, of course, the issue that N enjoys her classes and has every right to be there if and when she so desires.
i would guess that the reason the school has done little or nothing about this is that they simply don’t want a 10 year old girl there, and the sooner she’s harrassed out of the place, the better for them.
having slogged through the nightmare we call “the gifted childhood”, the main thing that got through to me is that the educational system we have now, and the administrators who run it, are not in the business of ‘educating’ young people to their full potential. they are in the business of, as Twisty said, creating mindless labor drones. your 10 year old daughter does not appear to be on an unremarkable path to labor drone-hood. this teenager with a learning disability probably is. they’ll pick the future drone over the exceptional case every time.
the fact that she’s a girl probably isn’t helping, either.
from the standpoint of the boy or boys who’re stalking her, it probably comes from the same place — they’ve zeroed in on someone who is “different”, who probably “thinks she’s better than them”. and they’ve decided to do the school’s dirty work, to shame her away, preferably into drone-hood, but y’know if she ends up in some silly private school or special program or something, sure, whatever, as long as she’s out of their hair.
there’s something fascinating that happens to girls around this very age, and i’m interested to see how it manifests in your daughter’s case. around the time puberty hits, all the wonder and fascination and brilliance and interest in intellectual pursuits starts to get beaten out of girls, in order to fit them to the ‘drone’ mold. and a lot of that is done through things like prom, makeup, clothes, boys, etc. and most high school boys will mainly encounter girls who’ve already undergone this process. so i also think an exacerbating aspect of this, from the guys’ point of view, is that she doesn’t act “right” for a high school girl, who is supposed to be far more interested in prom than chemistry.
in my own experience as a gifted kid, the one thing that helped when i faced situations like this (from boys closer to my own age, but no less traumatic), was the summer programs i attended with other gifted kids who were around my age, and then ultimately a transfer to a magnet school for my own age group. mainly in discovering i wasn’t the only 12 year old girl who’d rather read sci fi novels and explicate sonnets than put on makeup or talk about boys, but also because most of the boys had been through comparable levels of bullshit and weren’t nearly as mouthy as the boys at my other schools. i don’t know where you live or what your circumstances are, but something like this might be a much better fit for your daughter than simply skipping her ahead.
“I think I didn’t like the association of Asperger’s with the whole scenario - it seemed irrelevant to the real story, but like it was significant to the teller…”
Actually, I think it was totally relevant to the story seeing as it was the school’s excuse for not protecting N. Hopefully S can now clearly see that it is just as lazy an excuse as “boys will be boys.”
i should also add that i started getting behaviors like the above when, as a kindergartener, i was skipped ahead into some first and second grade classes. the girls didn’t much care; it was the boys who intimidated me into fear and confusion and hatred of my new position — mainly via proto-sexual harrassment, including being branded a “dyke” at the age of 5 or 6. needless to say my time in second grade reading and spelling was short.
Twisty, yes, I also think that teachers and parents should, must, absolutely have an obligation to direct a portion of their energy to smashing the system from within or without. Just smash it. (Whatever rises in its place can’t possibly be any worse.) I, in my time as an elementary school teacher, tried. It killed me to see it from within, that system. Killed me dead.
Anyone who thinks public schools can or should be rehabilitated should sign up at their nearest public elementary school to sit in on classes for a week. No matter how low your expectations, you’ll likely still be shocked at what passes for education these days.
I am a long-time veteren of the IEP (individualized educational plan) struggle, and I am still in that system, but have mostly won that war. I would like to point out that, in the US, fape (free, appropriate public education) only applies to the disabled, as narrowly defined by the IDEA laws, no one else has a right to that under the federal laws as they exist, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) notwithstanding. There may be state exceptions to this scenario. NCLB, as I understand it, makes a provision for schooling of kids in underperforming school districts. Some parents of disabled kids find it easier to enforce compliance and get things done using ADA instead.
In every case, disabled, underperforming schools, gifted, unexceptional, there is under-funding of breathtaking proportions. The laws pay a lot of lip service, but not much money.
It can be a regular part=time job to navigate and fight for your kid, and an almost impossible task to do without knowledgeable help.
to add to what OM just said, i’d also add that you’d be surprised which states actually have perfectly good options for “gifted” kids — you generally have to sift through a lot of BS to find out about them and get access to them, but it’s not as simple as civilized blue state = good, icky red state = hopeless.
i grew up in Louisiana and am an alumni of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a school that is extremely well-funded and open by a very transparent application process to any student in the state (if you are lucky enough to hear of the place). Mississippi, Arkansas, and several other states at the extreme bottom of the public education barrel have comparable high schools.
I wouldn’t bother with the school. I’d go straight to the police and press charges of pedophilia and assault.
shit, i’m not an alumni, i’m an alumnus! wow, that gifted education was so worthwhile, wasn’t it?
opoponax,
you’re an alumna. plural alumnae.
a male is an alumnus, plural alumni.
I date from the compulsory-Latin days.
Dear S.
I have a son who is highly gifted but with special needs (motor skills issues) I have found that lawsuit threats are the only way I can get public schools to provide the minimum in what is required. In my case the issue is not sexual harassment (kid’s a boy) but economic discrimination- they never expect the poor parents to fight back.
First- know your school district’s policies. Your daughter has a right to be safe and it is a failure of the school that she is not being kept so. I do most correspondence with the school via email so there is always a paper trail of what has been said. Since I am in a large urban school district we also have a department specifically for equity and race relations- I include its director on any important emails.
Second- since she is 10 and in high school- I assume she has an IEP (individual education plan). If she doesn’t, request one. A student doesn’t have to be special needs to get one and it is a legal contract with the school stating what services the school will provide. You can have her safety and what specific actions the school will take to protect her included in the IEP. When the school fails to follow those guidelines, they are breaking a contract. IEPs are renewed every year and parents get a lot of input into what an IEP includes.
Also- if they are not protecting your daughter they are not protecting any of the girls at the school. Doing anything to improve her situation will (hopefully) improve the situation of other girls. I managed to get a teacher fired and all the other teachers at my kid’s elementary school to go through training on economic discrimination, which did wonders for changing behaviors at his school. It is now one of the few schools in the district that is closing the testing gap between rich and poor kids. Not all my doing, but I like to think that I helped some. The kid is in middle school now (aggggggggggggggg) and I’ve had to start the process all over with a new set of teachers.
I second everyone that says your daughter needs to see adults who support her and will fight for her. How else will our kids ever learn to fight for themselves and others if the adults in their lives don’t.
Good Luck!
lot of issues here. the primary one presented by S is the harassment her daughter is enduring, and seems like we are all agreed that the school has a responsibility to stop that.
doesn’t matter that her main stalker has an educational difficulty — working out a plan where he can’t disrupt her is HIS problem, and the problem of his parents, his teachers, whoever does the special educational plans, his therapist, etc.
twisty, while i don’t disagree that the educational system fails kids in a lot of ways, i personally would have rather poked my eyes out with pencils than tried to homeschool. i’m not cut out for that, 24/7, even though i love my talented kids to pieces. i needed to work, for myself and my family’s support. we were basically homeschooling in all the off hours, anyway. i didn’t think the public school was right for my kids, so we went with a small private school that was really fabulous for them — low on the patriarchy scale of doom, big on music, art, experiments and field trips, reading, multicultural and international stuff — very good about understanding each child.
my son sunk like a rock when he began the local public high school, and i didn’t begin figuring out the system [or the problems] until it was too late. he looked about 11 and was quiet in class, so he was bullied by kids and ignored by teachers. anyway, i’ll skip the rest of that sorry story and get to the point, which is that kids need to feel safe and have the chance to learn new interesting stuff, and i think that is more likely to happen in smaller schools with smaller classes. by some remarkable coincidence, smaller classes let the teachers be in better contact with parents, which makes the world go ’round.
My advice to Blamer S is to call her county Bar Association to find out if there are free or sliding scale legal clinics in her area. The Bar Association can also provide a list of local attorneys who specialize in that area of law.
Good luck, Blamer S. My daughter was harassed via text messaging by an entitled dude at her school. We had many discussions about how it is not “not a big deal.” On the bright side, I’m now the proud mother of an apprentice blamer!
Folks, I think we’re getting away from the real issue at hand, here.
Escalating to lawyers before the principal has been called in seems premature. Also it assumes the principal won’t react properly to the situation. It also costs money that we don’t know if S even has.
Removing N from the school system also doesn’t address the issue. It is not her fault that these boys are harassing her, thus she should not be the one that is corrected or removed or hidden away from society. While I can appreciate that some number of you have or have been successfully home schooled, it’s again an issue bounded by money that we do not know if S has.
Also, it just avoids the issue at hand: what is to be done about the boys that harass girls in school?
Regardless of her age (and clearly she must be exceptional if she’s in HS at 10), stalking and sexually harassing girls in school is not acceptable behavior at any age. The fact that it seems to be an underlying assumption of our society - that boys are going to harass girls in school - is wrong. This is the issue that needs addressing. Personally, I think a conversation with the principal about having an assembly that discusses sexual harassment is what S should do. This, however, assumes that the principal responds appropriately to the situation. After that first hurdle is cleared, then it’s time to get proactive. Then, not only will S be protecting her daughter, she may also be helping to protect someone else’s daughter.
Charles: calling S abusive for her child being exceptional enough to warrant being enrolled in HS? You’re out of line. You don’t know her particular situation, how can you judge her parenting by the fact that her kid is enrolled in HS? Do you think she beats the intelligence into her? How is being bored to tears in classes far too easy for N not abuse?
Anyway, let’s put the blame squarely where it belongs: with the boys doing the harassing and push the school to respond appropriately first. If that doesn’t work, then it’s time to look for a lawyer. Hiding N from the world until she’s old enough to go to college doesn’t solve the problem, it only postpones it.
As usual, IBTP.
i also agree with working the district’s policies and threatening legal action, by the way.
One of the problems with public schools is that their quality depends so much on the district in which they are located. In my state, there is a notoriously good public high school in the richest neighborhood of the biggest city in the state. That school is safe and air-conditioned, has several PhD teachers, and enjoys a complete lack of students of color. On the other hand, there are public schools in my state that are little more than jailhouses for juvenile delinquents who openly smoke, drink, carry guns, and deal drugs on school grounds. I suspect the latter situation is far more common in our country than the former.
Another one of my huge problems with public schools is their lack of support for gifted students. Administrators are almost proud of their neglect of gifted students; they think it means they have the right priorities. Gifted students are expected to fend for themselves and essentially become autodidacts, yet the district continues to take credit for the students’ hard-won achievements.
Finally, public schools are fraught with godbaggery and patriarchy. Out of curiosity, does anyone know of a public school that offers a class in feminism or anything of the sort?
I hate public schools. I’m just afraid that if they are eliminated, 80% of the children of the next generation will be godbaggedly homeschooled.
Public schools have problems, and many of them stem from the pervasive sickness of patriarchy.
But.
Access to free education–to reading, writing, math–is a privilege fought for and bled for by a lot of good, progressive, intelligent people who understood that public education is absolutely necessary to prevent every poor person being doomed to permanent serfdom. Why is school so badly funded and attacked by conservatives? Because education can be a powerful tool of liberation. Even a bad school is doing a necessary service when it teaches a child to read. 200 years ago, hardly anyone BUT the elites could read, and that change is not something to sneeze at.
Has the system been subject to constant attack and co-option? Absolutely. Is mass illiteracy the answer? Absolutely not.
We need public schools, because there will always be students whose parents are unwilling or unable to educate them sufficiently. And for some kids, they are actually an escape, not a prison. Unschooling/homeschooling is great, if it works for you. But it will never work for everyone.
The problems of educating so many children–a mind-bogglingly enormous task–are myriad. Because educating everyone means taking into account all the problems of our country; patriarchy AND racism AND classism AND treatment of the disabled AND economic disparities AND confusion about what, exactly a good education entails anyway. Enormous amounts of money are involved, attracting vultures; enormous amounts of human capital are involved, attracting ideologues and saints alike.
There are many things that need smashing, but public education is one of the few fragile threads keeping at least some kids from permanent ignorance and illiteracy. It deserves preservation and improvement.
Personal point of view: I was skipped ahead a grade, started high school at 12, and I think the only reason I got out of high school relatively sane was it was an all-girls’ school. I was sexually harassed & groped in co-ed junior high at 10 and 11 years old, and never told any adults about it. I figured it was my job to avoid the boys that did that.
My high school was Catholic, and therefore drenched in patriarchy, but if the Catholics don’t get ahold of you until you’re twelve, they have a hard time with indoctrination. They had no luck with me. It’s unfortunate there are so few all-girls’ schools that aren’t religious, because freedom from boys eight hours a day is a glorious thing for a teenaged girl, whether she knows it or not. Separatist? Yes. Equal? Depends on the school.
Let me also second the poster who recommended looking into magnet schools. The boys who were mean to me in junior high didn’t like me because I was smarter than they were. If everybody is smart, it’s a whole different ball game.
The school thing is another one of my reasons not to have children: I could never home-school because of my career, and I’m not willing to give up my career to home-school, but pretty much all elementary schools I’ve come into contact with are vile in one way or another.
@ Louisa Mae Alcott: i date from the “trying to help forge a gender-neutral language” days.
ahhhhh!!! OK
My 2 cents is that this public school district is not meeting its obligations to provide this 10 year old girl with a free and appropriate public education by sending her to a high school. Maybe she is intellectually bright enough to be in high school but she certainly is not emotionally or socially ready for it. The school district should be footing the bill for her to attend a program that intellectually challenges her and is filled with other kids her age.
That said, the school district should be protecting her now that she’s in high school. I’d get an attorney and raise hell about everything everyone said above, and also that the district is not meeting its legal obligation toward this child.
Per Red Queen:
A student doesn’t have to be special needs to get one and it is a legal contract with the school stating what services the school will provide. You can have her safety and what specific actions the school will take to protect her included in the IEP. When the school fails to follow those guidelines, they are breaking a contract. IEPs are renewed every year and parents get a lot of input into what an IEP includes.
This is inaccurate. The IEP is not a legal contract and is not available to students that are not special needs. It is a legally binding document that is made to outline how a student with special needs will be provided fape, and must detail the existence of a qualifying disability as part of its content.
And, j, your little recap on the educational system in your first paragraph is incredibly racist - “enjoys a complete lack of students of color,” indeed.
“she should not be the one that is corrected or removed or hidden away from society”
i know you’re saying this in reference to homeschooling and not an alternative situation like a private school, charter school, magnet school, etc. but i don’t see how it’s “correcting” someone to take her out of a really fucked up situation and help her find one that would be a better fit for her. the harrassment this girl is getting is not an exceptional case, one of a few boys who are completely out of hand and can easily be disciplined into proper behavior. it’s a systematic problem that exists at all levels, probably for all female students (and i’d say almost certainly for all gifted female students or female students who show talents and/or interests above and beyond what is expected of the typical high school girl). even if she were at her age-typical grade level or only a year or so ahead, she would still be subject to this, because it’s a symptom of the school system as a whole — beating down students that show exceptional potential, especially girls. the sexual harrassment is just the preferrred beat-down method for the girls.
I have to agree with emjaybee on this one. A lot of priveleged people tend to forget just how much a saving grace public school can be for kids from fucked up homes, and that education is really too important for survival to leave it up to parents, who are almost universally worse than parents. There’s a reason why the right wingers want public school abolished, and it isn’t because they’re concerned about the well being of the children. I’m surprised to see so many people here playing into the same logic that they use.
Err, education is really too important to leave it up to parents, who are almost universally worse than TEACHERS when it comes to knowing how to properly raise children.
Actually, there are some very good teachers and some very shitty ones, and some very good parents and some shitty ones. I’ve gotten all sorts of crappy “advice” on raising my kids from really stupid people who happened to go into teaching. One of my son’s teachers personally disliked him, and had him convinced he was really bad at math. He’s in 7th grade now, but they put him in 8th grade math because he’s good at it. We’ve had a few teachers who are incredibly wonderful. I still don’t need parenting advice from them.
My older son went through the public school system and it stank for him. If he’d drawn different teachers, he would have had a different experience to some degree. My younger son would not make it in the public school system, and I’m grateful that my ex can afford tuition for him.
Chiming in from the trenches here. I can talk for approximately forever about school, so I hope no one will mind if I ramble on for a bit.
In my experience, the size of the school is more important than you’d think. My middle school was around 700-800 students, with three grades, and the social order was keenly and oppressively felt. It was extremely easy for the “popular” guys to pick a girl or two and harass them for however long they wanted. While I was the target of the month, I couldn’t find any way to express just how shitty is was. For example, one particular boy’s favorite was to come up to me in the hallway or cafeteria and give a big wave and a loud, mocking hello.
What could I say in that situation? On the surface, it was harmless, and I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate what was really going on. I vividly remember telling my mom about it. The first thing she asked was if he was just trying to be friendly. Friendly!
However, at my high school now there are more than 2000 students, and I can only remember hearing about a single instance of that kind of bullying. In middle school it was a fixture of daily life, whether or not you were directly involved. The size of my high school makes it possible to keep your own choice of company, and makes constant harassment much harder.
I know this isn’t very helpful to those who are or have kids stuck in small, insular schools, but I think it gets overlooked too often. The smallness that is touted as offering greater individual attention to students really does – just not always from the teachers.
As regards the horrible situation of S and her daughter, I’d absolutely agree with the commenters who have said it’s about intimidation and not attraction. Stupid intimidation, though; teenagers on the whole don’t have enough empathy to understand exactly what the psychological effect of their assholery will be. (It’s a toss-up whether that makes it more or less depressing.)
I’m guessing that j meant it sardonically, but even so, whoa, crappy execution, dude.
j:
I don’t know if this is what you had in mind, but this class is offered at my kids’ public high school (which they love, btw)(in the sense that any kid can be said to “love” school– that is, as opposed to vacation):
Course Title: Women’s Literature Course No.: 0113 Length of Course: 1 semester Grade Level: 12 Prerequisite: English 5-6 CP or Honors Fulfills UC/CSU: Pending Meets District Graduation Requirement: English; students receive credit for one semester of English 7-8 CP or Elective
This course will expose students to a wide variety of women’s literature in its historical context, with an emphasis on shifting gender roles. Readings will represent the traditional limitations that created boundaries for women in general and female authors in particular. However, other selections will emphasize strong female protagonists, and the authors who succeeded in expressing their unique voices and visions. Contemporary women’s issues will also be highlighted through the reading of modern fiction and the completion of a research project. In addition to this research project, writing assignments will include literary analysis, personal reflection, and creative expression.
yeah, i’ve heard of courses offered that would fit into certain aspects of a women’s studies curriculum (women writers, women’s history, etc), but not necessarily a Women’s Studies 101 type course.
and my better humanities teachers made sure to include that sort of thing in the general classes, anyway. which i think is more important — the only high school kids who are going to voluntarily take Women in Lit are the ones who are already interested in the subject. and not all students would usually have access to such a course, anyway.
i do, however, think that there needs to be more social sciences material covered at the high school level, especially stuff like Women’s Studies, anthropology, sociology, etc — things that teach us about the world as a whole, which we can use to frame an approach to more specialized material in Literature, History, etc.
OM: Yeah, I meant it sardonically. I am a woman of color. Sorry about the misunderstanding.
And that’s really interesting, SusanM and the opoponax. I wonder what it would take to start such a course in the school district here. Probably wouldn’t happen.
I skipped the posts because I can’t wait to post. I have to tell S that she MUST IMMEDIATELY begin legal action against these bastards pronto!
Talk to an attorney immediately, go yourself and file a restraining order.
Fuck the school administrators, they are worthless, lazy, lying minions of the the municipalities, which across this country are run by brown nosing sycophants who spend their entire lives and everyone else’s money hoping to get a chance to rub up to the upper classes (term being relative there) of the town.
Your daughter has a legal right to be protected and the school has a legal obligation to protect her, the boy’s needs be damned, he can be removed from that school district, that class, whatever. Solutions exist.
Please do this NOW!
My son, who had emotional problems due to sexual abuse by his father was abused regularly by classmates while teachers sat idly and did nothing to protect him or even inform me and unfortunately, my self esteem was shot, I was overwhelmed, overworked and too exhausted to know what to do and no one gave me a fucking clue.
Once I woke up and the rage set in, the very limited statute of limitations had set in and there was nothing I could do. My son should be in college now, but has had to make up for years he missed by dropping out.
Please don’t let that happen to you. Don’t listen to anyone but an attorney who will listen to and understand you and don’t stop calling until you find one you like.
And any asshole who won’t meet you for free in there office, or represent you on contingency doesn’t deserve your time on the phone.
Wow, if I can’t help my son recover what he lost, maybe you can help your daughter and your own sanity. Holy crap.
Kate, I’m usually more of a B. Dagger Lee chin-raiser type, myself, but the blamers have been giving out virtual tacos today, and I think you should have a big fat one.
Might I add also and I apologize if I am repeating others here without acknowledgment, but verbal harrasment of a sexual nature is criminal, albeit not easy to prosecute and something that would probably get cops to the school, but still, it is a criminal act and thus I think a restraining order and a talk with some advocates familiar with stalking and sexual abuse in your area might be in order (assuming you haven’t already done this).
This really strikes a nerve for me.
Please report back and let us know what develops, good or bad. I for one, offer my support, even if it is just on a blog.
personally, i feel like an introductory anthropology course would be both more valuable and also easier to sneak past reactionary school boards. the benefit being that you have to cover the actual truth about not only gender but race, ethnicity/nationality, culture, religion, class, family, sexuality, etc.
i know some schools offer courses in psychology and things like that, so i don’t see why an anthro course would be problematic. the way my high school worked, anybody already teaching at our school could offer any course they were qualified to teach and there was demand for. though my school was pretty unorthodox — i don’t know how others work in terms of how the curriculum is decided upon. and of course the first time you said anything particularly controversial, the school district would be on your ass.
I meant something that would NOT probably get the cops to the school.
Wow.
As a female grade skipper I am thanking my lucky stars here.
I had schools that were generally pretty good, at least in JH and high school. I also think my lack of trauma and harassment was the direct result of being a tomboy ox with no tolerance for being harassed and attacked - sure there were the mean girls shit, but that was all passive agressive. Having a reputation for self-defensive mangling of older kids who physically attacked me probably saved me much grief in the groping and bullying department.
My brother went through several circles of hell, however, as he couldn’t read social cues and he was a boy and therefore expected to be a boy about it or some such bullcrap. We didn’t find out he was aspy until he was 21.
Depending on where S is, there may be free or reduced-fee legal services organizations that focus on children’s rights or even specifically education–call the state or county bar associations to find out. Also, law firms do this kind of work for free if they hear about it from an org like that. I’ve been putting in significant hours on a case for mentally disabled seniors for about 18 months despite being at a large firm that makes its dollars advocating for the megacorporatocracy (no theo-, thank God [or don't]).
I don’t know what to say about skipping/not skipping grades except that I’m eternally grateful for the awesome gifted program at my K-8 PS district. My mom refused to advance me after suffering abuse at the hands of her peers as an advanced student. I don’t think she realized until it was too late that the abuse comes to smart girls no matter what their age. But if not for the gifted program and teachers who responded to my demands for attention I probably would have caused major problems out of boredom. My parents also did the quasi-homeschool thing, filling our home with reference books and educational games. I hated a lot of things about public school, but I loved many of my teachers and needed their encouragement and direction as a younger person. I hope S and N can get N what she needs to thrive, at her current school or elsewhere.
I’m horrified for that little girl and really hope that S is able to handle the situation to her daughter’s best advantage.
And Jesus Christ on a cucumber am I envious of those who attended less-ass-backwards public school districts than I did. Particularly those who were allowed to skipped grades. Public school in my western NY farming community killed my intellectual curiosity dead ’round about age 17 and, as I am 25 today, it’s been 8 years of trying to reawaken it and I’m about ready to give it up for dead. The district cut all gifted programming my first year in it, about age 9, and the next nine years were an exercise in conformity and perpetual boredom. No special provisions for smart kids - especially not girls. There were in fact some pretty clear cases of outright discrimination of which I wish I’d been more cognizant at the time.
The funding of public schools need to be changed. Wealthier communities have better schools and that’s just flat-out unfair. It’s actually depressing me right now, thinking about how miserable I was in school and how impotent I was to stop it and how overworked my parents were and how no one would fucking help me. I can’t get through college because of my issues with school - which started right in kindergarten. Traumatic and damaging. Okay. I’m stopping now, else I shall go on paragraph after paragraph of expletives.
MedeaonCrack:
Yes.
Granted, it’s often hard to tell.
emjaybee:
“There are many things that need smashing, but public education is one of the few fragile threads keeping at least some kids from permanent ignorance and illiteracy. It deserves preservation and improvement.”
Here, here! Thank you.
I hope everything turns out all right for your daughter, S.
Take legal action if necessary. The teachers’ reactions are outrageous and it’s obvious your daughter is not safe at her school. The creeps stalking her are pedophiles and it’s disgusting that the teachers are oblivious to that…
On another note, school systems everywhere are terrible, from what I can tell. I can name two teachers in my entire life that I’ve liked. On the other hand, I despised, and rightfully so, the majority of them. Just today one of my teachers openly mocked homosexuals causing my class to erupt into a giggling fit, as if homosexuals were the funniest thing they’ve ever heard of. I’d say it’s indoctrination but the entire class have been indoctrinated in countless ways their entire lives. Only two of us out of total 32 declared ourselves not to be homophobes. Others actually take pride in calling themselves homophobes and acting on it. I’m just waiting for them to print it on fucking badges.
I swear, sometimes I just want to quit school. Brainwashing is constant and it’s not as if I ever learned anything there unless you count the entire family trees of some insignificant 12th century nobles. I believe it’s worse over here than in the USA, from what I know of the American schooling system. We have 15-17 subjects, all of them obligatory. With tons of homework every day, and a curriculum so detailed and trivial that once, for example, we actually had to learn the GDP of every single country in the world, the torture that is school in my country is unbearable.
Yesterday was graduation celebration day in my country. The graduating classes obliterated six buses in my small city, several graduates got themselves hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and innocent passers-by got flour thrown at their faces. That’s a yearly tradition. And people still ask why that always happens, even though they know perfectly well the rage and stress the school system accumulates in students.
I just hope I finish school before the Church and the religious right manage to implement their sexual education programme (brief summary of said programme: homosexuals go to hell, masturbation is bad for your spirituality, pre-marital sex is a highway to hell, abortion should be banned, plus the inevitable lessons on a blissful husband-wife union…) I honestly hope so, cause if it happens while I’m still in this inferno, I’ll be kicked out of school for skipping sex-ed classes or disrespecting the sex-ed teachers.
Homeschoolling is illegal over here. I’m old enough to quit, but then I’d have no future without a diploma.
I used to mock private-school kids for being rich little snobs (over here there’s only one private high school per city, and they cost a ton). Now I know that, providing I have kids one day, if I ever have enough money for that, they’re going to private school. Definitely not perfect but it’s the lesser of two evils. Also, they won’t have to face the fear of getting pneumonia having PE outdoors during a storm, as I have for years now due to a lack of a decent gym in my 150-year-old school building …
Actually, the phrase is “hear, hear.”
And there you go.
“My son, who had emotional problems due to sexual abuse by his father was abused regularly by classmates while teachers sat idly and did nothing to protect him or even inform me and unfortunately, my self esteem was shot, I was overwhelmed, overworked and too exhausted to know what to do and no one gave me a fucking clue.” kate
That took my breathe away. I don’t cry much anymore so it takes some.
I actually had a fairly good look at precisely how an administration can make or break a school. I was 13 when I started high school. I had a fairly wide circle of acquaintances, since I was “the smart one,” and if I couldn’t tell them what they should do about a problem or assignment, I could tell them where to look or who to ask. I’m not very big, I’ve always gotten along well with teachers, and I’ve always been a little on the mouthy side with my peers. Nobody ever said inappropriate word one to me about a damn thing. The girls I knew never had to put up with anything like this shit in school, because the administration came down on any boy who tried it like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t perfect, but there were some problems at least that we really didn’t have to worry about.
Fast forward four years to when my sister and brother get to the same school with most of the same teachers and the same student-teacher ratio. The new principal and vice-principal can’t give a rat’s ass about anything but their statistics, their salaries, and keeping their names out of the paper. Now there’s a young male teacher openly dating girls he had as students a week after graduation without so much as a stern warning, an older male teacher blatantly ogling female students in class and reportedly skewing the grades of girls who habitually wear revealing tops, routine verbal harassment of female students, non-sexual stalking escalating to threats and outright physical attacks being punished with in-school suspension…the change that’s come over the place in just a few years is absolutely unreal.
Preying mantis, you didn’t go to a school with a “screaming” eagle for a mascot, did you? Because - sheesh. My high school in every detail. And probably not all that atypical, either.
No, our mascot was an unusually fierce manta ray. If you annoyed it, it would spend several years getting bigger, then look you up one day and land on you when you least expected it.
Unfortunately, I’m sure it’s not atypical. Once the idea of consequences for unacceptable behavior is removed from both students and staff, you get a lot of people behaving precisely as they wish, and the inevitable result always seems to be something along the lines of an entitled asshole trying to harass a ten-year-old into a burqa while a bunch of other entitled assholes act like this wouldn’t be happening if she weren’t just so goshdarned cheek-pinchingly oppressable.
Re: schools and home schooling
Most of “my” kids have parents who are holding down two or three jobs apiece. Many of their parents didn’t finish elementary school and are semi-literate in their first languages and illiterate in English. They would love to have the time and resources to home-school but, damn, there’s just no way.
And maybe it’s because my school is small - we know the kids by name - but when someone is harassed we call the parents and the cops. I have personally witnessed a boy in absolute shock when he realized that yes, he was facing a fine and expulsion for bothering a classmate.
I’m not saying we’re perfect or even close. A few years ago I was unable to stop kids from making a gay student’s life miserable - they were just too sneaky and the victim refused to talk. Fucking frustrating. IBTP.
Red Queen may be thinking of a 504 plan, not an IEP. A 504 plan is a legal contract, and that is why many schools won’t mention it to a parent whose child has some special needs, but doesn’t qualify for an IEP due to the lack of severity of their disability.
I have so many mixed feelings about this topic.
Yes, a child has a right to be safe in any school setting, and I agree that legal action should be taken. Far too many school administration condone harassment and bullying.
However, the 9 year-old ( since 9 is the age that the OP stated her daughter started high school)–the 9 year-old who is emotionally and socially equipped to handle even a non-harassing high school setting is a vanishingly rare creature, no matter how ‘intelligent’ they may be in the realm of academics.
The fact that her school system could not,or would not, accomodate her child’s educational needs at the elementary school level, and that a high school setting was deemed appropriate, speaks volumes about the inherent fucked-upness of that school system.
Often, though, parents can be brow-beaten into accepting ’solutions’ offered by the school district that are untenable, simply because the solutions are presented as the only options.
kate said: “Fuck the school administrators, they are worthless, lazy, lying minions of the the municipalities, which across this country are run by brown nosing sycophants who spend their entire lives and everyone else’s money hoping to get a chance to rub up to the upper classes (term being relative there) of the town.”
Well put and very true, and as an exhausted prison guard (aka urban teacher) I know about what I am talking.
I’m one of those teachers trying to break the system from within, but it’s a tough row to hoe. Not only is there the garden variety patriarchal brainwashing described above, but don’t forget that U.S. public schools are becoming military training grounds for imperialism with more and more ROTC programs reaching into the middle grades.
I’m an aspie and there are times when I was deeply obnoxious as a child, because I just didn’t get at first that there were things that were done to or around me that were wrong to imitate. This happens to all kids, but in an aspie it’s amplified and often takes longer to grow out of.
My mom pinched and spanked me to get me to behave; she was the person who spent the most time teaching me how to act, so I imitated her, sometimes pinching and hitting until it was made clear to me that this was an inappropriate way to treat peers. But this was explained to me sometime in the 2nd grade, mind, a point at which not even non-aspies had all gotten that sort of thing out of their systems. My family were members of an evangelistic faith, and it took me until I was a teenager to entirely figure out that it was a bad idea to corner people and lecture them about God. My family still has not figured this out, but they’ve always been more sensitive about which contexts in which it was appropriate. I was often mocked or insulted as a child for my overly formal speech, regardless of content and also by peers in my same faith when talking about secular subjects, and it came to seem normal to me that speech be insulting and sarcastic for rather too long.
Anyway, my point is, aspies definitely have issues figuring out who to imitate and when. It’s hard. We sometimes can’t figure out, and it’s worse when we’re young, why people do things or how they feel about them, so we copy almost haphazardly and at random. But allowing other children to misbehave and not explaining the appropriate way to act to the aspie (as someone else noted) doesn’t do the aspie any favors, it just means that it’s going to take them longer to assimilate into society, which virtually all of us do at some point - perhaps even to the degree that you wouldn’t be able to spot us anymore.
It means that the administration of this young man’s school is being grossly negligent out of some misguided idea of helping him, though it would be easier probably than correcting the behavior of the other boys. Most aspies are deeply relieved when someone takes the time to explain in detail how a particular social situation is supposed to work and will often stick with that rule for safety’s sake until we learn enough to appreciate cases of nuance and variation wherein some other course of action might be all right.
The real problem is that the administration doesn’t see this as an issue. It’s reinforcing behavior in this aspie boy that his peers will understand they can only get away with towards people of lower status, galling but true, while he’ll be oblivious to this nuance and be more likely to get in trouble later on. It’s teaching all of these boys that they’re free to disregard the opinions of girls and women about whether they should continue pursuing them. Because if you don’t even try to teach children the right way to behave, and as juveniles they are recognized by society as having limited responsibility for their actions, then their behavior is partly your fault.
This mother should sue the dang school for allowing and even fostering bullying, which is precisely what this is. Maybe that’s what it needs to be called for these people to take it seriously, to use a word that describes something that could happen to a boy and see if they get it.
roamaround, so true! I have no idea why Marine/Army/Navy/Coast Guard recruiters are allowed access to high school students’ information.
Parents may specifically opt out to prevent a school from reporting student information to military recruiting. The problem is that most parents are not aware of this right. I still haven’t figured out how to prevent military recruiters from getting this info while allowing college recruiters to have access to my child’s info.
Here’s the link for forms to opt out:
http://www.militaryfreeschools.org/forms.html
Tell your friends!
Several commenters above have stressed their concerns about 10-year-olds who aren’t prepared socially or emotionally for high school being placed there for the academic challenge. Regardless of how you feel about putting priority on keeping kids with their age groups as opposed to putting them at the most academically-appropriate level, shouldn’t we be more concerned about the social and emotional maturity of the boys doing the harassing?
This doesn’t sit well with me and I think the reason is that it feels like another way of blaming the victim. Girl gets skipped ahead several grades, boys engage in sick and pedophilic sexual harassment, school does nothing but blame the victim (”but she’s so cute!”). The reasonable response doesn’t seem to me to be “she isn’t emotionally ready.” In fact, having dealt with serious stalking for all 4 years of high school, the fact that this girl hasn’t had a complete nervous breakdown indicates to me that she’s very mature for being a 10-year-old. (Not to mention that she possesses enviable strength of character.) Why should the response to this situation be to question her right to be there?
Personal aside about school: lucizoe, when I read your comment I almost thought we went to the same school in western NY, but our mascot was the “saints” and not an eagle. I went to a semi-rural district at the lower end of mediocre with no chance of transferring to a magnet or otherwise unconventional school because I wasn’t in the city district (which would have been Rochester). The gifted program was 4th and 5th grade and consisted mostly of doing book reports and making paper-mache rainforest animals (needless to say, I dropped out after the first year). I’m now in a PhD program and am so envious of others I meet whose public schools had electives, encouraged them to take AP classes, had more than 15% of their graduates attend college, etc. I begged my mom to let me skip a grade and she wouldn’t let me, and I still wish to this day I had, mostly because I couldn’t wait to get out of that place. Maybe this is also why I took some offense at the questioning of the girl’s “readiness”; I was more emotionally mature than most of the other kids my age and would have really benefited from getting away from them in my opinion. Most of my friends were older than me and it was disheartening in my senior year when they had all graduated before me.
Sorry about the long post. Reading the comments really brought up a bunch of (angry) memories of high school, especially because the majority of my anger was caused by idiotic administrators (yeah, the ones who wouldn’t do anaything about my extremely persistent stalker).
It may have been written earlier in the comments but, it seems to me that a lawsuit might be in order here.
Correction: anything, not “anaything.”
By the way, are any others having serious problems with the comment box now that this preview is here? My typing only shows up (in the typing box) about 5-10 seconds after I type it, resulting in unfortunate typos.
my kids’ schools did not have military recruiters, but you had better believe that the selective service knows all the particulars about my son, anyway. and both son and daughter have been recruited extensively by mail.
hell, the military is so desperate that the navy tried to recruit ME for a year, via email. these people have no standards anymore.
i don’t really get how “10 year olds should not be put into the noxious social situation that is high school” is tatamount to “blaming the victim”, here.
i mean, if a bunch of miners get trapped in an obvious death trap of a coal mine, and then they luckily get rescued and survive the experience, and the mining company decides to change its safety standards, is that “blaming the victim”? no, it’s rescuing someone from a scary situation that is going to fuck them up, and then trying to change things to make sure that situation isn’t going to happen anymore.
being helped into a more workable educational program is not punishment or blaming. it’s what needs to happen. similarly, pointing out that this is a systematic problem which isn’t going to go away if you expell the boys. of course, without pointing out that the problem is systematic and doing something to change things, pulling the girl out of the situation is tatamount to a bandaid. but even a bandaid is better than bleeding to death.
i know it’s easy to romanticize “what if my parents had let me skip a grade”. but believe me, you really don’t know the half of it. and i say this as someone whose recourse after the skipping was a failure ended up being a cutesy “enrichment” program just like the ones y’all describe.
Jesus fuck, that story made my stomach turn. I think even my toenails are puking. I want to fly over there and smash the holy shit out of each of those crazy jerkwads into oblivion. They are not entitled to her, they are not entitled to her, they are NOT ENTITLED TO HER.
She, however, has the right to an educational environment that is free from harassment.
Oh wah, one of the predators has Aspergers. Not a fucking excuse.
The other predators, well…”boys will be boys”, right? NOT A FUCKING EXCUSE.
The boys think she’s “cute”?? That’s supposed to excuse their sicko behavior, because attractive girls are supposed to be natural receptacles for male lust? FUCK THAT.
Those teachers need to be fired or at least have their jobs threatened, because that sort of shit HAS GOT TO STOP.
Ugh, I’m so disgusted. She deserves to be protected. All women and girls have the right to be protected.
My son’s school covers grades 6 through 12. I was concerned about the older kids and how they’d treat the younger, but they are incredibly supportive and it’s a real community. The school works really hard at setting values and reinforcing them. I don’t think it’s an inherently impossible situation to have young children be safe around older children.
I think public schools can work if they’re done right. Problem is, they’re not really done right in way too many places. Running the place like a prison is incredibly infantilizing (asking permission to piss? My god) and does little to teach children about responsibility and decent behavior. And in an atmosphere where obedience is prized over the ability to learn, this just reinforces a patriarchal system, which puts a premium on dominance. What public schools should do is be less like prisons. They should be decent places to learn and should be places where children are taught that it’s not okay to other people.
As a part-time assistant teacher I will attest to the absolutely ridiculous and shitty-ass ways we raise boys in this culture to be a bunch of harassing and mentally-disabled jerks. Most of the kids with learning disabilities in public schools are boys, and it’s not genetic or biological. It’s because we raise them to have no responsibility, to act out violently, to not listen to others (especially girls and women). It just makes me sick the way girls are constantly harassed and made to feel unsafe in schools, and I agree whole-heartedly with Mali. The solution is to fix boys, not change what we do with girls. Boys are the ones taught to enact and perpetuate patriarchy, they are thus the source of the problem that we can make right by raising them to respect girls and women and to truly see them as freaking human beings! It is so sad too to see the ways the little boys in my educational program (even as young as 5!) are pressured to reject any natural innocent impulse so they can be “manly.” It makes my stomach turn.
And I will also attest to the absolutely shitty state that public schools are in as far as “education.” Most of the kids come in with homework directions they can barely even READ! These poor kids are getting screwed over so that they are trained to become complacent hyper-consumers in a patriarchal White Supremacist capitalist country. Minority and African American children are screwed over the worst. Ugh! It makes me so mad and so sad at the same time!
“I don’t think it’s an inherently impossible situation to have young children be safe around older children.”
i would imagine that at your sons’ school, the younger kids encompass an entirely seperate grade from the older kids and have different schedules, teachers, curricula, etc. i would also assume that your sons weren’t the only 12 year olds in the whole school when they started 6th grade there. the problem is not that older kids and younger kids can’t coexist, the problem is more with hyper-acceleration (and also being a ’smart’ girl in general), in the ways we’ve described above.
I want to state, again, that I was in no way blaming the victim.
I am blaming the school system, and then the harassing boys, and the school.
As an educator, familiar with the wily and lazy-assed operating mode of school administrations, I strongly suspect that the school system nudged this child into the high school setting.
This would be a much less costly solution for them than providing her with the educational content she needed with her same-aged peers.
High schools, btw, are rotten with misogyny and harassment. They always have been. And until the patriarchy is overthrown, they will continue to be.
But absolutely, we have to fight this, and ensure that our daughters are as safe as humanly possible, while we also try to provide them with the tools they need to maintain themselves in the face of grinding oppression.
But you know what? 9 and 10 year-olds, no matter how brilliant, are not emotionally and socially equipped to deal with this. EVen in situations without the overt harassment this poor child has experienced, ( and which absolutely needs to be addressed, in the criminal courts, preferrably.)
There’s a reason we don’t simply equip automobiles with brake-pedal extenders and adapted seats and let our school-aged kids loose on the highways. Even the brilliant ones.
Acknowledging that it takes time and experience to develop a wide range of skills, and the judgment about when and how to apply them, is not the same as ageism.
I just graduated high school. Yes, it can be a tool of the man, but several teachers and my favorite librarian were all certified patriarchy blamers/smashers, so high school really wasn’t so bad after all.
That said… school and I have never gotten along. I’m a brilliant and creative young woman who has well formed ideas and articulates them well. So of course I get called a bitch plenty, a freak/weirdo plenty (I don’t even fit into the porno appearance mold! zomg!), and heard far too many “you ask too many questions” when I was a kid.
My point was that the girl’s presence is less of a problem than the boys’ behavior, and a few (not most, by any stretch) of the commenters above were wording it as the opposite.
To go along with the mining analogy, I would see dealing with the boys’ behavior in an effective way as increasing the safety standards. Taking the girl out of a situation that is more academically appropriate for her sounds like removing all the miners that got hurt and not letting them work in the mine anymore.
Addressing the boys and creating a safer situation overall strikes me as doing more good in general than the adults who are supposedly on this girl’s side kicking her back down to an unchallenging level where she’ll be bored, because other kids in the school can’t control themselves.
“sexual education programme (brief summary of said programme: homosexuals go to hell, masturbation is bad for your spirituality, pre-marital sex is a highway to hell, abortion should be banned, plus the inevitable lessons on a blissful husband-wife union.”
This isn’t actually an education, it’s shouting ignorance at people.
Mali, you are completely missing my point.
HIgh school is not an appropriate placement for brilliant school aged children, because they are not developmentally equipped to deal with the advanced social/emotional demands of interacting all day long with adolescents, particularly if they are the only child in thatt school placement.
To quote the OP:
She likes cats, dogs and ponies…she has a prepubescent body and a heart to match.
This kind of placement is a cop out by the school system, which does not want to invest money, time and energy into appropriately producing a curriculum that meets the needs of advanced younger students.
I stand by my point, even in sijtuations where there is not any abuse.
Andyes, for the third time, abuse should not be tolerated, and those who abuse and harass should be dealt with in the criminal court system.
I skipped the second half of second grade and the first part of third grade. I have absolutely no doubt it was the right thing for me; it got me out of the daily boredom of second grade. Boredom isn’t even the right word for it; it was more like depression, like sensory deprivation, like watching someone cut out my brain cells a slice at a time while telling me I was a good girl.
Did I get shit from fellow students for skipping? Of course. Be intelligent and female in America’s public schools and in all but the most exceptional cases you’ll either (a) get called a dyke, or (b) get put into a situation like this one. Or both.
And here’s something even more disturbing that I learned: some teachers will blame the victim just because it’s easier. Blame the bully — they might fight back. So you get bullshit situations like the teacher who told me it was my problem that I couldn’t “get along” with the bully who happened to like punching me and hitting me with those metal-and-plastic chairs. (When I refused to sit next to him because I knew he’d punch me, guess who got the demerits? That’s right.)
So yes, being a smart girl in a normal school is usually a fucked up experience. Absolutely no doubt about that.
But I refuse to believe that it’s just the way things are, and that nothing can be done about it. Fuck that shit.
I started taking high school science when I was ten. I was brought over for just that class, and the teacher was firmly on-board with the program and supervised the situation. That was one of the few classes I didn’t have issues with.
The choice shouldn’t have to be between suicidal boredom or harassment. There are ways to give gifted kids an ok experience, even working within the public school system. I just wish more people in the school systems gave a shit about trying to find them.
(And as a coda, I second the yay! magnet schools comments from above. Or if not magnet schools, or boarding schools, then at least some kind of summer program for kids who care deeply about something your daughter loves. Doesn’t matter what it is, even — just something they’re passionate about, because kids who are passionate enough about something to go to a summer camp for it generally have a lot on the ball in other ways. Knowing there are other people out there who give a shit is a powerful magic.)
Former ten year-old:
If you skipped from second into third grade, how on earth did you end up in high school at the age of 10?
The math there is not computing for me.
Sorry, I missed the last part of your post.
But there is a real difference between taking one advanced class, closely supervised, and being thrown into high school all day long and expected to deal.
Texas blamers with high school age daughters who favor the traditional 8-hours-in-a-prison model might be able to take advantage of one of the new Young Women’s Leadership schools sprouting up in the larger cities. In Dallas you’ve got your Irma Rangel School, and here in Austin there’s the Ann Richards branch. Other versions will be popping up soon in Houston and San Antonio, and I think Lubbock (or was it Amarillo?). There’s talk of starting one in Juarez, Mexico. These are single-sex, college prep public schools. They have high academic standards and expect every kid to graduate and go to college. I possess this seemingly out-of-character information because I am on the board of a foundation that funds them; if the schools stop cutting the mustard, the foundation stops funding them.
So far my single contribution to the enterprise has been to insist that Latin be offered as an elective. At the next meeting I’m gonna go for Women’s Studies, but since the rest of the board are Republicans who think God is real, it’s gonna be a tough sell. So I haven’t bothered to suggest they just give the kids library cards and ask’em to pop by the science lab every couple of months to look at amoebas.
Ooh, the preview thing is gone, and I can type fast again. I started taking high-school classes at 13 and college courses at 15. I received zero support from counselors and administrators and even less support from the university. They didn’t know what to do to get me enrolled in the proper classes, they sent me back and forth between the same people, and they basically made me figure everything out on my own. The worst part was that I wasn’t the first or last person to dual-enroll in a high school and in a college. Every bright student who attempted dual enrollment had to find out what to do from word of mouth, learning from the mistakes of past students. Plus the whole thing was expensive because they wouldn’t pay for my courses and wouldn’t provide me transportation. Perhaps I will be unpopular for saying this, but why can’t we have ability grouping in public schools? I know that AP classes in high school start to group students naturally, but in elementary school, middle school, and junior high school, there was the most unsatisfactory homogeneous education ever.
Why are public school systems better in other countries? Why do students from other countries test better in math and science than American students?
I second your suggestion for “ability-groupings.” I think it would definitely be trickier than adolescent and adult education. There I think the classes themselves (can) carry the strucuring element to sort out those who can hack it and those who cannot.
When subject matter is closely and critically engaged, the abilities of students will show themselves more clearly. When they can’t defer to test-taking skills, they show where they are at. It is for this reason that not many Freshman (in college) take 400-level classes. It is for this reason that I (request to) take 500-level classes, because I can be mostly assured that I’m the only undergraduate in the course.
I haven’t been in grade-school for about 10 years, so it is hard to say how to parse out students of differing abilities. I fear that people would want to do it via some kind of test. I really think that the subject matter itself should be the test. At such a young age, though, you aren’t reading shakespeare and talking about economics in feudal Japan; and if you show an obvious propensity and desire to do those sorts of things, you get moved to where you belong.
I didn’t go to public school but I wanted to chime in to say I had a much better high school experience than middle school experience. Middle schools are, IMO, the real breeding grounds for abuse and harassment of girls. My class was extremely small and were stuck with each other from grades 4-8. It was revolting. I remember nothing of the intellectual “match” for me, frankly, but I do recall being miserable because of the small-mindedness, immaturity, and stifling lack of choice *socially*. At least high school widened the social horizon and afforded *gasp!* exposure to different personalities and ideas, and boys who did not regularly attach maxi pads to the outside of their clothing in an effort to humiliate girls (although some still did, lest you think it was just a function of growing out of it). I don’t agree that high school is an inherently terrifying or soul-crushing experience…I think *adolescence* is inherently difficult and tumultuous, sure, but conflating the two is a cop-out and lets school administrators and teachers off the hook. (Although I do agree that schools in general are capitalist / patriarchal training camps; that’s what they were designed to be). It’s not written in stone, though, that the most healthy / satisfying socialization MUST take place among exactly age-matched peers. Nor is it accurate to assume, in the case here, that these high school kids are *normal* for their age and it’s the 10-year-old who’s not at their level emotionally. Prepubescent or not.
Much more should be done for this girl, and the net effect examined, before anyone should send her the message *you are the problem* by removing her from the school. You know, Charles, a lot of us women have been hearing that *you are the problem* thing for most of our lives…you know, like, oh, you aren’t comfortable in that bar/restaurant/store/workplace/classroom/outdoor space because you’re getting whistled at, come on to, patronized, harassed, groped, etc, etc? Well, then, don’t go there anymore, transfer out, choose a different way home, stay in your safer places, don’t go out alone. Don’t want that kind of attention? This is how you should dress, and act, and speak, to avoid such attention, then. And the aggressors don’t have to change a damn thing. Then our world shrinks and theirs gets bigger. Fuck that.
I vote we all storm that school and take down names.
I’m curious to know what TYPE of schooling the brilliant blamers had? Seems to me the loathsome system turned out some really smart, accomplished and accredited Blamers.
As one of the “brilliant blamers” who was a gifted kid, skipped up a grade and put into advanced classes…
I went through the public school system very recently, the hurly-burly of IB and AP classes. I was “honors tracked” from the time I was in second grade, which was (if I recall correctly) when I was 6. Although I felt that my education prepared me very well in some ways (I had excellent instruction on grammar, spelling, and how to write papers) it did not prepare me at all in other ways (I was gender-blasted into believing I couldn’t do math; I slept through pretty much every class except English and Anthropology, which was taught by a fabulous feminist that wouldn’t take no guff; I felt alienated from my peers in a way that didn’t go away until I made it to college). I will never, ever subject my children to that — not because my soul was crushed or I didn’t learn (though most of my learning took place outside the classroom) but simply because I had the best of all possible situations (we had Anthropology in high school, for heaven’s sake!) and I was still very miserable.
I doubled up all my classes in my senior year and got the hell out. In order to do so, I had to take some classes at a high school for pregnant mothers, because they wouldn’t let me take regular summer school. Some of my classmates still, apparently, think I dropped out because I “got knocked up.”
Ick.
Anyhow, I sympathize with S’s choice to put her daughter into high school, and I think it’s the best of a bunch of bad options. But I don’t see what the other choices are, if S can’t home school. Even just being one year ahead of my classmates, I wasn’t prepared to deal with some of the things that were thrown at me — but I would genuinely have gone bananas if I had been held back. I don’t think I ever would have read a book again, I would have just turned crazy. My mom always says “we knew we were close to losing you when you were five. That’s why we skipped you ahead.”
What really needs to happen is just what Twisty said — smash that goddamned patriarchy, get it out of there.
(Speaking of which: even in the gifted program I only ever had two books, that I can remember, that were written by women in my English classes: The House on Mango St. and Mrs. Dalloway. The boys in my class slagged on them like nothing else. They were too boring, too femme. I don’t remember any teacher ever forcing those boys to confront their hatred of the female author. Even in the highest level English class that the California public school system offers, they were allowed to sit around and tell me I was a nutjob for wanting to read books that were written by my own people. Ick!)
“Ability grouping” elementary school kids is the worst idea ever, and here’s why:
Not everybody develops intellectually, socially, emotionally, or creatively at the same rate or to the same degree. Say I’m in 3rd grade and in the middle of the road class for reading/spelling/English. I could be a great thinker, good vocabulary, good understanding, but still have trouble with spelling and the actual act of reading a word. Over the summer I get much better, but I’ve already been enrolled in middle of the road 4th grade. Now I’m bored out of my mind.
Leveling classes at older ages makes sense because by the time puberty rolls around, many kids are getting a sense of where their strengths and interests actually are, and whether or not they’re willing to work hard for them.
At 6? 8? 10? Not so much.
Just chiming in to say I am loving this conversation. I love hearing from all the parents, students, teachers, former teachers, spouses of teachers, homeschoolers, and unschoolers! I know I should have homeschooled my son–he was a square peg in a round hole over at the elementary school–but when I really thought about it, I was worried I would strangle him. I’m not proud of this. (But I love the comment by Norbizness!) My children are now 27, 24, and 21 (a boy and two girls, respectively). They turned out to be charming, complicated, exasperating individuals all, just like most people I know and love.
I was tested and designated as gifted in 2nd grade. I loved the daily half hour pull-out program I was in from then on (through 6th grade). But I loved the rest of school too. As a fifth grade teacher, I am always amazed at the bright students who will allow themselves to be bored. I know it’s my job to challenge them, and I do the best I can, but I’m only human. One lesson stands out in particular: divisibility. The students were learning how to determine if a number is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 9. I asked them to come up with a 5-digit number that would be divisible by 3. One bright boy wrote, in a very bored fashion, “33333.” It dawned on me that when I was in fifth grade I would have come up with the most complicated number I could possibly think of! Without thinking about it or even realizing what I was doing, I quite naturally made school fun for myself. It always surprises me when students don’t do this.
I was bright and I was not bored for one minute in school.
I work (maintenance) at a community college that has programs for high school folks and it seems to work pretty well.
My first memory of college was the shock that people weren’t interested in harassing me like high school; not that it was totally free of it but it wasn’t #1 on the agenda like I was used to. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the administration at my high school appeared to approve of bullying as a social control. I don’t know about the others but it sure didn’t work on me. I wanted to go to the alternative school or graduate a year early (at 16) but my mother wouldn’t let me-she didn’t believe what was going on because her small-town school experience was so blissful.
Being within the system, albeit “higher ed” and maintenance at that, I can tell you that a lot of teachers are radical but are constrained by the status-seeking, job-jumping, top heavy administration that sucks the life out of every good idea. My friends in the k12 system report the same. We (groundskeepers, custodians, teachers) tend to stay for decades while the average administrator stays 3-5 years. Guess who trains these fools? We usually have to spank them repeatedly with the union contract to make them pay attention and disabuse them of really stupid ideas that won’t fly. Meanwhile the students suffer. We had all these creeps from private business in the ’90’s and after they snuck off with tails between legs as the economy fell, we began getting retired military jerks-gah!
The work mostly gets done on a horizontal level because of the ineffectiveness of these idiots and we subvert their actions as often as is necessary to provide for our students. If they all went down in a plane over the ocean the place would run just fine.
I’m happy to learn that the situation is under control. The whole thing blows my MIND. WTF indeed.
I was a hard case as a first-grader. I was reading at a college level and bored beyond belief, but I had poor spatial abilities: I just didn’t “get” fractions, or rotating triangles, or anything that required me to move things around in my head. I was also super-tiny; I looked like an elf! Skipping grades? Not bloody likely.
What to do? My teacher and my mother had a meeting and decided 1) they would never tell me my IQ, and they’d encourage me to believe I was “normal;” 2) I’d spend half the day with the “big kids” and half with my peers; and 3) I’d have gymclass, eat lunch and play in the schoolyard with my peers. At first things worked out fine. I learned to wear shorts under my skirts and dresses because the “big” boys would gang up on me in the halls so they could all see my underpants, so that part sucked. However, I had a GREAT teacher who had me sit close to her so that I wouldn’t be bothered in class.
Then she died, and the substitute teacher never quite got on the Klue Train. She sent me to the back of the class with the “big boys” and wouldn’t let me leave early to eat lunch with my grade. The whole experiment ended when I disappeared one day: Eventually they found me hiding behind the coats in the hallway. Oh well.
I don’t know the answer, probably because every child needs his/her education tailored to his/her needs. However, I think social considerations are EQUALLY as important as academic considerations. My cousins dealt with their son’s brain by keeping him with his grade, but by giving him different work. Also, his teacher would let him go to the library whenever he got bored. Actually, I think the library was the best part of the deal! So far as I can tell he thrived BOTH academically and socially, and once he was old enough for his size/age not to matter he graduated from college while still in his teens.
V, I’m sorry that we’re both talking over each other here. I was addressing a different point than you are, not willfully missing yours. For what it’s worth, you are not one of the commenters whose attitude rubbed me the wrong way with instantly jumping to say that the girl has no place there to begin with.
I agree with you that putting a kid like that in high school in order to address her academic needs is probably not the best solution, or even a particularly good one. What bothered me was the writer’s description of her daughter’s happiness at being in those classes (even amongst this crap), and thinking of how she might perceive being pulled back out of them: that her harrassers were right that she didn’t belong there, and that the right thing to do is appease them. That harrassing someone will have the intended result, and you’ll get your way. I would find that pretty demoralizing at that age (especially because things seem so large and so personal) and it didn’t feel like it’s sending the right message to any of the parties involved.
I’m upset and frustrated at this girl’s situation because I don’t think the situation she is in is good, but I can’t imagine a school like the one I went to even accelerating someone (I don’t know of anyone who ever was), let alone coming up with a specialized plan of more challenging material for just one student. If she does go to a school that would do it, I agree that it would be much better - but it didn’t occur to me that any school would do that, again because of my personal shitty experience in the past.
For Texas blamers:
Texas Tech has a distance learning program for K-12. It is more affordable than private schools, so it might help some families out there. It might be a good option for a gifted student stuck in high school. There’s info about testing out of courses, too.
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/ode/ttuisd.asp
regarding my life as a “brilliant blamer” and what kind of education i ended up with: basically a hodgepodge of skipping, gifted programs, private school, honors classes, and magnet school, depending on my age, the abilities of my parents, and what happened to be available.
oddly enough, standardized testing was a big help, and put me on the gravy train of summer programs and boarding/magnet schools. my private elementary administered the Iowa Skills Test every year, which is one of the tests that the major national-level gifted programs use to find the kids who need their services. due to scoring at a certain percentile in a certain year, i was scouted out by the Duke TIP program, which invites eligible 6th & 7th graders to take the SAT or ACT, and depending on your scores on those tests, you become eligible for all sorts of exciting stuff (and regardless of how you do on the SAT/ACT, you remain on TIP’s radar aka mailing list which means you at least hear about various oppurtunities for academically inclined kids).
funny enough, i kinda can’t believe i’m actually recommending that people try to run through the gauntlet that is the gifted fast track system in the US — i feel pretty conflicted about the whole concept of being “gifted” and getting preferential treatment for it. but you know, it’s probably better than being a 10 year old in high school.
There has been ability grouping throughout the history of elementary education. It is most often called “tracking.” If you remember being in the “blue” reading group or the “red” reading group or the “cardinals” or the “canaries” math group or whatever, where a small group of students took turns going up to the teacher’s u-shaped table for a few minutes during reading time, then you were tracked. Tracking is often disasterous in that it does just what the name implies: it tracks students into a preconcieved arbitrary rut that they are stuck with for the next 12 years. And, it still usually does not address the needs of highly gifted students such as those who can handle highschool chemistry at the age of ten.
To give an example: my sister had trouble in reading in 1st grade. Looking back, she thinks it was because she didn’t go to preschool and was a very young kindergartener at age 4 when she started. She was tracked low in everything, and even labeled learning disabled because she flipped some of her letters. This low tracking went on throughout elementary school until 6th grade. Then, the teacher was getting ready to give a test for advanced placement in junior high. She had a list of the high tracked kids to give it to. Then she had a heart attack and the sub who came in had no idea who was supposed to take the tests, so she gave it to everyone. My sister got high marks in everything and in junior high was able to take advanced placement math, science and english courses. This success built on itself in highschool and then college. As one of the top high school students, she was able to get a bunch of college credits and scholarships. As a teacher, I saw kids who were tracked both low and high get pigeon-holed into the prison that wa the expectations of their teachers and parents. Elementary school is WAY TOO EARLY to be making any kind of ‘ability level’ decisions about anyone that will follow them for the rest of their lives.
In public education, I think one of the main answers is lowering class size to about ten students of mixed ability levels and creating individualized plans for each. This will never happen, but that would go far in solving some of these issues. As for harrassment, the teacher and administration set the tone to either allow that or not. It makes all the difference. I taught Special ed students with multiple disabilities, and sometimes we would mainstream them into a wonderful, supportive classroom. Other times they would go into the classroom of hell, where they were constantly bullied. This was LARGELY due to what tone the teacher set and how they dealt with their own prejudices about my students. This might be why some of my own experiences of being treated unfairly as a girl more often occurred when their was a male teacher.
One more thing then I’ll shut up. I have a memory of being molested by another student in the second grade. I was seven, and during a fire drill another second grader shoved his hands up my shorts and around my private areas and then laughed about it with his friends. I remember telling my mother about it and being horribly embarrassed. She talked to the teacher and I begged them both to let the whole thing drop because it was so embarrassing. They did. Looking back now, I can’t believe that they let that drop. Or let me go on being so embarrassed by it when I did nothing wrong. That kid, who I’ve totally lost track of, was a little misogynist in the making. If we don’t stop little boys at seven, or ten, or fifteen…what do we think is going to happen to them as adults? Taking a ten year old girl out of highschool may or may not be the answer for that particular girl, but overall it does nothing to stop the issue of boys who treat girls like crap. I got really irritated after the Columbine thing when all these talk shows like Oprah had shows where they talked about freaks and geeks and had them on as guests to talk about why they are being bullied and then never, ever addressed the so-called “popular” kids that were doing the bullying. The whole mentality in school is that if you are getting bullied or harassed, then it means their is something wrong with YOU. Too bad you are smart, or have an individual fashion sense, or god-forbid are a girl. You get what’s coming to you.
Please forgive some of my spelling and gramatical errors and my constant misuse of the word “their.” Really, I know how to write a sentence, but I am visually impaired and use screen-reading software that makes it very hard to proofread in comment boxes. Thanks for putting up with my comments anyway.
note that i DO think the bullies (in this case and all cases) ought to be disciplined. of course. the problem is that it’s not just a matter of “x girl is getting harrassed, let’s expel y boy and it will obviously be fixed,” because for every boy you expell, another one crops up. when i was harrassed in school, it wasn’t just one boy, or even one small group of boys. in small schools, it was ALL the boys, and in larger schools, it was a complex network of boys who generally ran in different social circles and may not have even known each other (basically “any boy who felt like harrassing me”). so there wasn’t even a ringleader you could discipline. every boy in school would have needed to be expelled for me not to ever be harrassed.
in order to stop the bullying, you need to create an educational environment that doesn’t teach boys to do this. you can’t raise boys to be harrassers and abusers and then slap them on the wrist when they grow up to do exactly what you taught them. individual punishments don’t do very much, because for every kid you punish, another 5 pick up the slack.
basically, what i’m saying here is IBTP.
MedeaonCrack:
There are men who don’t have “asperger’s�
Bubbas’ Nightmare
Yes.
Granted, it’s often hard to tell.
I’m not sure I understand these jokes that are sliding by. Is it that men are assholes, so you can’t tell them apart from people with Asperger’s? I hope not.
My daughter - a stunning large-breasted 9-year-old whom I home-schooled for a variety of intellectual, social, developmental, and religious reasons - sent me the link to your site months ago. Three cheers for this mother’s outrage. What the hell is wrong with this school (this world)? This is a CHILD!
My own babe (pun intended) enjoyed the wholesome companionship of her three brothers, pursued her many interests, skipped the hell of junior high, and entered an Ivy college in her teens.
She remains a strong independent woman who still insists that a man talk to her face not her chest. This year, at 24, she moves to the Middle East to pursue the work she loves. K, if you are reading this, you know my respect for you as an amzing woman that I’m proud to have as a friend.
“a stunning large-breasted 9-year-old”
Seven words I never expected to see in these comments, particularly in conjunction with “sent me the link to your site.”
De-lurking briefly to add to the conversation on Asperger’s - so glad, Twisty, that this is an Asperger’s-friendly blog.
In several provinces of Canada special-needs funding has been cut by conservative governments and many kids diagnosed with Asperger’s are getting less help than they deserve. My ten-year-old brother has Asperger’s and is a really sensitive, gentle little guy who bursts into tears at the drop of a hat. But in recent years the other boys at his public school have been teaching him really nasty stuff, and it’s only going to get worse. Thankfully his mother is a really fierce advocate on his behalf, but she has to fight tooth and nail to get the teachers and admin to tell her what’s really going on in the classroom and the schoolyard. My parents are contemplating homeschooling him because the kids in his class are vicious and the teachers aren’t willing to do anything about the bullying. Every time they talk about homeschooling to the therapists, though, they are told to “leave him in school because he needs to learn how to be social.” Well, if learning to be social means learning to be a frickin’ violent misogynist asshole along with everyone else, I say let him stay home where he’s safe.
When I read letters like this I’m worried as hell about the public school system, and what nasty little misogynist 10-year-olds are doing to girls and vulnerable boys who just want to get through a day without being harassed. Posters above are exactly right - the educational environment has GOT to be changed to teach kids to respect each other. And if legal action is the only way for S. to protect her daughter, I say go for it. Kick some misogynist ass! IBTP.
As a former one of those (SLB 9 yr old) who is considerably older and in the process of reduction mammoplasty (so many years and so mucb pain both physical and emotional too late) I have to say I fear for this child. And not only for what will be visited upon her from outside her family.
Sorry I was so shocked by the phraseology there, that I missed the child is now 24. I’m still just as shocked by the word choice and what that means, to me.
Preliminary disclosures: 1. First time blamer. 2. I have not yet read all of the comments; I’m on deadline. However, I feel strongly about this issue.
Single-sex education was the best thing that ever happened to me. After continual sexual harassment throughout private, co-ed middle school, my all girls (private) high school was nirvana. I was introduced to feminist theory in honors English. Nurse practioners taught us to do self breast exams in junior year health class. No it was not perfect or insulated from the general badness of the patriarchy, but it was a fabulous environment. Remove boys and girls get to be people.
S - If there is any way possible to get your daughter into an all-girls school, DO IT! High school, local college, whatever. Don’t automatically discount parochial schools. 13 years with various nuns didn’t make me a papist. Also, parochial schools often have need-based funding as part of their institutional mission.
There are also a lot of girls-only activities that your daughter can get involved in immediately. Girl Scouts can be fabulous if you find the right troop. Girl’s Incorporated is a great organization with resources for both you and your daughter.
Oh, and sue the hell out of the school district that allowed this to happen.
clemson(dot)edu/newsroom/articles/2007/february/girlscouts(dot)php5
“Seventy girls, in 4th-12th grades, from across the state will attend the workshop sponsored by Clemson’s Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program, Lockheed Martin and Girl Scouts of the Old 96 Council. The girls will mix chemicals to create shampoo, conduct weather experiments and create robots.”
This program is well-known in Canada and the UK and includes mentoring of students by veted women in science, and summer schools.
V said: HIgh school is not an appropriate placement for brilliant school aged children, because they are not developmentally equipped to deal with the advanced social/emotional demands of interacting all day long with adolescents, particularly if they are the only child in thatt school placement.
I have to disagree with this. Most studies on this very topic have reported positive results for those gifted children grade-skipped ahead to high-school. Gifted children are developmentally equipped to deal with adolescents who are at their own level of intellectual development, THAT is the most important element that researchers have discovered, and their emotional and social adjustment follows on naturally from there. Those who are satisfied on the cognitive level tend to be better adjust socially and emotionally, even though they are dealing with adolescents when they are 10.
Of course, the above is predicated on the fact that this is well-behaved adolescents we are talking about and not out-of-control thugs, bullies and rapists. The problem here is not with the 10 year old girl but, as always, with the society or school system that allows sexual discrimination and bullying as part of its regular program of activities. I’m outraged at the behaviour of these boys, the teachers and the school. They have a duty of care towards that girl and should be reminded of it. I only wish I wasn’t on the other side of the world or I’d offer to storm the school with her mother and beat them over the head with a clue stick.
I highly recommend the book Genius Denied by Jan and Bob Davidson. It really changed my life. Before reading this book, I had accepted as inevitable the second-class treatment of gifted students. Now I know we must demand better. If you want to know more, the book has a website: http://www.geniusdenied.com/
the opononax said: funny enough, i kinda can’t believe i’m actually recommending that people try to run through the gauntlet that is the gifted fast track system in the US — i feel pretty conflicted about the whole concept of being “gifted†and getting preferential treatment for it. but you know, it’s probably better than being a 10 year old in high school.
I find this very interesting. Can you expand upon why you feel conflicted about being fast-tracked for being gifted?
I don’t know much about the US system and there isn’t really much of a gifted thing going on here in Australia. There certainly wasn’t when I was going through school in the 70’s in a tiny country town in the middle of nowhere. In primary school I was ostracised when I missed a year of school due to illness and still managed to top Year 6, despite coming back 1/2 the way into the year. In high school I went underground and pretty much hid the smarts so as not to get the same treatment. Being a smart woman is not something you want to be in our society because, in my experience, it can hardly wait to slap you down.
i mainly feel conflicted about it because i don’t think i am particularly gifted, or really, i don’t think anybody particularly is.
i’m pretty sure that most of the differences between a “gifted” kid and a “regular” kid are a combination of factors from random accident, to cultural biases playing themselves out.
i started kindergarten at a montessori which was connected to my family’s church, which is the only way we would ever have been able to afford it (i.e. if we were muslim or jewish or fundie xtian or atheist, none of it would ever have happened). my teacher happened to be working on a masters in ed, specializing in gifted kids. i was white and cute and articulate and clean and dressed nicely and spoke english as a first language, as well as being outspoken and precocious. nothing except for the precocious part is necessarily a “meritocracy” kind of thing. this teacher mentioned to my mother (who was involved at the school, being a SAHM at the time) that she thought i should be IQ tested. my parents were interested and had the time and resources to make this happen. i worked the same magic on the IQ tester (though, ok, i guess i couldn’t have done this if i was a complete moron), and the rest is history.
other than the extreme harrassment i faced due to being a “smart girl”, i was basically given a free pass to academic acheivement, from the age of about 5. not really due to any inherent qualities about me, and almost entirely due to race & class benefits, as well as a little bit of pure accident.
that said, by the time i got to the magnet high school, there was a smattering of poor students and students of color who probably acheived it by wits alone. those kids deserved to be there far more than i ever did.
Just wanted to chip in about tracking –
Tracking is in itself often a very subjective, very biased thing.
When I was in kindergarten, we were tracked into reading groups. There were several. I was in one of the middle ones. This is not startling except for the fact that I was reading National Geographic at two and a half.
Turns out, the higher reading groups were entirely male. The teacher was a sexist-against-herself and refused to believe that I was really reading those books, or that my best friend was either. Fortunately, my parents listened to my frustration and called her out on it. This was in a private Montessori school, full of rich kids from liberal to moderate families.
The thing is, I don’t think there’s any way to fix this tracking problem. Kids who get tracked one way (for instance, as a low achiever in math) tend to perform that way because that’s what’s expected of them. Even if they’re in the “right track” for their initial skill level, I think it’s quite possible that that kind of tracking can impede learning — you’re getting a message that you’re not as good as kid X or kid Y and better than kid Z. And that isn’t healthy, but in the competitive environment of schools it’s going to happen as long as there are tracks.
goblinbee:
Jesus. Thank you! I loved school too and, since I’ve since talked with classmates at reunions who ostensibly went through a similar experience to mine yet claimed to hate it, I’ve also chalked it up to attitude. This has carried over to my worklife– I am literally never bored, but realize I make a lot of my own fun. Maybe that’s the lesson I learned best in school?
SusanM, good to hear from you!
I was, however, bored to tears in church each Sunday (we went in the morning, went home for lunch, then back in the afternoon for more church). My main diversion was to count and recount the squares and rectangles of different sizes and colors that made up the four tall stained-glass windows in the chapel (”8 small purple rectangles, 4 large yellow squares, 3 large green rectangles…”). I remember wishing, pathetically, that all four windows weren’t exactly the same! I set up other little contests and games for myself as well, but to no avail. Nothing could cut the dreariness.
Did you fare any better in church, if applicable?
I loved school until 6th grade. I started kindergarten at a public Montessorri school at the age of 3 (this school offered 3 years of kindergarten), after crying everyday when my sister left for school because I was too young to go.
I was able to work on whatever I wanted to, and I remember being constantly busy with all the things I was interested in. This school had multiple grades together in the classroom, and the teacher would let students work on their own, and then have lessons at different levels in various subject matters, and you could choose what level you wanted to work at. I loved it passionately, but then I went to a regular public school for 6th grade, and suddenly I had to sit and listen to someone lecture at me for 7 hours a day, and I still liked it when I could work on what I wanted (i.e. a science fair project I designed, a research project that I chose the topic for) but for the most part I was bored due to the regimentation of the whole thing.
I think that high school on (including college and the law school I am now attending) is all about learning how to jump through the appropriate hoops. You can certainly get by without learning any substantive subject matter, but you cannot get by without learning how to respect the authori-tay of teachers and administrators and how to play the game.
the opoponax:
I can see that I was right to be afraid that you were conflicted because you felt guilty about being fortunate enough to receive the education you, as a gifted child, deserve.
I’ve been identified as gifted but I received no special education help at all and was bored out of my brain in primary school. In High school it was better because I took books to read into class for when I was finished the work. My two kids have been identified as gifted by the school - I certainly had nothing to do with it as I was in complete denial about the gifted thing until then. Now I’m studying education at university and I’ve just finished a major assignment on giftedness for one of my classes and it helps a lot to be finding out so much about the subject, even at this late stage for me, because it helps me with what’s going on with my kids’ education.
the opoponax said: i mainly feel conflicted about it because i don’t think i am particularly gifted, or really, i don’t think anybody particularly is.
This is the “every child is gifted” fallacy. Every child has her own gifts but is not “gifted” in the precise sense used for educational purposes, which includes more rapid cognitive development than is usual.
i’m pretty sure that most of the differences between a “gifted†kid and a “regular†kid are a combination of factors from random accident, to cultural biases playing themselves out.
No. Cultural biases and other factors do lead to loss of opportunity etc that effect a child’s access and exposure to education which can have an effect on their development, but gifted children crop up everywhere and there is a difference between them and the “regular” kids, just as there is a difference between someone with a natural talent for sport or art and one without.
i was white and cute and articulate and clean and dressed nicely and spoke english as a first language, as well as being outspoken and precocious. nothing except for the precocious part is necessarily a “meritocracy†kind of thing.
I was white and cute and articulate and clean and dressed nicely and spoke English as a first language, although I wasn’t outspoken in those days. But that wasn’t enough in itself because I didn’t receive the same advantages as you did, so I don’t think you should feel guilty because YOU did. I think all gifted kids should have the opportunities you had.
other than the extreme harrassment i faced due to being a “smart girlâ€, i was basically given a free pass to academic acheivement, from the age of about 5. not really due to any inherent qualities about me, and almost entirely due to race & class benefits, as well as a little bit of pure accident.
No, it was due to inherent qualities you posessed - it was because you were SMART. You deserved those chances. So do all the other smart kids, the ones who didn’t get them but just because they couldn’t get them doesn’t mean nobody should. We just need to lobby and work hard until everybody does, yes?
that said, by the time i got to the magnet high school, there was a smattering of poor students and students of color who probably acheived it by wits alone. those kids deserved to be there far more than i ever did.
Rubbish. They didn’t deserve is more than you did, they deserved it just as much as you did. Stop feeling guilty for your good fortune! You deserved it!
It’s not so much that I feel that I, in particular, did not deserve it, but that if all children were given the resources I was given, all children would be “gifted”. It’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t have all those assorted advantages to find themselves the lucky recipient of a fantastic education, almost entirely state funded, a red carpet rolled out before them, in the way it was for me. And I don’t really see why a few lucky kids should get unlimited resources at their disposal, while most kids get nothing. I think all kids should get everything.
IBTP for this not being the current state of things.
goblinbee:
HA! I am the oldest of eight (Catholic). I figured out early that God hates girls, and nothing the priests said countered this, so I spent most of my time in church seething and gathering evidence on the patriarchy. As soon as I was old enough to drive, I became responsible for transporting the rest of the kids to mass. I started taking them to Winchell’s donuts instead, arguing that God didn’t really care where we went, he just wanted us to talk about him. Talk we did, and now most of my siblings are atheists.
In fact, I think one thing that contributes to the harrassment of “gifted” kids is the other kids subconscious awareness that we are getting something they’re not, which in an ideal world ought to be theirs. Which isn’t to say that it’s justified, obviously.
the opoponax said: It’s not so much that I feel that I, in particular, did not deserve it, but that if all children were given the resources I was given, all children would be “giftedâ€.
But they wouldn’t. Not in the way “gifted” is used in your case to mean intellectual giftedness. If every child was given your advantages, they would not all become gifted in the same way you are, because they do not have that innate ability in the first place. They would do better than they will now with substandard education, sure, but they will never be able to make use of it in the way you have. That’s why you got the particular opportunities you did.
Every child should be given the opportunity to develop their gifts to their highest potential, but not all children have the same intellectual gifts that you have. Or to the extent you do, okay? That’s just a fact.
Look at it this way: an 8 yr old gifted child who is accelerated into Year 6 with 10 and 11 year olds because that’s the intellectual level at which s/he is working is unusual. Not all 8 year olds can do this, and accelerating them all up to the Year 6 level wouldn’t help them one bit. It’d be a catastophre for them on many levels. The whole education system, bad though it is, is set up for the “regular kids” don’t forget. It’s the ones who don’t fit the mould, like the gifted, that need something other than what the regular class offers.
It’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t have all those assorted advantages to find themselves the lucky recipient of a fantastic education, almost entirely state funded, a red carpet rolled out before them, in the way it was for me. And I don’t really see why a few lucky kids should get unlimited resources at their disposal, while most kids get nothing. I think all kids should get everything.
We’re in agreement that everybody should get them but how does your guilt that YOU got them help anybody - me, for example - that didn’t get them? Frankly, I’m just happy that SOMEBODY got help and I want to work hard so that everybody else can. But making it all or nothing isn’t the least bit helpful, IMO. Nor is guilt.
“how does your guilt that YOU got them help anybody - me, for example - that didn’t get them”
This is very true, and something worth reminding myself of. Also why I feel no qualms about letting as many people as possible know about the resources that are out there, if only you know where to look.
the opoponax said: In fact, I think one thing that contributes to the harrassment of “gifted†kids is the other kids subconscious awareness that we are getting something they’re not, which in an ideal world ought to be theirs. Which isn’t to say that it’s justified, obviously.
No, you are getting the same thing they are getting: an education based on your particular needs. I’m sure you could offer the sort of educational opportunites you got to regular kids but what would be the point? They aren’t ready for them intellectually and can’t demonstrate that they are. Gifted kids have demonstrated that they are ready so that get the opportunity. I really don’t see the problem. “Every student has a right to an equal opportunity to receive a quality educational experience; however, that should not be interpreted to be the same experience.†(Barbara Clark: Growing Up Gifted) We agree that each child should get the quality part of the educational experience but I don’t think that the fact that you got a quality gifted educational experience should make you feel so terribly guilty that others didn’t get what they deserve. It wasn’t your fault!
SusanM: “I started taking them to Winchell’s donuts instead…”
How completely wonderful. I’m in the middle of six (Mormon). Did none of your siblings ever snitch on you? I’m afraid my younger siblings could not have kept that to themselves.
My two older sisters are strait-laced Mormon people, but us younger four are infidels.
MedeaOnCrack: I “dropped out” of high school too! By graduating early! BORED BORED BORED. Like you I took what I needed to graduate from high school, but I did it by taking correspondence courses from the local university. If my daughter is bored in high school someday I’ll encourage her to do the same.
Not that anyone asked, but Church? I dealt by cloistering myself on a toilet in the ladies’ room, reading a book on witchcraft I’d hidden in my bag. I don’t think anyone noticed I was missing.
Whatever. Look, I’m glad that homeschooling works for some of you, and others of you are able to find awesome progressive public schools or charter schools or magnet schools or private schools for your kids.
Personally, I went to a bunch of shitty schools. My high school had such a low graduation rate that we lost our cred and was taken over by the district big wigs in order to improve us. We didn’t.
I went to a Montessori school as a child, and that experience made transitioning to public school difficult, because I didn’t know basic skills like how to work in groups (we were all allowed to do our own thing) or math (my teachers thought it was best that I learn what I was interested in, regardless of what that was, and I was never interested in learning math).
This blamer is the child of two high school teachers, who have taught in public schools for a combined 70 years. They have taught at some of the worst schools in the nation. And when I graduate from college, I plan on getting my teaching credential and doing the same thing.
Most people’s kids go to public school. If you want to make a difference in more kids’ lives than your own, be a teacher in a public school. If you want to reach everyone, not just the elite, and not just the kids blessed enough to have parents that really care and go the extra mile to place them in great schools, teach in a public school. I want to teach kids with abusive parents and absent parents and simply clueless parents. I want to teach kids in foster care and kids of immigrants. I don’t want to fucking teach a bunch of kids with hippie parents who know enough to read to their children every night and get their IQs tested and sent them off to highly gifted magnets and specialty charter schools where kids can design their own curriculum because they’re considered “smart enough” to do so. I want to teach kids that are told they are dumb by everyone, and might be the first of their family to graduate from high school if they don’t get pregnant first.
And if I have to deal with the bureaucracy that goes along with it, so be it. There’s pretty much nothing that I hate more than educational elitism from so-called progressives.
Oh yeah, and I totally agree with the opoponax. More kids who are “gifted” come from stable homes, have parents who are college graduates, and all kinds of other advantages. Then they get placed in the best classes with the best teachers and are given more opportunities overall. It’s completely unfair and it reinforces everyone into the haves and have nots.
As a contrast, one of my most brilliant friends, who is far more talented and accomplished than I will probably ever be, is East Asian, and grew up in the East End of London (basically the ghetto). His parents were poor immigrants who were totally unequipped to figure out the school system, and from their POV he was lucky even to have access to free public education. There was not a book in the house.
He was as systematically held back and tripped up and beaten down as i was guided ahead and shown the way. He was tracked into special ed (this, someone who today holds an MFA in creative writing and teaches at the university level). He probably would have had no oppurtunity to go to college at all had his family not moved to California when he was halfway through high school, and had his (really abysmal) English school not been leaps and bounds ahead of his (pretty average) American school. He dropped out of high school, got his equivalency, and started college at 16. (on his own dime, his parents refused to pay for it.) The rest is history.
Contrasting his educational life with mine is an extreme eye opener.
Edith said: This blamer is the child of two high school teachers, who have taught in public schools for a combined 70 years. They have taught at some of the worst schools in the nation. And when I graduate from college, I plan on getting my teaching credential and doing the same thing.
This blamer is the child of two primary school teachers who have taught in public schools for a combined 70 years at least, too. My sister and brother and their spouses also teach at public schools.
Most people’s kids go to public school. If you want to make a difference in more kids’ lives than your own, be a teacher in a public school. If you want to reach everyone, not just the elite, and not just the kids blessed enough to have parents that really care and go the extra mile to place them in great schools, teach in a public school.
I am currently training to teach and will teach at public schools. My kids go to public schools. What’s that got to do with gifted kids? You think gifted kids don’t go to public school? You think gifted kids aren’t part of minority groups that live in poverty?
I want to teach kids with abusive parents and absent parents and simply clueless parents. I want to teach kids in foster care and kids of immigrants. I don’t want to fucking teach a bunch of kids with hippie parents who know enough to read to their children every night and get their IQs tested and sent them off to highly gifted magnets and specialty charter schools where kids can design their own curriculum because they’re considered “smart enough†to do so. I want to teach kids that are told they are dumb by everyone, and might be the first of their family to graduate from high school if they don’t get pregnant first.
I really don’t know how to start answering this diatribe, since it’s obvious you know very little about gifted kids, who they are and what they are about, since you’re under the mistaken apprehension that they are made by hippie parents who read to them every night! Good grief! Since you say you’re training to be a teacher, why don’t you go to the education section of your campus library and look up books on giftedness and have a read? If you like I can recommend some pretty decent books. At the moment you’re merely repeating a lot of society’s misconceptions about giftedness as some sort of elitism vested in the wealthy and privileged and that’s just wrong.
the opoponax:
The difference between your story and your friend’s is that he wasn’t identified by a very flawed system. He’s still gifted and he still deserves everything a gifted program can do for him but he doesn’t deserve it just because he’s poor and Asian, he deserves it because every gifted child deserves it. Yes, the system we operate under now is completely, seriously flawed. That doesn’t detract from my point that giftedness is a real issue that needs to be addressed, that it is not necessarily, as Edith suggests, some elitist hogging of resources by the already privileged!
Frankly, as a teacher I want to help all the gifted, especially those who are slipping through the cracks now, for whatever reason.
For what it’s worth folks! If any of you have a child with a turbocharged brain and no gifted-child opportunities, but his/her teachers say they don’t have the time or inclination to come up with a different curriculum for one child, call BULLSHIT.
A teacher doesn’t need to make up a special curriculum. Curricula already exist: Formally established, standardized, often MANDATED by your district or state, and easily obtained. All it takes is a test (mandated for all kids anyway, depending on the state) and a phone call (or online search these days?) to obtain lesson plans that operate at your child’s level of thinking, up to the 12th grade AND SOME COLLEGE. Sometimes in Spanish! For instance, there ARE established lesson plans for calculus, and any teacher who tells you there isn’t needs to retire, STAT. There were two kids in my 6th grade class learning calculus at their own speed while the rest of us struggled with long division, and that was in the 1970’s!
Failing that approach, most state-controlled schools have standardized correspondence courses for kids (sick?) who can’t go to school for whatever reason, HS dropouts, and for college students doing the distance-learning thing. That’s how I coped back in the ’80s. It’s 2007 now, so any school that hasn’t hopped on the Klue Train needs to be shut-the-f*#$ DOWN or taken over.
Crappy schools make me SO MAD. We spend squillions destroying the lives of people in other countries and we can’t even - oh don’t get me started.
THe Hedonistic Pleasureseeker: “I dealt by cloistering myself on a toilet in the ladies’ room, reading a book on witchcraft I’d hidden in my bag. I don’t think anyone noticed I was missing.”
How on earth were some of you able to skip church without anyone noticing? If I hadn’t been sitting in the pew with the rest, Mom would have known. For Sunday School classes that were separate from the adults, the teachers would surely have reported any absences. Or maybe that was just an assumption on my part. Okay, I needed to go to church with some of you bad girls, so you could show me the way!
Skipping kids ahead is a dumb idea. What is it in aid of? So they can make a million dollars and retire before they’re 30? I say leave the kids in an age-appropriate grade, and let them satisfy their curiosity at the library.
Those with delicate ears please close them for a moment, please:
Go violate yourself with the nearest sharp object, Charles. You have ABSOLUTELY no idea what it is like to be so bored in school that you actually start flunking your classes because you don’t see the point. One of the most vivid memories I have pre-skipping a grade (they wanted to skip me two, but Mom said no) was a 6th grade teacher asking us to write down all the countries in Europe that we could name.
Other kids: France. Spain. Is England in Europe?
Me: (wrote ‘em all out, got asked by the teacher if there was a problem, since I was writing much, much longer than everyone else, wondering out loud if we should count the Baltic States or not, etc, and oh, hey, does Luxembourg have one U or 2?)
I gave up on school. I HATED school. At one point I even asked my parents to send me to a local all-female Catholic school (we’re not Catholic), because I figured maybe less moron boys in class would equal less frustration for me. No dice, we didn’t have the money.
Not skipping ahead kids who can deal with it is really just damning them to extra years in a hellish system. “Age-appropriate grades,” my shiny gifted ass. I was reading at a third-grade level in kindergarten, so tell your story walking.
I love you, Virago. Much more polite than me. But oh so true. Stuff like this is the reason I will homeschool any child I ever have, ever.
Back to the original letter-writer: suing these schools is usually the only way to get any permanent results whatsoever. A friend of mine has two autistic boys and has been to hell and back dealing with their IEPs, etc. She’s a super-mouthy Brit who used to be a high-powered nanny, she knows her child development. And they’re scared to death of her down at the district office. I hope you achieve the same result!
Actually - is it Charles upthread? - Anyway: Gifted kids usually do NOT make squillions of dollars by the time they reach 20 or even 30 or 40 or EVER. Often things even out in the end. “Normal” kids eventually catch up and sometimes even surpass the gifted child in terms of intellect, ability and income.
Often gifted children have such a hard time relating to their peers that by the time they reach adulthood they’ve suffered enough so that it’s difficult for them to get by in the hyper-competitive, kiss-ass business world, which actually prefers shrewd socialites, movers and shakers. Many folk with stratospheric IQs end up as some variety of government clerk (like moi), or end up in a technical or artistic field where they can play by their lonesomes. Most of the time the money ain’t so good. Even engineers make less than one might think.
Perhaps if some of the more resentful/irritated folk upthread reframe their ideas about early precociousness, and see it as (bear with me!) a disability instead of a privilege they’d understand better? Gifted children ARE differently-abled and often a challenge to deal with and/or educate. As a brainiac born of two brainiacs I developed an intimidating vocabulary, not to mention formal operational thought processes, well before I probably should have. My peers simply could NOT relate to me, while their behaviors confused me greatly. I spent much of my childhood thinking WTF WTF WTF???!!!!!???, a social outcast despite my looks. I entered college and adulthood socially retarded, and I really do mean retarded. At the age of 41 I’m still getting over it.
Spit the Dummy: I couldn’t give less of a shit about gifted kids. You know why? BECAUSE THEY’RE GIFTED. Gifted kids, oh the poor, poor things, with their scads of privileges right from the get-go do partially, I concede, to their “superior” intellect, and MOSTLY to their “superior” parents, schools, teachers, and general opportunities.
Give me a break. I was tracked as “highly gifted” myself, for your information. My parents knew the system — they knew after taking the IQ test and maxing out the scores that I would be given scads more opportunities than the other kids. I’d get to participate in GATE activities, I’d get school-sanctioned THERAPY if I fell below a B in any class (because HIGHLY GIFTED KIDS should NEVER be allowed to do poorly, because if they are, clearly there is SOMETHING ELSE going on other than general laziness), I’d be allowed to pick as many AP classes as I wanted, I could take classes at the local college, etc. Are these opportunities available to other kids who don’t have parents that know enough to demand testing? No.
FYI, I went to a high school that was 70% students of color. My AP and honors classes were AT LEAST 70% white.
When I worked as a teaching assistant in a literacy program that taught public high school ninth and tenth graders how to read above the second or third grade level, this opened my eyes a bit more. Fact: every single kid in this class was on the reduced lunch program. Fact: all of these kids had been tested for learning disabilites or special needs and none of them had any, hence, why they were in this class. Fact: none of these kids were ESL kids. Fact: out of a class of 45, TWO of them were white. What does that tell me? What does that tell YOU?
In my experience, scads of funding goes to helping the very top and the very bottom. But kids like these, non-special needs kids, neither mentally gifted or mentally challenged, simply fall through the cracks. Who gives a shit about them? Sad, really, that so many educated progressives care more about “gifted” kids, who, although bored, still are able to go on and use their superior brains since they have such a hard time in school, you know, learning to read. Or wait, not so much.
HP,
I had exactly that experience. Vocabulary, acceleration, math contest winner, early admission to University with advanced standing, never needing to study to get A’s.
Complete social misfit. Employment history is wreckage. I was finally able to collapse onto disability as manic depressive. Is it cuz I memorized the diagnosis & fed the symptoms back to the psychiatrist? I dunno. :-)
I prefer to avoid human contact, and I enjoy thinking my own thoughts and pursuing my own studies. I will for as long as I have to be on this planet.
But as for acceleration: Yes!!! It was the only thing that made school bearable for me.
I had good teachers who let me sit at the back of the class and work ahead in my book. Or sit at the front of the class and do math exercises in my notebook right under the French teacher’s nose. It’s easy to think about math & french at the same time.
A life wasted by patriarchal success standards: advanced degrees but no professional standing or experience (beyond a few years.)
But by my own standards I succeeded: I succeeded in not growing up. And, I’ve managed to pursue my own intellectual and sociological interests all the way through.
Wow, what a bunch of gifted blamers. So, which came first, the being gifted or being a blamer? The seeing that something is very wrong with our society and looking for reasons (patriarchy) or learning about it and then seeing it? I’m going with door number one.
I must be lucky since my school experiences were so different than most. I got a wonderful public school education. I grew up in a very blue collar New England town and went to gifted programs starting in third grade.
My HS had AP and honors classes for those who made the grade and wanted to be there. No godbags to speak of and plenty of opportunities for girls while still having to navigate the frothing waters of patriarchal indoctrination of high school girls. Or I really was completely oblivious to the expectations placed on me for being female. Maybe not being one little bit interested in boys - not caring what they thought of me and not wanting to date them, made life easier for me.
My parents, both high school dropouts and factory workers pretty much let me do my own thing.
I guess I can’t understand the absolute disgust with our school system that I’m seeing here. I had a great, free, public school education and I don’t have, nor do I want, children to worry about educating. I went to an Ivy on a softball scholarship and didn’t have much trouble with patriarchy there, either (Brown, for those interested.)
It wasn’t until I got out into the so-called “real-world” that I smacked headlong into it (20 years ago) and have been living with the rage that the absolute injustice of patriarchal pressure does to women everywhere for the sole crime of existing while female.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see that so many blamers are “gifted and talented.”
Upon further reflection, I think what insulated me most from patriarchy as a child and as a teenager in the public school system was my absolute indifference to male desire. I never in my life donned female drag and I never once gave a whit about how my actions or attitude would make men see me (meaning not want to date me.)
The fact that I could defend myself physically and *did* defend kids who were picked on using physical means kept me from being bullied for non-conforming to rigid gender roles.
Being an asexual lesbian does have its benefits, I see now!
Edith, we might be talking past each other because there are certainly so-called “gifted and talented” programs for (agreed: mostly but not ALL) privileged children of above-average intellect. Living on the East coast in WhiteBread UpperCrust, I certainly do see them. Their parents can’t BEAR to have a “normal” child. They MUST be “gifted and talented,” take every AP class offered, BLAH BLAH BLAH. There is certainly something to be said for having:
1) Motivated parents with the energy to put in the effort;
2) A full tummy (good breakfast);
3) Less exposure to toxins (Lead paint, bad water, etc.);
4) Better schools in general;
5) White skin and a middle-class way of approaching problem-solving;
6) Etcetera, ad nauseum
Privilege, in other words. I think the blamer community KNOWS this and could blame on it fiercely for days. However, these are NOT the kids most of us are talking about. These are NORMAL KIDS! They are A and B students. Not having AP classes wouldn’t kill them. With all their privileges (barring learning disabilities or psychiatric problems) they’d do fine regardless.
Rather, the rest of us are talking about children whose brains don’t work like normal kid brains. It’s a real problem, almost at the psychiatric level. Actually, it’s probably not difficult for a teacher to make the mistake of tracking an off-the-charts kid into special ed, because this kind of child just doesn’t DEAL well in an “age-appropriate” setting, fails tests and assignments, and occasionally even disrupts classes into chaos because s/he’s even smarter than the teacher.
What are you going to do the first time you get one of these children in your class? Punish him or her for being “privileged?”
“I think what insulated me most from patriarchy as a child and as a teenager in the public school system was my absolute indifference to male desire.”
Maybe times have changed, but in my experience male desire had nothing to do with it. In fact, I’d go as far to say that my interest in subjects other than boys and how to please them was what inspired the abuse. I mean, being queer probably got rid of some cognitive dissonance (the pressure to want to please boys, vs. my own passions and interests), and probably enabled me to resign myself to things enough to create a little escape hatch for myself (when they start calling you a dyke at 6, it loses its novelty by the time you’re old enough for anyone to realize that, no, actually, you are a really a dyke). I also think you could make a tenuous connection to being a girl jock providing some female solidarity that insulated you a little, and connect an open interest in sports with the indifference to male desire.
But a general lack of male desire never did nothin’ for me…
also, I will ditto the idea of “gifted” becoming pretty meaningless once you hit adulthood (another reason i feel ambivalent about the whole thing). some people (a lot of my friends from giftedland) can extend it through college by attending an ivy or a big research university, keeping an academic focus, and translating that into advanced degrees and an eventual career in academia. not that a career in academia will likely pay well.
but goddess help you if you’re not inclined toward academia, or if some aspect of your life or your studies forces you out of that bubble (the real ivory tower).
it is a real source of guilt and anxiety that after all that, i grew up to be a graphic designer. i neither make very much money nor even really work with my mind. none of my coworkers were “gifted”. other than a passing familiarity with art history and concept development, i’m basically a craftsperson. i’m certainly no better off than my non-gifted siblings, all of whom will make more money than i do, eventually, and some of whom are in much more intellectually-focused career paths.
because this kind of child just doesn’t DEAL well in an “age-appropriate” setting, fails tests and assignments, and occasionally even disrupts classes into chaos because s/he’s even smarter than the teacher.
Remind my mom to tell you about the times she had to:
* apologize for my correcting teachers’ spelling in elementary school
* tell off my third grade teacher who claimed I didn’t know how to read — after she almost fell off her chair laughing, that is
(etc etc ad nauseum)
This is not about freaky Helicopter Parents micromanaging their children — my parents were academic underachievers who met in art school, for heaven’s sake! — this is about “brains [that] don’t work like normal kid brains,” as THP put it.
Above-average IQ does not give you the keys to the cookie jar. Most of the people I knew from our “gifted” program dropped out of the CEO-track because they don’t like playing the social games required to get there.
I hold myself up as an example: I’ve got a cum laude triple degree in political science, German and history with a specialization in medieval women’s religious history. Could’ve gone into academia, but I realized the futility of that. I suffered through some truly ridiculous job choices in my twenties. Now I write knitting books for a living.
I graduated from a Southern California high school in 1965, just under the wire because Ronnie Raygun was elected Governor in 1966, expressly to gut the public school system since it had done way too good a job turning out kids who were way too bright and causing way too much trouble for Authority.
In the Fall of 1965, I was chosen to participate in a program for humanities majors to attend their sophmore year at extension campuses in other countries. I was going to the University of Barcelona. However, Raygun decided that Californians didn’t even need mental hospitals much less international educational opportunities for those girlie humanities majors. Oh. Well.
He was then prepped and primed to become President in 1981 so the dumbing down could be taken to the national level. Have I mentioned lately how much I despise Ronnie Raygun?
wendyann:”Being an asexual lesbian does have its benefits, I see now!”
I call myself asexual too! Have you ever visited the AVEN website (Asexual Visibility and Education Network)? There are some great threads over there.
–g
Have her send the harassers formal letters of no contact. Tell them not to approach her in school. Insist that the school cooperate with this. If he/they violate, file for a protective order.
HP, I just happen to doubt highly that the majority of blamers here are really as gifted as they think they are. Full disclosure: when I was IQ tested at 11 years old, I had a 166 IQ. That put me at the the top 99%. Yet it seemed to me, even then, that an awful lot of us were at the top 99% — reading college textbooks in second grade, teaching ourselves calculus “for fun,” and so forth. I think most gifted kids could use a little perspective, honestly. IQ tests for children are basically about development — those of us who had books at home, for intance, will probably be more intellectually advanced than other kids our age. But as the opononax said, that shit levels out. The other kids catch up. They do. And I know most people like me, who were told at 11 years of age how advanced they were continue to BELIEVE in their own giftedness for the rest of their lives, despite the fact that their giftedness was RELATIVE.
We all know that famous psych test, don’t we? The one where the teacher arbitrarily told some of the class they were brilliant and the rest of them that they were dumb? And even though they had performed equally as well before, the “smart” kids improved radically and the “dumb” kids went to shit.
Now, I don’t think kids should be PUNISHED for being “gifted,” that is, privileged. I’m not going to treat my male students and my white students like shit just because they are privileged. I just think that isolating “gifted” kids in special all-gifted classes and having schools spend funds and energy on them to give them access to all the best science equipment and so forth, is wrong. I also think it’s wrong that formerly gifted adults (who of course, think they’re still gifted now) insist on teaching upper-level students rather than the normal kids because of some warped desire to continue hanging out with the cool smart kids.
Forgive me for being just the big commie pinko that I am, but here’s what I think: “normal” kids should have JUST AS GOOD of teachers as the “brilliant.” EVERYONE should be allowed into high school honors and AP classes REGARDLESS of grades and test scores. Elementary school students who are gifted should be placed in classes with “normal” kids. Additional education beyond school can easily be done with the help of parents, after school programs, summer programs, and kids’ own natural curiosity and ability to educate themselves. By NO MEANS should elementary school students be skipped ahead or should high school students graduate early because, let’s face it: although I’m sure you’re all intellectual geniuses, you’re emotionally still a child when you are a child. And I’m sorry, but reading some of these comments, I can’t help but point out that for those of you that skipped and entered college at 15, you certainly don’t seem to be doing all that fucking great now. And I should know. I was a “brilliant” kid who is now a manic-depressive who has suffered multiple suicide attempts, etc. And I’m not depressed because the patriarchy is so much harder to deal with for me because I’m brilliant. I’m depressed because I’m emotionally fucked up. My emotional intelligence does not equal my intellectual intelligence. “Normal” kids who became “normal” adults who, you know, didn’t drop out of college and haven’t quit 90 jobs are maybe intellectually inferior — although they probably aren’t — but they’re certainly emotionally superior to you. Deal with it. Adults who get stuck in that whole rut of “the world doesn’t understand me because I’m so much smarter than everyone” really need to fucking grow up, I’m sorry.
Wow Edith, have you understood any of what we’ve been saying here? You’ve just PROVEN OUR POINT.
I rest my case.
Edith,
Merry meet!
I was sure that I couldn’t be the only over-intellectualized manic depressive blamer around here.
Our experiences cover a broad spectrum. One of my favorite things about these threads is when we see that several of you had very similar experiences, and yet, came away with very different opinions. Perhaps it is because there are so many other variables that affect our education.
I received criticism frequently in school for failing to live up to my potential. Having been in 3 foster homes between the time I was five and seven, always the new kid in school, and toss in the requisite sexual abuse, I can’t help wonder that they thought I had any potential to live up to. I lived in fear, and reading was my escape. Not surprisingly when you read a lot you learn a lot. So they considered skipping me when I was 8, in 1954. Didn’t matter, the next school thought I was slow. But I could read so well, they just didn’t understand how I could be so fast and slow at the same time. It was directly related to the pedophile step father, of course. When my mom dumped the pedophile it was back to the foster homes, plenty of sexual abuse there too. These days we call that weird state of disconnect with the sudden onset of panic, PTSD. Back then I simply knew that I was different, too different. It took years, and I did a lot of damage along the was, but I finally became me in my forties.
I think most people are smart and should be treated that way. It just depends on the subject.
As was said upthread, if the class size was reduced to ten it wouldn’t be necessary to impose tracks or play status games with childrens education.
The school system was designed to provide educated and obedient workers who could better serve the needs of the industrial age. It turned out to be much greater than expected, I think. It became a tool people used to meet their own needs and desires.
Since the eighties it seems that there has been an effort to reframe education back to the original intent, providing educated and obedient workers for plantation capitalism. I take that as a very bad sign.
Wow. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, Edith, but damn, you just come off as so insulting to all of us that you actually make me see the other side of things.
Reverse psychology really does work, it seems.
I mean, did you really have to suggest to all of us that we really can’t possibly be that intelligent, because look how far it’s apparently taken us in life? Wow, and you accuse others of being “elitist”.
But I can see that you have a very important future in front of you, being that completely imbecilic teacher who actually resents students who show an interest in and aptitude for academic learning. I always assumed those teachers must have been the slower kids who resented the priveleges we got (which everyone should have got). Guess that’s not always the case. You also come off as the kid who’d throw a cookie on the floor rather than share it. If you can’t have it, nobody can, right?
Oh, and the best part is when she accuses us of not really being that brilliant because today we are (in terms of what’s been revealed in the thread so far) a graphic designer and a writer of instructional craft books (and maybe some teachers?). You’d think we’d confessed to being dirt farmers or checkers at Wal Mart or something.
Yeah, definitely, if you don’t grow up to win a Nobel Prize, you really weren’t that gifted anyway, were you?
Edith said: Spit the Dummy: I couldn’t give less of a shit about gifted kids. You know why? BECAUSE THEY’RE GIFTED. Gifted kids, oh the poor, poor things, with their scads of privileges right from the get-go do partially, I concede, to their “superior†intellect, and MOSTLY to their “superior†parents, schools, teachers, and general opportunities.
Edith, where is this hostility coming from? You say you were a gifted kid but you seem very hostile to the gifted due to some supposed “scads of privileges” they have over everybody else. What privileges do they have? They tend to learn school related subjects at an accelerated rate but that is, as you say, balanced out by the problems this causes them in the real world emotionally and socially. Gifted kids especially meet a whole lot of the hostility you are exhibiting from peers, teachers, school sdminstrators and society in general. Witness the crap the girl who started this conversation and what she’s putting up with! How privileged is she? I’m sure she feels very privileged when she gets sexually harassed on a daily basis at school and her teachers let it happen!
Give me a break. I was tracked as “highly gifted†myself, for your information.
So were a lot of people on this list. So was I. So were my sons. So what? Are we playing “my experience trumps yours” now? And if so, who adjudicates?
My parents knew the system — they knew after taking the IQ test and maxing out the scores that I would be given scads more opportunities
Good for them, doing their best for their kid. I’m trying to do my best for my kid within the system I’m stuck with, too. Funnily enough, I see that as part of my job as a good parent. Part of my job as a good teacher will be to get hose opportunities for ALL my students.
Are these opportunities available to other kids who don’t have parents that know enough to demand testing? No.
This is a system failure, not something that that the gifted themselves are responsible for. The answer is to get systems that work for EVERYBODY, not to single out the gifted and attack them as if they were the cause of all the inequality in the education system. The gifted parents I talk to on a regular basis (most in the US) are telling me that gifted education over there pretty much is a random thing, depending on where you live and what you can afford and it often sucks - but why do you want to take out the inherent unfairness of the system on the gifted? Aren’t they victims of it, too? Especially the minority gifted and those in poverty who are regularly excluded from gifted programs?
FYI, I went to a high school that was 70% students of color. My AP and honors classes were AT LEAST 70% white.
Edith, I don’t know what all these personal details have to do with our argument but you might want to take a moment to absorb the fact that I am not an American and therefore all my education took place outside the US - so whatever assumptions you are making about my privileged background can just stop right there. I attended a small country primary school from year k-6 in which half the students were Sikhs, originally from the Punjab area of India. My parents were the first and only members of each of their working class families to reach tertiary education level (or even high school on one side) and despite the fact that I was identified as “gifted” I never received one iota of special education throughout all my years of schooling. I didn’t even know about the “gifted” thing until my own kids were identified and my parents came clean with my IQ then - I was almost 40.
When I worked as a teaching assistant in a literacy program that taught public high school ninth and tenth graders how to read above the second or third grade level, this opened my eyes a bit more. Fact: every single kid in this class was on the reduced lunch program. Fact: all of these kids had been tested for learning disabilites or special needs and none of them had any, hence, why they were in this class. Fact: none of these kids were ESL kids. Fact: out of a class of 45, TWO of them were white. What does that tell me? What does that tell YOU?
It tells me that racism and SES and other prejudices still inhibit education for all-comers and that the system sucks. It doesn’t tell me that I should target all gifted kids and blame them for the fact that the education system isn’t perfect. I think you are missing the point here on this list by assuming that since we’re talking about gifted kids that we don’t care about any other sort, or any other type of discrimination in schools but that’s not true. The people on this list care about ALL kids and want them all to be educated well. I certainly do. The fact is that we’re currently talking about giftedness because it’s an experience a lot of us share. I can’t believe I have to spell this out but talking about one aspect of education like this doesn’t mean we don’t give a crap about everybody else, okay?
In my experience, scads of funding goes to helping the very top and the very bottom.
Interesting. In MY experience NO funding goes to the gifted but lots goes to the mainstream and the bottom. Maybe they do things differently here in Australia, but the reading I’ve done doesn’t seem to suggest it. I’m open to correction on that, though. There are special programs at my son’s school for integrating the special needs kids into the school, there are special programs for the native aboriginal kids, there are special classes for those having trouble with their classes in the normal run of things, there’s special after school classes for those “regular” kids who are having difficulties keeping up for whatever reason (and of course, lets not forget that the whole educational system with its age lock-step system is set up for the “regular” learners) - there’s nothing for the gifted.
Sad, really, that so many educated progressives care more about “gifted†kids, who, although bored, still are able to go on and use their superior brains since they have such a hard time in school, you know, learning to read. Or wait, not so much.
I’m not sure who these educational progressives are that you obviously have such a problem with. I can only say I don’t see any sign of them on this side of the Pacific. The conservative backlash in education over the last 30 years or so has killed services to the gifted stone dead, although they show a slight sense of reviving it’s a hard slog against the tide of opinion that despises the gifted, as you do, as “elitist” and “privilieged”. With this sort of attitude I can only feel sorry for any gifted kid who lands in one of your classes. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder about the whole subject and have wound up blaming the gifted for a whole lot of social, economic and educational problems that they are not responsible for. That sort of self-hatred must be a hard thing to carry around and I hope you can come to terms with it sometime.
Correction: I did no damage along the was, I did it along the way.
I just tried drawing a straw-hippie-elitist but I SUCK at it. Anyone wanna give it a go?
Besides, is there such a thing as a hippie elitist? Isn’t that an oxygen- no wait - oxycontin - no that’s not it either - WAIT I GOT IT! - oxymoron?
-j
With the author’s permission, I would like to contrast my school experience with my spouse’s.
My spouse immigrated to the US from a Soviet Bloc country when he was in his “tweens.” He had already taken physics, chemistry, calculus, and was fluent in a foreign language. When he was enrolled in the US public school system, they had no math courses advanced enough for him to take, so they simply put him in the standard track. He was not exposed to any new material for the next 6 years. In his country, there was no kindergarten.
I went to a small school in the Midwest. I was so bored that I secretly stayed up all night, reading books furtively checked out from the library, so that I could sleep in class all day. I was not permitted to read in class, but sleeping was acceptable. I did this all through elementary, middle, and high school. I was challenged by the librarian for my choice of reading materials- I consistently wanted books that were deemed too mature for me.
I still fall asleep at my desk- even during the interesting lectures- because I spent 12 years teaching myself to do so.
The Hedonistic Pleasureseeker said: Besides, is there such a thing as a hippie elitist? Isn’t that an (snip) oxymoron?
I woulda thought so but then I was afraid it was some swanky new US monster elite I was unaware of!
Edith, I’m not going to jump on you about gifted education because I think you do have a point in there somewhere. That kind of tracking is often elitist and racist in practice. As others have pointed out, however, it doesn’t mean that the premise of individualizing instruction is wrong or that gifted kids are spoiled brats.
You said: “I want to teach kids with abusive parents and absent parents and simply clueless parents. I want to teach kids in foster care and kids of immigrants.”
That’s what I do, though I wouldn’t phrase it quite that way. And you say you are depressed now and you haven’t even started teaching yet? Hey, it’s a depressing and fucked up world and I am sympathetic about your emotional state, but I’m more than a little concerned about how you’ll handle the realities of teaching troubled kids. I wish you well, but find a source of emotional strength or you’ll burn right out.
Interesting how many teacher-blamers there are! Can we wear some kind of secret badge or something so we can know when we have allies? I have all kinds of ideas for feminist curricula, projects, groups, etc (like the suggestion others have made about teaching boys not be be assholes) but without allies in a building it’s hard to get anything going. Maybe a special handshake? Tattoo?
Spit The Dummy, I’m glad you pointed out that the U.S. experience can’t be generalized to everything. My understanding of the Australian system (in ESL specifically) is that it is more progressive than the American system in terms of funding and services. I think there is less of the “savage inequality” that Jonothan Kozol writes about here wherein the “bottom” of the social and educational ladder gets very little.
I haven’t had cause to think much about this giftedness issue. The schools where I’ve taught have had so many problems providing even basic education. Hell, they can’t even maintain safe and clean buildings. I was not gifted that I know of, but I was bored and hated school so I understand some of the frustrations.
Lots should be done to improve public education, but I don’t like the idea of homeschooling as the solution. Since “home” is generally in the mold of the patriarchal nuclear family, root of our oppression, it’s not necessarily an improvement for girls. I like the idea of more communal structures, not fewer. We need socialized children, just not pathologically indoctrinated ones.
roamaround: “Interesting how many teacher-blamers there are! Can we wear some kind of secret badge or something so we can know when we have allies?”
I’m in N Portland! Anyone else?
roamaround said: Spit The Dummy, I’m glad you pointed out that the U.S. experience can’t be generalized to everything. My understanding of the Australian system (in ESL specifically) is that it is more progressive than the American system in terms of funding and services. I think there is less of the “savage inequality†that Jonothan Kozol writes about here wherein the “bottom†of the social and educational ladder gets very little.
Yes, my understanding is the same. Here in Australia, for example, the schools are run on a state by state basis but we have only 7 states all up. And each State Education Department funds each school so that they have the basics for the number of children they have to teach. Funding does not come, as I understand it does in the US, from the property taxes paid by people in the local area (which means a hell of a lot of inequality depending on how wealthy the school district is, yes?) So schools here are funded theoretically across the board on an equal level so that a school in a poorer area will have similar basics to a school in a richer area. Of course, richer school ditricts then go on to provide “extras” for their schools by fund-raising privately through the school, which is allowed, but that’s a whole ‘nother story! Private schools are mostly religion-based, although that’s changing these days.
When I went to school every local kid went to the local public school - it was just what we all did. I remember the shock it was for me to go to university when I was 17 and to be asked what school I went to, because in the country there was only one school and you didn’t get a choice. Things are changing now for the worse but things are still, as I understand it, not as polarised as they are in the US. Schools are run and teachers are employed by the State, so there is no poweful local politics thing going on with the running of the school as much as I understand there is in the US.
ttrentham: Kindly don’t use the phrase “mental defectives.”
Interesting thread!
The only comment I have to add that I haven’t seen elsewhere in all this is that yes, a lot of gifted kids are poorly adapted socially, but keeping them (us) with kids their own age doesn’t make any difference. In fact, kids their own age are as likely, if not more likely, to feel threatened by them and be mean to them.
My school was 7th through 12th. I didn’t skip grades, but I was around the older kids a lot because I crammed grades, and took really heavy course loads to get out of there faster. The older kids were generally pretty nice to me because they thought my intelligence was “cute.” Not in the way poor N is dealing with at her school, but in the way my family probably should have responded in a more ideal world.
The older kids didn’t exactly treat me as a peer or equal, but they did enjoy drawing me out on my opinions about books and such just to see what I would say. Not so they could poke fun, but out of a friendly curiousity, or that’s how it felt. They thought I was unusually smart for my age, but not actually smarter than them, and I’m sure that’s part of why I didn’t bother them. I seemed to bother most kids my own age quite a bit.
Am I well enough socialized to be a CEO? Hardly, and I thank the FSM for that. But I think I’m far better socialized for getting to be around older kids some of the time than I would have been stuck with nothing but the company of my “peers.”
Edith said: here’s what I think: “normal†kids should have JUST AS GOOD of teachers as the “brilliant.†EVERYONE should be allowed into high school honors and AP classes REGARDLESS of grades and test scores. Elementary school students who are gifted should be placed in classes with “normal†kids. Additional education beyond school can easily be done with the help of parents, after school programs, summer programs, and kids’ own natural curiosity and ability to educate themselves. By NO MEANS should elementary school students be skipped ahead or should high school students graduate early because, let’s face it: although I’m sure you’re all intellectual geniuses, you’re emotionally still a child when you are a child.
The following studies in giftedness refute all your above statements: Alexander and Skinner, 1980; Anderson, 1960; Bish & Fliegler, 11959; Braga, 1969; Brody & Benbow, 1987; Fund for the Advancement of Education, 1957; Gallagher, 1966; Justman, 1953; Lehman, 1953; Lucito, 1964; Morgan, Tennant & Gold, 1980; Plowman & Rice, 1967; Pressey, 1955; Reynolds, 1962; Terman & Oldman, 1947; Worcester, 1955.
Their findings are that, on the contrary: acceleration is essential, especially for the very gifted; grouping the gifted together benefits everybody, including the students they leave behind in “regular” classrooms emotionally and intellectually; additional education for the gifted outside of school is hardest for the disadvantaged groups you purport to be interested most in teaching; gifted children who are accelerated corrected handle the emotional and social factors of the change better than if they were left in their regular classroom with their age peers.
Therefore I have to say that I think you really know very little about gifted education at all, since this is all basic to the topic.
I still think many people (in the US) are confused between:
1) The run-of-the-mill (mostly privileged) overachiever with above-average intelligence who MAY have a high IQ. Regardless, emotional/social functioning isn’t impaired by it. I thought these kids all lived in MY daughter’s district but hey!
2) The (rather rare) child whose intelligence actually causes problems that, if not dealt with effectively, result in a f*cked-up mess of a human being.
(Edith, if you’re still reading this thread: What I mean to get across is that things COULD have worked out so much better for you if only someone in your school had known what to DO with you, and I’m talking about your emotions, not your schoolwork.)
For those of you out there on psychiatric meds (I’m presently hopped-up on two of them), it’s not unusual for folks like us to ride that rough edge between brilliance and insanity. Many of our most cherished historical figures were frickin’ NUTS (and frickin’ POOR). The ONLY thing separating the “brilliant” from the (destitute) homeless/jailed folk or the (less destitute) psych ward patients was their ability to communicate and contribute to society in ways that society actually appreciated (sometimes posthumously).
So, if you’re one of those wacky people who is trying to fall on the better side of that rough edge, FIND THAT ONE THING. For me it’s writing: The crazier I am the better I write. Sometimes I need to write a letter or an email to a person so that he or she can “get” me.
“Lots should be done to improve public education, but I don’t like the idea of homeschooling as the solution.” roamaround
Agreed. Homeschooling dovetails nicely with patriarchy’s goal of keeping women where they belong, in their boxes, er, homes, providing yet another free service, another great thing they can be blamed for, controlled by papa. “We [may] need socialized children, just not pathologically indoctrinated ones” but great white papa needs all the monsters he can get to carry on the war racket. We can’t be wasting money on edumacation, woman, we’re at war!
Right after putting women back in the box, the highest priority of the Raygun Revolution was destroying public education, followed by all the rest of horrible “big government.” They break it then turn around and say, “See, we told you it doesn’t work.” The “vision thing?” Hurricane Katerina IS their vision.
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate Ronnie Raygun (who is merely the figurehead for the twisted neocons we are still afflicted with)?
MarIguana: WORD. All this Reagan-wusship has been driving me nuts. I mean, for me Reagan was AIDS and all my friends dying in the space of one year and that hideous ‘trickle-down’ thing and paranoia and class ignorance and just one horrible ugliness after another. Plus, he was a total idiot. And his wife freaked me right out. *This* is an icon?
On the upside, I now have that Violent Femmes song ‘Old Mother Reagan’ stuck in my head. Which is not too shabby.
I’m a girl who attended (Oakland CA) public school for the first 6 years of my life and was tortured and bullied mercilessly the entire time by the other girls.
It’s not always the boys, but it’s always a lack of authority present.
I should have said ‘the first 6 years of my scholastic life’, meaning K through the 5th grade (when I had a shuddering breakdown and my mother finally carted me off to a private school).
My crime? Warts. A blockade in my path to joining the sexbot mandate, and we hadn’t even hit puberty yet. IBTP. However, it took me a very very long time not to blame little girls.
Altelope, I disagree that many gifted kids are social rejects. This is a myth. Research shows the opposite.
What research does show is that more gifted people are introverted than so-called regular people. Whether this trait is a bad thing is a value judgment.
I’m introverted, but I’m not a social reject. I prefer smaller groups of people. I am really quite personable in a comfortable setting.
“keeping women where they belong, in their boxes, er, homes,”
You know that the “home” in “homeschool” doesn’t refer to a literal house, right?
I mean, sure, some people (the ones who lean in the Xtian fundie direction) tend to take it that way, convert a room in the house to a one-room school house, complete w/ the exact same setup as found in a traditional school, and get all literal with it. Those are the people who take their kids out of school because they want to ingrain them further than the regular schools are even capable of doing.
But a great many “homeschoolers” take the oppurtunity to leave that dated model of “room, desk, chalkboard” behind and let their kids out into the world. They do most of their learning out in nature, at galleries and museums, in the library, and all sorts of places far more interesting than a mere classroom. And at the high school level, when you need to get down to the brass tacks of learning calculus et al, most homeschoolers I’ve met take courses at a local community college or even a university.
“homeschool” is a catch-all figure of speech meaning that one’s education is handled individually by one’s family rather than attending a school. it’s not just “school at our house.”
though i’ll agree fervently with you about the unpaid labor it entails (mainly for mothers).
Oh, and the best part is when she accuses us of not really being that brilliant because today we are (in terms of what’s been revealed in the thread so far) a graphic designer and a writer of instructional craft books (and maybe some teachers?). You’d think we’d confessed to being dirt farmers or checkers at Wal Mart or something.
Exactly. And if we’re going to play the ol’ IQ reveal game, I tested at 163 when I was 10, for all the good that did me. My mom told the staff at my new school I’d been in the gifted program since the second grade and they blew her off. The school watched me for a year before recommending acceleration, and did the IQ test in the meantime. IQ scores don’t mean a damn thing, though, but for the fact that the so-called “profoundly gifted” as ranked on the scale have a horrible time with authority figures. From this page:
http://www.sidis.net/HighQStacey.htm
“When you are want to criticize your leaders (politicians, bosses, cultural icons), keep in mind that there is a direct ratio between the intelligence of the leader and that of the led. A leadership pattern will not form, or it will break up, when a discrepancy of more than approximately 30 points of IQ comes to exist between the leader and the led.]”
This isn’t very surprising at all. And in fact, it’s probably a direct cause of why I got out of the financial services field — when you’ve got a patriarchal ass with a borderline IQ busting you for wearing sleeveless tops to the office (because you’ve got a cast on from wrist to armpit), it’s hard to take the work environment seriously. Is this really a bad thing? Does it make me a fuckup? I don’t think so. I just chose not to play that game. And now I have a job I love instead, where I can use my verbal and artistic ability to its utmost.
roamaround, I swear my “depression” has nothing to do with school, teaching, stress, anxiety, whatever. You’ve heard of mental illnesses, right? I take my meds and I go to therapy and I’m fine. I haven’t had an “episode” in, what, three years? Are you suggesting people with mental illnesses shouldn’t teach, or, like, interact with humans? Way to go.
My main gripe, really, has less to do with the VERY RARE instances of children who are legitimately “gifted” despite their very difficult backrounds. Most kids who are gifted don’t come from such backgrounds. That’s a fact.
Also, perhaps I didn’t make this clear: I wasn’t diagnosed with bipolar disorder until I was 18. Before then, I wasn’t mentally ill. I was a kid, then an angsty teenager. Many mentally ill adults weren’t mentally ill as kids — in fact, most of us weren’t.
Spit the Dummy, if you aren’t familiar with US schools, then you shouldn’t talk about them. I’m talking about US schools, period. If that wasn’t glaringly obvious, I apologize. Also, if it wasn’t glaringly obvious that I wasn’t like, responding to you and you alone, I apologize. But really, I am not talking about education outside the US. I offered personal details of my situation since you seemed to have assumed that I knew, and I quote, “nothing about gifted kids.” This is more of the elitist attitude I’m talking about, by the way. You basically put me in a corner where I had to prove my gifted “cred” in order for you to listen to what I was saying which apparently, you did not.
Listen, if being a good parent is making sure your kid gets the best education, I’m all for that. But somehow this also seems to turn into, “My kid will get the best, and I will NOT feel guilty about the fact that other kids don’t get the best — I want them to have the opportunities that my kid has, and I’ll talk a lot about that.” Fact is, these kids DON’T have these opportunities. So rather than imagine a fairy tale world where all kids get to be apart of the elite, why not do something more revolutionary — GET RID OF THE ELITE? Instead of doing this charter school, homeschool band-aid thing — taking the best and the most privileged out of public schools and leaving the rest of the masses to fester — how about having ALL kids go to public schools so that these concerned parents can focus on NOT JUST THEIR OWN child’s education, but ALL children’s education?
Maybe I’m living in a dream world too. I guess I don’t understand this whole, “my family is more important than strangers thing,” or, “I take care of my own, and to hell with the rest.” Speaking of US-centric attitudes, I suppose it’s sort of the same as giving more of a damn about US deaths in Iraq than Iraqi. Just seems hypocritical if you consider yourself a progressive, a feminist, an anti-racist, etc. Anti-elitism, I feel, goes along with that.
Since this thread is about homeschooling, and apparently my points haven’t been clear, let me state what is, to me, the obvious: homeschooling is like sticking all the “special” kids in one class, but worse. So in other words, I’m against it.
Oh yeah, and me pointing out that you (the plural you) aren’t as gifted as you think you are ISN’T me trying to say you’re dumb. But funny how y’all think that, because you tie up intelligence with, you know, test scores, IQ tests, ability to do well in classrooms, and all the things we say are racist and sexist and all the rest (except you can’t think they’re all bad if you put stock in them, right? Guess if you do well in these things, and that’s what got you into gifted classes after all, you MUST be gifted instead of, you know, privileged). The larger point that I’m trying to make is that, actually, OTHER people aren’t as DUMB as you think they are. That kid who played football