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Take a moment and call to mind the gifted advocates you know, the parents of gifted kids, the gifted parents of kids, the kids themselves. The professionals who specialize in and work with gifted kids. Notice anything unusual about them?

Actually, notice anything that’s not unusual about them?

My hunch is that just about everyone you could think of was consistent with a particular demographic — probably white, probably middle class or better, and, if an adult, probably a college graduate or better, and not a first-generation one at that.

If people accuse gifted advocates of elitism, can you really blame them?

Growing up gifted, I was surrounded by people of far less natural ability who had access to private tutors, opportunities, and connections I didn’t have. They could afford to sign their kids up for extracurriculars, camps, programs, and expensive academies. I attended parochial schools K-12, sure, but my parents bought my clothes at Walmart, Salvation Army thrift stores, and garage sales, not at Esprit and Guess.

I was lucky: I got a world-class high school education from a public magnet. Anyone who scored well enough on the tests could get in. The demographics were not nearly proportional to those of the general population in the area, making the school’s admissions policies controversial, but it was a start. There were plenty kids of color, and many kids qualified for free or reduced-cost school lunches.

But when I look at the gifted advocacy movement, those kids largely don’t appear on the radar. Sure, there’s research on those populations, but our involvement doesn’t go much further. We hold up kids who overcome adversity as exemplars of giftedness, but did we help them in any way to get there? Do we have any right at all to lay claims on their accomplishments?

There are practical obstacles, to be sure, and financial ones are foremost. Education and opportunity do not come free, and professionals who work with gifted kids deserve to make a living doing so.

Still, it’s a shame we’re spending so much of our collective creativity and intelligence fending off claims of elitism instead of putting our talents to the task of creating accessible, scalable methods of gifted education and making our social circles a bit more permeable to encourage greater equity. Drawing in more perspectives would enrich us all.

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A story has been spreading on Twitter of an Easter egg hunt gone mad, with over-involved parents actually jumping the rope at the event and scrambling to collect eggs for their kids.

“The only thing more shameful than not getting any Easter eggs,” I tweeted, “is a parent who has lost all hope that you might.”

I was the child of early helicopter parents, young for my grade and far more nerd than athlete. I consistently got picked last, or near last, for teams in P.E. It was something I had learned to live with. Then my father decided to step in. He gave my coach a bag of poker chips of two different colors so we could randomly pick teams. When my coach pulled out that bag of poker chips, my face burned with shame. He stopped using them after about a week, and I was glad to see them go.

In high school, the Key Club sold balloons as a fundraiser. You could buy them for friends or boyfriends and girlfriends as a gift for birthdays and other special occasions, and they were delivered to the person’s homeroom. One morning close to my birthday, I received a big bunch of balloons, anonymously, from a friend.

Later that day, someone from the Key Club let slip that the balloons were from my parents. For the rest of the day I had to walk around with this reminder that, not only did none of my few friends buy me balloons, but that my parents were certain I was so friendless and unfriendable that they went to these lengths to make it appear otherwise. And I was placed in the awkward position of explaining the balloons’ origin to every classmate who asked.

These days I can joke about being the kid who got picked last, or about being a loner back then. But I still feel a profound sense of shame when I remember the poker chips and the balloons. Far worse than just being bad at something is realizing that the people around you think you are so fundamentally flawed that the only solution is to compensate for you.

Helicopter parents are thieves of the worst sort. They steal hope: hope that you might grow out of it, get better with practice, or simply develop the emotional strength to handle disappointment.

What should you do instead? Let your children fail, hard as that might be. It’s not your job to do it for them. It’s your job to hug them, to wipe their tears away, to help them get better, and to let them know there’s always next year.

And it wouldn’t hurt to stop for a carton of eggs and some dye on the way home.

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Image used under Creative Commons license from Brooke Novak’s Flickr photostream.Tweet

The process we will work with here is extraordinarily subtle. I am going to ask you to learn to question your every assumption, everything you think you know. Your “koan” (a spiritual riddle, in the Zen tradition, that cannot be answered intellectually) is “Do I know that?” When, through a burst of intuitive knowing, you have successfully answered that koan, the next one will be, “How do I know that?”

Through this process, we learn to approach every moment of life without assumption, to cultivate a completely fresh awareness. If I hear a voice in my head say, “I’m not an artist,” rather than experiencing a reaction to that statement and assuming that the reaction means the statement is true — because the voice has always said that and I have always believed it — I am going to question that voice. I will ask myself questions designed to enable me to examine the situation more carefully. “Is that true? How do I know that’s true? What if it’s not true? What does it mean if it is true? What would it mean if it weren’t true? How did I get this information? Who is defining the terms? Who is setting the standards? How can I test this?”

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Cheri Huber, How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be

Image used under Creative Commons license from dominic bartolini’s Flickr photostream.Tweet

A small bat clings to the bulkhead outside my high school’s library. Soon, a Xerox of an encyclopedia page on bats is taped to the glass door beneath it. We ponder its arrival with our physics teacher. No one ever sees the bat move, but it changes positions once or twice. In a couple days, it disappears.

 

My classmates are bright and quirky, as are most of the faculty, who generally give us as much as we can handle. In our ninth grade Civics class we read Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and some of the Federalist Papers. We memorize landmark Supreme Court decisions, volunteer with political campaigns. At 14, we know more about good citizenship and the foundations of our government than most American adults.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons we are prone to subversion, even mutiny. When we are required to attend the swearing in of an alumnus to the school board, some of my classmates walk out on the unmistakably Christian prayers. I do not, but I feel uncomfortable. My friends are Jewish, Hindu, Jain, Bah’ai, agnostic, atheist. After the event, I run into the favorite Catholic priest of my childhood. This time, I can barely look him in the eye.

In AP American History, two of us escape to the office to complain about a hostile substitute with a crazy haircut and a bright purple suit who overuses the word “apropos” and insists we debate with him. By the time lunch is over, he has been removed. It is we who are in charge of our educations, and we demand, if not to be challenged and respected, then to be left alone.

 

My physics teacher, Ira Nirenberg, is a skinny, balding, bearded vegan and animal rights activist. He is the faculty sponsor of the environmental club, and once or twice a year, he tries to introduce all his students to vegan hot dogs. He wears t-shirts and runners with his trousers, and the mental image I will always carry is of him jogging in a tight circle, his outstretched arm the radius, his downward-pointing finger the center. He is talking about electrons.

Nirenberg is my first science teacher there and my last. I have him for both Physical Science and AP Physics. He is also the founder of Physics Dress Up Day. I paint my face like a cat and carry around a small cardboard box on which I’ve written passages from The Dancing Wu Li Masters. As Schroedinger’s cat, I am simultaneously dead and not dead. A classmate from a different year dons a sombrero and serape and wraps pieces of a vacuum cleaner around himself. He has come as Pepe the Partial Vacuum.

The grand event on Physics Dressup Day is the scavenger hunt. Nirenberg takes the time to tape a Physics problem to the door of every classroom. He gives us the first problem, the solution of which is the room number of the next problem, and sends us solving.

Nirenberg spoils us by doing real science. Absentmindedly bouncing a superball on the lab table, he notices the bounce goes dead when the ball hits a piece of paper, and we wonder for a few minutes about the shock-absorbing properties of paper. When he receives some posters in cardboard mailing tubes, he puts “reduce, reuse, recycle” into action by inventing a challenge for us. We try to predict where to put the tube so that a ball bearing rolling off an angle ramp will fall in the opening of the tube.

Nirenberg hates memorization, hates what he calls “formula grunts.” He can’t stop us from memorizing the formulae for use on tests, but insists we derive them ourselves at least once.

We enter every endeavor this way, not knowing what the answers are. It is entirely up to us what we deduce and write in our lab reports, what we take our best fit curves to mean about the speed of a ball bearing rolling down the hallways. We are rewarded not so much for being right — he doesn’t know the answers either — but for how we think about the questions.

When I take my first college science course, freshman Chem at Duke University, the canned lab experiments depress me, and the lectures, memorized to the 12th decimal place by the famous Dr. Bonk, bore me. I stop attending Bonkistry altogether.

 

When I return to university after many years, the picture is still as bleak as a Vancouver winter. Sometimes, the sun breaks through and the teaching — and learning — are superb. We soak it up while it lasts.

Often, though, there is a succession of dreary days. My high school classmates would have been to the administration by now demanding an education, but no one has ever told my classmates at the university that they deserve one. Few complain. Many leave. The rest quietly accept what is offered, focus on survival, and commiserate outside the classroom.

I am too committed to finishing my degree to consider quitting, but in some courses I become the kind of student I don’t even recognize: bored, present in body only when my attendance is required, skipping sometimes when it isn’t. I do the bare minimum to get the grade I want, or settle for something slightly lower. I am too polite to text in class, but a couple times I sit in the back and hide a crossword puzzle in my binder.

I feel bad for these profs, whom I imagine being driven to drink by long sessions grading papers we couldn’t be bothered to put our hearts into and by the dearth of class participation. I get the sense from the way they talk in class that their expectations of us are low.

We do our best to live up to them.

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Image of bat used under Creative Commons license from binux’s Flickr stream.

Ira Nirenberg is still kicking around. You can read his book, Living With Math, free from his website.Tweet

The actualizing tendency can, of course, be thwarted or warped, but it cannot be destroyed without destroying the organism. I remember that in my boyhood, the bin in which we stored our winter’s supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout — pale, white sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow 2 or 3 feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become plants, never mature, never fulfill their real potential. But under the most adverse circumstances, they were striving to become. Life would not give up, even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet, the directional tendency in them can be trusted. The clue to understanding their behavior is that they are striving, in the only ways that they perceive as available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming. To healthy persons, the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life’s desperate attempt to become itself.

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Carl Rogers, A Way of Being

Image used under Creative Commons license from merwing✿little dear’s Flickr photostream.Tweet

Yet there is, I believe, a much more important reason for my writing. It seems to me that I am still — inside — the shy boy who found communication very difficult in interpersonal situations: who wrote love letters which were more eloquent than his direct expressions of love; who expressed himself freely in high school themes, but felt himself too “odd” to say the same things in class. That boy is still very much a part of me. Writing is my way of communicating with a world to which, in a very real sense, I feel I do not quite belong. I wish very much to be understood, but I don’t expect to be. Writing is the message I seal in the bottle and cast into the sea. My astonishment is that people on an enormous number of beaches — psychological and geographical — have found the bottles and discovered that the messages speak to them. So I continue to write.

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Carl Rogers, A Way of Being

Image used under Creative Commons license from jamesmorton’s Flickr photostream.Tweet

I was an only child, bright, and as the bright often are, quirky, so much so that I never really fit in with my classmates at my Catholic elementary school. During recess, I often checked out a basketball and spent the time alone, dribbling around the schoolyard. At home, I spent a lot of time alone in my room reading and fantasizing about being in the woods with only a trusty canine companion for company, or riding the Pony Express, just me, my horse, and a mochila full of letters.

Although I was a city girl, I was as much of an amateur naturalist as our postage-stamp backyard and occasional camping trips with my Girl Scout troop allowed me to be. The Goldenrain tree next to our house was a favorite food of Io moth caterpillars, prickly and bright green with red and white racing stripes down the length of their bodies, so I captured and raised them on my dresser in pickle jars with perforated lids. I gave them Mexican names: Juanita, Pedro. When they emerged from their cocoons sporting wings with owlish eyespots, I left the jar open on the back porch and set them free.

My solitary endeavors didn’t seem to have bothered me much, but as I grew older, they certainly bothered my father, who often criticized my lack of social skills. He told me teachers had commented to him that I hung around them a lot but didn’t seem to have any friends my own age. No doubt their intentions in telling him were noble, and their words never meant to be passed along to me, but delivered by my father, this was just something else about me that was deeply flawed and needed fixing. Because even those who tried to have me as a friend were viewed by my father as flawed, I never felt comfortable spending more time around them and deepening these relationships.

As I got older, I learned to interact comfortably with other people, so much so that old coworkers jokingly began calling me a social butterfly despite my protestations that I was, and would always be, fundamentally an introvert. I made dear friends, often lovably quirky and bookish. Still, in new situations with new people, especially when I am being formally evaluated, the old insecurities return. Now that I am presenting myself as a candidate for graduate programs in counselling, these old voices are particularly vicious. Who am I, who have never been particularly socially adept or popular, to want to make a career of working so intimately with people?

As is often the case when I am feeling low, I began reading. I started one long-neglected work, On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy, and learned that in his childhood, he, too, had raised moths. Watching old videos of Carl Rogers and reading his books always makes me feel good because he is the embodiment of warmth and acceptance — indeed his theoretical approach is founded on these — and this detail shared between us made me smile even more.

But when I picked up a copy of another of his books, A Way of Being, at a used bookstore, I was stunned to find that Carl Rogers had similarly inauspicious beginnings.

Let me begin with my childhood. In a narrowly fundamentalist religious home, I introjected the value attitudes towards others that were held by my parents. . . To the best of my recollection this unconsciously arrogant separateness characterized my behavior through elementary school. I certainly had no close friends. There were a group of boys and girls my age who rode bicycles together on the street behind our house. But I never went to their homes, nor did they come to mine. . . during the important years of adolescence I had no close friend and only superficial personal contact. I did express some feelings in my English themes during the two terms when I had reasonably understanding teachers. At home I felt increasingly close to my next younger brother, but an age difference of five years cut down on any deep sharing. I was now more consciously a complete outsider, an onlooker in anything involving personal relationships. I believe my intense scientific interest in collecting and rearing the great night-flying moths was without doubt a partial compensation for the lack of intimate sharing. I realized by now that I was peculiar, a loner, with very little place or opportunity for a place in the world of persons. I was socially incompetent in any but superficial contacts. My fantasies during this period were definitely bizarre, and probably would be classed as schizoid by a diagnostician, but fortunately I never came in contact with a psychologist.

If this is the stuff young Carl Rogers was made of, then surely there is a chance for me too. For all of us.

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Thanks to Jason Michalko for pointing out that today would have been Carl Rogers’ 110th birthday, which prompted me to sit down and finish this post. Be sure to check out his post on Carl Rogers’ person-centered therapy: Unconditional Positive Regard: It’s Not Just for the Dogs

Image of a female Io moth used under Creative Commons license from Anita Gould’s Flickr feedTweet

On his last day of work, Nate boxed up his Blues Brothers figurines and posters from his cube, collected his severance check, and proceeded home, where he got drunk in front of the television.

He didn’t recall having landed in bed, but that was where he woke up, wearing the previous day’s plaid boxers and “All your base are belong to us” t-shirt. He cupped his hand under the faucet and drank some water from it, then brushed the fuzz off his teeth.

“The end of an era,” he said to himself. “Fuck.”

He pulled on yesterday’s jeans, pocket checked, and left for the 7-Eleven to buy Gatorade.

 

A middle-aged guy and his wife and their suitcases were already in the elevator on the way back up. “Y’all could use another elevator in this place.”

Nate smiled weakly and nodded at the man, whose baseball cap said “Wiener Dog Races, Boda, Texas.”

If he felt better, he thought, he’d have asked about them.

 

The good news was that, between severance and savings and not even counting EI, Nate figured he had a year easy to figure out his next move. The bad news was that the days stretched out before him endlessly, without real interruptions. The milk would expire and the bills would come due, but it didn’t matter when he was awake and when he wasn’t, nor how he filled his days.

He’d spent the past eight years working his way up the games industry ladder, starting in the large cadre of testers. He stuck out the insane overtime and cyclical boredom until he got to be, at long last, an artist. This was what he’d suffered for. And in the beginning, he loved it. But the work became routine again over time, and as the layoffs started, it became clear he was still just a small cog in a very large wheel. Management ordered up meetings in which they showed organizational charts without his job on them and talked cheerily about business needs and future plans. For once, Nate considered himself lucky to be single; many of the guys had families to support.

Lucky, but lonely.

With that thought, Nate crawled back under the covers.

 

The second time Nate got up, he flicked on the TV and made himself a pot of coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast. He sat down at his computer with his breakfast, checked his e-mail, and fired up World of Warcraft. He and his guildmates played into the early hours of the next morning, stopping only for bio breaks and to pay the pizza guy.

He occupied the better part of the week this way, but by Thursday, the novelty was wearing off. Low on groceries and starved for fresh air and self-respect, he showered, shaved for the first time since he’d been let go, and left to run errands.

At the library, he wandered the stacks and picked out some fiction, some philosophy, some photography. It was midday, and with everyone else at work, it was peaceful and quiet. At the grocery, Nate bought fruit and veggies to atone for the sins of the week, and plotted a big pot of chili.

Close to home, he ran into the cute neighbor with the Dachshunds, one brown, one spotted like a Guernsey cow. He bent down to pet them. The brown one was cautious, but the cow-spotted one wagged his tail happily as he scratched it behind the ears.

“Day off?” his neighbor asked.

“No, I got laid off last week.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It’ll work out,” Nate shrugged, sparing her his misery. “I should get my groceries in, catch you later.”

 

Nate’s dreams that night were chaotic, but one scene stood out clearly – he was in the middle of a muddy track trying to catch wiener dogs. He couldn’t remember why, but the dream had a feeling of urgency. What could possibly have been so important about catching wiener dogs? Dreams were funny things.

When he sat down at his computer with breakfast and checked his Facebook, one status update caught his eye.

“Scott Samson ‘s sister has a litter of brown Dachshund pups for sale. 9 wks old.”

Christ. This is getting fucking ridiculous, Nate thought, and put his head in his hands. He’d often thought about getting a dog, but his work schedule had prohibited it. But now. . .

“How much?” he typed back.

 

The next day, Nate walked out of Scott’s sister’s house holding a shivering brown boy pup inside his jacket. The pup had chosen him; when Nate sat on the floor to look at the litter, this little dog wobbled over curiously, sniffed Nate’s leg, and then began playing tug-of-war with his jeans.

“It’s ok,” he told the pup. “Everything will be ok.”

On the way home, Nate stopped at the pet store. It was a bit much to carry in his pack and one-handed, but he bought everything he thought he would need. Everyone smiled at him and cooed at the little brown eyes and sharp nose that peered out from his jacket.

Nate’s world had just taken a turn towards the friendly.

 

When Nate got inside, he put his new pup down to explore.

“This is home, bud. How do you like it?” The pup waddled around the apartment, cautiously sniffing everything.

Nate shook his head. The whole universe seemed to be telling him he needed a wiener dog. It was a little like God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It made no sense. Abraham must have looked up at God and thought, however it came out in Hebrew, “Are you shitting me?”

That was it. Abraham. “Hey, what do you think of that name?” he asked the pup, who’d claimed a stray dirty sock as his first toy. “Hammy, c’mere Hammy.” He seemed torn between staying with the sock and going to his new owner.

Nate took the sock away and scooped Hammy up. He picked up the remote, lay down on the couch, and stood Hammy on his chest. “What do you think? It’s not so bad here.”

He stroked Hammy and scratched behind his ears. Hammy’s eyes began to blink and he soon fell asleep in a little ball in the middle of Nate’s chest.

 

For the first few days, Hammy avoided the fleece-lined pet bed Nate had brought home, preferring to curl up on Nate’s dirty t-shirts, but once Nate put one in Hammy’s bed, he happily began snoozing there. When he wasn’t sleeping, Hammy was underfoot. He liked to tug at Nate’s pants leg and nibble his toes with his sharp puppy teeth. Nate had to be careful not to squish him as he stood washing dishes or cooking dinner. The days were filled with trips outside, attempts at housetraining, and, once Hammy was finished with his shots, socializing with the other dogs and their owners. Nate enjoyed these excursions, especially as the weather warmed. Hammy was, true to his breed, stubborn and fearless, and, true to his name, a comedian. He lifted his leg so high when he peed that he often nearly fell over. “He can’t help it. He’s got a Napoleonic complex,” Nate joked.

“He’s like a little cartoon character,” Jess, the girl with the two weenie dogs, told him one day. Later, as Hammy slept, Nate pulled out his long-neglected sketchbook and pencils and drew a napping cartoon Hammy.

He was so pleased with himself that more drawings soon followed: Hammy chewing on socks, Hammy singing, Hammy’s ear dangling from his head as he tilted it, questioning whether he’d get a piece of Nate’s turkey sandwich. Nate began drawing other things too. Some days, he sat on a park bench with Hammy’s leash tied to the leg and caricatured the people in the park.

 

One day, as Nate sat on that park bench, doing what he’d initially gone to art school for, it suddenly struck him as funny that he had spent years working up to the level of anonymity his previous job had offered. Games shipped without him. Nobody read the credits, and no one cared anyway after they’d exhausted the game’s 30-70 hours of playtime. No one gave a rat’s ass if he wasn’t the one who designed the skin of an orc or the scales of a dragon.

Nate felt free. Maybe he didn’t know what he was going to do to pay the bills once the money ran out, but he wasn’t going back into games. Couldn’t. The idea of never going back filled him with a child-like glee.

“Whaddya think, Hammy? What shall we do next?”

Hammy just tilted his head and looked at him.

 

A few days later, Jess stopped by the park with her dogs, Frank and Oscar. “Hammy! Hi Hammy!” Hammy wagged his thin little tail furiously, and Jess’s dogs strained at their leashes.

“Plotting world domination?” Jess asked.

“Heh, no. Just sketching a bit.”

“You sure draw a lot. Can I see?”

“Sure.”

Jess tied her dogs up close to Hammy and sat down beside Nate. He handed her his sketchbook and she began paging through it backwards.

“These are amazing,” Jess said. “Oh my god, that’s the crazy old guy with the shih-tzu!”

Nate laughed, and he felt his face flushing. “Yeah, that’s him.”

Jess pored over his drawings.

“You know,” she said, closing and handing back Nate’s sketchbook, “I have a friend who publishes children’s books. You should talk to her. I think she’d love these.”

“Children’s books? You mean like See Spot Run?”

Jess laughed. “They’ve come a long way since we were kids. My niece and nephew have the coolest books. Are you on Facebook? I’ll friend you and then I’ll try to arrange something, if you want.”

“Yeah, that’d be great.” Nate and Jess exchanged last names.

Jess got up and untied Frank and Oscar. “Bye Nate, bye Hammy.”

“Thanks, see you later,” Nate said, stretching his arm across the back of the bench.

Nate had never considered himself a sappy guy, but the idea warmed him. He imagined his drawings in a book, imagined it being read in classrooms and libraries to squirmy little bodies, imagined it preceding kisses goodnight, imagined little fingers turning the pages and following the words, sounding them out. The idea had never entered his mind before, but it felt right. He looked down at Hammy, who tilted his head quizzically.

“And a wiener dog shall lead them,” Nate chuckled. “C’mon, Hammy, let’s go home.”Tweet

The two hundred fifty dollars
from selling my keyboard
still sits on my desk
unspent.

I look up from my book
and the classical music
I play for some peace
in our tiny condo
and muse, sad and guilty
that I am giving up
as the day my father
sold the black baby grand.

But then Horowitz
begins to play Moonlight Sonata
tentatively,

tenderly,
and suddenly we are
heart to heart.

I listen
over and over
trying to know
this man I’ll never meet.

Vlady,
play me the piano

and I will write you poems.Tweet

hangs over the railing
at the first townhouse
next to my building
only I don’t know yet
his name is Ronnie.

He is 15, maybe,
tall, Chinese, with
smart, stylish glasses.

He skips hellos goes straight
to my dog’s name,
then sticks his hand out.

I’m Ronnie what’s your name?

I decide against
my citydweller’s caution
shake his hand
and tell him.

How do you spell that?

He spells it back in staccato,
tapping his leg at each letter.

His parents call him back in.

It’s ok,
he says,
you go on without me.

I stand there dumbly, smiling,
wanting to tell them
he isn’t bothering me,
staring at the crack in the door,
from which he struggles
to emerge,
pressing his long,
taut fingers against it,
frustrated,

telling me again,
It’s ok,
you go on without me,
as his parents
wrangle him inside

and the door closes
in front of him.
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