Good morning all! It's been a great couple of weeks away for your dear old Professor Crackpot Caractacus, and I hope this fortnight past passed you well as well.
I had a plan to share pictures from my summer vacation with everyone this morning, but technology interfered. More on that later.
But for now, a few reflections on some observations I've made since my return to the land of tall buildings and concrete rivers, yes, New York City.
I've been working on a project involving advanced young children, and I have a few stories to tell. Who knows, maybe these baby geniuses will grow up to be BPI students? Or, dare I dream, faculty?
First
If you live in California, South Carolina, Maine, New Jersey, Virginia, the Dakotas, and especially Arkansas, and any other states I may have missed with primaries or other state or local elections today, please go do that pulling-the-lever thing. Voting is important.
Switching Gears
Well, I had planned on presenting a love letter to the New England communities of Mystic, Newport, Gloucester, Sandwich, Hyannis, Provincetown, Boston, Beverly, Portland, Plymouth, Worcester, and Montague. But, for some reason indiscernible to me, all my photobucket pictures are coming through supersized, even after resizing them down to medium or even super-teensy-weensy size. So, having discovered that each picture in my photo diary would take up 3 vertical screens of cyberspace, I'm switching gears kind of at the last minute to a backup topic. If I can get the picture thing worked out, there may be something there next Tuesday, if not, well, not. I mention this to vent, and to ask if anyone else has had an issue with getting Photobucket embeds to appear in their post-edited sizes lately...Otherwise, on to private schools.
A Few Quotes
I worry because my 2.5 yo DS cannot write his name well and he can't yet draw pictures that look like anything. I worry a lot that he's behind.
This one is the banner quote on this morning's website "urbanbaby.com." UrbanBaby is a site that caters to a particularly informed audience, in my opinion. Private and gifted schooling in New York City is a very competitive space. And, possibly for good reason. There are more than 1 million students k-12 in NYC, and for those competing to get into public gifted programs, the following statistics from the NYT are a little sobering:
Last year, 14,822 4-year-olds tested for admission to the city’s gifted kindergarten programs, up from 12,410 the year before. About 1 in 5 (3,231) scored in the 90th percentile or higher, qualifying them for neighborhood-based gifted programs, and 9 percent (1,345) made the 97th percentile cutoff for the three citywide gifted programs in Manhattan and two new ones in Brooklyn and Queens.
But those programs have a total of 325 seats — fewer than half the number of 4-year-olds who scored in the 99th percentile, the highest possible score.
As for a 2.5 year old not writing his name well, well, that's perfectly normal for a 2.5 year old. But, many parents in NYC are not about being normal as much as they are about being perfect. If someone's child has written their name at 2.5, then their child is behind if they have not.
Overheard in a kindergarten classroom:
Female Teacher- When you design your superhero, do you want want them to be a _____ or a ________?
Student- An antagonist.
Teacher- But the antagonist is not the good guy in the story. Are you sure you want your superhero to be a bad guy?
Another Student- The protagonist, then.
Teacher- What if I was drawing a picture of myself? What would I start with?
3rd Student- A little girl.
The students in this interaction were 5 and 6 years old, and completely overlooked the answer the teacher was angling for as boy or girl and went straight to antagonist or protagonist.
When dealing with the 97th percentile, or 99th percentile, most children will be "behind" in some way compared to that criterion. That's the nature of percentiles. The same can be said for percentiles in income, height, weight, or degrees fahrenheit. The real question is whether or not the basis for the percentile has any relevance or not. I've argued here in the past that standardized tests do not.
On that same website, UrbanBaby, a discussion board recently included an exchanged between a person identifying herself as the mother of a 2nd grader in a private competitive Manhattan school. She was lamenting her middle class income of $450,000 a year, as it was barely enough to cover the school's annual tuition of $30,000+ and provide for her accustomed lifestyle. She was especially distraught that after several months of being invited by her child's classmates' parents to society events and charity fundraisers, which her family could not afford, that the invitations had dried up and along with them playdate invitations and social events involving her child. She now felt that her child was the only one at the school not seeing any of the children from the school outside of school socially, and was asking other parents for advice on whether or not to continue the enrollment in the school or to look for another solution for the education of young one.
Other Assessments
So, if standardized tests are not good barometers of giftedness (not the focus of this diary, but I'm assuming they are not), then how do the schools that eschew them screen and select students? Nearly every private elementary school in Manhattan has a play date. They bring the prospective students in and observe them interacting with other children. Some teachers of the school may present them with an activity or two to see how they engage with it, their attention span, their apparent maturity level, etc... Some schools have trained psychologists interview the children separately from the group. Family histories, child histories, and parent interviews also play a role. Then there is the role played by legacy children, funders and donors, and political connections to board members and other families associated with the schools. None of which has much to do with the academic potential of the child, even though a minimum threshold is assumed to be necessary to protect the reputation of the school.
3 Stories
Micah (not his real name) finished all Harry Potter books before his 6th birthday. His mother reports not having heard him ask for a definition or explanation of plot the entire time. Beginning with his 5th birthday, he began asking for an Apple laptop for his next birthday. Saving up his own money (his parents' loose change in a piggy bank, mostly, and some chores they paid him small amounts for) he had accumulated $600 by his 7th birthday. His parents asked friends and family to contribute to his laptop fund instead of getting him other presents as he was only interested in one thing. He is now using his new Powerbook to write his first real book.
Rachel spoke her first words at 5 months. Before she was 18 months old she recited the alphabet, knew standard colors and shapes, and counted from 1 to 10. She was playing chess competently a few weeks after her 3rd birthday. Competitively after her 5th. She speaks 4 languages and is learning a fourth, Mandarin Chinese. And she just finished kindergarten.
Alan didn't speak until after his 4th birthday. His elementary school teachers felt he had such little potential they didn't believe he would amount to much and wrote so on his formal assessments. By age 15 he had mastered integral calculus and independently solved the Pythagorean Theorem before he had learned Pythagoras had already done it.
What Matters?
What can be difficult for me, and any parent obsessed with the daily achievements and changes in a child's verbosity, behavior, and cognitive abilities, is that what happens before age 6 doesn't determine a child's trajectory in carved stone. Of course the early years are important, but when we're focused on the first 3 or 4 years, we discount the importance of the next 20. Carol Dweck has done convincing research (convincing for me at least) on something called the growth mindset. In this mindset, people seek out challenge and relish failure for the information gained about how to improve as a result. These people tend to become Alan Albert Einstein's and Martha Grahams. The book is not yet written on Micah and Rachel. While they may become great doctors or physicists may not depend as much on when the stopped using a pacifier or first counted to 20 as it does on whether or not as teenagers and young adults they believe their only self-worth is in being correct, because being smart = being correct. Then, the fear of being incorrect and therefore not smart, may hold them back from fulfilling all that potential they exhibited when they were younger, and someone who did not play chess when she was 3 but who believes that her ability to improve is malleable and stretchable may pass her by.
Maybe I should go to UrbanBaby and try to make that point there. I wonder how many would listen.
TWLTW
- Vocabulary
- Morton's Fork: A situation involving a forced choice between two equally undesirable outcomes.
- Bindle: A bundle, usually carried by a hobo, including bedding.
- Elint: Military-based collection of information using electronic means, "electronic intelligence."
- Taxis: The manual repositioning of a displaced body part back to its original position.
- Peccant: Guilty.
- Rush Limbaugh was married this weekend (his 4th marriage). Headlining the reception was Elton John, for a reported $1 million. In attendance was a gallery of those one would expect at a Rush Limbaugh wedding, Clarence Thomas, Karl Rove, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson. All grooving to Elton John.
- Each foot can produce one pint of sweat each day. There are, on average, 250,000 sweat pores on each foot. Bacteria thrive on feet, as sweat in socks and shoes cannot easily evaporate as sweat on other parts of the body. That smell is the result of the life cycle of bacteria feeding on sweat. You can thank my FIL's golf bag for the inspiration to investigate this phenomenon.
- The sidewalls of "run-flat" tires are so stiff they can carry the weight of a vehicle without any air in them at all.
- H.P. Lovecraft's parents both had mental breakdowns before he wrote his most famous fiction works in the Cthulhu Mythos. At least, I assume they're fiction.
- The Montague BookMill's closest thing to an advertising slogan is, "Books You Don't Need In A Place You Can't Find." And it may just be the coolest, hippest, most awesomest bookstore I've ever seen.Montague BookMill's
What Did You Learn This Week?