Gifted

Got to spend some time with my brother and his family again tonight. They are in town from California and have been staying with my parents for the past few days. We rarely get to see them—he’s in the Air Force and has been stationed in California for the past year or two and he was in England for about three years before that. I hate not seeing him and his kids. I think Harrison misses out on them even more, though, because he’s not getting to be close with his cousins. I’m thinking of seeing if Harrison wants to start writing letters with Aaron, kind of pen-pal style, so that A) they can keep in touch easier and B) they can both get mail regularly. (What kid doesn’t like getting mail? I like getting mail!)

In other news, Harrison’s teacher has asked for permission to have him tested for the gifted program at school. I’ve avoided thinking about this for several reasons. First of all, I have to wonder how much of his ‘brightness’ is nature versus nurture. I mean, yeah, Robert and I were both in gifted classes when we were in school, but that doesn’t guarantee that our kids will be that way. What if he’s just ‘gifted’ because we spend more time with him reading and talking to him. We explain things to him when he asks questions and try very hard not to tell him, “I don’t know.” as a final answer. If we don’t know the answer, we try to help him find the answer.

I’ve also avoided it because, frankly, it sounds pretentious. While these guys laugh about the abundance of gifted children, I have to see a bit of truth behind their satire. I know waaaaay too many people whose kids are ‘gifted’ and it always seems a bit grandiose. I mean, the kids actually are smart; I can’t contest that. It just seems funny that so many of the people I know have ‘above average’ kids. Almost all of them are teachers’ kids, which brings me back to the original question: are they actually smarter, or did their parents pay more attention to them in the formative stages to the point that they got an advantage over the ‘regular’ kids.

I don’t know.

I’m going to have to think about this for a while.