When GT does not mean Gin & Tonic
This morning I went to a presentation at my son’s elementary school, focused on its Gifted & Talented program. Much of the focus was on the improvements in GT programs in recent decades, designed to avoid excluding children from educational resources, while also allowing for curriculum differentiation — all laudable goals.
The school is located in an upper class, fully gentrified, hyper-bourgeois neighborhood, but close enough to some gentrifying portions of the city to have a pretty diverse student body. I’ve gone to kid birthday parties at well-heeled playscapes, public parks and backyards with bouncy houses and folding tables. I live in a less wealthy neighborhood on the other side of town, and I generally identify more with the bouncy house family; it reminds me of the gravel-street neighborhood of my youth.
Even back then, I was a bit of a both-worldser. My father’s a computer engineer, a traditionally upper-middle-class job, but he was only 28 with a family of six, so we lived on Seminole Trail with dozens of other young families, almost all of whom were hooligans. You had the single mom across the street whose life’s summit was reached when she won a contest to meet Barry Manilow. You had the neighbor kid with the burn scars from when his brother set him on fire. You had a family of incredibly dumb kids who I would have considered developmentally disabled, but they were all equally dumb. (The middle one was a dead ringer for the Joaquin Phoenix character in “To Die For”.) You had a kid named Diesel.
Someday I’ll write my version of Silvina Ocampo’s “The Promise,” in which the narrator has survived a shipwreck and spends the book floating, trying to stay awake, following her synapses from person to person, only mine will be things like, “[Redacted] lived one street over. She was blonde and sexually aggressive starting at age five. She had step-brothers in their 20s who were almost certainly abusing her, and by age nine she told me I was her boyfriend, or one of them.”
Today’s meeting, though. I was surrounded by parents with personal experience in gifted programs. The principal talked about the mindset behind the way GT programs are structured now, attempting to avoid how standardized testing tends to identify wealthy white kids as disproportionally gifted. Of the 40 or so parents in the room, only two were not white, east Asian or south Asian, and most were definitely well-off, with white-collar jobs that allow the freedom to attend on a weekday morning.
When the counselor and principal opened up for questions, the first woman said, “My child is very advanced, years ahead of his peers. I don’t believe he benefits from being in a class with those other children.” (Yeesh.) Another talked about her older child’s positive experience, how he built a house out of toothpicks and created architectural drawings. Another’s child wrote a book that her mom was sending to publishers.
I entered my school’s Gifted program 44 years ago, which gave me access to the school’s Apple ][+. I remember a subset of us meeting regularly with a teacher who I had to correct when he slid the 5 1/4” floppy in sideways. (After he left the school, he came down our gravel street to sell us encyclopedias.) I remember creating a film strip about macular degeneration for some reason. They sequestered us and took us out of class, told us we were special, and set in motion a thousand memes.
When I was in 2nd grade, I gave a report on the Solar System that was so well received, the teachers had me present it to all the other classes. The teachers were impressed that even the 5th graders paid attention. I didn’t tell my parents — I didn’t get a lot of airtime at home with three brothers — but after the next parent-teacher conference, they asked me about it, and I sighed. “Yeah,” I said, “I forgot one of Jupiter’s moons.”
By 4th grade, my little rural elementary school had no more classes for me to take, so I skipped 5th and went to middle school. In doing so, I went from being a confident, normal-sized kid to the youngest, smallest kid in school, sharing the halls with 8th graders who were bigger then than I am now. Sometimes I’d get shoved, other times picked up and thrown, and I’d pick up my mound of books and silently continue on my way. I certainly didn’t have the confidence to teach classes anymore.
Later, as an 8th grader taking Geometry and Trig at the high school, I got to be the smallest kid in school once again. There were seniors in that class, actual adults, though I imagine I was more of a novelty, not someone to bully. Still, even though I’m a tall-ish 5’11” person now, in my mind’s eye I am tiny. I am prey.
My experience is far from unique, particularly at AA. When you’re a forever-failure, with expectations of yourself that are so nebulous, you could never actually achieve them, alcohol is a great way to quiet that part of your brain. At the same time, there are many, many alcoholics who have trouble getting over their own gifted brains to accept they need help. I was one of them for 17 years.
Anyway, the GT program today isn’t for me, it’s for my son. When I picked him up from school yesterday, he asked if we could have beans for dinner because he “wanted to get some money from the Toot Fairy.”
Gifts come in many forms.