Cherish the scientist discusses homeschooling and gifted children.
Yes I am cheap has an amazing story about how she engineered her layoff.
I am officially tired of the anti-Sandberg rhetoric. I’m especially tired of people saying that she’s destroying her children. That said, the CNN reporters have been having a good streak this week. (Again, don’t read the comments.) 1 2 3 4 And here’s Laura Vanderkam’s review.
Miser mom posted this week. Yay!
This CNN story on a new charity like donors choose for foster kids made me cry. Last I checked, they’d run out of people to donate to because of the huge influx of donors, but hopefully everything is back up again by now. It is a wonderful idea.
Show us your bookshelf!
Afford Anything discusses breaking habits.
Single Mom Rich Mom pointed us to this gawker article about how it is easy to preach minimalism when you have a huge security net underneath you.
Challenges of parenting a gifted kid. Perspective from away from the oven. Another by childhood inspired. Let’s just say, this week we’re a little ticked off at backlash against parents of gifted kids. Here’s a response to the idea that gifted kids don’t need anything special until third grade from about.com.
We were in this week’s carnival of personal finance.
March 16, 2013 at 1:28 am
Thanks for including my story in your links!
March 16, 2013 at 6:00 am
I like this show your bookshelf idea! In fact, I am going to take a picture of one of my bookshelves and post it on my blogge! And you two should do the same! We can make this a blogge thing!
March 16, 2013 at 7:43 am
do itte!
March 16, 2013 at 7:09 am
I don’t know if you are still reading comments at Laura Vanderkam’s review, but I also got married at 22 after dating for 6 years! Maybe that explains why I love your blog so much. It’s been an advantage (I think, we’ll see if I get tenure!) to be able to have kids earlier so that they can be out of diapers now.
March 16, 2013 at 7:44 am
Awwwww! Yay for high school sweethearts!
March 16, 2013 at 8:50 am
I have to admit, the idea of trying to get laid off makes my midwestern puritan work ethic soul cringe a little bit. I don’t judge, because it is smart and it is part of the “rules”, but one of the steps (in the article yes i am cheap refers to) is to stop doing your job well and become disliked by your coworkers. What?!
I used to dream of Beauty and the Beast style library. now i just want less stuff!
March 16, 2013 at 9:02 am
I must have skimmed over that part. My midwestern soul liked the part where she worked extra to automate her job so she wasn’t needed anymore.
March 16, 2013 at 9:05 am
True – her post was more neutral to my soul. she linked to another one (financial samuri) on the same topic that inspired the cringing :)
March 16, 2013 at 9:09 am
Ah, well, Financial Sam is a special guy. I’m often not sure when he’s being serious and when he’s just trying to drive links. We may have gotten the idea for our series of “deliberately controversial posts” from him.
March 16, 2013 at 12:29 pm
OK. I read the post and the ones linked therein about “bragging” or whatever about gifted kids, and I am confused. It sounds like there are multiple different ways of using the term “gifted” going on.
I always figured it basically meant “a kid who is exceedingly f*cken smart and is painfully bored by the rote f*cken shitte they do in school to teach to the average and so they sometimes act up and do badde shitte out of excruciating boredom but they are able to master intellectual skills much faster and more easily than the average”. And that seems to be how some of those links are using it, but others seem to imply that it means that their kid’s brain is “wired differently” and that they therefore think differently than other kids.
So the one author is all like “I hate hearing parents bragging about how their gifted kid is so advanced”, and the other author is all like “my gifted kid *isn’t* advanced”. It seems like they are talking about different kinds of kids and talking past each other.
March 16, 2013 at 12:33 pm
Both are right, in your middle paragraph. (Or at least, both are not mutually-exclusive theories on how gifted syndrome works.) And what manifests depends on which symptoms the individual child is more prone to and what kind of environment the gifted child is put in. For example, in addition to the learning stuff you’re talking about, gifted kids are often (but not always) more intense, more emotional, have skin problems(!) and so on. Those comorbidities suggest potential for different wiring. I think there’s also some evidence that they’re better at pattern-matching.
The original post they’re commenting on is from some insecure woman who hates her own non-gifted kids and knows nothing about gifted kids. I feel really sorry for the kids of women like that. Parents should think their own kids are awesome.
March 16, 2013 at 12:47 pm
Interesting. I was always told I was “profoundly gifted” or “profusely gifted” or something like that, but maybe I was just really smart. I am definitely intense, but not particularly emotional or have any skin problems. The only things I did that could be thought of as “symptoms” seemed to relate to being bored out of my f*cken skull.
Like one time in second grade (or third grade, maybe?) in public school we were supposed to be learning the motherf*cken multiplication table and we had this f*cken entire workbook filled with the goddamn multiplication table shitte. And I was damned if I was gonna slog through that f*cken bullshittio. So I attempted to flush the f*cken thing down the classroom toilet, which of course clogged and flooded out the entire room.
The next year I transferred to prep school, which worked a lot better.
March 16, 2013 at 12:50 pm
Yeah, a lot of gifted kids get into trouble when they’re bored. Our angel of an oldest child seems to get stuck in chair slats whenever ze gets bored. (Well, that particular example has only happened twice so far since after the second time we’ve been on the lookout for it.) That is why we do things like practice math problems while waiting for the food to come at restaurants– the dirty looks we get from anti-intellectuals are not as bad as trying to pry hir head out from between slats. (Apparently, my husband got his head stuck in a couch once…)
March 16, 2013 at 12:53 pm
btw, the strong sense of social justice (see your posts on the hypocrisy of organized religion), also a common symptom
March 16, 2013 at 1:08 pm
Do you know what they mean when they refer to their kids as “2e” and “PG”?
March 16, 2013 at 1:13 pm
2e is twice exceptional– you are both gifted and have a learning disability
PG is what you were (are?)– profoundly gifted. It has different definitions, but it’s usually based on an IQ cutoff. (There’s a behavioral definition as well.)
March 16, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Thanks. This is all very interesting to me. In trying to piece things together based on my own memories, it seems like my prep school teachers and administrators somehow figured out that the best thing for me was to allow me to cut class and school regularly and do my own reading and thinking and writing without trying to force me to conform to the regular curriculum. My school had no separate formal curriculum or track or any other accommodation for gifted students, but I guess they somehow figured out how to deal with me in an informal manner. I sure am glad they did!
March 16, 2013 at 1:31 pm
Reading up on giftedness with DC1 in mind, I learned some stuff about me too (like why I had to wear my socks inside out to stop the itching… who knew?)
March 16, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Yeah. I used to cut off the tags from inside my tee-shirts.
March 16, 2013 at 2:06 pm
That’s the example in the books!
March 16, 2013 at 2:14 pm
No shitte?? lolz
http://freethoughtblogs.com/physioprof/2013/03/16/funne-blogge-shitte1111/
March 16, 2013 at 7:09 pm
I’ll try to get ours up on Tuesday with our “what are we reading” post. #2 just got a bunch of “congrats on getting tenure” books and has been MIA from the internet. :)
March 16, 2013 at 11:33 pm
There was an awesome tumblr response to the “live with less” article, too- and I am so proud my Google-fu was good enough to find it:
http://vruba.tumblr.com/post/45256059128/wealth-risk-and-stuff
It reminds me a bit of the people who would tell me when I was in grad school that I should join Costco because I would save so much by buying in bulk. If I had taken that advice and bought a year’s supply of toilet paper, I would not have had money for food… it is easy for people to just not get what living on a really tight budget means. I should have taken better notes, I think- I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of it.
And of course, living on a really tight budget for a defined period of time with a promised reward of a better paying job at the end is a lot different than feeling trapped in such a situation indefinitely.
Anyhow, moving on… Which bookshelf am I supposed to photograph? There are two in my current house, one in my office at work (mostly science and tech books, with a few project management books sprinkled in). And of course, my “too read” stack.
I should really read up on giftedness. It would probably explain a lot about Pumpkin, who I suspect is somewhere on the giftedness scale. But so far, we seem to be doing OK, so I haven’t gotten motivated.
March 17, 2013 at 9:16 am
Well, I picked a small shot of the ones in our bedroom because people who come to our house are least likely to recognize those.
re: giftedness reading, I put it off until we needed to, we just needed to earlier, partly because the region of the country in which we live is naturally geared towards lower academic achievement. The important thing that most people get wrong is the fixed mindset stuff, and you know that already. (As in, people like to call gifted kids “smart” all the time, and that leads to problems.) Other than that, if it ain’t broke, no need for fixing.
Great article! It is so true.
March 17, 2013 at 11:20 am
Fantastic link to the story on One Simple Wish (for donating to foster kids): http://www.onesimplewish.org
Great links on giftedness, as always. I’m still pondering that Anonymous commenter on @Cloud’s blog this week who claimed some expertise on giftedness while at the same time dropping such credibility-undermining phrases like “special snowflake” and “getting into Harvard.” Unconscious incompetence sucks.
March 17, 2013 at 11:46 am
I was wondering if you’d seen that. It wouldn’t bother me so much if such ignorance didn’t have the power to do great harm. I mean, it isn’t like those views aren’t widely prevalent, they’re just incredibly common among people who know absolutely nothing about gifted education. Also correlated with being terrified of math in my experience (of course math workbooks aren’t going to be fun if you’re terrified of math!). I’ve read some horror stories on Davidson Gifted and on Hoagies about gifted coordinators who say such things– gifted coordinators who know nothing about gifted education, of course. (And can’t separate theory from evidence-based research.)
And, of course the NYTimes posts such tripe in the parenting section from time to time. Unconscionable.
(Sadly, it reminds me of those well-meaning things that people say to folks who have had a miscarriage. I looked a little bit for a list of “Things not to say to parents of gifted kids” but only found lists of things not to say to gifted kids. I’m pretty sure a couple of the books had such lists, but they’re back at the library.)
Although even given all that, I really hate the way the patriarchy attacks the children of highly educated women. Sheryl Sandberg’s kids are going to do just fine. My kids are going to do just fine. But that’s no reason to force them to be miserable in elementary school because some idiot on the internet thinks that giving gifted kids the opportunity to learn somehow takes away their Rousseau dream-child status. Been there, lived through that. Finally escaped to a boarding school.
We have a post in about a month that goes into more detail on the Harvard thing and why Harvard may not be the best choice for a gifted kid (though it is a great choice for low SES gifted kids! Free tuition!)
March 17, 2013 at 3:06 pm
Does this mean you’re not going on a certain retreat to Ecuador? LOL
I read an article about Aaron Schwartz’s suicide this last week. It’s a sad example of unbelievably profound giftedness with an unhappy ending. I think this link will take you there:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/11/130311fa_fact_macfarquhar?currentPage=all
Makes me sort of glad I’m pretty average in the giftedness department.
Good Tumblr article.
March 17, 2013 at 3:10 pm
ROFL! No, we are definitely not (we have better things to do). You neither, eh?
March 17, 2013 at 4:16 pm
That’s so tame compared to the firewalking LGAT‘s that I’ve been on. Nope, I’m done with that noise – it might be like being taught math by a kindergarten student…
The selfishness thing disturbs me. In How I Found Freedom… Harry Browne wrote:
“When my wife said she wanted it all, including sole access to my daughter, I accepted those terms without fighting. I knew I could reacquire everything I wanted on a better basis. If you have children now, ask yourself if they were in the dream world you imagined when starting from zero. If not, you aren’t likely to help them or yourself by taking them into your new life.”
He didn’t see her again until she was an adult. What a wimpy deadbeat.
Also see nothing wrong with being introverted – it’s awesome. And it’s only when I’ve been too confident in investing that I’ve lost money. So no goal-orientation, confidence, extroversion training or what have you wanted here. And god knows I don’t need to learn how to LBYM. :-)
March 17, 2013 at 4:30 pm
That is one of the sadder quotes I have ever read.
And you’re definitely right– there’s a large literature showing that confidence in investing leads to systematic losses. (That’s why women do better than men on average.)
December 29, 2015 at 8:46 am
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