Should the progress of gifted kids be tracked?

I've been reading in a few different places about the TALENT Act, a bill in Congress that would require states and schools to measure the progress of students who score above grade level on standardized tests. The progress of these students would be reported on state report cards. The idea is that, while No Child Left Behind has done a reasonable job of tracking the progress of students scoring below grade level, anyone above grade level is deemed to be doing fine. If the proportion of students scoring at the highest levels goes down, that doesn't trigger any problems under the law.

It's an interesting idea. You can read an editorial in favor of the idea over at Education Week here. The author, Frances R. Spielhagen, writes, "As a former high school teacher and coordinator of programs for gifted students, I know firsthand the frustrations of the very capable student who must slog through drill-and-kill reviews every fall while teachers ensure that everyone is up to speed and ready to move forward."

What all this gets at is that schools should be serving a "value-add" function. There is no particular glory, as a school, in getting students who are all from well-educated families, and then producing students who score reasonably well on grade-level standardized tests. If you got kids who were on average one year above grade-level, and cranked out kids who were performing at two years above grade-level, that would be more remarkable. Likewise, a high-poverty school that produces students scoring at grade level, when similar schools score far below, is adding quite a bit of value.

People track these kinds of things in other spheres, and it certainly seems possible to track it in education as well. I hope we'll be moving toward the day of high-tech testing, when the tests respond to the student, and we figure out exactly where a student is, and can monitor progress more closely. Laws, though, are blunt ways to get at this idea.

On a personal note: I have a new book out today (March 1)! It's called "All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending," and it's published by Portfolio (part of Penguin). The book looks at money as a tool for building the lives we want, and argues that money can buy happiness (usually) if we spend it right. If you enjoy my writing here, I'd appreciate if you'd check it out. There's more over at my personal blog, www.lauravanderkam.com.

Homeschooling and working

I have long been fascinated by homeschooling. I wrote my senior thesis on the topic in college (basically on the legal framework; you don't want to read it, it wasn't any good). As I started researching gifted education later, I learned that a very high percentage of families of highly gifted children homeschool. If you can't get a good accommodation in school then homeschooling winds up being the fall back option. When I wrote Genius Denied with Jan and Bob Davidson, we noted that about half the families of their Young Scholars homeschool at some point.

I don't have the personality to homeschool my own kids, and I don't think I would have been a good homeschooled student myself, but I'm intrigued by the parallels to the way I work. I pursue new knowledge as I have reason to do so (usually because I'm writing about it). I work at my own pace on longer projects (books; when a deadline in 12 months out, you have to self-pace). My schedule is my own as long as I get the work done. I don't commute to an office every day at a certain time to do certain things just because it's 9 a.m., and homeschooled students don't either.

I'm pretty sure that a lot more people will be working the way I work in 20 years. So the question becomes, is homeschooling the best way to prepare for the workforce two decades hence? That's the thesis Penelope Trunk (gadfly blogger and serial entrepreneur) has proposed over at her blog's section on homeschooling:

"Gen Z will have an education that is practical. College is widely seen as worth far less than its price tag in most cases. Graduate school is an anachronism, now seen by many (including the Chronicle of Higher Education) as a babysitting service for adults. So I started thinking, if Gen X ers – the parents of Gen Z – are not buying into the education system, then what will happen? The answer is that Gen Z will be homeschooled much more frequently than any generation before them, and Generation Z will understand how to synthesize data, self-direct learning, and ask the kinds of questions that make or break companies. The portion of Generation Z that gets the old-fashioned, classroom-based education, will end up being unprepared to compete."

Of course, homeschooling requires something from the parent that many didn't necessarily plan on doing: being a teacher (or at least an education facilitator). The traditional model of homeschooling is that mom stays home with the kids to teach them, rather than building a traditional career. A tiny number of families hire governesses, and thus can homeschool as two-career couples, but this is a small number.

But as people are working in different ways, this is opening up new options, and I've been coming across a few more mothers (or fathers) who work while homeschooling, often in a freelance or entrepreneurial fashion. Trunk, for instance, has her blogs. Modern Mrs. Darcy is another homeschooling working mom, as is Catherine at A Spirited Mind. I'd love to find more examples (and I've written about a few readers from Gifted Exchange as well). As technology opens up more options, we may see more families trying this different way of educating their children, which may change the workforce in more ways than we can currently see.

Paleopalooza!

Over the weekend, we got to meet Dr. Scott, the paleontologist.

Those of you with preschoolers may know just how big a deal this is. “Dr. Scott, the Paleontologist,” is the scientist who comes on between cartoon segments on Dinosaur Train (a PBS Kids show). He talks about different kinds of dinosaurs, and other prehistoric creatures, and how we know various things about them. He always ends with “get outside, get into nature, and make your own discoveries!”

Anyway, he was in Philadelphia for some live events at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Hauling little kids anywhere is always vaguely traumatic. I couldn’t find parking, so I was circling around downtown Philly’s various small streets, eventually parking in a lot. I took a ticket with a magnetic stripe, then managed to fold it in my pocket, so it wouldn’t read afterwards in the machine or at the gate. I had to back my car out of the gate, run back to the hut to get the lot attendant, with the kids strapped in the car... ugh. But Dr. Scott! He told us all about various dinosaurs, and showed us clips from Dino Train, and then the kids got to meet him and take a picture with him afterwards. My 4-year-old found this a bit odd. How could Dr. Scott be on TV and talking to him?

But even if he found him odd, he did what he said. We came home and that afternoon, we played “finding fossils” outside for quite a while. Several rocks from our walk way turned out to look like T-Rex teeth. A stick that was bent at an odd angle became a fossil of a pteranodon wing (and shoulder-like hinge). We did, in fact, get outside, get into nature, and make our own discoveries.

I know there’s plenty to lament with TV, and how much of childhood these days is spent in front of a blue screen. But we never would have bothered to go be preschool groupies for Dr. Scott if we hadn’t seen the show. And in this case, a TV show encouraged us to go play scientists. So I’d list that as a mitigating factor in the sentencing of television for all that ails us.

(cross-posted at LauraVanderkam.com)

Another post on kids and sleep

We've looked at kids and sleep on Gifted Exchange a few times. Some gifted children seem to need less sleep than other kids (though this isn't a universal sign). But interestingly, there's some evidence that the usual sleep guidelines aren't necessarily right. Kids may need less sleep than the experts used to say.

An article in the Wall Street Journal this morning on "Challenging 100 Years of Sleep Guidelines for Children" notes that in 1897, a scientific book claimed 2-year-olds should be sleeping 16 (!) hours a day. Researchers in 2010 say that 2-year-olds should get 11.5 hours a night.

If you think about it, this makes the usual 2-year-old bedtime (like 7:30 p.m.) kind of nutty. If the kid is taking a 2-hour nap, this means it would be quite normal for the child to wake up at 5:30 a.m. Or earlier! My 2-year-old falls asleep around 9:30pm. He wakes up around 7-7:30 a.m. He takes a 2-hour nap. This adds up to exactly the right amount of time. It's just later. But why would I want to be up with him at 5 am? So I'm glad to know it's not worth fighting to get him down earlier.

My baby is shaping up to be a better night-time sleeper than the other two. She is usually asleep before 8pm and sleeps until 6:30-7am. She doesn't take great naps during the day - they tend to be short - which I was slightly worried about at first. But it turns out that the sleep guidelines for babies are 14-15 hours, plus or minus 2 hours. If my baby is sleeping close to 12 hours at night, she just doesn't need that much daytime sleep.

On one parenting list-serve I'm on, people use the abbreviation "YMMV" all the time. It took me a while to figure out that means "your mileage may vary." Meaning that what works perfectly fine for one kid won't work for another. Children, like adults, probably need varying amounts of sleep, and some kids are larks and some are night owls. I'm happy that at least my older two are now at the age where they can look at books in bed, which seems to keep them happy enough during the hours that other 4- and 2-year-olds are asleep.

How much sleep do your children get?

Teaching Self-Reliance

Things are a wee bit chaotic in my house these days. There are 3 kids under age 5, for starters. I have a book coming out in a little over 2 weeks. My husband has a busy time at work as well. We've called in lots of help, but there is still a lot to be done.

So I've been pondering ways that my 4-year-old, at least, could start to do a few more things on his own. He knows how to get himself dressed...but doesn't always want to. He could wash himself better in the bath. He could bring his dishes from the table to the sink (and throw any garbage away). He could put his and his little brother's dirty clothes in the hamper.

Thinking I would try to get buy-in on this project, I asked him what jobs he'd like to do around the house. The answer? "I want to take care of Cutie." That's his nickname for the baby. A nice idea, but a 4-year-old doesn't make a good baby sitter.

So where does that leave us? A sticker chart helped with the potty training project a few years ago, but I have a sense that it wouldn't be as motivational in this circumstance. I'm trying to talk in a polite way that makes expectations clear, such as "Thank you for bringing the Legos back to the basement" as he's standing there pondering whether he's going to do it. But I'm really curious if people have had success with anything in particular. He's a smart kid, so I've pondered just explaining what I have here. Mom and Dad are swamped, and we would really appreciate it if he could be a big boy and do some things to help. But who knows...

Science at the White House

We have an impressive system for seeking out basketball talent in this country. One reason promising kids are found young and -- this is key -- trained, is that there is much fame and fortune involved in being good at basketball.

The fortune part is partly a matter of entertainment value. Much of science doesn't lend itself to televised spectacle in the same way sports do. But fame is a slightly different matter. Every year, I see photos of the president meeting with the NCAA tournament champion basketball teams. But what about brilliant young scientists?

That's why I really appreciate what President Obama has been doing with the visibility of young scientists. He's been meeting with the finalists of the Intel Science Talent Search, bringing them to the White House. He's also been hosting a White House Science Fair for the past two years, and trying to make good news clips out of it. For instance, a number of news outlets wrote about Taylor Wilson of Reno, NV (a student at the Davidson Academy), who developed a low-cost way to detect radioactive material. This clearly has security implications, and Obama made sure to point that out.

Who knows what will become of Wilson's project, but we do know this will come of it: young people will see him on television and in the newspaper and get the message that if you do something really cool in science, fame of the sort often associated with sports stars can be yours. If we're really trying to "win the future" as folks keep saying, that's a good thing.

Community relations

As long time readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of the residential math, science (and occasionally humanities) high schools that a number of states have created for gifted students. These schools offer advanced classes and let young people learn in an environment with their intellectual peers.

The problem, of course, is that in an era of tight funding, such schools look suspiciously like "extras" that are not strictly necessary to fulfill state constitutional requirements of offering students a K-12 education. So they are a tempting target for cuts.

But what if you could extend the reach of your resources, and create a larger constituency? Would that incline the larger community toward you? It's an interesting political question, aside from being an interesting thing to do in general to further educational goals. So I was happy to see that the Indiana Academy, where I went to high school, is offering summer classes to kids in elementary to high school grades, and some for adults too. People can learn about biomedicine, programming, Legos, Japan, etc. Indiana Academy students are also available for tutoring kids in math and science subjects.

It's a smart move. Every child tutored will potentially do better in school, but beyond that, every child tutored creates another family that may or may not ever send a kid to the Indiana Academy, but will think fondly of the school nonetheless.

Owning one's mistakes

Last night I went to hear Trevor Eissler speak at my 2-year-old's Montessori school. Eissler, an Austin, TX-based pilot, wrote a book called Montessori Madness: A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education. Eissler is certainly a Montessori enthusiast, and regaled us with tales of the great happenings in Montessori classrooms. I do think there are great things that happen in such classrooms, though there is always the correlation vs. causation issue. Though Maria Montessori may have tested her theories in a slum, in this country, at least, many Montessori schools are private. In the case of the one my son attends, it was actually written up in Philadelphia magazine as being the snootiest pre-school in the area (Note: I am not paying $12,000 a year for it, but then again my kid only goes 2 days a week). So...I am not sure it is entirely fair to compare it with schools that have to take all kids, where some kids are showing up hungry and may have stayed in three different places in the past month. While I also like discovery-centered education in theory, I have seen constructivism done horribly. Bad teachers could make a mess of Montessori too. Private schools have more control over who they hire.

But one concept I have been intrigued by, educationally, is the idea of learning from one's mistakes. One of the problems of traditional education is that you take a test, then learn several days later what you got wrong. You may not even know why. Sometimes you get a chance to redo wrong problems, but the feedback isn't immediate, and the consequences are artificial (bad grade) rather than natural (the toy house you're building falls over when you measure the pieces wrong). Done right, the Montessori method aims for immediate feedback and natural consequences.

Of course, Montessori isn't the only way to get at that concept. One of the great promises of digital learning is that you not only meet the child at his level, you give immediate feedback. The child can learn from his mistakes in real time, seeing what works and what doesn't. In general, we fear errors too much. Sometimes there are bad consequences (medical mishaps come to mind). But trial and error is a great way to make new knowledge, and once you own your mistakes, knowing why things went wrong, you know how to do things differently in the future.

Cutting sports for science

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a story called "Friday Night Lights (Out)." A small school district in Texas, on the verge of bankruptcy and in trouble with the state for low academic performance, has decided to cut its high school sports program to free up cash. Among the things the cash has to go for? A better science lab, as required by state standards.

High school sports are obviously a big deal in Texas (especially football). So the idea of cutting sports to support academics is novel, to say the least. In the case of this little town (Premont, about 150 miles south of San Antonio), the sports teams hadn't exactly been powerhouses. It's not like the town of Allen, near Dallas, which is opening a new $60 million stadium. (One wonders how many science labs in small districts could be created for the price of that monument to those Friday Night Lights). Still, win or lose, as the article notes, high school sports competitions are often the glue that holds a community together.

But, of course, one could come up with many things to hold a community together. Volunteer projects. Variety shows. I read multiple times the scene in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books when, as a high school student, she recites a long historical oratory on a night in which the whole town has gathered in the school house. The article quotes someone from the PTA lamenting that education should be about the whole child (including physical fitness). Which is true. But with athletics, I've been pondering, lately, if our high school emphasis on team sports is part of our problem with an out-of-shape populace. To be athletic as a child is to be into team sports. That is the kind of athleticism that is valued. So I figured I was never athletic. But in my 20s, I started running -- an individual sport you can do your whole life, with little equipment. I'm not fast, but I turn out to have a fair bit of endurance. I finished the Big Sur Marathon in April 2010 and was in good enough shape afterwards to deal with an ER trip for my kid the next morning (long story) and to go hiking the next afternoon. I now run 5 days a week, and lift weights most days, something I'm guessing the vast majority of former high school athletes no longer do. If the goal is the whole child, emphasizing sports that the vast majority of people will no longer do after school -- like football -- doesn't seem to be the way to go.

That said, I wish this town didn't have to cut anything. I do wish, though, that all districts would go through the hard process of figuring out whether their budgets match up with what their priorities should be. The top priority should be producing students who can be good citizens and support themselves in the modern economy. Most likely, a good science program is a better bet than a formal sports program. Especially when you can send the kids outside to run for 30 minutes a day instead.

Too Many Gifted Kids?

Houston, we have a problem... too many gifted kids in the Houston Independent School District.

At least that's the gist of an article from Watchdog.org, pointing out that the HISD gifted rate of about 15% is double that of the state at large (closer to 7%).

This is, of course, one of the perils of giftedness being a concept without a clear definition. It is unlikely that there are twice as many students per capita in Houston who require the educational intervention that gifted education should entail vs. elsewhere. What we have is varying standards, likely looser in Houston than the rest of Texas. But what happens when a child who is gifted in one district isn't considered gifted in another?

This is yet another reason to keep one's eye on the ultimate goal of matching the education to the child. Because then the particular definition doesn't matter quite as much -- and those of us who care about this issue don't have to keep seeing the word gifted in quote marks, as Watchdog.org puts it, indicating how flimsy a concept they seem to think it is.

Scouting badges, challenges and rewards

Over at my other blog (the newly tricked out lauravanderkam.com) I posted the other day about the "Merit Badge Mindset." As a junior Girl Scout years ago, I used to love looking through the badge book and choosing projects that I could do without a huge field trip. There was something so neatly satisfying about undertaking a challenge, checking off different components of it, and then having some concrete proof of mastery.

Wouldn't it be nice if more of life was like that?

I've been thinking about the topic in the context of parenting. It's easy to have a neutral or sour attitude toward many of the challenges we face in family life. As parents and as kids. But when you've got a merit badge mindset, it's very different. You want to do a good job, and to proudly display your achievement (even if, to be honest, most other people don't notice. It's not like anyone was counting the badges on my Girl Scout vest!)

I've thought of a few merit badges I, personally, would like to display:

* The getting all three kids into the car by 8:45 a.m. without raising my voice badge
* The balanced meal on the table even though I didn't feel like it badge
* The still using a dramatic voice upon the tenth reading of Madeline badge
* The willingness to answer 15 "but why?" questions in a row badge

What about you? What kinds of merit badges would you want to display? What kinds of merit badges do you think your kids would want to earn?

Supporting homeschoolers

Districts and states take an incredible diversity of approaches to homeschooling - a practice that has grown considerably over the past 20 years. Some are actively antagonistic. Others figure that if you're opting out of the public school system, it's best if all parties don't have a lot to do with each other. But others have decided to offer support services to people who choose to homeschool, particularly on the enrichment front.

That's what seems to be going on in the Lewis-Palmer School District 38 in Colorado. According to this article, the district will be opening an enrichment academy that, one day a week, offers the "fun stuff" -- art, music, P.E.

I think this is a cool idea. Obviously, some people who are homeschooling for political reasons may want nothing whatsoever to do with a public school system, but many families homeschool for other reasons. I know many Gifted Exchange readers do simply because it's the best way to deal with their child's particular learning style and needs. Need college math, 6th grade English, and your kid wants to learn 3 different languages because he's really into that? Yeah, good luck with that in most institutional settings. But that kid might still like to do normal art class and PE. So why not serve all the children in one's community the best that you can?

If you're homeschooling, does your district offer any support services?

A 'Life with Little Ones' Journal

A while ago, I started a new project: keeping a journal specific to my kids. I keep a journal about my life in general (something I started doing when I was 13) but I figure my kids won't want to wade through that to find the fun parts about them when they haul these books out of my attic after I'm gone. And there are parts I don't want my kids reading -- even if I won't be around to deal with the aftermath!

Every week or two, when my kids do something cute or memorable, I write it down in my "Life with Little Ones" journal. I had forgotten when I'd started it -- I'd thought a few months ago -- so imagine my great surprise (and happiness) when I realized I'd actually started in August 2010. 16 months is a lifetime when you have a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old and a baby. I got to read about Sam's first words, his first steps, and Jasper's various stunners. Like when we talked about moving to our new house, one night he called me into his room and said "I'm sad." I sat next to him and said, sympathetically, "yes, it's sad to leave your friends." And then he said, "No, I'm sad because I want you to bring me water." Ah.

Anyway, it's been a small investment of time to keep the diary, but hopefully a big payoff in memories. It also helps me remember how and when my kids have learned various skills -- Jasper in particular with writing letters and numbers and then his current interest in math. Children take up a lot of energy, and so often it's hard to remember specific things, but writing them down has the memories flooding back.

How do you preserve memories of parenthood?

"Not a one shot event"

I was reading Scott Barry Kaufman's post on gifted education over at the Huffington Post, where he mentioned a report that will be soon published in the Journal of Applied School Psychology. The report surveys gifted policies in the various states, and makes recommendations.

One? The very sensible idea that gifted identification should "be a recurring phenomena, not a one-shot event." The old idea that you test once at third grade has a lot of holes in it. For starters, the "third grade" idea seems quite late to me. Apparently people were concerned that some kids learned more at home or went to pre-school, but by third grade, this would all come out in the wash. How arbitrary. Why not 2nd grade, or 4th grade? If gifted identification is about school accommodation (as it should be) then kids should be tested as they're starting school. That is, around kindergarten. If people really think everything will come out in the wash by third grade, then keep testing. And why not after that too? There's nothing magical about third grade.

Personally, I like the idea of individually-matched curriculum and pacing, as is becoming more possible through digital learning. In this case, you're constantly testing and figuring out what a child needs. You can also move at different paces for different subjects. Much of our approach to education is stuck in old mindsets, but here's hoping this is the year this starts changing.

As we start another year with Gifted Exchange, I'd love to hear what people would like to see covered. My oldest child will be starting kindergarten in the fall so, after years of shooting off my mouth about schools and curricula and testing and the like, I'll finally have some personal experience with it. Digital learning will be a big topic this year, and possibly education policy too, with it being an election year. Ideas are welcome!

Are Legos for girls?

BusinessWeek ran a cover story this past week on whether Lego is for girls. A note of explanation, before anyone leaps to certain conclusions. The classic Lego blocks are, most emphatically, for either gender. However, in recent years, Lego has figured out that there is far more money to be made selling kits based on different themes. So which themes? While Harry Potter has been pretty gender neutral, most of the other themes are pretty over-the-top boy: battles, Ninjas, etc. I wish the laws of economics didn't point toward kits (talk about stifling creativity, to dictate how a toy should be played with, and assigning a story line already...) but it does.

So why not some kits aimed at girls? Sounds simple enough as a way to build market share. But what should those kits look like?

To the credit of Lego, it sounds like they are not simply making the blocks pink. The soon-to-launch Lego Friends line is based on studies of how girls play -- packaging kits so you can start playing before you've totally assembled the kit, since girls seem to be more into enjoying the process than boys (who tend to race against the clock to complete a kit). It seems to be like a reasonable compromise to make Legos more appealing to girls so they can get the spatial reasoning benefits of playing with these little blocks... but I'm curious what Gifted Exchange readers think.

A Bold Step?

Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, director of Northwestern's Center for Talent Development, recently took over the reigns of the National Association for Gifted Children. In her first address, she called on the field to take a "bold step" toward focusing on talent development, rather than giftedness. Focusing on "giftednesss" has led to marginalization, she says (and given that the spell check on this blogger software doesn't even recognize "giftedness" as a word, I'd have to agree that the field is not exactly central to much of education).

This announcement has been controversial for several reasons. One is that parents of highly gifted children often have to fight to convince schools that there is anything different about their children and their children's learning styles. Olszewski-Kubilius's point is that the field has been focused too much on identification -- sometimes a bit of an angels dancing on the head of a pin type question of whether a tested IQ of 129 vs. 131 means anything, and on which test, and at what age, and then nothing happens to the kid anyway except getting 45 minutes of enrichment once a week. But after decades of work, at least many school districts now try to identify gifted children. Clearly, people would be a bit miffed to have the head of NACG say that's not so critical.

I have mixed feelings about this myself. Regardless of whether children grow up to do anything remotely high-achieving as adults, they deserve to have their educational needs met. Sure, some gifted kids grow up to win Nobel prizes, write great symphonies, etc., but others live quiet and normal lives. One's temperament has a great deal to do with these things too -- one's level of ambition, one's level of self-discipline, competing priorities like family obligations, etc. I don't view the quiet and normal types as failures.

On the other hand, Olszewski-Kubilius is correct that identification is only the very, very start. Personally, I'd rather live in a world where there was no identification, but all children were challenged, stretched, and had their talents maximized, vs. a world with perfect identification but none of the above. The question is whether this "all children challenged" vision is too utopian for the world we do live in, where the educational establishment likes to ignore high-achievers as a matter of policy with NCLB, and sometimes just for sport (cutting down the tall poppies and all).

What do you think? Should the field talk about "giftedness" or "talent development"? Is there much of a difference in focus, or is there plenty of room for both?

Be careful with "no"

(cross-posted with My168hours.com)

I've been pondering lately the question of "what have my children taught me?" (Asked by the facilitator of my parents' group). One lesson I'm working on learning is to be careful with my "nos."

Here's the thinking: Whining is hell on earth. Listening to children whine makes one irritated, tense, embarrassed. Why do children whine? Well, we tend to encourage it. Many of us say "no" reflexively to whatever random thing a child is proposing. Then, the child starts whining or throwing a tantrum and we eventually say "yes." Because we probably didn't really care. Yes, you can play for 5 more minutes. I only wanted to leave the playground because I was bored. Yes, you can have jam on your pizza crusts. Why not?

The lesson the child learns is what any good negotiator (or dungeon master) knows. Don't take the first offer. Torture produces a much better confession. Find out for sure what the parent cares about and doesn't care about. Whine enough and "no" turns into "yes."

So what is a parent to do? Grow a spine, perhaps -- but the best negotiators know that confrontation often leaves your opponent with no choice but aggression. Here's another framework:

If you are going to say no, be willing to defend it to the death. Well, not death, but to the point of a public, grocery-throwing temper tantrum.

Otherwise, consider a "yes." Or at least pause before you automatically say "no." Stall by asking "why do you think that would be fun?" or "tell me more about that idea." Because if you're going to say yes eventually under duress, you may as well say it before the kid realizes that screaming is the way to go. In other words, be careful with each "no."

This is obviously easier said than done. But I am trying to be judicious with my flat-out refusals. Sam, my 2-year-old, got himself out of his car seat straps last night. That was a definite "we are pulling this car over" no. But when he wanted to have a bite of my birthday cake before lunch, I realized this was going to escalate rapidly, and wasn't that big a deal. He's a good eater, shoveling in tomatoes, oranges and other foods that his 4-year-old brother won't touch. When I realized that I didn't care enough about lunch order enforcement to endure a temper tantrum during my birthday lunch, I went ahead and said yes fairly quickly. After all, I have been known to eat junk food before meals as well.

When do you say "no" and when do you say "yes"?

What have your children taught you?

That was a question posed recently in a parenting group I've joined. I imagine that broadly, people would say things like "patience" or possibly "humility" (something I was thinking, the other day, upon learning that a couple expecting their first child had chosen a parenting manual they intended to follow exactly...as if children follow operating instructions).

But the first answer that popped into my head was actually literal. My 4-year-old is currently obsessed with how many letters are in different words. So I now know that "Philadelphia" and "Pennsylvania" both have 12 letters. I also know that 2 "Jasper"s make a "Philadelphia." These are definitely things that I never pondered before.

My children have, perhaps, tried to teach me patience in their often aggravating fashions. But I do know they have taught me a lot about time, and whether I am spending it on things that matter or not, and that you can do quite a bit in small bits of time. Someone was describing to me the other day that they need long, uninterrupted periods to write. My children have taught me that, at least for me, this is not the case.

What have your children taught you?

Can you change your IQ?

I keep reading articles about new research (published in Nature last month) finding that IQ is malleable. The sample size of the study (33 British students) was quite small, which means that outlier findings need to be taken with a grain of salt. One student's IQ rose from 107 to 128, and another's fell from 114 to 96. The trumpeted finding is that 9% of students showed a change of 15 points or more, but of course 9% of 33 is 3 kids. The most interesting finding is that MRI scans showed actual brain changes in the kids with the big IQ changes, which suggest that it might not be total measurement error. The idea is that one can possibly change IQ, on the margins, through certain brain exercises.

Some people will no doubt trumpet this as evidence that giftedness is some sort of made up concept, just capturing a snapshot in time among kids whose parents have trained them more than others. But one certainly doesn't have to draw this conclusion. I am comfortable believing these two things at once:

1. I am not nearly as athletically gifted as many other people and never will be and
2. If I practiced hard in any given sport, I could become better at it over time in a way my body might actually physically reflect.

These two beliefs also do not lead me to believe that we should get rid of varsity basketball teams, or camps for children who've shown promise in basketball or that athletic ability is some sort of social construct. So I'm not sure why the idea that IQ might change by one standard deviation in a small number of children would lead anyone to believe that there aren't children who learn differently and need more challenge than others of the same age.

Children and Rituals

The holidays are approaching, and they are always a time for traditions. This will be our first Thanksgiving and Christmas in our new house, and our first with three kids, and our first with any sort of space. As we start to put down roots, we can start to choose which rituals and traditions we will do, and hence our kids will someday think of as "normal." If you think about it, this is a heady amount of power.

Families raising gifted kids have the additional element of the constant "whys." When it comes to rituals and traditions, these are often good questions -- from both the mundane to the profound. Why do we have hamburgers and hot dogs on Sunday nights? (Because it's easy and your father grew up having that for Sunday dinner. That's why). Why do we give gifts? Why do some kids celebrate different holidays? (and this at an age where you didn't think you'd be explaining such things). Why were the pilgrims so thankful for food? Did they not have food? Why? What happens when you don't have food?

I think this year will feature some sort of write-up of what we're thankful for, some Christmas cookie baking, a decorated tree with lots of kid-made ornaments, an Advent calendar, and such. I'd like to take the boys shopping for another child through one of the non-profits around here, but I'm not sure how that will go. I'd love to hear from people about what rituals and traditions they've introduced or kept up in their families, what their kids think and ask about them, and how you've figured ways to celebrate the meaning of the season with small kids.