Busytown: For the (broken) record
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I personally hated English as a subject, because they made us read shit I basically didn't like, then pore over it in ways that I didn't like, then discuss it with people I didn't like, then write about it in a format I didn't like.
Me too, absolutely hated the subject. I loved plenty of what they made us read, though I was not assigned one book in high school that I had not already read. In Canada kids are assigned Katherine Mansfield and I always enjoyed her stories - The Daughters of the Late Colonel is one of the funniest stories ever written.
Much as I disliked English I quite enjoyed English Lit, which is a different subject from and additional to English. Again, I was familiar with the reading list - Pope, Milton, Chaucer, the inevitable Shakespeare, Byron, Shelly etc as I grew up in a house with a lot of books. An appetite for essays (Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, George Eliot, Denis Diderot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell) and natural history (Darwin, Humboldt, Wallace, Suzuki) gave me an advantage when I turned up for class.
By highschool I was truant for more than 50% of my classes and had an A average. I prided myself on never taking a note (I have an unusually good memory) never writing a rough draft and never participating.
When I went to university and reached a level at which I had to take notes (particularly in biochem and logic) my ego, arrogance and intellectual conceit were crushed and suddenly I had to learn how to take notes and study. A scientist once said to me "ex-gifted children never distinguish themselves because they never learn to study and because precocity means nothing." So true. I once wrote an A paper for a book I hadn't actually read ( The Immigrants ) and I once won a bet that I could write an A paper on any - any - subject proposed to me by a fellow student - Elements of Homosexuality in Huckleberry Finn . Unfortunately there is not much use in real life for this kind of ability...
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Makes for good company, but.
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dyan, precocious sounds like an understatement. I was feeling bitter that I didn't get a longer chat with you a the Great Blend, but now I'm beginning to feel relieved. The tachycardia I experienced from intellectual overload whilst talking to Sacha might have proved fatal ;-)
I think I realized pretty early in life that people thinking I was really clever wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and pretty much deliberately foiled everyone's plans to make some kind of scholar out of me. Not that it helped, I got all the bumouts of the supposedly gifted, with none of the acclaim. But I did get to do what I wanted most of the time, and that was worth a lot to me, and still is.
If I was to brag of academic achievement, it would be for being the first person to ever pass a stage 3 politics paper at Auckland without doing the coursework. Apparently it had not happened before. No one who had ever been clever enough to pass when they started with a 30% disadvantage, had also been stupid enough to not just hand in 500 words of some rubbish, considering their system was 'plussage' (meaning you get the better mark of the coursework vs the exam). The most bizarre twist in this is that apparently there was another B Wilson in the class, who did hand in some coursework, but never turned up for the exam. This put the professor in a bind, because it was possible that it was all a big mistake and one of us was a slacker and the other a scholar. He could have grilled us about it, but this is NZ, so he just asked my Mum instead, who crushed my only chance of an A+ with some brutal honesty. Instead of honor, I got infamy. I think I prefer infamy, since I still can't believe that my exam was that good.
Where did you go to school that you could get away with 50% truancy? Metro?
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Ah, a fellow graduate of Pol Sci at Auckland Uni. I remember Dr Atkinson's first lecture in Stage 3 Political Ideology where for the whole session he refused to use any words of less than ten syllables (Ok I exaggerate, nine), and when about 13 of the 24 came back in the second week he said 'right so these are the people that actually want to be here'.
I was the reverse with regards to exams and coursework. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen from hyperventilating during the exams, but fortunately the coursework carried the day. I got a B or B+ I think (have to check the transcript) but someone told me I should be happy, because he quite simply didn't give As. Although knowing this forum someone here probably got an A+.
Since we're talking precocious, leaving small town New Zealand at 16 to come to Auckland I had a choice of an all boys 'grammar school' or University. For whatever reason, I chose the latter, even if my 6th form grades were equal to the cut-off point. It was actually the same teacher who commented on my hand writing that told me one of my essays was 'university level', but in hindsight, how would she know? Still 3.5 years to do Philosophy, English, Geography to stage 2, and Pol Sci to 3, seems reasonable.
Being socially incompetent countered any arrogance (better?) I might have felt about being so young and at university.
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Sword.
Falling.
Impaled.I know that one! The whole last act of Julius Caesar!
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Yeah, exams are not for everyone. Plussage seemed like a good system to me, because coursework is not for everyone either. Doesn't work for a lot of subjects though, pretty hard to not do the coursework in sciences.
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Makes for good company, but.
Why, thank you Sacha, I'd like to think so but actually it makes me a crashing bore. Early in life I learned to recognise that weird look people get when they fall asleep with their eyes open.
dyan, precocious sounds like an understatement. I was feeling bitter that I didn't get a longer chat with you a the Great Blend, but now I'm beginning to feel relieved.
Ben, you will be relieved to know that I am really quite... mediocre at most things. And boy, does precocity mean nothing. I learned how to play chess at 3, which was very cute I am sure, but I have never, ever played chess well. I have literally never won a game - and in fact once lost to another child while I was teaching her the game.
Speaking of precocity, my sister (who is 63 now) started talking at 9 months and was talking fluently in full sentences at 14 months, which I am told was creepy, not cute.
It would have been impossible not to grow up precocious in my house. My Mum used to read to everyone every evening - so well adults would stop and listen. My Dad, a civil engineer, remains convinced that the ideal playthings for tiny children are graph paper, drafting pencils and a good grasp of numbers.
My Mum had no concept that some books were unsuitable for children and no patience with us if we claimed we were bored. "You must be boring company if you can bore yourself" she'd say. She also had no patience with teachers that thought we were clever - I read The Plague by Albert Camus when I was 8 or 9 and enjoyed basking in the worship of teachers but my Mum observed I only understood it on a child's level: I was completely unaware that it was an allegorical depiction of the Nazi occupation of Algiers; there were no bigger words in anything by Camus that than there were in Wind in the Willows so it was in no way exceptional that I had read it.
I thought she was unable to appreciate my genius, but actually she was right. I didn't get anything more out of it than the literal story that Camus told. For that matter I didn't get that The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was a Christian allegory, and thought that was about the Nazis. I was surprised that Aslan was supposed to represent Christ and not the leader of the French Resistance.
Where did you go to school that you could get away with 50% truancy? Metro?
I went to school in Canada, and no, I didn't exactly get away with it, it was an on-going battle with the administration. Oh, how they annoyed me. Oh, what opportunities I wasted.
In retrospect I kick myself for not taking as many courses as I could because I wanted to do pre-med in university - in Canada you have to have a BSc to apply to med school - technically you can have any undergrad degree, but in practice it has to include calculus, statistics, organic chemistry, clinical chemistry... I got to university and had to study all these things I could have had as AP classes (advanced placement - university level courses available to high school students).
But worst of all is what Prof Lewis Wolpert observed, which is ex-gifted children are invariably mediocre in later life. All the abilities that make a person good at something are stunted, not developed at all, and what you have instead is a tremendous amount of information. That information is impressive and useful right up until university - and at university those who have learned to study and think as opposed to merely remember interesting facts suddenly leave all the precocious types in the dust. And the worst part of that precocity is the arrogance and conceit it engenders - there is no greater barrier to learning things than thinking you don't need to.
Being precocious is like growing early - it doesn't mean you're going to be tall. It just means you're a freak. At 11 I was the size of a 7 or 8 year old which made me seem a lot smarter than I was. By comparison, my friend's daughter at 11 could have passed for 20 (5'8", big breasted and was often mistaken for Cindy Crawford) so she when she opened her mouth she was perceived as a bimbo whereas at the same age, anything I uttered seemed profound because I was the size of a ground squirrel.
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I know that one! The whole last act of Julius Caesar!
I prefer the Wayne and Shuster version, which we did as a play in 5th form. It was a hoot...
...HE burst in to my office.
Brutus: You Flavius Maximus, private eye?
Flavius: I certainly am. What can I do for you? What's on your mind?
Brutus: Just a minute— Are we alone?
Flavius: Yes, we're alone.
Brutus: Are you sure we're alone?
Flavius: Yes, yes, I'm sure we're alone!
Brutus: Then who's that standing beside you?
Flavius: That's you.
Brutus: I know, but can I be trusted?Rest is over here, and you can listen to it here.
We did the Frontier Psychiatrist as well. 'Have couch, will travel.'
Speaking of couches, what's with all this abject honesty on this blog? Did someone drop a STTP bomb or something? I'm not complaining, just getting a bit overwhelmed.
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Speaking of couches, what's with all this abject honesty on this blog?
Dude, you're asking us? You're the one who just admitted liking Wayne and Shuster.
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Dude, you're asking us? You're the one who just admitted liking Wayne and Shuster.
Yes well on reflection, and listening to it, it's pretty crap really, but the 'prefer' was loitering longer than the edit button. I'll claim nostalgia from the fact we did it at school. ;-)
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Heh, in high school my best friend and I liked Wayne and Shuster and it was dubbed into Italian, so a lot of the puns just fell by the wayside. I have even fewer excuses.
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The tachycardia I experienced from intellectual overload whilst talking to Sacha might have proved fatal ;-)
Crikey, what were we talking about? Was that the part of the evening by the waterfall when the martinis had definitely kicked in?
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Jackson, you look.. more anonymous.
Was it something we said? -
Jackson, you look.. more anonymous.
Was it something we said?No, I was about to send RB a message. My picture just disappeared. Was it something I said?
Didn't seem to be anywhere to upload new one.
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Other people's gravatars still seem OK so I doubt there's much Russell can do. Maybe check with the Gravatar folks?
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Other people's gravatars still seem OK
It will be adding an email address or changing email address.
Gravatars seem attached to email. Mine did it as I changed my address, while keeping other detail the same although I did change my location. Gotta go back and do it again. Note I changed the colour on my brain scan :) -
Happygravatarchanging e Sof'! Love the pretty blue bits-it's now like some lovely naturalistic shrine-
OnT- I really loved English at all my schooling, and I was very good at it. I was irritated in the 3rd form at AHS by being told that I couldnt take Maori (my dear, we dont have teachers, the language is useless, now, you've taken French - why not German & Latin? we *can* put you through to CHCHGHS you know?)
So I sulked, and I was a world class sulker.
I won all the English prizes (5th Form - you are 1st equal with te mea - you actually won, but he tried and you didnt.) And - heehee - a prize for translating a French poem into English...But it took me nearly a decade to go back to reading Shakespeare for the pleasure of it (and we'd read- and sung- Shakespeare, Burns, and ballads as our birthright-)
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Always a bit of a haze in the twilight Sweetheart. :)
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Oh, I've never heard that one before ¿-)
Gravatar sorted. Was a change of email. Going for seasonal appropriacy.
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dyan, there's truth in the idea of precocity being a difficult path. But it's not a guaranteed fail any more than a guaranteed pass. Also, one can always start anew, and the precocious will still always have an advantage at that, and perhaps the character they might have lacked earlier will have formed.
I sometimes regret various missed opportunities, but I think I'm wise enough now to see that such regrets are only useful if they change your behaviour. Otherwise they become excuses.
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dyan, there's truth in the idea of precocity being a difficult path. But it's not a guaranteed fail any more than a guaranteed pass.
Perhaps not guaranteed, but there is a well documented link between "profound giftedness" in childhood and - if not failure - certainly a tendency to not distinguish yourself.
I think this is less "burnout" than the psychological stunting that is caused by the attention and the label that "gifted" carries. If you are constantly being told how smart you are it stokes intellectual conceit - a huge barrier to learning anything and as soon as you tell someone their identity is their intellect, you make them afraid to try anything at which they might fail.
The whole concept of "giftedness" is really measuring - mostly - environment. I knew how to recognise a fibbonacci sequence when I came across one on an IQ test because someone had told me what a fibbonacci sequence was, what it looked like in numerals, what it looked like in a spiral shell and what it represented in terms of structural integrity. This didn't make me any smarter than the kid beside me, but I can tell you it sure made IQ tests easy. But would I have recognised the pattern if I hadn't already been taught that? Good god, no, I would have stared at if for days and not figured it out. As it turns out I am dumber than a box of rocks in that capacity.
Did the enriched environment make it easier for me to achieve, at least at the common school experience level? Certainly. But am I any better at math - or chess - or music than anyone else? Really not.
The enriched environment was almost accidental from my family's point of view - both parents were kind of brainy and interested in everything. They weren't actually trying to make us excel, exactly. Or at least that wasn't the point - most of it was incredibly interesting. My parents used to teach us... anything. Plus I was the youngest (by 11 years) and had older siblings teaching me everything. It would have been hard to emerge past the age of 7 not knowing how to play poker, build a highly sophisticated stink bomb involving a ballpoint pen that clicks, sulphur, match heads, copper wire and airplane glue, how to prepare caterpillars for a baby bird to eat, how to keep reptiles... my family were a fount of practical knowledge, much of it giving me both a pass to get away with nearly anything at school. I had a weird childhood and plenty of freedom. Too much freedom. Too much approbation from adults. I wasn't nearly as smart as everyone kept telling me I was at school. It didn't actually help, it just made me arrogant by the time I got to high school.
The problem comes from the school system grading everyone, classifying everyone - especially as it is well documented that there is very little advantage in this concept of "giftedness". The messages that are given to kids that display those traits ultimately discourage curiousity and creativity.
I read a really interesting article in Scientific American - years ago (maybe 1990ish?) that was a huge 20 year study comparing schools and school systems in several US cities, Beijing, Taipei and Tokyo.
The whole Asian attitude to teaching was different - and the concept of "giftedness" is dismissed by teachers and children alike (except in the cases of music and math, where it is clearly an innate talent) but much more emphasis is put on individual effort than in the west. Much.
The interesting thing about that was kids doing poorly in the USA were more depressed than kids doing poorly in Asian countries, because they felt they were doomed to their status as lousy students. Poor students in Asian schools were less stressed (they measured stress in primary school students as episodes of stomach pain and headache) than poor students in the USA, which they found very interesting, as they expected the opposite.
The other striking thing was that the very good students in Asian countries felt it was far more important they worked hard as they believed their peers could catch up and pass them at any time. And all this kept standards higher for both good and poor students.
There were a lot of other differences - teachers in the west must die of envy - Asian teachers had paid time to prepare lessons, mark work - they had offices in which to do this and in some cases staff. Lessons were never more than 25 minutes long (as opposed to 40 in the west) as the Asian schools had determined 25 minutes is the longest span of time a small kid can really concentrate on a subject before getting bored an moving on. And most interesting, the classes were not only not streamed, but they moved up as a group. The gifted students were deputised with the task of teaching the ones who were having trouble grasping an idea or lesson. As a result this made everyone less bored and there were many more cases (than in the west) of kids who started off very poorly only to excel (hugely) later in their school career. Interesting.
Anyhow, giftedness is like my husband's size. Paul is a medium sized guy - a whisker over 5'11" and he was huge as a child. He's been pretty much this height since he we 13 or 14. But when his peers reached 14 - 15 - 16 some grew waay taller and Paul is just a regular sized guy these days. Same deal with giftedness, except growing big when you're young doesn't make you think you can slack off growing because you're taller than everyone else.
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I don't think 'failing to distinguish oneself' is such a bad deal. I know the gifted usually feel bad about it, but on the other hand they are usually capable of getting by in life on piss-all work in perpetuity. That's worth something.
Not to mention the fact that they're only a few hard years of graft from distinguishing themselves, if they ever really want to.
Furthermore, there are the odd ones who do distinguish themselves very much.
But I do agree it's a tough path and parents should not obsess about developing superbrainy kids. Mine were wise enough not to.
Sometimes I wonder how I might have been if I'd gone harder in my studies. But the answer if obvious. It's the same answer to how I'd go if I went really hard in my work right now. I'd do well, like most people do who try hard. The reasons for not going as hard as I could are many and various - they can't be laid squarely at the feet of childhood precocity. I still like to think I have agency, that I could change. Indeed, I'm always working on it. It's just a bit of a meandering path.
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Has this been dead-threaded? Must be a Defibrillator around here somewhere. Hang on.
Clear....
Well, I'm far from a thread doctor, but just feel there's more books that we could cover. Is there another book thread hiding somewhere?
Honourable mention to Iain Banks Transition. It is either so obvious it is probably not noteworthy, or so clever I no longer know what is real.
The Patrick Rothfuss sequel to Name of the Wind, Wise Man's Fear, released April 2009, according to Amazon from as early as Oct 2008. But of course it wasn't. The Author wasn't happy with it, and the ensuing 'flame war', for want of a better description, on his own discussion forum was quite entertaining.
With reference to the original topic of this thread, I prefer my authors to take the time to get things right, rather than rushing them to print to appease their publishers, or the impatient reading public. Some of his 'fans' abused him quite vehemently.
Next projected release date is May 2010. Needless to say I am a bit of a fan myself, as the first was a pretty decent début, IMhO.
Maybe we could start the Christmas Wish Lust (Freudian slip, but decided to keep it).
Or, as this was just me loitering in an abandoned thread, we could call it, and move on...
Happy Jollies everyone.
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No worries, recordari... Christmas Book Lust post on the way (ta for the title inspiration!). Just putting in the links etc. Watch this space. Er, that space.
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