Posts by dyan campbell
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You've just given me another reason to be irritated by Winnie the Pooh. A reason I hardly needed, to be perfectly honest.
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Dude, there will be handbags at dawn if you're going to slag off my Pooh. Or my Eeyore. Actually, *especially* my Eeyore.
Gio, you can hardly blame Shepherd for having a cuter kid than Milne. Christopher Robin Milne was a real sourpuss, even in photos as a child.
Danielle, I have to agree, W the P is great, and Eeyore is the greatest. Several passages are guaranteed to make small children laugh out loud.
The problem with books like Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows is they were meant for kids about 2 - 5 but to be read to them. By the time a kid is old enough to read it by themselves the books are too juvenile and saccharine. -
dyan - the illustrations in the book I read (just checked with the utterly-infallible Wikipedia and the article there has "Mr Stubbs, the chimpanzee etc.)
The edition I read didn't have illustrations.
There are descriptions of Mr. Stubbs being carried (along with his satchel of possessions) for a distance by Toby, as well as descriptions of Mr. Stubbs sitting on the boy's shoulder as well as several references to his "little paws" that would suggest Toby's friend is a whole lot smaller than a chimp. A full grown chimp is about 5'6" and 150 lbs.
A lot of books wind up with illustrations that were not necessarily what the author was writing about. The little boy and teddy bear in Winnie the Pooh aren't Milne's (regrettably homely) son, but E.H. Shepherd's own (much cuter) child and his bear.
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What a great reading list! Like everyone else I loved Gerald Durrell's books - especially My Family and Other Animals.
Certainly a great antidote to both the misery memoir
As an a character on an American sitcom once said when someone tried to make him read Angela's Ashes "I don't need to read it... it's an Irish novel, I know how it goes.... " (screwing up his face and whining) I'm starving - Dad's drunk ".
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dyan - this will sound picky but I've been doing it since I was seven -
Mr Stubbs, in "Toby Tyler", was a chimpanzee, not a monkeyIslander, why do you think that? Mr. Stubbs is too small to be a chimp - he sounds like a capucin monkey partly because he's small enough for a little boy to carry him (along with other burdens) and also to climb up and sit on Toby's shoulder. A chimp would be the same size as a small boy. Besides - Toby is in an American circus, so it's unlikely they would have chimps (from Africa) but likely they would have monkeys (from Central America).
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But I have recently acquired a number of American children to give books to [*], and I can't help worrying that they might not be able to connect with a lot of these books. Is this worry well-founded?
I think the stories are pretty universal - though I have to say the biggest difference I noticed between English and American (or Canadian) literature is the English seemed to write with a greater effort to spare the child upsetting emotions. American and Canadian authors (at least historically) seemed to relish tweaking childhood feelings of grief and loss. None of the English books came close to the tone of the Canadian or American ones in this respect.
In Toby Tyler the depiction of Toby's pet monkey being shot, then dying horribly (Toby is too upset to let the hunter put the animal out of its misery so it dies quite slowly) is certainly not like any English book written for children I've ever read. This passage deals with how much worse this grief can be if a kid happens to be furiously angry with his elderly pet moments before he's shot...
Beautiful Joe is a Canadian classic, and was somehow associated with the formation of the SPCA. My teacher sister always used to read it to her school kids, with the view that a class that weeps openly together will get along better (eliminates bullying apparently). The passages where poor Joe is mutilated as a puppy (his name is ironic) and his mother is killed by a no-account farmer are pretty alarming and horribly sad. But the cultural differences between English and North American kids are not very great.
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Hi Jolisa
What a great reading list! Like everyone else I loved Gerald Durrell's books - especially My Family and Other Animals.
Other books an 8 year old might:
Science fiction with children as protagonists, plus the happy ending is in New Zealand.
The author's dedication is interesting in itself:
"TO
H. R. H. VITTORIO EMANUELE
PRINCE OF NAPLES
CROWN PRINCE OF ITALY
ONE OF THE KINDLIEST OF MY
YOUNG READERS"but the book is wonderful. Giovanni, did Vittorio Emanuele grow up to be kindly?
Toby Tyler: Ten Weeks With a Circus
Carl Sandburg, William S. Burroughs and Harlan Ellison all cited this as one of their favourite books from childhood, though I'll warn you the death of the kid's pet monkey is much more harrowing than most modern readers would expect.
Strange creature in a gravel quarry grants wishes to children - pretty standard fare, but very funny all the same, particularly when they (accidentally) wish for their baby brother to be all grown up.
I've linked to the books themselves so you can have a look.
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dyan, there's truth in the idea of precocity being a difficult path.
Ben, I don't mean to say I had a hard time... that's what's wrong with the concept of "giftedness". Apart from genuine talent in music or math, "gifted" is almost invariably a measure of environment. Environment and nutrition . If we were to make sure no kids in NZ schools were suffering nutritional deficiencies there would be a massive jump in academic performance.
In the SciAm article I read about education, it said the concept of "giftedness" is not recognised at all in Asian schools (except in the obvious and genuine cases of math and music) and academic success is considered a result of how hard a student chooses to work more than any other factor. This is good for both poor students and good students.
The point Prof Wolpert was making was that academic success is on ongoing task, not an innate talent. While it was all very nice for me to be considered smart, it wasn't at all an accurate appraisal of my abilities.
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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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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 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...