Boston's West Zone: Where all the children are above average
Mommy on the Floor is faced with that toughest of Boston parenting issues: She's decided to send her child to a public school and that means dealing with the frustrating lottery system for kindergarten. Like a good prospective BPS parent, she's been going on a lot of school tours. And she's noticed something:
... [E]veryone seems to think their kid is gifted. No one asks, "How are you going to help my delayed and troubled child succeed?" The question is always, "How do you handle gifted children?" This question gets repeatedly ask at every single tour.
Last time this happened, after yet another woman asked the principle this, Jen turned to me and said, "Does she mean that kid who just fell out of her chair and onto her ass?" Yep. That's the gifted kid she was talking about. Apparently, we have a whole lot of gifted kids in our zone.
Comments
Yes, but...
Oh, I've absolutely noticed this too in working with families looking into BPS, especially in the West Zone.
However, there's an explanation for some of it at least. Kids who have any kind of disability have usually been receiving BPS services since age 3, since special ed starts at age 3 for eligible kids. Kids with significant enough disabilities that they need to start out in a special ed classroom (kids with Down's, kids on the more severe end of the autism spectrum, blind kids, deaf kids, etc.) receive a classroom shortly after their third birthday.
In the case of a kid who doesn't need a special ed classroom, but is receiving speech-language therapy or occupational therapy or social skills training or whatnot, the parent has been taking the kid to an elementary school for an hour or two a week to get the therapies since age 3. So these families are already connected with BPS and are finding their child's K2 placement through the special ed process, even if the child will be in a regular K2 classroom with just weekly speech therapy. These parents wouldn't generally be at the meetings about lotteries etc., and they already know what BPS can/does do for kids who need support services.
More likely explanation
is that they make sure to ask about it in front of a large crowd in order to show off.
what chance does the kid have...
...if Mom doesn't seem to know which spelling of "principal" to use? Just sayin'...
Pfft
You've never made a mistake, I gather.
Just because parents aren't educated ...
doesn't mean that their kids will be similarly deprived of education.
I have seen near-illiterate parents raise very successful kids. Some of these were products of our local school system at a time when those lovely school committee members believed that parents should put their kids in private school if they had any expectations of competence. Lovely, huh. I have also coached some pretty serious, driven kids in soccer who have not just English but all-language illiterate parents, yet they make honor roll repeatedly.
Of course being a victim of poor circumstances, having immigrant parents, etc. is a genetic situation in anon's mind. Classic social darwinistic thinking, that.
WOOSH
--JOKE-->>
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YOU
No.
Um, jokes have to be funny? Right?
And it was.
And it was.
Swirrrly's Law
No joke directed at Swirrly is ever funny because Swirrly is always right, and everyone who sugggests otherwise is primitive and unenlightened.
Not Funny
unless your definition of humor = picking at people you think you are better than (blacks, gays, women, uneducated, poor, etc.)
I think it was picking on
I think it was picking on people who pick on people. Where did the chronically repressed come into it?
spelling mistake
thepassenger, you are absolutely right, and I am properly mortified. In my defense, I am also in law school. I am in the middle of exams, researching kindergarden, Christmas and we are having another baby in January. I am a little tired. I just threw that post up this morning. I am surprised universal hub even reads my silly little blog so I didn't expect it to get posted here.
I swear, I'm not illiterate! I go to a really good law school but I have never won a spelling bee.
eeka - Thank you for the back ground information. That explains a lot.
Gifted Children - "Stuff White People Like"
I can't let this pass without pointing to the Stuff White People Like entry on "Gifted Children":
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/22/17-gifted-children/
A friend of mine, who (liked me) moved here from Europe, liked to say that you could stop a conversation by saying "my child is in the bottom 25%" in school, or "I think he's a little slow".
It is weird how *everyone* is "95% percentile". How can that be?
because
because all of us like to believe that we live in Lake Wobegon where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,"
Speaking of Lake Wobegon, Keillor will be here Monday
Garrison Keillor will speak at Cambridge Forum on Monday evening, December 14th, see:
http://www.cambridgeforum.org/
Easy answer
If you run enough tests, everybody is 95th percentile in something.
Hard answer: a middle-class kid from a stable family can easily be 95th percentile in the BPS without being terribly smart at all.
Yes!
For a lot of families, "gifted" is code for "white/middle class." As in, the kid isn't necessarily super smart, but they're wanting to make sure that there are opportunities for their kid from a high-functioning family to be segregated from the kids who are just as smart but whose homework might not always get done amidst Mom's three jobs and issues with housing and child care and whatnot.