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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Smithee who wrote (404832)	1/17/2011 3:29:39 PM
From: Katelew	5 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 794001

I have a 4 year old gifted grandson. I would never ever say this if he weren't adopted, and by this I mean I have no ego attachment or vested interest of any kind in this child. He's Asian, he's adopted, and he just is what he is. Basically, our whole extended family is bright enough. Colleges grads, reasonably successful, blah, blah, blah. But this little boy is in a category unto himself...a stunningly different category. By that I mean he's not just way ahead developmentally, he's also very different from his cousins, or his peers, or my children at that age...who were quite bright and motivated themselves. The games he invents and plays with himself and what he does with the standard knowledge that young kids acquire has always just been really different, at least in my experience. I can also say that some children can, indeed, teach themselves to read which he did starting toward the end of his second year. I'd heard of this but always thought surely the parents were also engaging the child in a structured learning process. But no. This little boy memorized passages in books from being read to.....somehow figured out alot of the words that went with pictures and then started pointing out those words when in other places, like the grocery store. No one knew he was even working on this. He just suddenly was able to "read", which if you think about it is nothing more than recognizing a configuration of grouped letters. He had a sizable vocabulary by the age of two, and at night you could hear him in his crib come up with lists of words that rhymed and quietly say them over and over to himself. Or he would list to himself all the words he knew that started with a 'k' sound or an 's' sound or some other sound. And he would often tell us he liked the sound of a particular word more than another word, and tell us not to use that word he didn't like. It was like having a window into a mind teaching itself poetry and phonics. In fact, this is what I mean by being different. The same thing happened when he became interested in mathematical relationships. He would organize things into groups and add and subtract items from the groups and come tell you what he came up with. Sometimes the groups would be subdivided into colors or sizes. He spent a lot of time at that age spontaneously grouping and subgrouping things....toys, kitchen utensils, things in the yard, the neighbors bushes.... and this became the source of little family jokes. As a family, we just don't know what to do with or for him.....or if we should even be trying to structure his environment that much. Right now he's clocking along without much input....just needs an adult or two around to answer questions. He's in two different private pre-schools. By Sunday evening, he's figuring out on the clock how many hours until he can go back to school so that says a lot. Our worry is what happens to him in public school. Watching this little boy's mind develop, I can well imagine that someone like Langan would have lots of trouble in a conventional school environment, even at the college level. Again, it's not really that they're smarter. I'm thinking the mind itself may be wired a little differently. I'm thinking that as such a person gets older, the need for that person's mind to unfold in its own way becomes relentless.