14th
Kids who like math
I am now the proud tutor of four sixth graders who like math and whose teacher thinks are good at math.
It’s, on the one hand, the funnest job I could ever ask for. Doing math with kids who come into the room expecting to enjoy themselves, who aren’t afraid of whatever I might ask of them, is a delight. I get to ask them to manipulate ideas they haven’t heard of until thirty seconds ago when I gave some cursory explanation, to solve some problem that they’re interested in and care about, and they’ll just do it. They find it maybe a little overwhelming, but in a thrilling way rather than discouraging. It feels like I’m pushing them off a cliff and they’re flying and I love it.
It’s on the other hand a chance to reflect on “giftedness” and gifted education and my own experiences as a kid with those labels and that special attention. It makes me sad to see how concerned the kids are with getting answers right and with their images as smart people. It makes me uncomfortable the way the teacher talks to me about the kids, telling me with certainty about who’s most gifted in what skills and areas (unsurprisingly, the two boys are most gifted at math and the white girl is most gifted at writing. Hmm.). Of course it makes me uncomfortable the way he talks about the kids getting “silly” as something to be avoided and fixing any way that my lessons fail to work by blaming it on the kids and telling them to act differently, though those are problems in any dealings I have with schools ever.
This giftedness stuff is murkier for me. A lot of times people want to say that we should direct resources towards kids who need the help more, who wouldn’t be getting along okay without extra help. And very idea of identifying certain kids as smarter than others from an early age is ridiculous and messed up and largely suppresses people’s innate intelligence and joy in learning. I hate the idea of tracking.
And yet I benefited from it. And it horrifies me to imagine my life without the myriad little ways I was given extra breaks and special attention and pull-out time away from the dreary main classroom as a kid. And a lot of my classmates had to do without that extra attention and live in that permanent drear. Certainly every kid deserve individual attention from a teacher who’s happy to see them and thinks they’re smart. Every kid should have a pull-out gifted program.
But also. And this is the part I can’t quite get a handle on, so maybe forgive me if it’s messed up. Part of what was so awful about school, and not the awfullest part, but a part that was nonetheless awful, was the way 90% of my classmates had already been turned off to learning. And it had nothing to do with them and wasn’t their fault and was tragic. But being around these intellectually defeated kids at a time when peer pressure was so intense tended to pull me toward absorbing a lot of their issues into myself. To losing confidence, to thinking of myself as stupid or at least to thinking of intelligence as a binary and innate thing that people either had or didn’t have, to thinking of expending effort on intellectual pursuits as a waste of time. There’s a way that gifted programs are a last attempt to save the few kids who haven’t been completely ruined by school by taking them out of the school occasionally to a place that functions they way school should. And I guess I think that’s worthwhile, even at the same time as it’s so much too little, so far too late, for so many too few of the kids who need help. If there are a few kids who make it to sixth grade with some sense of themselves as intelligent people and some hope that the world might be worth thinking about, there’s a part of me that does want to scoop them up and take them away from all the kids who’ve had the hope beaten out of them, and put them in a room together with a happy, caring teacher and say here, at least you few be happy together and learn and think and work the way everyone would want to if we hadn’t spent the past twelve years training them not to. Someone should get out of this mess intact. Which I don’t want to mean abandoning the other kids as permanently lost. I want to continue to fight for them. But I guess I think maybe it’s too much to ask other sixth graders to fight for them too, when they have enough fighting to do just to keep themselves from being dragged under the bus with everyone else.
Actually, maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I need to give sixth graders more credit as potential fighters for the liberation of all sixth graders. Yeah, actually, duh. I guess a gifted program should be about training kids to recognize the messed up beliefs and behavior patterns that school has ingrained in them and others. And, yes, giving them some space and time partially outside of the fight to relax and have joy in learning and know what life can be like with less oppression, but also giving them time and support to think about how to change the bigger classrooms that they live in and support their classmates.
Man, I can be THICK sometimes. Maggie, remember. You need to fight for yourself if you’re going to fight for other people effectively. You need to fight for others if you’re going to fight for yourself effectively. You have no reason to think it would be different for kids.
I guess it feels like asking too much of kids, to try to make them aware of oppression and help them develop skills for pushing back. They didn’t create these systems and they shouldn’t have to deal with them! What they really deserve is for us to just end all systems of oppression so they can live their lives in Utopian bliss. But I guess we’re not going to do that in the next five years and I should own up to that and try to figure out how to help kids live in the world as it is and work to make it better. I’m scared and I don’t know how. I think other adults will hate me.
