recently i have been attending saturday classes for teachers on how to effectively teach gifted and highly gifted (yes there is a difference apparently) students. however today’s session was focused on parents of gifted children and strategies and resources they can use to support the innate and unique composition of their child’s brain… including topics such as: not how to argue with your gifted child. love it!
i can’t help thinking of the infinitely different parent/child relationships, mine as well as those of recent fictional characters i have been introduced to thanks to antero… franny and zooey by j.d. salinger would be a great read for parents of the gifted, in so far as i have read, still plotting along this short read in standard mark gomez form… in particularly entertaining fashion (and relevance to this post) is the relationship between zooey and his mother, Mrs. “Bessie” Glass and their comically profound bathroom discussion where we are first introduced to them… the mother of not one, but many highly gifted and talented children, Mrs. Glass has developed strategies and routines of interacting with her children, some of which are more effective than others (effective at what i am not sure) but all of which are nonetheless hilarious…
reminds me of some exchanges i have had with my mother… sarcastic, sharp, harsh, and abrasive… but loving. these sarcastic exchanges, in the bathroom of all places, were enjoyable reading… and may help to understand the relationship between gifted and children and the gifts necessary for their parents to deal with them:
speaking on zooey’s sister franny:
“Just don’t you be so fresh, young man – Oh, that mouth of yours! For your information, I don’t think it’s at all impossible that the kind of food that child takes into her system hasn’t a lot to do with this whole entire funny business. Even as a child you practically had to force that child to even touch her vegetables or any other of the things that were good for her. You can’t go on abusing the body indefinitely, year in, year out – regardless of what you think.”“You’re absolutely right. Your absolutely right. It’s staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of the matter. I’m goosebumps all over… By God, you inspire me. You inflame me, Bessie. You know what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve given this whole goddam issue a fresh, new, Biblical slant. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion – five, really – and every one of them worried me half crazy because i thought something was missing. Now I know what it was. Now it’s clear to me. I see Christ in an entirely different light. His unhealthy fanaticism. his rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying, Pharisees. Oh, this is exciting! In your simple, straightforward, bigoted way, Bessie, you’ve sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes. For all we know , he probably fed the mult -”
“Just stop that, now. Oh, I’d like to put a diaper in that mouth of yours!”
classic stuff people…