Driving the Bell Curve

So I’m now working on a spring contract for a board of education about an hour and a half drive away from home. And before I start going on and on about how much fun it is to high achieving kids for giftedness, let me just tell you that having access to a car frickin’ rocks! This is seriously total and complete awesomeness the likes of which I have not known since I was 18 and my brother and I shared a car in my last year of highschool. Yeah, we had OACs back then...

It’s like you can drive around a really large briefcase and clothes closet. I’m staying with my parents for a few days, because they are MUCH closer to the schools I’m visiting... and I don’t even mind the excessive intrusiveness and house full of clutter that would rival any OC type on the show Horders. I have a CAR. I have hundreds of pounds of steel surrounding me and protecting me from having to deal with the cesspool that is commuting. With the bottom feeders that are my fellow commuters! I don’t even get riled up when someone cuts me off, tailgates, or decides that stoplights are a modern convienience they can do without. As a pedestrian, I get sidewalk of the extreme that will eventually see me living out my final days in a cold, dark cell. But as a MOTORIST! Well, you could pretty much do a shit on “my” hood and I’d bronze it and call it a hood ornament.

Sigh... it’s my father-in-law’s car... and he’s a veteran, with one of those veteran liscence plates. So yeah, I’ve had about 4 people so far stop me as I get out of the car to ask me where I saw action. This is understandable, because I do not look the army type. But I also look considerably younger than I am. At times it is not understandable, when said stoopid lady from a few posts ago asks me the same question. “Seriously, Stoopid Lady? But... you KNOW me. You know I was a PERFORMER before I went back to school. You know my whole sordid life story. And you know that I FREAKIN BORROWED THIS CAR!!!” So yeah, I told her I was in Nam, and please don’t tell anyone else, because I’m really older than I’ve been telling everyone. Sheesh. Her IQ is so low it could walk under a snake with its high hat on.

But I digress in ways that only Psyche can digress. I want to tell you about the delightful gifted children! Now, look, I pride myself on giving a very standardized but “human” WISC-IV. And I am completely flabbergasted by some of the incredible responses I get. Now, I can’t actually tell you any of the questions because putting them out on the Internet would give little Jeezurs like the one I tested today an unfair advantage. This kid, who was NINE btw, told me that he knew what we were doing. I said, oh? What? He says, “this is a memory subtest and I suspect that you are testing my working memory and not my long-term memory.” He had been online “practising” at the behest of his helicopter parents. Another kid, who was doing a test that measures their ability to use logic to find patterns in a series of pictures, got to the final item and when I turned the page to reveal the last (and most difficult) puzzle, he said, and I quote, “JEEBUS, Psyche! This is reDONKulous!”

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of shy, and slow to warm up kids. I don’t know if it’s because I am some sort of super-rapport machine, or if kids today are just more outspoken than when I was being tested, but Jeebus, they are a lot more outspoken that I remember being.

Having said all that... I’m loving giftedness testing (except when you get some kid whose parents you suspect of bribing the learning resource teacher). They are so bright, articulate, and for the most part beginning to bloom with some self-confidence. They seem so happy to be in a situation where someone is talking to them like an equal instead of talking down to them. And I’m happy to do so. I DO remember what it was like, after all.

I’m rooting for all of them. Really hoping that they will meet teachers who realize that just because they may be “gifted,” that doesn’t mean that they “will be just fine” if left to their own devices. They need guidance, they need help to build and grow their skills, but also their personalities, their citizenship, their mental health. I pray for excellent teachers. These kids need and deserve as much special attention as those who are on the other side of the bell curve.

Speaking of bell-curve... one of the girls I tested this week was a fellow Triple 9er. I desperately wanted to tell her! This information will probably never actually get to her (unless she tries out for Mensa or the actual Triple 9 society – bastions of superior intellect and poor social skills) and that’s probably good. I suspect her EQ of being far too high to feel at home in either of those clubs. I’ve noted her name. I hope I run into her again someday. Bless her heart. Bless all their hearts. Geez, I’m starting to wonder if I should leave the clinical field to advocate for the gifted?

I was identified as gifted when I was in grade 5. I went to a small school with less than about 80 kids in K – 8. There were only 7 kids in my cohort. There was this weird rivalry between myself and a guy in my grade so each year, instead of giving an award to the top student, we always got “top girl” and “top boy.” It pissed me off more than you can know. I mean, surely they were just being nice to him, right? HAH! In retrospect, this fellow definitely skooled me in reading and verbal, and I kicked ass in anything to do with numbers or visual-spatial problems. Exact opposite of what you’d expect considering our genders. I’m going to see him in a couple of weeks at my grade 8 reunion. We both went into the gifted program in grade 6, and I got to leave my childhood “bully” behind me (cause she was nominated for gifted but didn’t make it!!!) WIN! Rot in hell enormous BITCH who cut my hair off while I was asleep at a birthday sleepover party! Whoooooot! I revel in my relative superiority! I have no idea what’s become of you, but can only think of you as my pint-sized tormentor and the girl who thought it was a cool insult to call me “dickless.” What can I say? You were technically right.

I, ladies and gentlemen, am a dickless woman. Well... let’s be honest. I DO have a dick. It’s just that my husband has it most of the time...

In other news... I’ve just emailed off my final take home exam for the year, and I’ve decided that if my partner for my other course’s paper (Ms. Stoopid) doesn’t get her act together, that I’m just emailing the prof and saying I’m done. So really, I’ve only got my thesis and this teachers’ guide to work on now. That and work. Summer is coming. Relaxing time is almost here!

More news to surely come soon. Stay tuned!