DADWAGON

Reading Nathan’s and Theodore’s thoughtful considerations of this important parenting question, I quivered with fear: Really? This is the shit I’m going to have to face with Sasha two years from now?

Frankly, it all feels highly theoretical, and that’s probably because I have absolutely no experience with gifted-and-talented programs. Neither of the public school systems I attended—in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Williamsburg, Virginia—had such programs, or if they did, my parents hid their existence from me pretty well.

Which is not to say there wasn’t tracking, or the sense that some kids were ahead of others (or way behind). In Virginia, we had a “magnet school” for students interested in advanced physics or something. That sounds like the kind of thing I would’ve done, but I didn’t. I was too busy taking advanced calculus classes over at William & Mary.

Here’s how that happened: I spent my first 10 years of public school as a pretty bright but not top-of-the-class student in Amherst, where the sheer number of professors’ kids (a.k.a. faculty brats) ensured a highly competitive atmosphere. I did well, more out of my own initiative than anything else (I think), but there were problems along the way: In fifth grade, my hatred of writing—the actual physical act of writing—got me temporarily placed in the slow Language Arts class. In eighth grade, I just wasn’t getting the idea of “generalizations” in History, and was in danger of failing. Nothing catastrophic, and I’m sure all kids go through such issues at one time or another.

Then, just before tenth grade, we moved to Williamsburg, which had its share of smart students and good schools but just wasn’t as competitive as Amherst, where ambition had always been palpable. Pretty quickly, I found myself standing out in this crowd, and easily able to convince teachers to let me pursue independent studies in math and computers (i.e., to print out reams of bad jokes downloaded from local BBSes). I didn’t waste time letting the school teach me what it felt like teaching me; instead, I figured out how to bend the system to my advantage. I guess it worked: I got into a good college, which is what this is all about, right?

So, my advice: Forget about gifted-and-talented. You’re much better off bringing your kids up in a good, highly competitive school system, then moving them to a pretty good but less competitive system, where their well-developed competitive instincts will let them dominate their peers.

Or maybe G&T programs have a part to play here. After all, where else in a massive school system like New York’s are you going to find the peer competition that will push your child to excel in the early years? Maybe it comes from the parents, maybe from the kids themselves, but in the end it doesn’t matter. A self-selecting (sort of) group of high achievers is good training. (Unless, of course, those numbers Nathan cited mean anything.) But don’t stay in the program forever. There’s more to school than hanging out with nerds.

Before I delve too deeply into this topic, I’d like to take issue with the coverage Nathan’s post yesterday received on the New York Times’s City Room blog. Hardly fair to call it a “rant,” I think. Screed, yes. Potentially libelous of our city’s educators, possibly. Unhinged? You be the judge. But rant, I think not.

I don’t know that G&T programs are evil in and of themselves. I think the points Nathan made relate mostly to the inefficiencies of the the New York City educational system: it’s inefficient across the board, and frustrating, too, and there’s no reason to think G&T education would be an exception. These open meetings are impossible—filled with contradictory and, all too often, flat-out incorrect information.

But I also have concerns about the substance of these programs, largely with the testing age. It seems a rather accepted fact, or at least one I see anecdotally, that girls tend to develop at a younger age than boys. By testing at 4 years old, then, aren’t we providing a greater advantage to girls? I don’t have hard numbers on this (the DadWagon intern is taking the week off), but I would be surprised if there weren’t more girls than boys in NYC’s G&T program—and conversely more boys in special education.

Does this suggest that girls are more academically astute? I don’t know. You’d have to ask Hanna Rosin to get an answer to a question that absurd. But, and this is where I probably disagree with Nathan, I think there is an advantage to being in a G&T class in terms of resources and attention, even if it’s subtle (Nathan’s point being that there really isn’t any difference in terms of curriculum and class size). These are the children who are marked, from an early age, as the most deserving. Does that mean that entering G&T at age 4 is the ticket to Harvard? No. But it does mean that access to the program should be equitable (and not by gender—what about race and economic factors?).

Bottom line, my greatest unease with the testing is that it feels like yet another way in which the parents, even more than the kids, are being educated in the ways in which resources are scarce and have to be fought for. We know that the G&T program isn’t spectacular; we know that entering it signifies very little about the intellectual potential of our children; we know that the testing is inaccurate, that holding children to standards at such an early age is unfair, that supporting local schools provides the greatest good for the greatest number of children—and yet we still sign up for the testing.

Thus ends the lesson.

A little afternoon chaser from Belinda Luscombe, who wrote at Time.com’s Healthland blog about a fishy (froggy?) new business in France:

Here’s how it works: you send Lamby, Kissy, Teddy or your stuffed animal of choice to Denis Gerber and he’ll escort it around the City of Light, snap photos of it at the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre and other landmarks and return it to you with a digital photo album chronicling its adventures. For an extra $70 or so, Teddy can take one of four extension tours, exploring chic Paris or the parts of the city featured in The Da Vinci Code. “We’ve decided to offer the opportunity to visit this beautiful city to furry toys across the globe, and make sure their owners enjoy it (almost) as much as the furry darlings will,” says the Furry Toys Tours website.

But before you start saying that sending a flippin’ toy to La Ville Lumière as if that would constitute some sort of life experience or really anything more worthwhile than shredding up a perfectly good hundred Euro bill and using it to restuff Lamby’s limp leg, Luscombe notes that 25% of men take a teddy bear with them on business trips.

That’s one out of four of us. Seems like a high number.

And yet, while I haven’t done it yet, that doesn’t mean I won’t start. The only stuffed animals in my luggage have been homebound trinkets that I bought for the kids while on the road. Oh, I found my daughter’s pjs in my suitcase once (and was irrationally afraid that the TSA would take me in for further questioning if they found them), but I’ve never intentionally brought anything from home.

I do notice, though, that the older I get, the more sentimental I get, and the harder it is to leave my children and fly off somewhere. When I’m on the road, all those pictures of my kids on my phone aren’t for showing other people; they’re for me to look at when I’m missing their dumb little jokes, outrageous bedheads and mochi cheeks. Stealing some bear that has fallen out of favor but still reminds me of them doesn’t seem so strange a concept.

But sending a toy to France? That’s not for people with children. That’s for people whose teddy bears are their children, a demographique I hope I never join.

Just a quick note of congratulations to DadWagon buddy John Cave Osborne, who has landed a blogging gig at Strollerderby, the hyper-polished, if often frustrating, parenting blog at Babble.com.

John, who has long been gamely blogging the experience of raising triplets (good lord) and a stepdaughter in Knoxville, is off to a strong start at Strollerderby, first with a post calling into question a new, and highly questionable,  be-a-better-dad PSA campaign, and then with this morning’s seasonally-appropriate bit of advice to keep your kids from pulling a Steve Bartman at the ballpark.

But more than individual posts, I am glad to see him in there because Strollerderby could use a strong dad voice, someone who doesn’t conform to the drunkard, distractoid, or doof models of fatherhood. There may have been other dads contributing, but John’s got a voice I know and trust. And I did find it a bit ironic that the post just preceding John’s first post yesterday was written by one of the female bloggers about a dad who may have been all three kinds of idiot father. It was, in short, about a dude who got his wife pregnant because he didn’t have his iPhone around to remind him of the rhythm method. Oy.

Those are the dads you’ve been likely to read about on StrollerDerby. I am very glad that John is now there to set the record straighter.