a few things / Brontosaurus / Gifted Children

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Riet, your 'grown-up Harry' in the photograph can't be Harry; his 
hair is FAR TOO TIDY.

Oh, Jen, what a stinky problem! I'm so glad that people have come up 
with creative methods to try to get it fixed. I hope some of them 
work.

I missed last Sunday's chat and couldn't even e-mail or YM my regrets 
to anyone, because my computer was sick. A new 'power cord' (that's 
what Tim calls it, altho' I used to call it 'AC convertor' because 
the convertor box sits between two (parts of) cord(s)) made it all 
better now.

And I have missed so MANY top-class people's birthdays! And William's 
surgery (I'm so glad it worked out well!), Jamieson's life going
well (except for his old cat going to Heaven to wait for him), 
Betty's graduation, Christian's good grade, and the discussion of 
great writer Stephen Jay Gould's astonishingly young death (age 60).

Let me apologize to the birthday people:
Scott (Scott who was the first to suggest a Harry Potter musical on 
Broadway, back in '00?)
Minzzer (who is from New Orleans? and speaks in the third person?)
Megan rhiannon333
Michelle the Penguin Elf
Mirzam Black

John wrote:
<< IIRC some bright spark scientist realised that they'd been putting 
the wrong head on an Apatosaurus. Does that sound right? >>

IIRC (which is Far From Certain) the beast had the right head, but 
two competing paleontologists each named it at about the same time. 
The rule is that the name that was given first is the true name (no 
matter how much better or how much more familiar the second name is). 
It had been thought that the name Brontosaurus was given first, but 
the bright spark scientists found out that the name Apatosaurus had 
beat it (by a few days IIRC). I can't remember the damn NAMES of the 
competitors, IIRC one from Harvard and one from American Museum of 
Natural History? Cope, Drinker, and Marsh? 

The topic of Gifted Children elicits outbursts of self-pity from me.

Kimberly wrote:
<< I was left trying to figure out why I should get particular 
attention, or to do fun things the other kids didn't. >>

You must be a far more innately virtuous a person than me: it never 
comes naturally to doubt that *I* have a *right* (an unmet right!) 
to favorable attention and fun activities.

David wrote:

<< it seems invidious to single out one dimension and call it 
'intelligence', because, whatever the experts do, the public will 
latch onto it, and stigmatise their children accordingly. >>

Intelligence IS the stigma! Words like nurd, geek, and wonk were NOT 
intended favorably! You can tell by the words accompanying them, like 
fat, ugly, weird, drinks from the toilet, slut...  Hitting you and 
taking your bicycle from the bike rack to put it in a patch of poison 
ivy are NOT signs of friendliness despite what my mother always said!

Maybe they should tell the kids that they are being put in a special 
remedial class to learn to deal with their handicaps: poor social 
skills and addiction to reading and thinking, rather than telling 
them that they are 'bright' or 'gifted'. However, it may not be 
necessary for them to STATE that: 

I was in regular school (regular school is a subset of Hell, a place 
where all adults ignore you except to punish you, and all kids hate 
you and try to harm you in every way they can) from pre-school and 
kindergarten (actually, pre-school wasn't bad!) through fourth grade, 
when I very luckily ESCAPED to -- even tho' they called it a school 
for gifted chldren, I knew that I was being put in a kindly 
protective shelter for total losers. 

<< That seems to me to be just as important an issue as ensuring that 
particular groups of kids get the right educational provision for 
them. >>

In USAmerican, it appears to be believed that the correct education 
for high-IQ children is one which reduces their school- and verbal- 
ability to normal, or, failing that, destroys them. I could go off on 
a seperate rant about the 20th century school methods being intended 
for the PURPOSE of seperating winners from losers ... 

TABOULI, I disagree with you so much that I can't write! I wish I 
lived in some universe where schools taught high-IQ children that 
they were superduper just because of being book-smart! I had the 
vague impression (stereotype) that Australians had an even stronger 
egalitarian (except for sports) idea than USAmericans, and would 
therefore be even more eager to punish anyone who got better than 
average grades...