Blog : Page 3 of 129 : Suki Wessling, writer

Review: Getting gifted homeschoolers (almost) right

Posted on November 22, 2021 by Suki

The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl
by Stacy McAnulty
Random House, 2018

As a teacher of gifted learners, I am always interested in how they are portrayed in kids’ books. Generations of smart kids had to see themselves portrayed as clueless, clumsy, antisocial idiot savants. The Great Brain aside, it was definitely not cool to be smart.

And then there’s what mainstream writers do to homeschoolers. They’re weirdo Christian separatists who have never learned how to behave in polite society. At least sometimes they get to be vampires, too.

Stereotypes don’t come from nowhere—there’s almost always a kernel of truth. But it’s a writer’s job to go beyond the stereotype and find the real person.

Stacy McAnulty does just that in The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl.

This middle grade novel presents us with a familiar gifted homeschooler: Lucy is very weird. Struck by lightning when she was younger, she’s now a middle schooler who’s never been to school, whose OCD makes her stick out in any crowd, and who is immediately the target of Maddie, the alpha dog bully of her grade. Lucy is in school because her grandmother, who’s her guardian, believes she needs to be socialized. Yet another homeschooler/gifted kid stereotype.

But that’s where the stereotypes end, and the real child emerges.

First of all, Lucy does not buy her grandmother’s arguments for a minute. She knows that she’s not the problem—other kids and adults are the problem. Her grandmother (a wonderful character despite her stereotypical belief in the fallacy of socialization) has raised her well. She’s a self-possessed, thoughtful kid who makes the thoroughly believable choice not to let anyone know just how smart she is.

As she tells the girl who becomes her best friend, Windy, her OCD already makes it clear she’s weird. She doesn’t need any other baggage.

Charmingly, Lucy thinks her way through the problem and calculates how to get through this mandatory year of socialization. Just the fact that she’s able to do this disproves her grandmother’s opinion that she needs to be socialized—she gets what the other kids and the teachers need, and she sets about giving it to them.

She purposely becomes an A student, good enough to get into the college she wants to attend—but not a perfect A student. She calculates how to do just well enough not to gain too much attention.

She knows she’s not going to be acceptable to most of the other kids, so she doesn’t try. She presses on fulfilling her own needs for order (she has to sit and stand three times before sitting down in class) and cleanliness (the kids call her “the cleaning lady” because she wipes down every surface she comes into contact with using disposable wipes she carries in her backpack). But she’s thoughtful and kind to the other students, and soon at least two of them notice and accept her.

The miscalculation in the title does not refer to her attempt to deceive the others—she fits in well enough that the kids and teachers don’t guess just how smart she is until various circumstances lead to her unmasking. Her miscalculation is that she’ll be able to ride out this year without forming real friendships, experiencing real growth, and actually learning something (though not necessarily what her teachers think she’s learning).

I loved how realistic Lucy is, how all the characters (even the bully) are well-drawn and sympathetic, and how the book gets past almost all of the usual stereotypes and gifted homeschooler tropes.

I finished with only one question: Why does it take a strike of lightning to make Lucy smart? Why can’t she just be a generic smart kid, born that way? I know that the lightning offered a fun opportunity for characterization. But it’s a bit like writing a story about a white kid who wakes up Black and has to face racism. Why not just write about a Black kid?

Gifted kids are real. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them do have disabilities (called twice-exceptionalities in the gifted world). Some of them are socially awkward.

But they’re all people, and they deserve to be integrated into our schools—and our literature—as fully human and deserving of the same care and respect as everyone else. The fact that the author chose to make Lucy homeschooled gets at an ugly truth: Our society can be very, very nasty to kids who don’t fit in. Teachers largely don’t like being corrected. (Lucy actually keeps her mouth shut when her math teacher makes a mistake on a problem, for good reason.) Kids don’t like being bested, especially when it’s so easy for the gifted kid to do it. (Lucy is careful not to be the best at anything.)

But gifted kids are not an accident, not a strike of lightning. They’re just one side of the wonderful rainbow of human variability. Let’s just accept them and move on.

So yes, this is a great book for your gifted kid, but when they ask why they are the way they are, make sure they know that they are no accident. They are exactly the way they’re supposed to be.

Books Featuring Homeschoolers

On raising a “tryer”

Posted on November 6, 2021November 8, 2021 by Suki

One of the major issues that parents struggle with is food. Why, living in a time and place of plenty, is food such a struggle?

Food choices often relate to family harmony, neurodiversity, gender, relationships with grandparents, health…

In other words, food is related to everything in a way that few other aspects of human lives are. That’s why I wrote the book Food for Humans: The history, science, and culture of what we eat. I wrote the text for my course at Athena’s, Yum! (I am currently seeking a publisher for the book but students who enroll get to read it in class.) The study of food is fascinating! It relates to culture, history, science, nutrition, ethics, and tradition.

I really love teaching this class because it’s one of the times I see “aha moments” just popping and sparking from my students. So often, even if they love to eat, they’ve never even thought about food. They have no idea what the difference is between fat and oil, why British people eat from forks but Thai people eat from spoons, or where potatoes are from. Many of my students have eating issues: allergies or sensitivities, aversions, unhealthy obsessive eating. As they learn more about food, they learn more about themselves.

But long before I started writing about food, I was a dedicated foodie pregnant with my first child…

Trying to be the Perfect Mom from a hospital bed

My first attempt at forestalling pickiness was when I had just given birth. I had read that sometimes American kids reject breast milk after the mom has had a particularly flavorful meal. My husband’s response? Get me Thai takeout while my milk was coming in! When our first child was a baby we’d grind up whatever we were eating and feed it to him—regardless of how spicy or unusual. [Read about how we came to this approach.]

Our older child had a few dislikes, but that was OK in our house. (We parents have a few of our own.) Mostly, he came to love good food, and being a freshman at UC was a torturous experience for him.

And then along comes that picky eater.

Like many neurodivergent children, our younger child’s eating habits were…rather unusual. That’s when we as a family had to get out the big guns. We were tryers! We went to every grocery or restaurant offering unusual cuisine that we could find.

Did it work? Well… yes and no. He definitely developed a wider palate than most picky eaters. Since most parents, faced with a picky eater, don’t try to get them to eat unusual things, they probably wouldn’t have introduced their kids to some of my kid’s favorites: squid, smoked fish, and pickles! He went from being a picky, mac’n’cheese sort to semi-adventurous—within limits.

All grown up

It wasn’t always easy, but now both of my young adults are adventurous, (usually) healthy eaters. We had lots of unexpected twists and turns along the way. Both kids had times when eating was difficult for one reason or another. And it turned out that we have found ourselves on a completely unexpected eating path because of food allergies that were un/misdiagnosed for years.

The most satisfying part of our food life now is that our kids love to cook wonderful food for us! When you spend so many years nurturing young bodies, it’s such a treat to get to sit down with a glass of wine and wait for a new, unexpected dish to be placed in front of you.

Keys to raising healthy, adventurous eaters:

I can’t tell you how to deal with your specific issues, but I think there are two ideas to keep in mind as you raise your children.

Encourage a healthy love of a wide variety of food by modeling. We parents sometimes have to confront our own issues first in this area. It’s important for us to model the eating we want to see in our kids. For example, if you don’t tend to eat raw veggies, try to start. If you won’t give up sugar, don’t ask your kid to.
Foster a family food culture of adventure and inquiry. Don’t make any assumptions about your “picky” kid because you never know what they’ll end up loving. (For a while, the only protein ours loved was squid!)
Seek and share information about food that connects with your child’s other interests. Got a budding scientist? Food science is fascinating. A geography buff? Find out what people eat in different countries. A social justice warrior? Food relates to everything!
Include your child in growing, buying, and cooking food. So many parents decide that it’s too much trouble have kids in the kitchen, but all the trouble pays off. Teach them the basics that you know, and ask them to join you in inquiry-based learning about foods that you haven’t cooked before.

Of course, children with eating issues will not necessarily turn into gourmets overnight, but wherever you’re starting from, you can make headway and raise a child who is more open to eating and enjoying food than they were at the start.

Food Fights

Armchair expertise strikes again

Posted on October 27, 2021October 27, 2021 by Suki

I have to tell you: I am so relieved that my neighbors commenting on our local fire department’s Facebook page are such skilled wildland fire fighters that they know exactly what went wrong with a controlled burn near my town a couple of weeks ago. To think that the burn had been entrusted to people who have studied, trained, and risked their lives for years—people who need to be paid, outfitted, and managed!

Really, if the crowd on social media had been in charge, it would been just fine.

Not.

Have you noticed that Armchair Expertise seems to be at an all-time high? After I used the phrase “armchair traveler” with my students recently, I did research to find out where it came from [here’s the answer]. That was the same day that my neighbors exploded with “advice” for the fire fighters whose controlled burn, meant to mitigate fire risk in the hills nearby, jumped the lines and was briefly the talk of the neighborhood.

Fortunately, the fire fighters did just fine without my neighbors’ help.

I realize that know-it-all advice from people who can’t be bothered to get up and actually help probably started with the cavemen….

You know, Ogg, if you’d used a flint-tipped arrow instead of that spear, you might have brought home more meat for me.

…but lately, it’s become a reflex, enabled by the media people consume and fueled by the ease of social media.

It all started with reality

Reality TV, that is. I truly believe that the rise of Reality TV in the 90s is at the root of a lot of our recent cultural changes. Personally, I never watched it. But I did notice a change in how people seemed to perceive their role in events that didn’t concern them.

Before Reality TV, people tended to get a view of events that excluded them. When you watched the evening TV news, you didn’t expect that your opinion would be addressed. And when you watched a fictional storyline unfold, you had no sense that you, an everyday person, were in there. It was fiction, created for entertainment. News was information, created to inform you.

Reality TV, along with 24-hour cable news, did away with that separation. We were supposed to believe that the Survivors really were fighting for their lives, and that we really could be one of them. We were led to believe that our opinions about the news were of equal importance to the news itself.

Then reality went social

It got worse with the arrival of social media. Suddenly, you didn’t have to take out a piece of paper and write, find a stamp and send, when you wanted to express your opinion. You didn’t actually have to show up at your school board meeting. You didn’t even have to face your real, live neighbors when you could just pretend to be a neighbor on NextDoor.

There was a lot of pushback in the past about the “gatekeepers” who were controlling the media and not allowing real voices in. These days, it feels like we could use a few gatekeepers!

The result: a lack of respect for expertise

Armchair everythings abound in our society. Armchair epidemiologists argue with the people who actually went to school and actually learned how to read data. Armchair legislators hate everything their government does but can’t be bothered to get to work to make change. Armchair psychologists can tell you exactly what’s wrong with you, but apparently haven’t learned the phrase, “physician, heal thyself.”

In many cases, this false expertise is pretty harmless. Yeah, it’s really annoying to hear your buddy who never held a movie camera critiquing a cinematographer’s camera angles, but the only person who looks bad is him.

But it really makes me sad to watch a group of people criticize the fire fighters who are out there—right that moment—busting their asses to protect the people criticizing them. The fire fighters did, indeed, let a controlled burn slip its bounds. “But remember,” I felt like yelling into my computer, “they were doing that burn at risk to their own lives to save your miserable hide!”

And I don’t even want to go into the public vitriol that has led a record number of public health employees to leave their jobs.

Armchairs are for sitting

I don’t think that being the citizen of a democracy should be a spectator sport. Of course, if it turns out that there was negligence on the part of a public employee, that should be exposed. Our democracy secures checks and balances and a free press for just that reason.

But this armchair criticism of every single action of our skilled public employees is doing no favors to our democracy. So many people can’t be bothered to take part in our public discourse without constantly trying to undermine others, as if they think they are contestants on Survivor, hoping to be the last one on the island.

All alone.

With no one else there to put out their fires.

‘First world problems’ are everyone’s problems

Posted on October 11, 2021October 11, 2021 by Suki

We recently had a series of disasters at our house, from rats eating our plumbing to a solar flare knocking out our Internet. Inevitably, while we were navigating the maze of construction-during-Covid, someone used the phrase “first world problems” to remind me that not having plumbing in our kitchen isn’t the worst problem to have.

I understand the phrase and I get its point: I know that my life is easy compared to the lives of many humans on this planet. I try to be conscious of the gifts I was given as an accident of my birth. Our family tries to live economically, pollute as little as possible, support others, and give money to good causes.

But that doesn’t mean that I like that phrase, because frankly, it misses the point.

Orchids and dandelions

One piece of psychology research that particularly fascinates me explores a phenomenon that every one of us has experienced: given the same privileges and the same challenges, no two people react the same way.

You’ve seen it if you have siblings: despite sharing the same genetics and environment, you responded differently under the same circumstances.

Given the same challenge, one person will feel energized and move forward, while another will fold. Given the same bad event, one person will cheerfully continue, while another will fall into despair. The size and magnitude of the challenge is not important. There are happy people living in abject poverty and miserable people living in comfort.

This phenomenon has been named “Orchids and Dandelions,” referencing the sensitivity of the former and the hardiness of the latter. It turns out that what you notice in your siblings is true: given the same challenges, people do not respond in the same way.

Relative despair does not translate

So which is worse, the opiate epidemic of the 2000s or the crack epidemic of the 1980s? Are you willing to make that judgment?

I’m not. The crack epidemic was concentrated in (though not confined to) inner city Black neighborhoods. The opiate epidemic is concentrated in (though not confined to) white suburban and rural populations. Whose relative despair was greater? Does it matter?

I believe that it doesn’t. Each human experiences their own life within the confines of time and space. We can know that others are suffering more in some relative way, but that doesn’t necessarily mitigate our own suffering. In fact, the most miserable people living comfortable lives in the US may in fact be more miserable contemplating the misery of the poor of Bangladesh.

Relative despair is simply not meaningful.

First world problems are human problems

When someone replies to your expression of despair with the phrase “first world problems,” they are dismissing you. They are saying that your despair is not valid, that by expressing your despair, you are insulting the millions who suffer greater physical distress than you do.

It’s truly an offensive phrase. And I say that even from the perspective of someone who does not suffer when being on the receiving end of it.

I know that I largely fall on the dandelion end of the spectrum. I did not suffer greatly from having to wash dishes in the bathroom sink, and in fact, although I swore some and expressed my annoyance at times, I largely did take a “look on the bright side” view of it.

But I also know people for whom the series of minor, first-world disasters that we’ve lived through in the last month would have been emotionally devastating. And their despair would not be relative. It’s despair, and despair sucks.

Compassion comes first, no matter what “world” you’re in

No matter how we move through this world, we have to keep compassion as the tool that we use to navigate amongst our fellow humans. And I say this as someone who has to work hard at compassion. I get angry thinking about the way some people bring on their own problems. I get annoyed at orchids I know who seem to melt at the first rays of sunshine that hit them. I know I’m not an exemplar of the advice that I’m doling out here.

But when I hear someone slight my little despairs, I think of the people for whom such a slight really would be hurtful. I know that despair over a kitchen sink is not the same as despair that you can’t feed your child or escape a war zone. But it’s despair, and despair is real.

‘First world problems’ is a nasty little phrase used to wound and shame. We can do better than this. We must.

Trust the Transfer

Posted on October 6, 2021October 11, 2021 by Suki

“This was not my idea. I don’t want to be here.”

In my goal-setting course and in my book Homeschool with Confidence, I walk teens through the process of setting and achieving goals. And each semester, I ask the students to tell me whose idea it was for them to be there.

Since 2016, only one student has ever answered, “mine!”

Goal-setting sounds…bo-o-o-o-o-oring!

That’s the first hurdle I have to get over with teens, and I do it by keeping in mind the educational property of transfer. According to whoever wrote this web page for Yale, “‘Transfer’ is a cognitive practice whereby a learner’s mastery of knowledge or skills in one context enables them to apply that knowledge or skill in a different context.”

It’s an easy concept: a piano student practices scales and arpeggios not because they’re pretty music, but because playing them builds skills that they will apply when actually playing music.

But scales are… bo-o-o-o-o-oring! And many a piano student has quit in frustration when their teacher emphasizes scales too early.

So…start with enjoyment

I start by asking students what they like to do. Some of them respond with academic pursuits, some respond with so-called “extracurricular” activities, and many respond with…you guessed it…playing video games!

But no matter what their response, that’s where we start to build their goal-setting skills. Students are passionate about their passions! And yes, some students have passions that align well with their parents’ expectations. But many teens’ passions seem unimportant, or worse, a waste of time to their parents.

Build on passions

In my course, no pastime is a waste of time. If the only thing a kid can tell me really lights up their world is a videogame, well, that’s where we start. And I say this as someone who has played Minecraft once. (Short version: I started to walk, fell into a hole. Painstakingly climbed out of the hole, turned around, and fell back in. Went off to make dinner while my kids continued to play.)

It’s important not to judge any other person’s passion if you want to reach them, and in any case, the relative “value” of their passion is not important. I’ve had students whose initial goals were built on gaming, coding, photography, cleaning out a basement storage room, doing push-ups, and planning a D&D campaign. Their success at goal-setting had no relationship to any value that their parents or I ascribed to their goal—but their success was intrinsically tied to the value that they ascribed to their goal.

Focus on positive success

The human brain likes to succeed. Once we experience that feeling, we seek it out. If the only thing a kid ever succeeds at is getting attention for hitting another kid, that’s what they’ll seek out. If the only success a teen ever feels is hiding their gaming from their parents, that’s what they’ll seek out. Shaming our kids will always backfire, because shaming excites our brains and gives us a backwards sense of success by focusing attention on a negative attribute.

Sure, we don’t want our kid to be a bully or a 30-year-old living in their parents’ basement playing games all day. But the way we get the result we want is to set them up for success that feels just as good—or preferably better—than the negative attention that sends them in the wrong direction.

Step into their world

The way to get buy-in with goal-setting is to turn around and step into your teen’s world. What is important to them? What do they want to happen in the short-term? (Please don’t ask them what they want to be doing when they’re 30—they don’t even believe in 30 yet!)

Express your own enthusiasm and support of a goal, no matter how small. That kid who came into my class and made a goal of organizing a room in his basement initially did it to make a little space for himself. But how surprised was he when his dad came in and joined him in the effort? By the end of our 8-week course, they had created a new work space in their basement and were planning projects to do together.

Trust the transfer

This is the hard part: You have to trust that as your child matures, they will automatically do a transfer of skills. Goal-setting is a skill that can be practiced using any activity, no matter how small. Once they need it, they will have the skill to apply to more “important” pursuits.

The parent of the student who was designing D&D campaigns told me that the student was “totally disorganized and couldn’t plan anything.” Well… I beg to differ. Each week, the student would upload snapshots of all the work they’d done, and it was impressive. Sure, it was “just Dungeons & Dragons,” but they were developing pretty awesome organizational skills. At the time, they didn’t yet value academics in the same way, but once they did, they’d be ready.

The student who only wanted to code every day and all day is a great example. They realized that in order to get into the college they wanted, they’d have to focus on academics, and so they applied their problem-solving skills to academics without a hitch—but only once they valued college as a goal.

We’re all works in progress

We parents spend a lot of time telling kids what to do, but how much time do we spend telling kids little tidbits about who we are, what we want, and how hard it is to get through a day knowing we haven’t yet reached our own goals? I’m not advocating bo-o-o-o-o-oring your kids with unnecessary details, but just a little bit of, “Wow, I’m really excited I finished that project” or “I think I bit off more than I could chew—any advice?” can let kids know that you’re still a work in progress, too.

Our teens may look “all grown up,” but they are works in progress, and with support and encouragement, they will be able to reach their goals.