This autumn we got devastating news about our new kitten: she had a previously incurable, almost certainly fatal disease. Our vet couldn’t treat her, but did mention to us that there was an experimental drug.Thus started my first foray into the world of experimental drug procurement.
We noticed something unusual about one of Tabitha’s eyes and took her to the vet. It turned out that we caught her disease right at the beginning, which gave her a fighting chance.
But I didn’t do it alone.
I joined a Facebook group of nearly 15,000 members who were in the same boat. The members, typical of Facebook groups, range from the frantic pet owner asking pretty crazy-sounding questions to seasoned veterans reassuring and supporting newbies.
Usually, a group like this would descend into the chaos that we’re seeing all over Facebook, with fake news, name-calling, and dark conspiracy theories. But this group is a shining example of how the Internet can work to bring us together. What makes this group work?
1. Committed moderators
Americans typically yearn to be fully independent, often believe that groups don’t need leaders, sometimes think that other humans are, in fact, the problem.
But the fact is, well-functioning groups have leaders, and those leaders make decisions. In this group, committed moderators scan each and every post within minutes and respond, if only with a click of the “like” button to confirm.
2. Real participants
The promise of the Internet was that anonymity would free us to pursue truth and fairness. Unfortunately, it’s also freed us to express the ugliest parts of human nature, including lies and bullying.
In this group, when a new participant joins, they are assigned a personal moderator who lives in their vicinity. No anonymity, no chance that participants will feel free to be abusive, dismissive, or ugly. Conspiracy theories are quashed immediately. Participants are encouraged by their moderators to share appropriately.
3. Crossing into IRL
Finally, the best-functioning groups I’ve been part of are like this one, where members acknowledge and support the real humans behind the posts and smiley faces. When my family ran low on medication, one of the group members met me on the street outside of the radio station where I do a show to hand me enough medicine to get through while we wait for our shipment.
No questions asked, no ID needed. She knows who I am; I know who she is. We will have no trouble finding each other IRL. The trust of this stranger that I would repay her was extremely touching.
Our beautiful, healthy kitty at 7 months. Without the group, we would have lost her 3 months ago.
How can we get control of this beast that is the Internet?
I believe that groups like this are a blueprint for how things can and should work. But it will be up to us, the users of the Internet, to make it happen. How?
Don’t join anonymous groups unless you really want all that goes with anonymity.
If you want to keep a group positive and functional, be prepared to offer your time when needed.
Be supportive of the hard (usually unpaid) job that moderators have, and post within a group’s guidelines.
Exert political and financial pressure as you can. If we make it clear to companies that we want sites to have moderation and verification of users, it will happen.
I am enchantress, witch I am somebody mortal, a soul I am a widow woman an adult female, individual
I am skeptic, sceptic, doubter I am somebody, someone, a soul I am a face I am mortal
I am an anomaly, an unusual person An individual, a person, a mortal soul I am a rester, a slumberer I am a person
An individual
A somebody
A soul, mortal
What the Internet has done to us.
My hacker husband pointed me toward a website that will probably be defunct by the time you get to it, if you try to go. In the words of the website’s creators:
[Imagenet] uses a neural network trained on the “Person” categories from the ImageNet dataset which has over 2,500 labels used to classify images of people.
Warning: ImageNet Roulette regularly returns racist, misogynistic and cruel results. That is because of the underlying data set it is drawing on, which is ImageNet’s ‘Person’ categories. ImageNet is one of the most influential training sets in AI. This is a tool designed to show some of the underlying problems with how AI is classifying people.
I don’t think the returns on my various webcam captures were particularly misogynistic or racist, but they were…fascinating. They inspired the poem above. Here is what a machine thinks I am.
Ah, finally a photo that doesn’t highlight the fact that I’m having a really bad hair day!
2e: Twice Exceptional is a low-budget documentary with heart. There’s nothing fancy about this peek into the lives of twice-exceptional teens, their parents, and their teachers.
But just the existence of this documentary is revolutionary enough.
2e?
The average reader’s first question is obvious: 2e? What’s that? I wrote a long discourse on the topic which you can access here. However, the short answer is that a twice-exceptional child is both gifted and has a disability. That disability could be physical, emotional, neurological. But no matter what the disability, the end result is that the disability often masks the giftedness.
There have been some movies made about 2e people without identifying them as such. The most prominent that comes to mind is My Left Foot, about a child so physically compromised, he couldn’t communicate what was happening in his very active brain. It is a dramatic and beautiful movie.
In contrast, this documentary focuses in on real, everyday teens fighting the battle between their intellect and the issues that compromise their ability to access education, communicate, and achieve. There’s not a lot of drama here, just a clear look at the hard work of supporting these students into adulthood.
What you’ll see
This one-hour documentary is long on direct interviews. Parents explain their journey from thinking they were raising typical kids to being plunged into the chaos of raising a child with special needs. Teachers talk about their experiences working with this difficult, but rewarding, population.
The focus, however, is on the kids themselves. And in this movie, they make a compelling argument for why we need more educational flexibility. Many of these students argue that without their 2e-dedicated school (Bridges Academy in Los Angeles), they would have been lost in a system not equipped to handle them.
The drama centers on Pi Day, when the students compete to memorize Pi to the furthest amount of digits. Punctuated with students struggling to perform the digits they have memorized, we hear from the students themselves about their challenges and their dreams.
Limits exposed
The limits of this documentary mirror our society as a whole. With its dense population and surfeit of wealthy donors, L.A. is the sort of place where such a school can exist. In most places, such as my county where our only school serving 2e students just closed, there is neither the large number of 2e students nor the concentration of wealth to support such a school.
The limits of this documentary point out the limits in our society as a whole. In most places in this country, a 2e student is lucky to get a couple of teachers throughout their school years who understand and connect with them. It’s hard enough for gifted students to find teachers trained in the special needs of giftedness. (Most teacher trainings do not require study of gifted learners.)
But most teachers have absolutely no training in how to serve the needs of gifted students with disabilities.
Awareness is key
Documentaries like this one can help by spreading awareness of these students’ existence, their great potential, and their educational needs. By the end of the movie, it’s clear how much these kids have to offer society. Many similar kids, spread around the world, are not receiving the support they need. They are languishing in special education programs that do not support their academic needs. They are bullied and emotionally harmed by fellow students and teachers in regular education. Their parents are told they need medication and therapy.
The teachers in the documentary make a strong case for an educational approach that is sadly rare in our society: instead of focusing on these students’ deficits, they focus on their strengths and interests. This is messy, complicated education. It’s expensive and the payoff is sometimes not obvious. It’s very hard to quantify.
But when you see these students move past their disabilities as they shine in their abilities, you can see that it’s all worth the trouble.
Do you know what the kids they are chatting with are watching and reading?
I’m not asking these questions because I think you’re a bad parent.
I’m not asking these questions because I think any parent can stay on top of everything their child does.
I’m asking these questions because I’m a teacher. Not only that but I’m a teacher of creative writing.
Lately, I’ve become a little concerned about your kids.
In one teaching year, I’ve had more conferences with students, notes to students’ parents, times when I’ve had to stop class and speak sternly…
Not more than other years. I’ve had more than I’ve ever had. Cumulative. My whole life.
This one school year, I have had more students referencing violent memes, more students taking part in destructive and deceptive communities, more students writing about violent fantasies.
It’s not just good, clean fun.
One student wrote a piece in which a murderer was interviewed by police while tied up, listening to other people in the police station being tortured.
Multiple students are ardent followers of quasi-religious online groups that take part in something akin to mass hysteria.
A student wrote a story based on a popular Internet meme about a child murderer and a sexual offender.
A group of students invented a world in which everyone had evil “dark sides,” and then their “dark sides” started attending classes with them, typing nasty things into the chat window.
Today, a few days after a mass murderer referenced a popular Internet meme while murdering people in a house of worship, one of my students referenced that meme in class.
It’s not just my online students.
I’ve asked around. Kids are coming to schools with all sorts of inappropriate materials. Kids are aware of things that you and I didn’t even know existed when we were that age.
It’s not ‘just stories’.
The stories we tell with our children important. Stories shape their worldview. Violence in children’s stories is not new. But despair and hopelessness in media for children is new. It’s harming our kids. It’s harming their psyches.
Have you considered what your child might be accessing that could lead them to despair?
I know this is harsh, but I’m worried about your kids. Humans have faced war, famine, volcanoes, mass migration, and drought. But I think the Internet is, perhaps, a bigger long term challenge to the health of the human race.
Your kids are great. Please take care of them. Please sit down and express interest in what they are doing online. Ask them what interests them. Be there for them to express their fears to.
It’s hard to educate a child who is profoundly asynchronous, as many gifted children are. While a young gifted child may have a high school level vocabulary, they may struggle to hold a pencil. And the disconnect becomes even more pronounced as the child grows and seems to become more mature. When a child can read and discuss a history text at a high level, we expect that they should also be able to write an essay at the same level. However, it’s an unusual gifted child of 10 years old that can write a coherent essay; even more unusual for a 10-year-old to want to write a coherent essay.
My students’ parents have been asking me this question for years: How can I accelerate my child’s writing to match their analytical abilities? My answer is a multi-step one. Hopefully this will be helpful both for homeschooling parents who are frustrated with their child’s writing output, and school parents whose children are being held back from accessing classes they seem ready for.
1) A disconnect between input and output is completely normal for gifted kids
For homeschooling families, this can seem like a personal struggle. You may not notice other homeschooled kids having similar difficulties, but the fact is, it’s extremely common (within our uncommon demographic), and will require some patience on your part.
If your student is in school, you may be frustrated that educators generally understand little about gifted children and may use this disconnect as “proof” that your child isn’t gifted. It certainly isn’t proof that your child isn’t gifted; however, it may be evidence that your child is not mature enough yet to access advanced courses which require high-level output.
2) Forcing gets the wrong result
One of the first instincts when homeschoolers and teachers sense a lagging skill is to push on it. However, issues of asynchronous development don’t go away if you push on them—they tend to be exacerbated. Especially in writing, it’s important to remember that good writing never comes from being forced. Students need to develop fluency in writing things they want to write before they can be challenged to write academically.
3) Focus on success
I borrowed my “focus on success” approach from teachers in Special Education. They have to accept that some of their students will never be able to function at a high level, so it doesn’t make sense to focus on the things these kids can’t do. Instead they focus on making the kids feel successful at the things they can do, then work on improving their lagging skills as best they can.
How this translates to gifted kids is that if you focus on the lagging areas too much, the kids start to think of themselves as having a problem to be addressed. Then they start to think that the problem “defines” them and they may start to try to avoid confronting it. Especially if they are perfectionists, which is common in gifted kids, they start to shy away from “working on” the “problem” because they don’t feel successful at it. Then they develop a block, and once that happens, you have a lot more work to do to get back to the place where they can work on their skills.
4) Remember that maturity is important
Our gifted kids can seem so mature, but that’s only because certain parts of their brains are developed beyond what is expected for their biological age. The other parts of their brain show age-appropriate (and sometimes lower) development. In some areas of education, you simply have to have the patience to wait for maturity to happen. As long as your child is progressing and is happy and healthy, you probably have nothing to worry about. Waiting for maturity is the right approach, as frustrating as it can be. (The exception is if your child is indicating the presence of a disability such as dyslexia or dysgraphia. In that case, you need professional help.)
There is nowhere I have noticed the importance of maturity more than in developing academic writing skills. Even my best, most fluent creative writers balk at writing essays before they are mature enough to see the need for them. Sometimes the change is almost as sudden as flipping a switch: A child who refused to do any academic writing is suddenly a teen who writes, edits, and takes pride in a serious academic essay. Sometimes the process is slow—and it often happens too late for the comfort of parents and teachers.
5) Input almost always develops before output
I have heard of kids who love to write before they can read, but this is extremely unusual and not necessarily something you should want. Avid young readers who resist academic writing are simply not ready for it, and pushing them won’t help. If input is what they are enjoying, and if their output is keeping pace with their biological age, then you’re doing fine.
6) Adapt as much as you can so input progresses while output develops naturally with maturity
While you are waiting for maturity, you can help foster a love of writing by not pushing writing assignments that are meaningless to them. As long as writing is meaningful, most students will want to do it. Read “Approaching Formal Writing” for tips on how to work on writing skills in age-appropriate ways.
As I explain in my article “Adapting Curriculum,” there are many ways outside of formal writing to continue to engage with advanced materials while not expecting advanced output. For example, if you are reading college-level literature, you can:
Have lots of verbal discussions about the book
Make it social by taking part in a book group
Make creative projects based on the book—visual art, videos, creative writing, comics
Ask your child to dictate their ideas while you type or use dictation software
Watch movie adaptations and do comparative analysis
Go on field trips related to the book’s subject
You can do these sorts of activities for pretty much any subject. Don’t discount the importance of creative output in demonstrating a child’s understanding of a text—this is a natural way for children to interact with their studies.
7) Be patient and realize that much of maturity is biological
No matter how advanced our kids are intellectually, they are still, like all of us, one with their biology. In time, their bodies will grow, their hormones will mature, and it will all sync up. Remaining patient and trusting the process is one of the greatest challenges in parenting gifted children. We need to keep our eyes on the goal: producing happy, healthy, productive adults.
