My Kid Is Gifted . . . And So Is Yours

March 8th, 2007 by ArLynn

“Fifty bucks.”

“No way,” I said. “How many minutes are we talking about?”

“I give her one minute.”

“Lillian, I’m making money off you tonight.”

My friend Lillian and I were going to a PTA parent-teacher party. I was excited because I would at last meet the very notorious Mrs. Betterman. Mrs. Betterman’s son George is a genius. He understands Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, both the Special and General. He does calculus in his head. He reads Herodotus for fun. At least, this is what Mrs. Betterman says. And Mrs. Betterman “George is a genius” stories are repeated endlessly in town. I only heard these stories secondhand. I wanted to meet her.

“Everyone thinks their kid’s a genius,” I said.

“Yeah, but she’s going to make sure you know that George is more of a genius,” Lillian assured me. “And she’ll do it to you within one minute of laying eyes on you.”

We entered the party room and I made a beeline for my little moneymaker.

Mrs. Betterman was in a circle of parents and I dashed right in and introduced myself to her. Interrupting a conversation about teasing on the playground. I nodded sagely. Teasing is very bad. 60, 59, 58. . . I was thinking of how to spend my money. 57, 56, 55. . . Fifty smackers would translate into the left shoe in a pair from Lori’s in Northfield.

“George gets teased sometimes because he always wears the same clothes,” Mrs. Betterman said. 54, 53, 52. . . Oh, yeah, I remembered. One of George’s quirks was that he wore the same thing every day. I took a deep breath, trying to think of a teasing anecdote I could share that would eat up fifty-one seconds. Mrs. Betterman beat me to it.

“But that doesn’t bother George as much as when the other children call him Genius.”

I gave Lillian a murderous gaze. A disproportionate number of parents announced a need to refresh their wine glasses. They had seen this conversational turn before.

“Doesn’t he sort of want to be known as a genius?” I asked peevishly.

“He can’t help what he is,” Mrs. Betterman said with a poignancy normally reserved for discussing dying puppies. We were now standing alone, she and I. She could confide in me. “We only keep in the school for the opportunity to socialize with other children his age.”

Lillian laughed in the car on the way home and gave her a check with a surly growl. After all, I’m a broadminded person—I’m willing to concede that he is a genius. But I happen to think there’s lots of genius kids on the North Shore. Take a look, for instance, at this year’s ISAT scores. The standardized tests focusing on math and reading are given to elementary school students in third through eighth grades. In a perfect world, all students would “meet or exceed state standards” but a quick glance at percentages of such students in any school in the state says no way. Chicago public schools will very often have less than forty percent of their students meeting expectations. But on the North Shore? As in previous years, over ninety percent of the students meet or exceed those standards. In Winnetka, for instance, 97.4% of third through eighth graders make those numbers. Avoca school district 37, covering an amalgam of Wilmette, Glenview, Winnetka and Northfield? An impressive 94.7%. Glencoe Central School? 95.4%.

But what came first? Are the schools truly so advanced in their teaching methods that they could take any group of kids and get the same results? Are our children as a group so talented and gifted that the school’s methodology doesn’t matter? Are we such wonderful parents supporting our children with tutors, educational computer games, reading books to them while they’re still in utero? Or is it that we’re so competitive that we’ve created competitive children determined to smack down any test they’re given? I have no idea. All I know is that people who have the resources to move to the North Shore are guaranteed to have their children educated alongside other children who together will do aces on any standardized test. These children also will compete for berths at the best colleges which will, in turn, create the opportunities for meeting and exceeding the averages in professional success.

But there is a minor problem for the Mrs. Bettermans of the North Shore. George might be gifted, might be special, might be a genius, might be Einstein, Da Vinci and Shostakovich all wrapped into one, but the neighbor’s kid is pretty darned smart himself.

For a quick read on ISAT composite scores for school districts in the county, go to http://www.suntimes.com/pcds/html/stng/hs/isat/cook.html

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