Limitations

I had an enlightening dream last night. I was in my wife’s car (which had morphed into an old, beat-up, white Ford), at a stop light, creeping up waiting for the light to turn green. Well, I kept creeping up, anticipating the change, until I was halfway through the intersection. I found myself beyond the point of no return, and as there was no perpendicular traffic, I just drifted through the intersection.

Then I decided to check my rear-view mirror. And sure enough, there was a cop sitting there, in his cruiser. The lights went on and I pulled over. What saved me from getting a ticket was that I had a brochure in my front seat from a local school for gifted children, which the police officer was well-acquainted with. We chatted politely about the school for a few minutes, and he let me go with just a warning to be more careful.

The school was amazing. Dreams fade pretty quickly for me after I awake, but a few things stayed. First, the children were all required to do a daily blog on the school internal network. Kids as young as the Little One. Then they had to do a weekly essay of a few pages on some really heavy stuff – physics, politics, the Middle East situation, things like that. It seemed they were taught a couple grades above the level you would think they should be taught. But the craziest things is, they had the ability to assimilate the information and make judgments and hold opinions on them.

Which just goes to a point of view my wife always expounds: a child will always respond to the level you interact with him. We tend to treat our oldest girl as an adult, in speech, actions, and responsibilities, and much more often than not, she responds at a higher level. No baby talk, no whining, no regressive behavior is tolerated, and very quickly none is displayed.

I think I had the dream because I do my homework with my daughter every morning. It’s very simple, and she usually breezes through it in a few minutes. Things like: “This is the number 15. Write it three times. Then color in the amount of tiles to represent 15.” We’re doing double-digit column math at home. She’s mastered flash card addition and subtraction, and can do most simple equations in her head – no finger counting. We’re starting simple multiplication. And that’s just math. With verbal skills we play the rhyming game and often ask her to spell pretty tough words. She knows about twenty-five words of Spanish and some simple phrases, and she probably knows more astronomy than any other child in her grade school (yeah, that’s my influence).

A child responds at the level you engage him. Or, in other words, the only limitations we have are in our own minds, and are often instilled at us at a very early age, by both teachers and parents.