Hot House Roses
By Teresa Lhotka

Kids are all different. Individuals. Unique. We all know this. We all say it a dozen times over and over whenever we talk about norms or labels or whatever…but it seems that as a society we just don’t buy it. It seems that in order to be an individual, a person must exceed the norm. A person who does not do things faster and better than the average is not an individual. He or she is deficient somehow. Either lazy, stupid or disabled, he or she must be brought into the line of the norm as soon as possible, through whatever means necessary, or the reason must be explained away in a diagnosis of some kind. As a society, we simply can’t seem to accept the mathematical fact that there have to be as many data points below the magical line of average as there are above it.

Somehow, every child I meet is exceptional. Half the children I know are in Gifted and Talented Programs…programs supposedly reserved for the top 2% of students rated for academic performance.

I’ve met some children whose parents inform me that when you compensate for their child’s particular learning disability, their child is a certified genius. In fact, many of them are in the Gifted and Talented Program.

Further, they are convinced that my children have the same disabilities, and if I only got them IEPs, classroom aids, and some carefully tailored cocktails of medications, they would be geniuses as well.

News to them, is the fact that I already know my children are geniuses. Of course they are. How could they not be? They’re MINE. They inherited it from me. I’m a genius too. I know, because my mom told me so. And she would know, because she’s…you guessed it…a genius. Three guesses as to how she figured it out.

Yet every year I’ve had the meeting. The one where the teachers try to tell me that my kids have ADD/ADHD or Asperger’s Syndrome, or sensory integration disorders or something that I don’t even know what, because they aren’t allowed to actually tell me what they think is wrong with my kids. I have to guess, but I’m pretty sure I know what they’re talking about, because I’ve read the same hot new books on the latest syndromes that they have.

A teacher will just point to the test scores, and show me where my child was in skills in relation to the norm of students, and then go on to list symptoms that indicate maybe my child has a learning disability. Then she hands me a list of places that do a “complete” battery of tests on children. She assures me that all of these places are “good” places, and that they will leave no stone unturned in their quest to explain my child’s lack of complete academic conquest. Every teacher has given me dark hints about the academic disaster that awaits my child in the coming year if “something” isn’t done to help him.

They even tell me that my child is obviously very bright. In fact, he could probably be in the Gifted and Talented Program, if we could just find a way to “help” him.

Every year, I have hemmed, hawed, stalled and quibbled until the end of the year. I’ve never quite made it in to the assessment places, and yet somehow my children get to the end of the year and have miraculously managed to remain somewhere in the average range in every subject.

Every year my grade-schooler is put in a supplementary program to give him “help”, and he goes to a couple of weeks of remedial summer school. The teachers suggest these programs and they are free, so I ask my son if he wants to do them. He says, “Yes.” I ask why, and he answers that they are easy, fun, and get him out of class. He meets a lot of new friends in summer school. Other kids who are just like him. Ok, that’s good enough for me.

I remember when I was in the slow group in grade school. The low expectations of my teachers let me coast through the day, gazing out the window watching the ponies and the unicorns grazing in the foreground of a magical castle…nothing like the rigorous, challenging, engaging, encouraging attention given to children in the Gifted and Talented program. Our school district only had a Gifted and Talented Program for grade-school children, so they arrived in junior high thinking that school was challenging, fun and engaging, and were dumped into the stymied boredom of regular classes with the rest of us schlubs. I, on the other hand, had the advantage of already having the skills needed to get through classes that held no interest, luster or challenge. I had the advantage of being rewarded for the slightest level of performance above failure. While many of the Gifted and Talented alumni withered like hot house roses in the tundra, I glided through secondary school on the oiled machinery of mediocrity…which left a lot of time for reading about the really interesting stuff in the books that I hid behind the textbooks that I was supposed to be reading.

And when I reached college, I blossomed like a Christmas cactus brought out into the light and watered after nearly a year sitting dry in a dark, cool closet. My SAT scores were through the roof. I was instantly selected for the honors program. After a year of …ahem…adjustment…I made the Dean’s list thirteen out of fifteen trimesters. I worked my way through college with no financial aid and no debt. I got two degrees in five years.

Obviously, I can’t get too worried about my boys being “average” or even “slightly below average”. I don’t obsess about their reading level, or their Iowa Basic’s scores or anything like that. Why? Because they’re geniuses, silly. They’ll be just like my husband and I. Somewhere, somehow, something will catch their interest, and like becalmed sails unfurling in a sudden gale, they will be off and learning everything at once. Maybe it will be like with my husband and his cryptography, submarine warfare, and computers. Maybe it will be like me with my horses, music, philosophy, astronomy and martial arts. It doesn’t matter what that first subject is, because all knowledge is connected, and one passion leads to another and another, and another.

Until then, we make sure they have the basics, don’t fall behind, and take an effort to give them lots and lots of exposure to a variety of subjects and interests outside of school.

As my mother always says, “If you bounce enough stuff off of them, eventually something’s going to stick.”

But whatever it is that catches on to them, it will be theirs: their interests, their passion, and their timing. They will have found their natural element, and blossomed in it, and they will thrive.

E-mail Teresa


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