Fascinating Things

There are so many fascinating things I could discuss on my blog today. Too bad I don't feel like it. Sorry.

UPDATE: My friend Mindy posted on her gifted kids today, and I was a gifted kid, even though it didn't show, unless you knew what to look for.

I went to a small private school called Southwest Christian Elementary, and back in the 60s there just weren't options for identifying gifted kids, let alone giving them suitable opportunities. And it didn't help that my grades weren't very good. There was one time in 3rd grade when I had to have a hearing test because the teacher was afraid I couldn't hear her (she'd call my name and I'd say "Huh?"). I knew there was nothing wrong with my hearing, but at home my mom snuck up behind me and whispered very quietly, "Can you hear me, Jeff?" Whereupon I gave a very surly reply: "Of course I can hear you! There' s nothing wrong with my hearing!" "Then why does the teacher think you need a hearing test?" "Because I don't listen to her." "Why don't you listen to her?" "Because she never has anything interesting to say!"

My entire elementary career consisted of me sitting in class, quietly most of the time, thinking about dinosaurs, spaceships and robots, and getting my older sister's friends to check out science books for me from the "big kids" section of the school library. You'd think that by the time I was reading books about Relativity theory in 7th grade, it would have dawned on someone that I was gifted, but it didn't. My parents were Depression era kids. My dad finished the 8th grade, worked a bit, then went into WWII. He and my mom weren't exactly aware of the attributes of giftedness. (As it turns out, my father was gifted himself, but I didn't see that until I studied gifted children and could look back on his accomplishments with some basis for comparison.)

Fortunately, by 9th grade the subject matter in school began to get interesting, my grades improved, and I myself eventually came to realize that I was gifted, and that most other kids couldn't do what I could do mentally "if they only read as much." Unfortunately, it was also at that time that skinny women with big boobs began to take up a disproportionate fraction of my interests, and if they ever let go of it, I may yet accomplish something.

UPDATE 2: I'm a West Michigan guy, and West Michigan has been in the news lately because our local minor league ballpark decided to offer a 4800 calorie hamburger on the menu. This has drawn relatively enormous national attention to what was supposed to be a local publicity and marketing gimmick. I think I'll blog about it tomorrow (but then again, you're getting to know how unreliable I am, so maybe I won't). (And I'm getting kind of tired of checking my spelling, so I might let that fall by the wayside.)