The Editor will be out of her corner for the holiday, celebrating with family and friends! (Don't tell me you won't be doing the same, instead of reading my rambles!) See you again in the new year!
As is normal for a third-year doctoral student, I'm in the process of applying for university positions at the moment. As innately stressful as the job application process is for all of us, I'm also finding it to be a good opportunity for self-reflection of all sorts.
Most recently, I've been considering again everyone's favorite question for a young fiction-author: why don't you do a creative writing degree?
Aside from the fact that, to put it baldly, fiction publishers don't generally care if an author has a degree—they're far more interested in the content and readability of what you submit (although in science fiction, sometime some related science credentials don't hurt!)—there's a far deeper reason for me personally.
I never seriously considered doing a creative writing degree because writing is a subjective process—there are technical elements that make a difference in the readability and appeal of almost anyone's work, but let's face it: your favorite book might well be the one your cousin, or your best friend, or your boss throws across the room or uses for a coaster, and vice versa. Psychology as a discipline is that bit more grounded—although different models can appear to contradict one another, and different researchers can and do get contradictory results, the fact remains that if two researchers analyze the same data using the same techniques, and both of them do it right, they'll get the same results. The same is not true of fiction—because, ultimately, there's no one right way to read a book: all of your personal experiences, the fact that a character reminds you of that horrible old woman across the street or your favorite teacher in fourth grade or an image in a painting you saw years ago—all of these are part of the interpretation. Factors in the model—or, more operationally, part of the error term.
As a writer, as an artist, I take the risk of submitting my model to the vagaries of my audience's error terms—I'm writing for the ones whose "disturbance values" (in the structural equation modeling sense, though I freely admit that the pun appealed) are similar to my own, or at least mesh well enough with mine that my art says something they can hear. But that's different from submitting my work for evaluation, as I do in my classes and projects here at UConn. Here, there's an objective standard—and by the same token, there's also more room allowed, not less, for interpretation!
I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to compare notes with a dear friend who's actually done graduate work in creative writing—and imagine how astonished both of us were to find that my statistics professor allowed more room for variance of interpretation and results than her creative writing professors! Most of my statistics assignments have focused on process, and within certain obvious limits, the professors make allowances for different choices that students may make in the data-analysis process, whether it's something as slight as how many decimal places you round to at a given step, or larger choices like respecification of a model. Indeed, one of my professors, Dr. David Kenny, has been known to reward students for allowing for uncertainty in their models (and more power to him!). My friend's experience in creative writing courses, however, has been so much more narrow, with such a limited idea of what constitutes "worthwhile" writing, despite the fact that so much of the experience of writing is even more subjective than the conceptual framing of a statistical model will ever be.
Even more telling to me is the fact that in academic creative writing, authors are, at best, strongly discouraged from commenting on their own work—this in stark contrast to ed psych, where running discussions between researchers and scholars, often carried out in the pages of major journals, are not uncommon. And yet, writing, and reading, are such subjective processes that I'd expect that literary analysts would welcome dialogues with the authors whose work they critique—and I'm still not sure why they aren't.
So in closing—I think I'll stick with research. There's so much more room for subjectivity in statistics than there is in literature!
This week in the Corner, I'm jumping on the blogging bandwagon to talk a little bit about my favorite "weblog" site, LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com)—not just as a space for personal expression, but as a potential teaching tool.
I've been reflecting on the merits of LiveJournal's "community" function as a classroom resource for a while, but it wasn't until a few weeks ago, when I became the maintainer for the Alabama Future Problem Solving Program's Board of Directors community, that I realized just how useful a LiveJournal community, or "comm" in popular usage, can be in the classroom.
Certainly, the features that LJ comms themselves offer are potentially powerful educational tools. Best of all from a teacher's perspective may be the opportunity to invite "virtual visitors" to participate in your classroom community (and, yes, that is a double meaning!) via LiveJournal—a nice way of inviting a "guest speaker" to come to your class on their own time! (Don't worry about uninvited guests, either—the Community Management options allow you to control who can join or post to your community.) Likewise, student LJ's allow them a wide range of options for self-expression—allowing them to show as much or as little personal style in their journal design as they choose. As with any online forum, it's available wherever an Internet connection is, making it easier to reach students who are absent. And it's a text-based medium, therefore an opportunity to work with students on developing good grammar and usage—what's not to like about that?
But more important, especially for teachers of the gifted, is the simple fact of using an online forum as part of regular class discussion. If you've been reading "Along Came a Spider" here on News and Views, you've seen the increasing attention paid to the love affair between our current crop of students and technology, specifically computer-oriented and Internet tools.
Much of the coverage of this phenomenon is cautionary, even alarmist—filled with caveats and warnings to parents to limit their children's self-disclosure, and schools' prohibitions on student possession of weblogs. Now, admittedly, I'm on the "leading edge" of the generation that grew up with computers, but I'm just not sure that this level of concern is justified.
Do we need to teach our students about protecting their own privacy, and the reasons for it? Absolutely. But is the best way to do that by denying them the opportunity to participate in and develop facility with tools that will likely be a significant part of their adult life? In a word: no.
Rather, we need to play to their strengths—and bring blogs, or LiveJournals, into the classroom is a great way to do so... not to mention an excellent opportunity to help them develop certain basic self-protection skills. LiveJournal in particular facilitates this through the amount of control over privacy settings that it allows to individual users. By bringing LJ into the classroom, we can help encourage students to make use of those tools, and understand the reasons for them.
Just as importantly, however, we can reach students on a whole new level, coming into a "world" that many young people today clearly find highly appealing. While there hasn't yet been much research in this area, it's fair to hypothesize that students who might be quiet in a conventional classroom environment may find it easier to express themselves through the written word in an online journal. Likewise, students who may find traditional visual-arts or graphical presentations difficult might just have an easier time creating impressive displays on the computer.
I'm not suggesting that LiveJournal posting and assignments should ever replace classroom discussion and paper and pencil. But as a supplement to traditional teaching methods, it might just serve to showcase talents that even your students don't know they have.
Since this is Thanksgiving weekend, I'm sure you've all got other places to be than at your computer, so I'll keep this short, sweet—and topical.
This week's column was inspired by a line from one of my favorite TV shows, the all-too-short-lived "Firefly", a "sci-fi Western" in the tradition of authors like Robert Heinlein and Mike Resnik. One of the characters, Dr. Simon Tam, himself a brilliant young surgeon, describes his even more intelligent and creative younger sister by saying, "She wasn't just gifted—she was a gift".
That line resonates very strongly with my own feelings about gifted education. I think it's easy in the process of surviving "administrivia" and general crises—whether you're trying to persuade a school board to provide you with much-needed program funding, get through a conference with a difficult parent, persuade a child whose stubbornness is only enhanced by her intellect to do something she just won't, or get a piece of research put together—to start feeling just a little burdened in our field; to start feeling that we, as advocates for the gifted, are the ones giving, and that our students, research participants, and children are the ones being given to. Even the term we use—"gifted"—implies that these children—"our kids"—have "gotten something for free."
But, especially on a day set aside for giving thanks, I think it's important to listen to Dr. Tam (even if he is a fictional character!)—and to think about what our kids give us. The wonder and the beauty of what they can do, not just the remarkable projects and products they can create, but what they show us of their process, the workings of their minds—and most of all, the humbling experience of having their trust as they seek out an accepting audience, not just for their products but for themselves, in a culture that all too often "doesn't want to hear it"—those are their gifts to us. Today is a good time to be thankful for them.
The Editor is back in her corner after a wonderful, exciting, inspirational—and therefore no little exhausting—time at NAGC! If you attended as well, you probably know exactly what I mean when I speak of the kind of professional and personal renewal I always derive from this conference. This year, with the "big book report" (or, as we sometimes joke at UConn, the "Type II in research methods") to occupy my spare time, I was especially delighted to have the chance to connect with fellow "dissertators" (no, I did not make that word up—it's an actual term sometimes used administratively by graduate schools!) at the Research and Evaluation Cracker Barrel. Some of the most prominent researchers in gifted education also attended the Cracker Barrel and I had the opportunity to discuss research with eminent scholars like Rena Subotnik and Michael Pyryt.
Another exciting aspect of this year's conference was the strong presence of scholars from areas beyond education—most notably bioscience. I started this year's NAGC by attending the pre-conference institute in the Neurobiology of Giftedness—before you run screaming, let me assure you that it was completely approachable, despite (or because) the presenters, Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, are both MD's—whose area of research is How We Learn. I could say a lot more about their wonderful presentation, but I'll let them speak for themselves at their website (http://neurolearning.com/) and blogspot (www.eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com)
The conference itself also boasted excellent multi-disciplinary presentations: it was standing room only in "Misdiagnoses and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults", given by Drs. James Webb (PhD, psychology), Edward Amend (Psy.D), Jean Goerss (MD, pediatrics), and Jerald Grobman (MD, psychiatry)—and during the Q&A it became apparent that a number of the audience were also psychologists!
This is exciting to me at a very basic level, in a way exemplified by the comments Dr. Grobman made during his part of the talk—he said that as a psychiatrist he had spent the early part of his career not even knowing that gifted education as a field existed. He described a process of essentially working his way into our "corner of the field" as a result of seeing gifted patients—highly talented individuals who also presented clinical symptoms—and through the diagnosis and treatment process coming to understand for himself as a scientist the common threads connecting them: not merely the presence of talent, but the differences it made in the origins of their disorders and in the approaches he needed to take to help them.
Put simply, this is validation for "the giftedness construct"—the idea that "gifted people" do exist as such; that there are qualitative differences between the gifted and the norm . . . and that we aren't simply talking about an "elite" class: those individuals wouldn't have been in Dr. Grobman's office if they weren't in trouble. As such, it's also validation for the role of gifted education: understanding the differences in processing that take place in individuals who show high levels of ability (as the Eides are studying) and also the special psychological vulnerabilities of this population provides the strongest support possible for the necessity of having people in our schools who are trained to work with them and who—echoing comments by Dr. Goerss—can help professionals, not only other teachers, but psychologists and physicians (whose training does not always include even a mention of "giftedness" as a concept), to understand how to provide for the needs of the gifted.
You'll be hearing more from me on this subject in future columns; for this week, I'll sign off by saying that I think we can all draw hope and excitement about the future of gifted education—a future that includes an understanding of giftedness that goes beyond education and back.
The Editor will be "out of her corner" this week, attending and presenting at the annual NAGC conference with the rest of the "Home Team" from UConn (see last week's News and Views for more details)! Stop by the NRC/GT booth to find out the latest about all our programs and come to see us at any of a number of exciting presentations by UConn's wonderful team of researchers and theorists!
And if you happen to drop by Royal Fireworks Press's booth, you can have a look at the fruit of my "other profession": my novels, Lera of Tymoria: The Dragonmage, Dragonmagic, and the latest book, The Arkanus, will be available for purchase, along with a teacher's guide!
Hope to see you in Louisville!
Halloween has long been one of my favorite holidays, second only to Christmas—fall and winter are my favorite seasons (yes, I do like cold weather!) and Halloween has always been a wonderful way to commemorate the peak of one of my favorite seasons even as the next one approaches! (I promised myself I wouldn't get started on the unfortunate habit that most stores have of putting up their Christmas displays before Halloween—that's another topic for another column!) And, of course, as a writer, I always love the chance to play "make-believe" that the tradition of Halloween costumes affords—dressing up as characters I admire was always a highlight of my year (and I eagerly await the day when I have an excuse to dress as one of my own characters!).
But this year, as the "anti-Halloween" movement grows louder, I thought I'd take a moment to reflect, not merely on the personal significance of the holiday, but on its larger cultural context. And, as so often happens, I was aided in my reflections by a good friend: a devout Christian . . . with a degree in anthropology. She recently told me that she's become more passionate about celebrating and supporting Halloween precisely because of the attitudes taken by some of her more militant co-religionists. She pointed out, for example, that the "harvest festivals" embraced by many of the churches in her community as an alternative to Halloween actually have more cultural roots in the original pagan festivals than does "Halloween" as it's celebrated in the US—a fact which I hadn't known!
Something I did know, however, is that many Christian holidays and festivals were timed in the early Church to coincide with popular "pagan" holidays—and not merely to coincide, but to co-opt and to consecrate them to the Christian faith (and, from a political point of view, to help establish the cultural dominance of Christianity by making it attractive to a wider audience). Take Christmas—historical and archaeological records seem to indicate that the census-taking which would have caused Mary and Joseph to be "on the road" in Bethlehem for Jesus' birth (and the reason there was no room at the inn) probably took place in the fall. But when do we celebrate Christmas? In the dead of winter, the dark of the year—the Solstice, to be exact. You do the math.
In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and make a little leap: given that Jesus' birth probably did take place in the fall, wouldn't it be more appropriate to have a significant Christian festival in autumn? Say... around the time of Halloween?
Just some food for thought—like the Halloween candy I'm munching on as I write.
Leni Riefenstahl. The Serenity Role-Playing Game. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
What in the world do a German filmmaker (in)famous for her Nazi propaganda, a pencil-and-paper RPG for a (too)-short-lived cult-hit TV show, and the latest installment of the most commercially popular fantasy series in history have in common? They've all made me think about the relationship between the social sciences and art.
Yes, this is yet another installment of "why a young fiction writer has chosen to do a degree in something-other-than-literature." But it's more than that—at its best, it's a call to arms for other young writers and artists—to consider the "governing dynamics" that inform their creative process; not merely the message they're sending, but the underlying structure of the ideas and whether they stand up to scrutiny in other than an artistic or commercial sense—how thoroughly they resonate with that which is known about human nature.
This is not to deny the extent to which the actual creative process itself—the time spent actually writing, drawing, filming—has a strong innate component. The first time I heard of Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory, it resonated at once with my own experience of the creative process—when I'm writing, I'm not evaluating (or not much), and not (usually) stopping to research. But "research and evaluation" in the broadest sense are also organic parts of the creative process؏for all the time I spent in "flow state", there's at least as much time and sometimes more spent either researching background material or evaluating how well my work "hangs together". But more than that, I've learned to embed my work in a grounding in the social sciences, so that by the time I am inspired to sit down at the keyboard and "go with the flow", I'm already drawing from a body of knowledge about human nature—and when I "come up for air", by the same token, my evaluation of how a story "hangs together" is informed by that same knowledge base.
It isn't simply a question of ethics, either; it's about the ability to get one's point across to an audience. It's not about being "politically correct" in the sense of, for instance, making all one's characters in a story abide by a narrow understanding of socially correct behavior (while overlooking the fact that some of these people, realistically, probably wouldn't behave "appropriately"!). Rather, the importance of the social sciences in art is at its base a question getting your point across—of understanding how your work will be received in the context in which you work.
Take Riefenstahl, whose work Triumph of the Will and Olympia—both paeans to Nazi ideals and their realization in Nazi Germany—are to this day simultaneously hailed as technical and aesthetic masterpieces (to the point of being required viewing in many film schools) and descried as political and social horrors. Riefenstahl's talent is difficult to deny, but so is the impact that her embrace of Nazism in her art has had on her ability to reach an audience, even with later works that would seem to fly in the face of Nazi ideology, as for example her post-war fascination with the Sudanese Nuba tribe as an ideal of physical beauty.
Or take Rowling, whose latest offering has sparked concerns from fans of all ages as she attempts to delve into the background of her villain, Lord Voldemort—and for some of us, succeeds in raising the question of whether she (and Albus Dumbledore) really do believe that "it is our choices" that determine who we are, not accidents of birth. Voldemort, in the sixth book, seems almost to have been "born bad"—a notion that flies in the face of current psychology and behavior genetics; "badness" itself is a social construct, after all, one which we as humans come to understand through the efforts of those who raise us. It's a controversy Rowling could perhaps have avoided with a little background research into psychology that would have enabled her to clarify her position as the story of Voldemort's life was unfolded for the reader.
And finally, "tabletop" gaming—I really shouldn't single out the Serenity RPG, since I've been poking holes in, and fun at, the way that the role-playing games of my acquaintance handle issues of ability and skill since I was in high school. A good researcher knows that any model of human behavior doesn't fully capture its complexity—and an RPG is a sort of model, in a sense, a means of allowing players to create and play characters realistically. But as both a psychologist and a writer, I've long been tempted to "take a crack" at designing a character-creation system for role-playing, based explicitly on psychological theories. (I wonder if Joe would let me use the "three rings"!) The point here, though, is that a little understanding of the psychological nature of ability and its impact on skill could conceivably enrich the role-playing process. (I'd tell you that it has for me, but of course I've been just a little too busy lately for that kind of thing!)
I could easily go on for pages on this topic—indeed, any one of these three is worthy of a column in itself—but at the end, the basic point is simply that one of the main challenges for any artist is knowing what they're communicating through their art—and that the social sciences, with all their faults and virtues, may for many of us be an indispensable piece of the puzzle of communication.
What with all the recent discussion of evolution versus creationism—excuse me, intelligent design—I've naturally joined the ranks of those thinking long and hard about my own beliefs and how best to express them constructively.
I'm aided in this process by two things: a core of intelligent, educated friends with backgrounds in a range of spiritual traditions ranging from Judaism to Buddism, and in a range of sciences from physics to medicine—and a certain background in statistics of my own.
Statistics, you say? Oh, yes, I answer. But first I need to acknowledge the contributions of my friends, especially a dear friend with a lifelong experience with the mystical or spiritual—who also works in research. Scientific method? Old hat to her. But that doesn't mean she denies the experience of her own senses, even when they tell her things that can't be proved scientifically.
She's also a fellow writer of speculative fiction, and she and I have had many wonderful and thought-provoking discussions on the nature of the paranormal, the supernatural—the spiritual. But it wasn't until I started studying statistics and specifically using the AMOS causal modeling software that I was able to formulate my own model of this—a theory that let me reconcile the reality of subjective spiritual experience with scientific research methodology.
If you've done even a bit of statistics, you've probably made the acquaintance of concepts like residuals and proportion of variance unexplained or maybe even disturbance variance. In plain English, what these refer to is error: the amount of variance or difference in whatever you're studying that can't be explained by your model.
In terms of modeling how the world works I've started things of the mystical or spiritual as a sort of disturbance variance in the scientific model of the world. There are the things we can measure, the constructs we can operationalize and study and demonstrate with research—and then there's that proportion of variance unexplained and inexplicable, the stuff we can't get our hands on through existing research methods. We know it's there, we just can't get it into the model except as the error term—or, at best, it's a latent variable, something that can't be measured directly. It's the error that prevents the model from being completely accurate—and no model ever is.
Indeed, from a methodological perspective, accepting the existence of spirituality as error or uniqueness variance in a purely scientific, rational model of reality actually strengthens the model, precisely because it admits the existence of that residual, that unexplained and possibly immeasurable variance. Likewise, admitting the latency of the spiritual as a variable—its status as the unexplained—also provides a common framework where science and spirituality can meet. (Indeed, a friend and colleague who is herself a minister enthusiastically embraced this metaphor when I offered it to her.) And certainly, the amount of variance explained through science—and therefore the amount of residual variance, the spiritual aspect of the world—is a matter for some debate. But then, most of the researchers I know are quick to admit just how much they don't know—and even how much they can't know about a given problem based on the data they have available. Statistics, at least in part, is the art of figuring out what questions can be answered with the data you have available, and how best to approach them—not the practice of assuming that you can find all the answers.
I'll admit that I'm always happiest when I can find a synthesis between two seemingly opposite points of view. But more than that, I believe that finding a common language for discussion of crucial ideas—especially the governing dynamics of the world as a whole—is in many ways, far more important than trying to find definitive answers to the questions of the ages. Certainly, if you believe in an omniscient God, there's always going to be something we don't know. And likewise, there is always an error term in every model—and the analysis as a process is at least as important as the results.
As I was considering what to put in the Corner this week, I decided to look at what was already here from previous weeks—and I'm awfully glad I did. In the last two weeks I've talked about, respectively, the role of family and the process of growing into books. Two seemingly unconnected topics—but when looked at closely, there's an underlying thread just waiting to be explored.
Specifically, the cultural attitude toward children. As a "cheerfully childless" woman, I admit to annoyance with parents who trundle everywhere with strollers larger than my first car and expect random passers-by and salesclerks to coo and bell over their offspring (whether or not the offspring in question have done anything to merit it besides existing). As an educator, on the other hand, I'm often distressed by parents who, even without actually being abusive, simply don't seem to care about their children's well-being, who'd rather browbeat them or force them into a mold rather than get to know them and value them as people.
And you know what? I'm starting to think it's all part of the same thing.
Consider this hypothesis: what we have is not a culture that values children, at least not as people. What we have is a culture that values the production of children—their existence, not their self-actualization or even function; quantity of life, not quality. I'm not going to get into the abortion debate here (you can all breathe a sigh of relief!) but I'd be interested to know how many anti-abortion politicians and activists are as interested and pro-active in supporting services for these children after they're born.
A lot of social initiatives and projects "for the children" seem to me to have some of that same spirit. People clamor for censorship of "violent" or "sexual" content in TV, games, movies, and on the internet—such that sites like the National Organization for Women's homepage get blocked by some content filters because they talk about gay rights or other issues. There's no discussion of, well discussion: the possibility that parents might talk to their children about what they're reading, playing, or watching doesn't seem to enter into it.
It's odd to me that people find this so intimidating, but then, my mother and I never had problems discussing just about anything, and (as I said before in the Corner) I was reading Jean Auel at age six—and moved on to my parents' Heinlein collection by twelve. And perhaps that's the point: maybe it's actually easier rather than harder to talk about tough topics like sex (and violence) when you and your child have some common ground to use for the discussion. (Heinlein's actually a great, if often controversial, role model for that: To Sail Beyond the Sunset, for example, includes a parent and child talking very, very frankly about the ethics of human behavior, sexual and otherwise.)
And then I have to wonder: how many parents find this kind of discussion challenging because they're not prepared for it—or perhaps for parenthood in general? It seems that, culturally, there's a strong inducement to have children—but there's no real discussion of what to do once they're here, no clear framework, only an idealized sense that children need to be "protected" for the sake of their morals or their (say it with me!) self-esteem.
Protected—from the world; from growing up. I ask you, how can anyone develop a moral sense if they don't have amoral or immoral behaviors to evaluate? How can anyone develop self-esteem if they haven't had the chance to be challenged and find out they can succeed?
The idealization of childhood (that we get from the Victorians, actually) is, I think, a special problem for and with gifted children. There's so much of a push to "let kids be kids" on the one hand (ever had a parent with a misbehaving toddler in a public place tell you indignantly, "S/he's only a child!" when you objected to, say, having a store's display pulled down on you?), and on the other to diagnose and medicate children who act out in the slightest—and it's very easy for gifted children to get caught in the middle. These are the kids who are often happy left to themselves with a book, but become rebellious and frustrated if denied intellectual challenge—I think the Scylla and Charybdis are fairly obvious. On the one hand, you have the teacher or parent who insists on making the happily introverted gifted child "be a child" and going out to play games with others (a task that's work, a chore, for the introvert); on the other, you have the disruptive or creatively daydreaming gifted child dosed up with Ritalin.
There's no easy answer to this—but it begins with a good hard look at the values we have, and whether we value children as objects—or as human beings.
Recently some friends of mine and I were discussing life choices, and specifically that old favorite, "family versus work". I'm not sure what got us onto it, but I know that something I took away from it was a sense that we as a culture need to think about how we define "family".
I'm a longtime fan of the work of Andrew Vachss, and one of the concepts I've always loved in his work is that of "family of choice". Certainly for me, my friends form a network not unlike what I see in some families, of people who look out for one another, listen to and help with each other's problems—oh, yeah, and have a heck of a good time. I'm lucky in that I include some of my blood relatives in that network, but it's not blood, or not blood alone, that defines the relationship.
And, as a young woman about to embark on what will hopefully be a long and engaging professional career, I'm also inspired to think further about alternate definitions, and options, for nurturing roles. Culturally speaking, it's very easy for a woman to choose to exercise whatever desire to nurture she has through motherhood—but that's by no means the only way to do it, or even, for all of us, necessarily the most appealing.
What comes to mind here is the role of the professional mentor, or rather the professional who is a mentor—someone who takes the "newbies" under her wing, or takes on a protege (sometimes without quite intending to); who takes an interest in the welfare of those who work under her. I've been fortunate in my adult life to have a number of great women mentors, both in academe and in the world of work: women who were open to forming a bond of care and friendship with others, interested not only in my development in the workplace or the school, but also in me as a person. That's a valid outlet for nurturing, regardless of your family situation—many of my mentors had children of their own, but that didn't stop them from taking on proteges, because they cared. Likewise, some of them were without other families, by choice or happenstance—it didn't mean that they weren't "really women" or that they lacked the capacity to care, rather that they'd found others outlet for caring.
I wonder how many young women, in the early stages of planning their lives, stop to think about other outlets for nurturing besides having a biological family. I know from my experiences in academe just how important a caring mentor can be to both undergraduate and graduate students (thanks, Sally and Betsy!), and I suspect, or at least hope, that a lot of gifted young women have had similar experiences with academic mentors of their own. But how many stop to consider the joys of taking on that role themselves? How many consider that their desire to care for others won't go begging if they don't have a biological family of their own?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to diminish the vital role of motherhood in our society. But I do hope that other young women will consider, as I have, the value of other outlets for a desire to care for others. We need mothers to bring us into the world—but many of us need mentors to get the most out of it.
"The right book for the right child at the right time." I first heard that phrase from my master's advisor, Tom Hébert, at the University of Georgia. It amused me—because at the time I was having my first clear-cut experience of exactly how true that can be.
The phrase refers specifically to bibliotherapy or guided reading—the process of helping people to work through problems in their lives using books to which they relate. But in a larger sense, it sometimes has to do with a reader's personal readiness to relate to a specific work, regardless of their reading level or ability.
A good example from my own life is my relationship with C.J. Cherryh's Hugo Award-winning novel, Cyteen—my love and respect for this book is such that I've occasionally described it as my personal "Bible" and I've contributed a chapter on it to an anthology on Cherryh's work. But it took me almost ten years from the time I first purchased the book until the time I actually read it through. In that time, I've lost count of the number of times I picked it up and put it down again, unable to get more than a few pages in without "tuning out". Then, suddenly, on my first weekend in grad school, I picked it up again—and this time I was hooked. I read it in a weekend: started on Friday and by Sunday was going back to start all over again. (The book was originally published in three parts, to give you some idea of the scale!) It was simple: I was finally ready for it. In this case, it was at least partly a question of finally having enough background in political science (my undergraduate major) and psychology, specifically the psychology of intelligence, to appreciate what Cherryh and her characters were doing.
Contrariwise, and meaning no disrespect to Jean Auel, I don't honestly think I'd have loved her "Earth's Children" novels if I'd come on them as an adult. But when I first read The Valley of Horses at the age of six (yes, you read that right!) I absolutely adored Ayla and her adventures—and I skipped the "boring" anthropological parts (and what to me was the equally "boring" love story). Now as an adult when I go back to this childhood favorite, I often find myself bypassing Ayla (and amour) in favor of anthropology.
The point of all this? An old one—don't give up hope if your child or student doesn't immediately "catch on" to a book you think will appeal to them, and by the same token let them cling steadfastly to books they haven't (yet) read . . . because you never know. And a new (and possibly controversial) one—don't be afraid to let your children explore books that might be too "adult" for them (the Earth's Children series is definitely not for children!); what better way to create a life-long favorite than to allow them the opportunity to read books that will grow with them!
All right, so I know that Windows XP is not everyone's favorite software. Certainly, some of my more technically inclined friends are inclined to suggest that it's actually a step back from Windows 98. But you'll have to ask them why—because I love XP.
Why? Three words: Plug and Play. With my old Win98 machine, installing new software was a little less like everyday business and a little more like playing roulette than I really liked. And let's not talk about new hardware—that required divine intervention!
But since getting two machines with XP, I've had a whole new world open up to me—the incredible usefulness of a thumbdrive and an external mouse for my laptop, the personal satisfaction of not having to call on those technically inclined friends when my mouse dies and I have to install a new one—or even just download anti-virus software.
As a bit of a public service, I thought I'd devote a column or two here and there to singing the praises of a few of the "techie-toys"—hardware and software—I've come to love.
What's in the Corner this week? A bit of totally free software: Mozilla Firefox, in your Editor's opinion the best little (free!) browser out there. You can keep Internet Explorer (or as I've come to call it, IEeeeeeeeeeeeeee!); I'll curl up with The 'Fox.
What makes Firefox so great? I'll let the software experts tell you about the technical virtues of it; what I (and I suspect you) really care about is the functionality at the end.
The basic format is very much like IEeeeeee when you start out (that's where the technical virtues come in, I presume). What makes Firefox so great from an "end-user's" standpoint are the extensions: you can customize the basic browser to do just about anything you want (well, I still haven't found one to make me a cup of coffee. . . .)
Extensions can be found here (addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application={ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}) and are basically little bits of software you can tack onto Firefox to make it friendlier for you. Many if not most of them are created by other users of Firefox (i.e. not people associated with Mozilla as a company) and are designed to meet whatever needs they see—some extensions may strike you as "weird" while others will have you wondering why they're not part of the basic browser!
In fact, one of my favorite extensions is so popular that it is now part of the default Firefox browser: tabbed browsing. Instead of having new pages open in a separate window, just right-click on the link of your choice and select "Open in New Tab". Now you have two "tabs" side-by-side in one window, and you can go back and forth between them without a hassle. You can also duplicate tabs to new tabs or windows, close multiple tabs at once, or merge windows into one window with many tabs. It's the difference between having all your files in separate drawers, and having one file drawer with a lot of folders. Which is easier for you? Additionally, a number of users have come up with extensions to improve on it; my personal favorite is the "Undo Close Tab" function, which I've often needed while browsing around for News and Views items!
Another favorite with me is the Search Bar—it comes standard with the current release, I believe, and you can search several engines and sites, including Google, Dictionary.com, Amazon, and eBay. With the right extensions, you can also highlight words or text in a web-page and then search the web or obtain a definition from Dictionary.com with just a couple of clicks. And if you stumble over something in a foreign language, the Translate Text extension lets you highlight the unknown terms and gives you a selection of languages to translate from, including not only the old standards like French, German and Spanish, but also Japanese, two forms of Chinese, and Portuguese. (I'm holding out for a Latin translator, myself!)
Other features I love include the option to choose different browser themes—just like desktop themes, they make your browser look the way you want without changing its function—and the Radial Context Menu, which compresses that long, long list of options you see when you right-click into a handy little circle of icons (and if you happen to need something in the text menu, Ctrl + right-click brings it right back for you!). But best of all is the fact that all of this is free—if you're a bit of a "shop-a-holic" (and the Editor confesses a bit of a tendency in that direction herself!) a stop by the extensions page has all the fun of shopping without the cost. Hmm, maybe I need to go over there myself right now. . .!
Recently a friend sent me a link to a very wonderful song, "Rich Fantasy Lives" (www.tomsmithonline.com/lyrics/rich_fantasy_lives.htm) (words by Rob Balder, music by Tom Smith). It's a very beautiful and touching piece about the role of imagination in the lives of the people whose "ordinaryness" we often take for granted, the worlds that live behind the eyes of those we pass in the street every day.
For me as a "student of giftedness" and an advocate for gifted children, the song also had some very special implications. Specifically, it got me thinking about how we recognize giftedness in our students, and the fact that process is pretty much inherently a latent variable.
Bear with the stats-speak for a moment: process—the way that people come up with and develop ideas—is not actually something we can measure. What we measure, even with "process journals" and step-by-step evaluations of student work, is actually a product, even if it's not a finished product. Likewise, all our assessment measures are basically products.
There's nothing wrong with this; in fact it's somewhat inevitable (although I do hold out hope that my lifetime will see advances in neuropsychology that might someday allow us to "watch genius at work"—to observe the biological process of idea creation and development in the brain). But it does have implications for how we handle our students—and this song clarified some of those for me.
"Don't be unkind to a wandering mind/Just say it again if we missed it." Balder's words are symbolic of what we need to learn to do for our gifted students, what many of us do naturally: to be patient with the creative process, even when it's not at a stage to offer up a product. For example, I know that when I'm working on a story, it's sometimes a bad idea to discuss it until I've gotten one draft done (unless I'm very, very "stuck" or feeling the need for input) because the act of discussing the story is enough for me—telling you about the story is almost as good as telling the story itself, the creative itch gets scratched, and I can go on my way . . . unfortunately, with rather less to show for it than if I'd just sat down and written. It's a good thing to know about myself, but it would be rather difficult to manage in a classroom environment, where teachers need products to evaluate.
Speaking of myself as a fiction writer, and therefore a dreamer: the song also called to mind another important element in how I think about gifted education and giftedness: the positive role of imagination. "Rich Fantasy Lives" is a story (in lyric form) about those unsatisfied with their realities, who feel the need to escape to another world. Certainly, as advocates for the gifted, we see that in these young people regularly, for any number of reasons.
But it's not only the "inhibited husbands and frustrated wives" and "techno-drone insects in cubicle hives" who feel the urge to go "browsing reality's infinite palate," to quote the lyrics. Sometimes even the happiest, the most successful, person in the world can imagine something even better—or at least different. Take J.R.R. Tolkien: distinguished non-fiction scholar whose work in philology won him recognition in academic circles... and, oh, by the way, have you heard of his Trilogy? Certainly a man successful in his field, in his life, in the real world—but also someone who evidently derived great pleasure from creating another one.
I know exactly what that feels like (even if I rather doubt my "rich fantasy life" will have the same wide appeal as his!). I'm in the most wonderful place I could ask to be, doing fascinating work and learning amazing new things from and with some of the best thinkers in our field, and I'm happier than I've ever been while doing it; as a UConn graduate I know I have a great future ahead of me right here in the real world. And you know what? I still cherish the Random Daily Sabbaticals I take every day as I drive to and from the office—a chance to wander, and wonder, off in another world entirely. It's not that this one is unpleasant or marginal—it's just that there are so many interesting possibilities in the "impossible" and the imaginary that the one thing I can't imagine is shutting them out entirely.
And who knows? One of the paths my mind wanders down as I head out to the office might just be the beginning (or the middle, or the ending) of my next novel. Process and product—for many of us, wandering and wondering are an important part of being able to create products. As I've said before, I love statistics and fiction writing for many of the same reasons—and sometimes my fiction ideas lead me down research paths that I might not have otherwise found.
So, be kind to your dreamers—and your dreams. They might just make reality a better, or a broader, place. They'll certainly make it a brighter one.
Certainly, our own Dr. Sally Reis has provided a wonderful model of female creativity (in Work Left Undone) which could explain my apparently divergent interests. But, and not to take away from her work, speaking for myself I'm often honestly just as surprised that the connection isn't obvious.
Certainly, the quantitative modeling of affective measures is a subject that's getting some attention from some very talented researchers in our field: only last semester, I had the privilege of working with Dr. Betsy McCoach while she and Dr. Carol Tieso did quantitative studies working with overexcitability in the gifted. Likewise, the connection between gifted students' affective needs and their reading choices is one that's also been explored, most notably perhaps in Judith Wynn Halsted's Some of My Best Friends Are Books.
But statistics and fiction writing? What in the world, you ask?
Exactly, I answer—what in the world, indeed. I've always been a writer (or at least a daydreamer), and I've always loved speculative fiction; I came to statistics later in life—and what pulled me in to the discipline most powerfully was, precisely, its unexpected similarity with the process of creating fiction.
Yes, I've heard all the jokes: "Figures don't lie, but liars figure," etc. Setting aside blatant ethical violations, however, there is something about the statistical process that is intensely, joyfully similar to what I do when I sit down to create a world and its characters.
The connection is this: both processes involve a modeling of the world—a hypothesis about what's going to happen. While writing fiction is much more of a thought experiment of sorts, the best and most respected writers become so because they draw heavily on existing knowledge and reality, and use this as the basis for weaving the answers to their "What-if?" questions. (As an aside, this is another point of connection between my interest in the affective needs of the gifted and my creative writing: how better to learn to create a range of uniquely talented characters, who will resonate with gifted people of varying ages, than to make a study of what makes them tick?) The writer chooses the questions, chooses the area of interest, and begins to write up the model—their world, their characters, and what happens to them.
Statistics is very little different: the researcher develops the hypothesis, sets up the model, and runs the data to see what happens. Both are methods of modeling the real world, and, as models, both a statistical model and a story inherently fail to capture the full complexity of human life—and both would fail if they tried to. The writer or researcher has to have taste and judgement in selecting the variables of interest and how to get at them—for a statistician that involves defining and operationalizing a construct, for a writer it involves choices about viewpoint characters and the type of perspective to use.
But ultimately, both disciplines, at their best, give us a little bit of a window onto ourselves—to paraphrase E.M. Forester, they take us a little further down the path we're already on. And that is why I love them both—and can't imagine not doing either.
If you're a fan of young adult fantasy, or know someone who is, chances are you've heard of Eragon and its author, Christopher Paolini, who is definitely "one of ours"—that is, a highly gifted young person driven to pursue what is perhaps the ultimate Type III: publishing a nationally bestselling book.
The story of Eragon is itself a delight, but what really fascinates you Humble Editor is Paolini's own tale—a real-life fantasy of sorts for any aspiring your author. As in all quest tales, though, there was a lot of hard labor that came before the triumph: Paolini and his parents put all their resources behind the books. His parents not only self-published it, but quit their jobs in order to enable him to tour the country selling the book directly. Although he himself was home-schooled, he's been in more schools than any of us, as he and his parents went from place to place, pitching the book to eager young readers, until Knopf publishing took him under their wing.
As a relatively young author myself (my first book, Lera of Tymoria: The Dragonmage wasn't published until I was *gasp* 21!) I can relate to Paolini's story: the summer I spent after my sophomore year in college with my laptop virtually chained to wrist, writing every spare moment; the twenty or so drafts and revisions I went through before even submitting it to publishers, and most of all the unending support I've enjoyed from my family: my mother was and still is my first editor for all my published fiction, helping me to translate between my own imagination and the rest of the world, and she and my father are my most enthusiastic publicists. I haven't kept quite as grueling a tour schedule (there's a little thing called grad school that demands just a bit of my attention!) but I love the opportunity to present on my work both to students and to teachers, especially as my own novel was written with special attention to addressing issues in the lives of gifted students.
That, however, is the part of Paolini's story I think it's most important for aspiring young writers to heed: that writing the novel—even editing the novel with the help of insightful readers in your own circle—is only the beginning. Paolini didn't just write the book; he and his family sold it, entirely on their own. And one fact in the publishing industry is that even if you do get a publisher, you may find yourself working just as hard to promote your book: the joke is that an author doesn't start getting public-relations support from a publisher until he or she no longer needs it—until the author's fan-base is already big enough that the book sells itself. Say you do get your first novel published: if you want it to get out there, you'll have to do it yourself. That means scheduling book signings, visiting libraries—going anywhere you think someone might be interested.
The writing process is an intensely private and personal one: my own rule of thumb is that a first draft shouldn't be seen by anyone until you've got your story laid out from beginning to end. You have to protect your ideas, your characters—at that stage, they're yours and no one else's. But the secret of being a successful author, as opposed to a writer, is the ability to bring your characters out into the world once they're ready—a process that may be the most public thing you've ever done in your life. But if you believe in your story—and in all the other stories you have just waiting to be written—and if, like Christopher Paolini and me, you're lucky enough to have the support of people who believe not just in you but in your work—you've got a chance to make your dream a reality.
Speaking of dreams becoming real: Paolini's Eragon and his friends are getting the Hollywood treatment. The fictional boy and his dragon will be coming to a theater near you in 2006.
The website for the series is here:
www.alagaesia.com
(Alagaesia is the fictional land where Eragon lives, if you're curious!)
Interested in the movie? Click here:
www.imdb.com/title/tt0449010
