The Editor's Corner [2006 Archive]
As both a fiction writer and a gifted-education specialist, I often find myself being asked by parents and teachers to recommend good books for gifted readers—especially those who love science-fiction and fantasy (a genre that's often an "undiscovered country" for many parents and teachers). While it's nearly impossible to find a single book, series or author that appeals to all readers (there are even some kids who don't like Harry Potter, or so I hear!), this week in the Corner I'll take a moment to "introduce" you to some of my favorite gifted fictional characters—imaginary young people to whom our real-life gifted students may be able to relate, or whose "company" they might at least enjoy.
Ender Wiggin (Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game): When you mention "gifted children in science fiction" odds are that someone's going to mention Ender—and with good reason: Card does a masterful job of depicting the emotional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal difficulties faced by a highly gifted young man. Tapped for military training at an early age because his embattled planet recognizes his talents, Ender's journey through a military "school for the gifted", and his progress from isolated prodigy to respected commander will engage the attention, and the identification, of many a young gifted person.
Ari Emory, Jr. (C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen): When you mention "gifted children in science fiction" to me, this is the name that comes to mind—Ari, the "version 2.0" of a profoundly gifted scientist, not merely a clone but a "replicate" whose early environment was carefully scripted to enable her to develop the formidable gifts of her predecessor while carefully "debugging" her personality (by some standards, at least—Ari, Jr., is emphatically human, and her "growing pains" as a gifted young woman trying to develop her powers within a network of social relationships with others, many of whom possess their own special talents, are central to the story). The book does deal with some ethically and emotionally "fraught" sexual situations—but Ari Emory Sr.'s recorded advice for her replicate on "coming of age" should be required reading for gifted young people trying to come to terms with their own sexuality in the contexts of developing both relationships with other and their own native gifts. The book also provides a fascinating possible future of psychometry and the understanding of talent, including the creation of a legal "Special Person" status which essentially treats the most profoundly gifted innovators in given fields as national treasures. Not recommended for younger readers, but adolescents and gifted adults will find a great deal to engage their attention.
Leisha Camden and Miri Sharifi (Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain, Beggars and Choosers, Beggars Ride): Nancy Kress is in a sense our colleague: she taught gifted students for a decade before becoming a full-time writer—and it shows in her depiction of the development of the "Sleepless", who have been genetically engineered not to sleep and who in consequence develop formidable intellects as a "side effect". Kress' talent shows clearly in the subtle differences between Sleepless psychology and that of "normal" gifted individuals. However, especially in the first volume, the relationships between Leisha, one of the first Sleepless, her family, and her own abilities will resonate with many gifted students and students of giftedness. As with Cyteen, adult themes are present, but if parents are comfortable with this aspect, the books may appeal to older gifted readers.
River Tam (the —Firefly television series and the Serenity movie): Creator Joss Whedon manages, without belaboring the point, to create a profoundly believable, and affecting, story of a profoundly gifted young woman—with an added twist: River's natural talents have been exploited by government neuroscientists (clearly, Institutional Review Boards are not a part of this future world!) with unpredictable results (essentially, she is a combat-trained telepath). Many fans of the series tend to view River as extremely unstable thanks to the experiments to which she has been subjected, but having watched the movie with the eye of both a science-fiction writer and a gifted-education specialist, I've come to the conclusion that she's not much odder than one would expect of a profoundly gifted, highly traumatized young woman with abilities not always under her own control. Her brother Simon is also highly gifted, though not as much as she, and the show does a good, understated, depiction of their relationship and the differences brought about by their relative levels of ability.
This list is not exhaustive, and admittedly it's biased by my own preferences—but it's a useful place to start if you're looking for stories that might catch the imagination of gifted students, or for that matter help introduce others to the grins and groans of giftedness.
Lately, I've been thinking about the epistolary nature of online communication—the fact that, in a sense, we have the potential to return to an era where "informal" written communication is an art form.
I say return—I'm thinking with especial fondness of the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, who spent much of their married lives separated by physical distance but never far from each other in thought if the correspondence that survives is any indication. Another favorite of mine as a writer of science fiction and fantasy is the correspondence between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and the progression of their friendship and influence on each other's ideas that it reveals. Certainly these relationships were no less significant in the lives of these great individuals for having a significant long-distance, written component.
However, I've noticed that such correspondence doesn't receive the same kind of respect in modern times—at least, not when it's conducted over the Internet instead of through the mail. In the course of my work on News and Views, I've come across a number of critiques of the internet as a medium of social exchange: text messages damage our grammar skills, email and chat and instant messaging lack nuance. I've attempted to rebut some of these in the Corner before, but lately I've come to the conclusion that the writers of these critiques simply aren't running in the same online circles that I am.
Perhaps it's simply that I'm a writer of both fiction and non-fiction: that the written word is my medium of choice for self-expression, and that most of the people with whom I share online friendships are writers of one sort or another themselves. But, put simply, what I see, especially in the online correspondence in which I've participated, is at least as articulate as a lot of "popular" fiction or non-fiction that's for sale. I'm talking about brilliantly written LiveJournal essays, lovingly crafted emails—expressions of ideas that clearly involved more thought and attention to detail than would likely be evident in the kind of face-to-face interaction whose superiority a lot of critics of online communication seem to take for granted.
Yes, there are nuances of tone and expression that can be lost in written communication—any kind of written communication. But there's also a level of order, organization, and attention to detail possible in an email or LiveJournal entry, just as there is in any other form of written communication, that's not possible in face-to-face conversation. In any kind of written communication, it's possible to take one's time, reply at leisure, address multiple levels of a discussion and reflect on your own words in a way that's simply not possible in spoken conversation. You have access to the comments that others have made—I've lost count of the number of times I've saved myself from a social faux pas because I was able to go back and re-read what a correspondent had said to me, and even more often the number of times I've gone through multiple drafts of emails to friends and colleagues to make certain that I've expressed what I wanted to say.
Yes, of course, there's still room for misunderstanding—but only some of it is intrinsic to the medium of communication. People misunderstand one another in face to face conversation, too—because people are people; humanity for the most part lacks anything resembling telepathic abilities; and we're bound to misunderstand each other some of the time. What online communications lose in non-verbal cues, they make up in the opportunity for rumination, which to paraphrase Nietzsche literally means chewing over ideas and "redigesting" them.
Now, that said, I'll freely admit that the critics of online communications have a certain point about the frivolity and general sloppiness of a lot of what's out there on the 'net. I've seen plenty of "LJ" entries and emails that would make Strunk and White have aneurisms. But I've also chanced to overhear plenty of face-to-face conversations of a similarly blood-vessel-bursting level of coherence. Again, it's not the medium, it's how it's being used.
As such, my recommendation for anyone concerned about the impact of internet communication on our students' use of language? Don't discourage use of the internet—do encourage the full use of what the medium has to offer. Encourage your students to craft well-considered and thought-provoking journal entries, if they're on LiveJournal or a similar site; point out to them the opportunities for reflection that an email "conversation" allows; suggest that they take the time to re-read chat-logs from Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and instant messages (IM) that they've shared with others.
Above all, don't forget that the written word has long been a significant tool for personal communication across distances. Consider the examples of John and Abigail Adams, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien—and encourage your students to follow in those footsteps. Who knows? Their own words, shared with others through the marvels of modern technology, might just make an important contribution.
We're all in this together. That's the message coming out of the Corner this week—inspired by far too many stories I've been hearing lately from teachers, parents, and students alike, about the adults in young people's lives who are cutting lifelines along with apron strings.
What am I talking about? Very simple: parents and teachers who, in their laudable desire to teach young people to be self-reliant and take responsibility for their lives, are failing to carry out their own responsibilities to the children in their care. Parents who refuse to help children work through the myriad "administrivial" details involved in moving on after graduation—especially when, for whatever reason, their children don't have an outside support system such as a guidance counselor to help. It's all very well to tell your son or daughter—or student—that applying for college is their own responsibility... but, let's face it, most of us need help with paperwork, whatever our ages. How many big businessmen do you know who don't have a secretary? And how many of us actually do our taxes unassisted?
For that matter, take graduate school. I'm a doctoral candidate, and you'd better believe that I'm responsible for meeting the degree requirements and getting out my job applications! But even though I'm definitely in charge of the process, I've got a lot of people backing me up: not only the professors on my committee who offer valuable direction on my dissertation research, but our wonderful administrative staff who grease the wheels, who take the piles of forms that I fill out and my professors sign and make sure they get to the right people in the right order. I'm not kidding when I say none of us doing our degrees could do without them. They're not responsible for initiating any part of my degree program—that's up to me. But once I've pointed the ball in the right direction and given it the first push, they're the ones who make sure it keeps rolling on course—and that's exactly what teenagers facing Real Life (or at least college) need from their parents and teachers.
Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely in favor of young people taking charge of their futures, and in the process of deciding what to do after high school (or during it), the young person in question should definitely be in charge of the process, and shoulder the primary responsibility. But the key word here is primary. Parents, and to a lesser extent teachers, need to be like the secretary, the accountant—we need to be available to help the young people in our care make their dreams reality, to help them plan—not to criticize a teenager who may have made a 1600 on the SATs but has never confronted the reality of educational bureaucracy head-on and alone before.
Not every parent has experience with educational bureaucracy as such—but if you've ever filled out a job application, you're probably ahead of your child the first time he or she sits down with one! You can have them "learn by doing"—and maybe miss out on opportunities they would have been able to catch with a little help—or you can provide them with the benefit of your experience and enable them to enjoy everything they're capable of doing.
This is especially important for gifted students, who are often faced with a wider array of opportunities—and a correspondingly greater load of paperwork to go with those options! I've heard too many stories about gifted young people who were all but set up for failure by those who should have helped them—but didn't.
Personal responsibility is a vital trait for a young person to develop. But hand-in-hand with personal responsibility comes interdependence: the ability to carry out your own part of the bargain secure in the knowledge that those who support you will do just that. Out in that Real World, most of us don't do everything on our own—we work as a team, and one survival skill that's important to learn is how to share experience: to let others make use of our own talents and be able to trust that they'll reciprocate. And the best way for parents and teachers to teach that skill is by modeling it. I'll say it again: we're all in this together.
Hello and Happy New Year, readers! The holidays are over and the editor is once again back in her corner and ready to ramble!
I'm tempted to start the new year off with some reflections on the holidays, but frankly, I'd rather not remind myself that they've been and gone. So, instead, a topic that is near and dear to my heart: technophobia.
I'm not talking about a personal fear or dislike of new technology—most of us, my gadget-loving self included, have had moments (usually when faced with a Blue Screen of Death or a printer that just won't) when we long for the days of manual typewriters or even pen and paper. No, what I'm talking about is a reflection inspired by one of the pieces in last week's "Along Came a Spider", on the potential evils of Google as a "replacement" for human memory.
As you can see in the article, critics of that theory have refuted this claim on biological grounds. I'm going to take another approach and ask, "And this is a bad thing how?"
I'm not just being flippant, either: search engines and indeed all computerized media have one gigantic advantage over every other information-storage system known to humanity: near-infinite capacity for backup and copying. Blank writable CDs for data-storage are cheap (the lowest price I've seen quoted is around 10 cents!) and hold hundreds of megabytes of data, or you can go my route and "carry your life around your neck" on a portable USB drive. Just insert the CD-R, or plug in the USB drive, and a few minutes later, you have copies of all your work, photos, and whatever else you keep on your computer.
Human brains, on the other hand—not so much. Except for the lucky few true eidetics (those with perfect recall), the rest of us are stuck wondering, "Did it really happen like that?" And as for backup. . . let's just say that I only hope to see the day when I can back up my own memories as easily as I can my computer's! (I'll leave the potential violations of privacy that kind of technology would permit for another column—trust me, it leaves me pretty cold, too!)
The problem goes beyond Google and memory issues, though; some months ago I encountered a diatribe about those darn kids and their darn blogs. The comment that most caught my attention (and elevated my blood pressure) was an essentially unsupported statement to the effect of, "How awful that these children are making themselves stars in such a shallow medium."
When I first read this comment, I was left speechless—how could anyone, except perhaps the most rampant ageist, descry the efforts of young people to be, not merely passive consumers of other people's celebrity, other people's creations, but instead active creators of ideas and opinions, not merely absorbing ideas but exchanging them and contributing to the creation of knowledge while at the same time developing their own thinking skills? How can anyone object to their desire to participate in the world more fully—even if we want to see them use caution about the content of their interactions, just as we would in face-to-face encounters? How . . . I simply couldn't find the words to express my disgust.
Fortunately, I didn't have to find the words: Charles Dickens said it for me, in the first lines of David Copperfield. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." Young people today are choosing to be the heroes, or at least the stars, of their own lives. The current boom of interactive communication technology like weblogs and wikis has finally given us a way to exist in the world, not merely as bystanders to the grand, sweeping actions of a few fortunate souls (be they world leaders or world-class athletes) but instead to make ourselves a full part of the larger world—and to experience others as a part of that world as well. The realities, the experiences and the lives, of people whose cultures would once have been a few dry sentences in a textbook are brought to life, at once commonplace and colorful, through participation in online communities of all sorts—a chance discussion of your day on a LiveJournal community can become a virtual excursion into the laws and customs of each other's countries.
I'm not saying we don't need to exercise caution. I'm not saying that personal information shouldn't be shared with care and consideration, that private comments should be made privately and that the excellent privacy options most weblogs offer shouldn't be used—and expanded on by their designers (I'm waiting with bated breath for the day that LiveJournal allows private comments in journal entries!). But the mere existence of an opportunity for people of all ages to make themselves heard—to recognize themselves as the heroes of their own lives—is something that, especially in a democracy, should be more welcome than worrisome.
After all, no one ever said being a hero was easy.
