Conversations on Twice Exceptional Homeschooling
Every now and again, more often than I am comfortable with, various memes pop up in my news feed. They’re usually positive, with a cute picture – a happy child, a beautiful baby, a rainbow over a lovely green field. Rinse and repeat.
And you know what? I love the pictures. They’re cute, they make me go ‘awww’. But it’s not the picture that’s the problem. It’s the words.
Continue reading “Gifted . . .You Know What That Means, Right?”
“I can’t homeschool”
“It’s too difficult”
“I have to work”
“I don’t have the patience, smarts, fill-in-the-blank“
So, you’ve thought about homeschooling . . . back and forth, pulling hair out until there are little bald patches appearing that can’t be easily covered with a comb-over. You’ve read too many books and articles, and you still can’t decide.
Have you thought about applying a bit of Bayesian thinking to the problem? What? Huh? It’s OK, I’ll walk you though it.
Continue reading “Using Bayesien Logic to Decide if You Should Homeschool”
When you’re staring at the far side of the bell curve of statistical probability, ‘normal’ in many ways ceases to have much meaning.
Let me run through a few basic numbers with you and I’ll explain how improbable our life is, from a statistical perspective.
Continue reading “Community”
There is a wonderful, probably reasonably obscure book by Rafael Sabatini called “Bellarion the Fortunate” where the intellectually gifted Bellarion is sent out into the world by his abbot because his reading and reason have lead him to believe – with the certainty of an intellectual who has read all the literature and thought hard about it in his convent – that evil and sin are a construct and do not exist.
“But to all the weapons of his saintly rhetoric Bellarion continued to oppose the impenetrable shield of that syllogism of his which the abbot knew at heart to be fallacious, yet whose fallacy he laboured in vain to expose. ” [1]
The book is not a treatise on the reality of good or evil, but an adventure book which ends with a very worldly Bellarion who is very much more aware of his fellow humans after leaving his ivory tower of thought.
But I am not writing today to talk about Bellarion and the nature of his discussions on good and evil. I am instead going to write about the work, so far, of Dr Clementine Beauvais, and her blog entries on ‘The Giftedness Project’ [2].
Much like Bellarion’s abbot, I do not expect to be able to make much of an impression on Dr Beauvais as she has her armour of academic credentials, and the raft of knowledge collected from many thousands of academics discussing ideas among themselves with little reference to the outside world, and that armour is very strong. She has also made clear that she is not interested in the reality of giftedness, which she believes to be largely a construct of society.
Continue reading “Darn Those Mythological Gifted Kids Who Are a Construct of Our Social Norms”
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| Yellow Readis: Welcome to New York* |
This is a bit of an odd post, and it starts with a wonderful piece of writing by
Emily Pearl Kingsley called “Welcome to Holland”. (And there are also a number of other awesome parodies as well … )
It’s magical, it’s moving, and for many parents with neuro-atypical kids it helps. It did with me.
And yet, for profoundly gifted and 2e kids, it’s not – quite – right. So I have penned a (hopefully) humorous variation. My apologies to Emily in advance.
Continue reading “Welcome to New York”