Conversations on Twice Exceptional Homeschooling
This week was not a good week.
So far we have managed, between my two children, to tick the boxes on a fair swathe of far too many major chronic diseases. It’s like we’re holding a bingo contest in a doctor’s surgery as they cry out various diagnoses terms, and I’m sitting there with a blank look and a pencil marking them off against some sort of ineffable list. I call it playing label bingo.
Continue reading “Playing Label Bingo”
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”
Sometimes life catches up with us in weird ways. We’ve been having a very busy November at the moment, and trying to make sure ‘everything’ happens when it needs to happen has been hard. And I’m not talking about fripperies, I’m talking about having enough time to do basic stuff like washing clothes and dishes. The stacks in our bathroom and kitchen are getting very high indeed at the moment.
Continue reading “Crazy-vember”
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”
For this blog-hop on gifted adults, I decided I would like to write about some of the great portrayals of gifted adults in SF literature.
Here are my set of micro-reviews of some of my favourite SF books on gifted adults. They range in reading demographic from YA to adult-only and these are the books that I keep going back to, again and again. In many ways, they reflect the struggles of the gifted adult – the problems with loneliness, ‘fitting in’ and dealing with thinking differently.
Continue reading “Gifted Adults in SF Literature”