This Dog is Gifted
December 18, 2008 by Julia King · Leave a Comment
This Dog is Gifted
When my daughter entered middle school some years ago, she came home one afternoon and told her father and me about the little laminated placard she would wear around her neck throughout her school day. We thought she was confused.
“If you get good grades, you get a bronze card,” she said, “but if you get Cs or worse, you get a white card. And the kids with good grades get to sit in a different part of the cafeteria.”
“Oh, honey,” I assured her, “they wouldn’t do THAT. It would be so… I don’t know, weird.”
Well, they DID wear color-coded placards and it WAS weird. When I complained about it to one of the school counselors, she told a story about a guy without arms or legs who made an incredible life for himself as an inspirational speaker. A bronze-card kinda guy if ever there was one.
My daughter agreed emphatically that the system was wrong, that it demeaned the average (and below-average) achieving kids in some fundamental way, but she clung to her bronze card and her comfy space in the school cafeteria. Those “other” kids were a little wild, she confided. While she sympathized with their plight, she was not exactly ready to sit with them and their exploding ketchup packets. After a while I gave up trying to convince her to take up her uncle’s advice and stage a mass protest, tossing the cards — Vietnam Vet style — over the lunch counter. And after a couple of visits to the cafeteria myself, I secretly loved the seating arrangements. My polite, obedient, skinny little daughter most definitely belonged on the “safe” side of the room partition.
It was classic Kubler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally… acceptance. It’s no big deal. It’s how grown-ups live anyway. Trailer parks for some, and multimillion dollar houses behind gates for others. Teach them when they’re young, right?
Recently, a researcher in Vienna, Austria discovered (or maybe we’ll just say “documented”) jealousy in dogs. Dogs were taught to reach out their paws and when they did, they were given a treat. Then they changed the rules, gave some dogs delicious treats (like sausage) and others slightly boring treats (like bread), until finally they took the treats away entirely from some of the dogs — and gave the other dogs sausages right in front of the snouts of the unrewarded dogs. Eventually, the unrewarded dogs stopped trying. They rolled paper into spit balls and threw them at the researchers. They started skipping class and smoking pot. Okay, they totally would have if they could have.
Probably there is a dog somewhere (without legs or legs) that would not have given up. That dog would be an inspirational barker for other dogs.
Most kids are at least as observant and sensitive as dogs. Finally, after many years of teaching and observing them (kids, that is), the Montgomery County Maryland school system has figured this out. They have decided to stop giving some kids sausages and some kids nothing, meaning they will retire that loveliest of all lovely school terms — “gifted.” They will still offer a range of school work, some less and some more challenging; they just won’t publicly label the children. Not surprisingly, some of the parents whose children were so-labeled are disappointed. These people will no longer be able to toss the term around at dinner parties, which is the best thing about labels.
*Update (Jan. 2009): After the initial article (about Montgomery County Schools dropping the “gifted” label) appeared in The Washington Post, a school official wrote to the paper and said the claim was untrue. Sausages, Anyone?
