He’s gifted because he doesn’t like to get beaten
One of my co-workers is trying to place her grandkid in a martial art, and asking another one of my co-workers (a 4th degree black belt in Karate who looks like Benjamin Franklin) which martial art is the best and this and that. Eavesdropping on them, it’s a bit painful to hear Ben explain that my co-worker’s 6 year old grandkid is just going to waste a contract’s worth of payments messing around in a dojo daycare. Charmingly, the woman doesn’t get it.
“Is Hapkido a good one?”
”Uh yea… it’s good but what you’ve really got to-”
“Oh never mind, it starts at 6:00 instead of 6:30″
This is the most recent of my interactions with people who have grand aspirations for their kids. I had dinner with one of Wai’s friends who is shopping her 5 year old around private school programs, taking tests to determine whether or not the kid is gifted. Guess not.
I mean, I DO understand the mentality, but at what point do the parents give up and just admit their kid is normal? She kept insisting that the kid was an early reader, but I was too nice to retort that apparently reading early isn’t correlated with being gifted. If it were my kid, I’d just beat smarts into them the Asian way and then let the schools sort it out.
February 8th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Well, you should know that every parent thinks their children is the brightest and cutest little creature on the face of the Earth. Except for my parents, of course.
February 8th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Yeah, all parents do this. You will too. Maybe not to that extreme, but everyone thinks their kid is the smartest little angle on the playground.
It comes with the territory I guess.
February 16th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
My dad still thinks I’m a failure. He thinks I should become a patent lawyer.