Genius Denied by Jan

Author:Jan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Patrons

The Lincoln Public Schools pay mentors to tutor highly gifted students. The International Telementoring Program charges a small fee. Very resourceful parents can find inexpensive ways to meet their children’s needs. But, in general, individual instruction in gifted children’s areas of talent can be staggeringly expensive. Music lessons cost hundreds of dollars a semester; high-quality instruments retail for thousands. Mathematicians need tutors and college classes. Writers need summer retreats and correspondence courses. Scientists need access to labs. When appropriate public schools aren’t available, parents may have to fork over $5,000, $10,000, or more for private schooling or give up a parent’s income so a child can be homeschooled. Parenting is expensive enough as it is. Parenting a child with special needs is even more expensive. Some families can afford to nurture their children’s talents, but others simply can’t.

That’s when patrons become necessary. Like the musical mentoring system, patronage has long and romantic roots. The Medicis in Florence encouraged, supported, and rewarded Renaissance geniuses for works that remain among the best in Western art. They also sponsored scientists and inventors such as Galileo. Pope Julius II himself sponsored Michelangelo. But patrons aren’t needed only at the advanced levels of a craft. Highly gifted children need them, too, to ensure that there will be Galileos and Michelangelos in years to come.

A few years before we met the Giordano family, an anonymous patron helped save them from an educational disaster. The family’s oldest son, Marc, had a voracious appetite to learn about everything around him. An aunt gave the family a map of the United States, and not knowing what to do with it, Marc’s parents hung it by his bassinet. He would stare at the poster. The family ran a delicatessen and pizza shop in a Long Island commuter town. When Marc was a year old, they would put him in a crib in the window of the shop so they could keep an eye on him while they worked. He would sit there in the window and, to occupy himself, nibble bits of cheese into the shapes of the states. Before he was two he could recite the names of the states and their capitals. He liked to stare at a globe and soon learned to locate countries by name.

People started coming to see this strange little boy in the window, and for a while he was a media star. A psychologist saw him on TV and insisted he be tested. Marc’s parents agreed. He hit the ceiling of the assessment, so the psychologist could only tell them that his IQ was over 160—and that was a conservative estimate.

Soon the Giordano family started looking into where Marc would go to school. They went to the local elementary school to find out what could be done for this precocious little boy, but the meeting was a disaster from the start. The psychologist didn’t trust his IQ scores, and others insinuated that his mom, Judy, was a stage mother who only thought she had a profoundly gifted child.

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