The Independent Stitch

Finished book: High IQ Kids!

A UPS truck pulled up at the curb in front of the house early this morning and delivered an author's (in this case, editor's) copy of High IQ Kids! This is an "advance" copy, although not an "advance reader's copy" or ARC, because it's the real book, freshly unpacked from the printer's shipment before the official publication date (which is, I think, September 1 although the publisher lists a ship date of August 31, or tomorrow). The books were about four days late from the printer, which seems to be a recurring theme right now. . . . Maybe all the printers are currently overloaded with fall titles. . . .

The volume's 416 pages contain 30 essays and technical papers on raising and educating high-IQ kids.

What's a "high IQ kid"?

Good question. If you want to get precise, which I don't and some of the people involved with this book may disagree with the following statement, it's a kid who tests above 145 on a standard instrument. HOWEVER:

IQ testing is imprecise (several articles in the book go into this in detail). Different sources set up different categories. There's a technical testing definition of IQ scores and giftedness (it's on pages 7 and, with slight variations, 60).

But pigeonholes are only useful in a few contexts, like research. The current arbitrary levels being used by the researchers we included in the book are mildly gifted, moderately gifted, highly gifted, exceptionally gifted, and profoundly gifted. These categories align with standard deviations above the norm.

A rule-of-thumb that I came across years ago that has been helpful to me in a practical sense suggested that kids in the mildly and moderately gifted ranges can do anything they want in life (i.e., they're smart enough to do whatever they choose) and can still cope well with the prevailing environments (e.g., school, home, and regular social interactions). Those at the other above-average levels (highly, exceptionally, and profoundly gifted) are "wired" differently in enough ways that they will not be able to cope comfortably with the prevailing environments. They don't think "better," they think differently, which means they just don't operate on the same wavelength. They don't care about the same topics of conversation and they may come up with questions and ideas that don't make sense to other people.

That's neither better nor worse. People with those levels of intelligence, though, are the ones for whom High IQ Kids offers guidance . . . along with anyone else who fits a similar enough profile that the information might help.

I have a personal theory that everyone comes into life with a package of strengths and weaknesses that's about equivalent to everyone else's. Intelligence, as we measure it in the industrialized Western world of the twenty-first century, is just one component of everyone's package. Because each of us has a unique combination of attributes, the trick is in figuring out how best to use the pluses without being tripped up by the minuses. Or, for parents and other responsible adults, in raising children to enjoy and develop their strengths and to compensate for, instead of being limited by, their weaknesses.

The information in the book will help anyone who is trying to parent, teach, counsel, or befriend a kid who sometimes seems "too smart," whether the child also has learning differences or not (many high-IQ kids do).

It will also help adults who are guiding children who don't seem "too smart"—who appear to be quite average or are putting out so little effort they seem below average—but are having unexplained and serious difficulties in standard classrooms (or in "standard" gifted-and-talented programs, if they've shown some of their potential).

I'm really pleased that Free Spirit Publishing is the press releasing this book. Not only is it independent, it's the publisher of several books that helped me out through all those years. They've got even more great stuff now.

High IQ Kids contains all the best information that I needed in one place while I was working on getting one of these kids raised to adulthood alive and with only average requirements for additional psychotherapy.

Giftedness is generally not an "okay" topic of conversation in our society. Several of the contributors to this book have asked to be identified by pseudonyms. It has not been easy for my daughter and me to go public on this topic, either. However, we agreed long ago that we'd do anything we could do to keep even one other kid or parent from going through what we had to handle. An overview of our school saga, titled "Red Zone," is on pages 246 to 259.

The same impetus that motivates my daughter and me—to help others—brought together the three editors of this book to do the looooooong, complicated work of gathering the pieces, editing them, eliminating some (the book could have been twice as long; trimming was the hardest part), and finding the right publisher.

Between us, we've parented four of these kids, and over the decades we've been in touch with many other parents and children in similar situations. They're everywhere: in all geographic, social, economic, racial, and other environments. And all of them are similarly challenged to just facilitate an appropriately happy (and appropriately unhappy) childhood and an effective education.

The book's full title is High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Personal Stories from the Experts. Some of the essays in it were written by young adults about their experiences when they were younger. They're probably the truest experts.

The sections include:

1. What's in a Number?
2. Take a Number
3. More Than a Number

And
    Resources and more information.

Here's a full list of the contents:

Part 1: What's in a Number?

• 1 Defining the Few: What Educators and Parents Need to Know about Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Children, by Annette Revel Sheely and Linda Kreger Silverman
• 2 Normal Kids Don't Quack, by Cathy Marciniak (we editors wanted to lead with this essay, but the publisher preferred to define terms before launching right into the puzzled parents' world)
• 3 Young Gifted Children as Natural Philosophers, by Deirdre Lovecky
• 4 Calculus, Pooh, and Tigger Too, by Courtney James
• 5 Intellectual Assessment of Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Children, by John D. Wasserman
• 6 Recommendations for Identifying and Serving Black Youth in Gifted Programs, by Tarek C. Grantham and Linda A. Long
• 7 Twice Exceptionality: Life in the Asynchronous Lane, by Lee Singer
• 8 An Anomaly: Parenting a Twice-Exceptional Girl, by Kiesa Kay

Part 2: Take a Number

• 9 "So You're the Teacher of a Profoundly Gifted Child" (And Then There Was Bill), by Laura Freese
• 10 What Makes the Highly Gifted Child Qualitatively Different? Implications for Schooling, by Karen B. Rogers
• 11 Too Smart for School? A Lesson about Teaching and Learning, by Marilyn Walker
• 12 Becoming an Educational Advocate: Dolphin's Story, by Carolyn Kottmeyer
• 13 The Underachievement of Gifted Students: Multiple Frustrations and Few Solutions, by Sally M. Reis
• 14 Surviving in Spite of It All, by Shaun Hately
• 15 Curriculum Issues for the Profoundly Gifted, by Joyce VanTassel Baska
• 16 Of Importance, Meaning, and Success: Application for Highly and Profoundly Gifted Students, by Christine S. (Tee) Neville
• 17 Homeschooling with Profoundly Gifted Children, by Kathryn Finn
• 18 Unfettered Innovation: The Promise of Charter Schools, by Amanda P. Avallone
• 19 An Early Entrance Program: A Well-Rounded College Experience for Young Students, by Trindel Maine (more) and Richard S. Maddox
• 20 A Longitudinal Study of Radical Acceleration with Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Children, by Miraca U. M. Gross

Part 3: More Than a Number

• 21 Red Zone, by Deborah Robson
• 22 The Problem of Pain, by Stephanie S. Tolan
• 23 When the Pop Bottle Overflows, by Judy Fort Brenneman
• 24 Giftedness is Heart and Soul, by Annemarie Roeper
• 25 A Mixed Blessing, by Ilona von Karolyi-Ross
• 26 Out of the Ordinary, by Elizabeth Lovance (also here)
  
• 27 Birds and Bees: Sex and the High-IQ Adolescent, by Annette Revel Sheely
• 28 Abnormally Brilliant, Brilliantly Normal, by Elizabeth Meckstroth
• 29 Rainbow Spirits, by Annamarie Summers

Appendix: Resources and More Information

• 30 Strength in Numbers: An Introduction to the Resources, by Judy Fort Brenneman

Here's the back cover.

The first reaction of all three editors at seeing the cover photos was that we wished our children had been able to experience that kind of joy-in-learning and comfortable confidence.

Our deepest hope is that because of this book more children in the future will look more often like the kids in the pictures.

The Free Spirit Book

I've been promising to talk about the book that's coming out this fall from Free Spirit Publishing. I've heard back from Free Spirit that it's okay to put the cover up here, so it's time. My understanding is that the book's scheduled to be released in September 2007.

The name of the book is High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Stories from the Experts, and it's edited by Kiesa Kay, Deborah Robson (me), and Judy Fort Brenneman. It took a long time to put the book together. The publishing house that decided to take a chance on it, after many others had said they thought it would be a great book but not one they could publish, is the perfect publisher to be issuing it and the people there are wonderful to work with.

So here's the cover:

That boy looks like what all three editors (and many of the contributors) wish our kids had looked like in school. Our kids didn't. We put the book together so maybe other people's similar kids will look like that. We've asked the press if there might be a similar photo of a girl elsewhere on the outside of the book—maybe the spine, since so many books are displayed spine-out. Our own kids, whose experiences motivated the creation of this book, are 50/50 split between boys and girls.

A quick overview of how this book came together

I wish I knew where I'd picked up the concept that I'm about to mention, which has helped me a great deal over the past couple of decades, but I don't. I probably came across it thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I was scrambling to learn what I needed to know about high-IQ kids, because my parenting responsibilities suddenly required this type of information on an emergency basis. The idea stuck because it's served as a compass point ever since.

The concept is that there is an “optimal” IQ, say between 100 and 145, with which people function easily and well in contemporary society. The idea is that people with IQs between 115 and 144 are smart enough to do anything they want but aren't so smart that they have trouble fitting in.

I just had to look up the latter set of numbers in the manuscript of High IQ Kids. I don't know all that much about IQ stuff, although I probably know more than most people because I've had to learn.

Personally, I view IQ like height: some people have more, some less. Some people need to use step stools while others bump their heads on doorways unless they duck. IQ is an arbitrary measurement, just like height is. It has nothing to do with the spirit inside. Height might have something to do with which rides you're allowed on at an amusement park like Elitch Gardens, and IQ might have something to do with which activities you enjoy most, but neither of these even remotely describes the entirety of a person or a life.

The helpful idea that I came across, though, is that children with IQs of 145 and up don't just have an extra dose of the same thinking ability that their peers have. They think differently. They may have trouble understanding, and being understood by, their age-mates—and their teachers and their parents, and the psychologists who are often called in to help everyone get along. Like extremes of height, extremes of IQ make a profound difference in daily living until you learn how to navigate in your particular vessel.

Most discussions of IQ don't differentiate between the experiences of people at different points above a certain IQ level (whatever that is). From X on up (choose a number), all is assumed to be peachy.

Not necessarily.

Many high-IQ kids don't appear to be smarter than average because for many of them the extra IQ points come bundled with learning challenges: for example, an inability to remember math facts, or cerebral palsy severe enough to prevent speech, or Tourette syndrome, or ADHD (I'm skipping a digression here on ADHD and intelligence), or a combination of these and other factors.

About fourteen years ago, I found myself struggling to get my brain around all this stuff while in crisis. One of the resource people I discovered was Marlo Rice, a psychologist who specializes in high-IQ kids and also has helped advocate for individual students' needs in the schools. A few years later, because she knew I'd been engaged for a while in a self-directed crash course in parenting a high-IQ kid, Marlo gave my name and phone number to Kiesa Kay, who was dealing with similar issues for her children, who were younger than mine. In the middle of this, I also met, and began to work on freelance jobs with, Judy Fort Brenneman. On behalf of her son (mid-range in age between Kiesa's kids and my child), Judy was paddling her own canoe upstream on the gifted/learning-different river.

Kiesa, Judy, and I all came out of our experiences with a strong desire to help other parents avoid some of the pain, frustration, and expense that we and our children had encountered.

Kiesa's first project to put this into action was an anthology she edited on “twice-exceptional” kids (gifted and learning-different), called Uniquely Gifted. She asked me to contribute an essay.

Then Kiesa and Annette Sheely began assembling another anthology, this one on high-IQ kids (those above 145 IQ). Judy and I first got involved  as contributors to this work, and later as co-editors with Kiesa while Annette devoted more time to her counseling practice and her own incipient parenting.

We've been passing the responsibilities for this project back and forth for a number of years. Now we finally have a book that's on its way to being published . . . on its way to doing the work we want it to do.

It's the one book we wish we had been able to consult while we were doing our best to raise our kids. It contains personal stories that are funny, heartbreaking, and sometimes both, as well as academic papers that discuss researchers' studies and insights. It's as quirky and wide-ranging as the experience of being one of the adults in a high-IQ kid's life.

“Experts”

First the people at Free Spirit said, “This book willl need a different title,” and we said, “Sure. That's fine. We aren't attached to the one on the manuscript, but it's the best we could come up with over the years.”

They went into a huddle and then said they couldn't come up with anything better, either.

They did suggest a variation on the subtitle, which we had phrased as something like “for adults who care.” They shifted this to “from the experts.”

Because I'm a contributor to the volume, as well as an editor, I gather that I'm being included with the “experts.”

I think of an expert as someone who knows a great deal of what there is to know about a topic . . . therefore, not me. I'm always aware of how much I don't know about any given subject.

So I've looked up the word expert. I seem to have greater expectations of someone to whom the word is applied than the dictionary does.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives this definition for the noun form: “A person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject.” Here's what it says about the adjective form: “Having, involving, or demonstrating great skill, dexterity, or knowledge as the result of experience or training.”

The meaning of great is open for debate, but on the subject of raising a high-IQ kid (and a couple of other topics), I do have some experience that seems to be helpful to others. I guess the word applies, although I still don't accept it comfortably.

However I'll accept easily that all of the contributors to this book are sharing their hard-earned knowledge, acquired as a result of experience, training, or both. I'm one of those contributors. And I'll accept that it's the right subtitle for this book.

Are we there yet?

High IQ Kids is a big book—about 550 manuscript pages, which will be fewer pages when it's typeset but there's no changing the fact that it's approximately 124,000 words, including the short extra list of books Judy and I put together on Wednesday night for the reference section, at the in-house editor's request.

I'll be so glad to see this as a real, useful book that's out in the world, available to help parents, teachers, counselors, and others involved with high-IQ kids' lives, so the kids themselves can figure out how to get through doorways without bruising themselves or others.

Although we've been through the acquisition-level editing, we've still got in-house copy editing, proofreading, and indexing to manage over the next couple of months before this book goes to the printer.

But at the moment, it's off our desks and on someone else's! YAY!

Free Spirit Publishing

Free Spirit Publishing, founded by Judy Galbraith, is a strong, well-focused, independent publishing house. Several of its early titles helped the editors of the new book stay sane (or as sane as we did stay). Among those books are The Gifted Kids Survival Guide (both versions: the one for under-10s and the one for teenagers) and The Survival Guide for Parents of Gifted Kids.

It's nice to think that with our own book we are now able to contribute to the ongoing dialogue and to support the next generation of parents and kids.