Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Not-really-brag-so-much-as-quirky- anecdote thread

Thanks SAHM. It's serendipitous their having such closely aligned interests. I bet they'd get along...swimmingly! (Silly pun, I know.)

I'm totally exceeding my reasonable quota of DS anecdotes, but I have to share two cute jokes he made up tonight after I posted the earlier stories.

Context for joke 1: we play tea parties in the bath. I was in the bath, and DS ran in with a tea cup to offer refreshment.

Joke # 1:

DS-- What do you call a tea cup in the bath? A sea cup! *Uproarious giggling*

Joke # 2:

Me -- DS, you're a cutie patooie!
DS-- No, I'm a cutie pie newt-y!

DD is transposing on the fly from uptempo Broadway showtunes as she "practices" the piano. Today we're going from major keys to minor and adding a little jazz on the side. Because "everything is better with swing. EVERYTHING."


I beg to differ when it comes to Bartok. Sorry kid, but that just sounds like... well, the audio equivalent of taking a Renaissance painting and running it through the "cubist" and "surrealist" filter.

Pretty sure that this is doing nothing to improve the neither the Chabrier nor the Scott Joplin work that she is (theoretically) working on. Oh well. It's improving theoretical knowledge and technique either way, right? (Somehow this actually seems to work for her, as bizarre as it sounds-- it doesn't matter WHAT she plays, as long as she practices mindfully at SOMETHING for 20-40 minutes a day, seemingly.)


Hey-- it beats tangling with her over practice time, anyway.

Acoustic dubstep, eh HK?

DD10 is obsessed with paradoxes these days. At dinner:

"This is a gruesome paradox, but if you went back in time and killed your parents, would you still exist?"

DS6 followed up with: "If you throw up while you're invisible, can people see the throw-up?"

I explained Schrodinger's Cat to her to the best of my ability. Her response: "No, you'd know if it was dead because you'd hear it meowing inside the box. Or not."

Ha!

Ultramarina, OMG - I am seriously laughing out loud! Those two are hysterical! And, yes, so very clever!

Clearly this is a young woman who is familiar with the habits of cats.

DD9 is delighted with her new vocabulary words, emphasizing latin prefixes/suffixes/roots, and has been quizzing us throughout the exercise.

"Dad, are you antediluvian, or antiantediluvian?"

Then I caught her singing the theme from Star Wars in the style of Bill Murray.

DD14, reading a problem on an AP stats quiz, which provided the normal distribution for 13yo SAT scores for Duke's talent-search.


Wow-- so, um-- is 400 like an 'average' SAT section score?? I thought that was, like, REALLY bad...


She seriously had no idea that most 13yo's wouldn't even score that well, and that this is like a "MG" population to begin with. NO. clue that her scores at 13yo were at or beyond TIP's top reported scores.

So what does it mean that my scores were over 700, then? Is this normally distributed data? {calculator punching}

{gasp}

NO. WAY!!!




I think that someone just figured out that she's, like, REALLY different from her MG friends who got those scores at 17yo.

In related news, I think that she just figured out that she's several standard deviations from the mean.

It's not like we've hidden this from her, or that she wasn't aware that she was brighter than the average (bright) bear, or anything-- just that the combination of running into this problem, THIS particular data, in THIS particular context made her come face to face with a stat that suggests that she's probably at the 1:10000 mark. This epiphany only happened because 13yo wasn't that far in her own past, and because she's in AP statistics-- in other words, as a result of being HG+ and grade-accelerated.

I think it shocked her. She seems to be more than a little bit surprised by how far out it places her-- and yes, I'm well aware that since she was grade-accelerated, it's less meaningful since at 13yo, she was a high school junior already, and not a 7th grader...

it's just wacky to me that she sees herself as "pretty bright, I guess" but doesn't necessarily assume that she's brighter than others, or really all that extraordinary as a result.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, honestly. I guess I'm glad that her ego is not tied up in being "smartest person" in the room, but at the same time, it feels as though she has an unrealistically low impression of her own cognitive ability.