Are Children Too Smart for Their Own Good…

Or Just Too Smart for Adults?

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

In using the word children, instead of kids – I was raised with the saying “baby goats are kids” or something like that – I’ve already put the age thing out there, so let me just say it: I’m 65, whatever. And I’m trying to homeschool my six-year-old son. Yes: 6, not a typo, whatever. And it isn’t going well. The method, as schools demand it, and as I originally envisioned it, has basically been blown to hell, but the results from the as yet undefined Plan B sort of seem to be happening. Which is a blow to the system I know and have long resented yet still believed in.
    Being of a certain age, I remember when it was “readin’ & writin’ & rithmetic’” and you just shut up, sat down, grabbed a pencil and paper and learned it. Or else. No negotiations. No arguing. Just do the work. Or else.
    And I remember sort of despising that style of being force taught, and rebelling as I could – as long as it didn’t blemish my straight-A report card – and eagerly awaiting the day I would be free from it all. Having been through helping raise two step kids who were ages two and four when my wife and I met, I am painfully aware today’s “kids” expect to be treated differently. I wasn’t a fan of the old school technique I endured, and I can’t say I’m a fan of the new-age approach, but when you are a step-parent you have the most hopeless job ever created: you just do what you need to do to survive.
    When my wife and I started talking about having our own child--yes, at an age when I should have been researching retirement homes – the idea of reliving the education wars was the main thing that put me off. If I was going to father a child at a ridiculous age, I stated, very firmly, I wasn’t going to raise one that would be coddled and enabled as I had seen with the step kids: the world has enough entitled brats, I wasn’t adding another. If we were going to raise a child, we were going to raise it to be a “super kid” or I wanted no part of it. Since my wife had another 30 years or so to reach retirement age, we decided I would retire a couple of years early, raise our child full-time, and I would be in charge of creating our super kid. (Insert disturbing anxiety building music here, maybe like that droning Jaws theme.)

Our son started fast, like he was hardwired for that superkid destiny. He took his first step a week before his seventh-month birthday and did his first “jog” with us on our quiet country road when he was only 11 months old. On a trip to California when he was two-years and eight-months old, “Superkid” initiated a jog up Huntington Beach that turned into a brisk three-mile run/walk.

A couple of months later he uncorked an even faster three-mile run/walk on the beach in Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina. That certainly seemed super: how many children do that before they are even three years old? And he wasn’t just a runner, he could identify 33 different car manufacturer emblems by age three, and he was attempting to ride a skateboard.
    I was on a roll, super dad raising super kid, with our son amazing people with what he could do at his age – and then we started the “education” process. Suddenly I was reduced to something like the desperate football coach trying to rally his team by drawing up trick plays on the sidelines, only to see every effort result in yet another touchdown for the OTHER team.
    Superkid son wanted NO part of writing, or even learning to read; he didn’t even care that much about anyone reading to him. He didn’t want to learn to pedal a tricycle or ride a kick scooter: “they’re too slow; I’ll just run.” His only interests were running – and cars and trucks. Forget everything else, just forget it. I should add here that his birthdate is the same as vaunted performance car guru Carroll Shelby, and the same as my older brother--who was building his own hot rod engines before he was old enough to drive--so maybe that car/truck fixation is set in the stars. When I FINALLY cajoled/threatened/forced my son through a workbook supposedly designed for his age, he wouldn’t draw the required stick figures, but he gave in and drew a picture of himself--with a spiky-hair crewcut straight out of the 1950s hot rod scene. He labeled it: “I Am A Car.”
    With that he had no more interest in workbooks, or writing. He announced “I’m done with school. That stuff is SO boring. “ He continued to develop a somewhat unbelievable vocabulary, would watch countless “educational” videos and anything about cars or trucks, but no boring writing or reading, thank you very much. Since I was now apparently raising “The Fonz” from Happy Days or a character straight out of Grease I started becoming desperate and distraught: What to do?

One day, somewhere between his fourth and fifth birthdays, my son was helping hold the safe end of an eight-foot 2x4 while I was cutting a short piece off the other end with a circular saw. When I finished, he said “that’s a perpendicular cut.” Suspecting it was a random word that just happened to fall at the right time, I said “perpendicular? Do you really know what that means?” And he said, “sure. It’s 90-degrees, straight across.” Still doubting, I said “what if I cut it like this?” as I drew a slanted line across the board. He studied it a moment: “That’s about a 45-degree angle.” Pushing it to the limit, I laid two boards side by side: “Do you know what they call it when they are lined up that way?” He looked at them from one angle, walked around for a different perspective, and said: “Parallel.”
    And that is where we get into the question: Are children too smart for their own good, or are they just too smart for us adults?
    “If you know all this, why won’t you write it down?” I asked.
    “Because it’s so boring. If I know it, I know it. Why do I have to write it down?”
    “So other people will know you know it.”
    “If they ask me I will tell them.”
    “But they won’t ask you. If I homeschool you, there will still be tests you have to take. It doesn’t make any difference what you know. If you won’t put it on paper they won’t know you are smart.”
    “I don’t care. I’m smart enough, right?”

Homeschooling about nature in our
National Wildlife Federation-Certified
Backyard Wildlife Habitat

And so it went. And so it continues to go. Since he is wild about vehicles I use every aspect of them to teach what I can. For example: If there are 61 cubic inches in a liter, how many in two liters? Three? He absolutely will not be bothered to write it down, but in less than a month he had it memorized up to eight liters: 488 cubic inches.
    Since I am a fan of the “Scandinavian” system of teaching students to be as fluent in math as in language, able to do math without a calculator or computer, I threw a curve. Or maybe it was just an off-speed slider. Whatever: it didn’t succeed.
    “What if it isn’t an even number of liters?” I asked my son. “Our Benz has a 4.3 liter V-8. If you won’t learn how to do math on paper, how will you figure out how many cubic inches? You can’t memorize everything.”
    “I will use a calculator.”
    “What if you don’t have a calculator?”
    “Everyone has a calculator. You have one of your cell phone. I have one on my play cell phone.”
    “In some countries that don’t let you use calculators.”
    “That sounds sort of dumb. Why would they do that?”
    I didn’t have the greatest answer for that one, so I let it ride. A few days later, fate gave me a chance to set it straight. We were estimating how many fence posts we would need to create a border on a corner of our property, and I didn’t have my cell phone with me, so I seized the moment to teach some “real” math.
    “How far do you think it is from here to where the last post will go?” I asked.
    My son looked, paced back and forth, and said “about 60 feet.”
    “That seems about right,” I said, more than a little surprised.
    “I don’t have my phone with me. How would we figure out how many yards that would be?”
    He gave me a hard look. “Dad. It’s about 20 yards. Duh.”
    Stunned, I said, “Why do you think that?”
    He looked at me again, really hard this time. “60 divided by three is like 6 divided by 3. You drop the zero to make it simple, then add it back in, and 2 becomes 20. You taught me that, you know.”
    “When did I teach you that?”
    “When we were fighting about me not doing my workbook because it was so boring.”

Moving on…my son’s love of cars and his frequent desire to do Google searches to learn more about them has helped push the importance of learning to spell. The other day he sat down beside me while I was reading the news online.
    “Will you look up Bugatti Veyron for me? I don’t know how to spell it.”
    “I’ve told you how to spell that. If you weren’t so stubborn about writing it down, you would know how to spell it by now. You could at least look at your notes.”
    “Just look it up, one more time. Please.”
    “Nope. You are own your own big guy. Here’s a spare tablet, have at it.”
    This is just too good, I thought, this will get the point across about the importance of writing.
    Several minutes later, he asked, “Does Bugatti have one “t” or two?”
    Feeling a bit less confident he was learning the lesson I intended, I said “what do you think?”
    “I think it must be two.”
    “Okay then, go for it.”
    A very few minutes later: “Does Veyron have an “e” or an “a” after the V?”
    “Try both of them,” I said, feeling much less confident about this educational experience, but still hoping it might somehow teach him to write well enough to at least make notes.
    Several minutes later: “Did you know the Bugatti Veyron uses as much air in a minute as you breathe in four days?”
    No, I did not know that, I had to admit.
    So, folks, you tell me: Are children too smart for their own good, or just too smart for us adults? And is the type of teaching most of us grew up with as productive as we imagined, or as outdated and as much of a waste of time as a six-year-old might think?

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Clark