Friends, welcome to the 2nd edition of the "Tracking Your Wyrd" course.
Thanks for coming back. You're my kinda wyrd.
I hope you had fun last week thinking about your childhood fascinations, obsessions, passions, and loves. If you still have siblings or parents who are alive, you may want to ask them about your childhood play. Sometimes they’ll remember things you don’t. One of my favorite stories about this is a former student of mine who worked in a hospice home. One of his most beloved tasks there was to take the bodies after death and prepare them to be removed from the home. He loved to bathe them, to dress them, to play music for them, to cite poetry to them—he found the whole thing an honor and it moved him deeply, and since no one else who worked there wanted to do that work, it fell gladly on him.
That’s wyrd, right?
I mean, wyrd in a beautiful way.
(I always mean wyrd in a beautiful way.)
So I asked him, what were the seeds of this in your childhood? I was sure there was no way this was unprecedented in his life. He had no idea whatsoever. So I said, can you call your parents and ask? He did, and he was so excited to tell me what his mom said.
She told him that when he was a boy, she noticed that her dishtowels always disappeared. One time she caught him sneaking one out of the kitchen, so she naturally asked him what it was for. He told her that on his way home from school (a walk through some woods), he was always looking out for dead animals. When he would find one, he would wrap it so carefully in a dishtowel and give it a proper burial with words and everything. She was so moved by this that she bought him his own collection of dishtowels. (Even just writing this, I’m tearing up. Such a wonderful mother, supporting his wyrd.) He had zero memory of this until she reminded him. So if there’s someone you can ask, ask! |
I want to stay with childhood in this week’s edition, and start by stating what to me is a fact upon which I have based my entire experience as an educator.
Every child is gifted and talented.
Full stop.
Every child is gifted and talented.
Not just the ones that test into the Gifted and Talented programs that almost every state in the United States offers. It is estimated that there are 3.2 million children enrolled in such programs in the US, out of the roughly 48 million school-aged children in the country. That means that only 6ish% of children in this country are deemed gifted and talented. That number disturbs me less than this number--94% of children in this country are deemed not gifted nor talented. |
We have declared that 94% of our children are not gifted and are not talented.
This message is not subtle.
I am not gifted and talented.
Full stop.
Message received.
This message is not subtle.
- When your best friend gets pulled out of class to go to her gifted and talented program and you don’t, the message is not subtle.
- When your brother gets to go to an enrichment class after school because he’s gifted and talented and you just have to go home because you are not, the message is not subtle.
- When you take the standardized test at six years old and receive the results—you failed, thus you are not gifted and talented—the message is not subtle.
I am not gifted and talented.
Full stop.
Message received.
The myth of Er belies this message. The myth of Er says every child is gifted and talented. Every child matters to the three sisters of Fate, who attached a genius to each soul, a genius who led the soul under the throne of Necessity, the mother of the Fates. It is by necessity that we each have a genius, a genius that makes us wyrd in the best of ways. (I always mean wyrd in the best of ways.) |
And so it should be a necessity that every child’s genius be supported in school, where they spend a half to two-thirds of their waking lives. The task of every teacher should be to track every child’s genius, to look for every child’s wyrd, and find ways to support it. If not support it, then at least try not to kill it. And labeling a child not gifted and not talented is a killer thing for a teacher to do.
I’m not blaming teachers in general here. I was a high school classroom teacher for 16 years. But I never, not once, in any of my teacher prep classes, was taught that every child is gifted and talented and it was part of my job to support them. When I briefly taught teacher education courses at the college level, there was no course or discourse really on how to look at a child’s wyrd as a gift, at a child’s differing abilities as an expression of their genius. We don’t even know how to untangle the word “genius” from intellectual acumen and IQ any longer. We have lost the old Latin definition of genius, “the guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth; spirit, incarnation; wit, talent.”
How impoverished the word “genius” has become.
How denigrated the word “weird” has become.
How narrowly we define “gifted.”
How stingy we are with the word “talented.”
How denigrated the word “weird” has become.
How narrowly we define “gifted.”
How stingy we are with the word “talented.”
No, I am not blaming teachers in general, but rather an educational system—and let’s face it, a cultural system—which has a huge failure of imagination when it comes to empowering our children. I don’t need anyone to believe literally in the myth of Er, but I love how it sparks the imagination, how it gives us an empowered way of seeing ourselves and seeing our lives.
It’s impossible to see the daimon in every child if we don’t have a notion of it.
It’s impossible to see the genius in every child if we don’t believe it’s there.
It’s impossible to cherish the wyrd in every child if we worship at the altar of standardization as an indication of success.
It’s impossible to see the genius in every child if we don’t believe it’s there.
It’s impossible to cherish the wyrd in every child if we worship at the altar of standardization as an indication of success.
(Only the monkey is gifted and talented)
I am seldom evangelical about anything but I can easily get behind the pulpit with this message—I think every teacher now and every teacher to come should be enrolled in a gifted and talented class where they are taught to suss out the gifts and talents in every child, and to find ways to support those gifts and talents that may be outside of the traditional curriculum. When teachers first receive their class roster, they should know they have been entrusted with 32 little wyrds. On report cards and during teacher/parent meetings, it should be requisite that the teacher offers clues about the child’s genius, what they’re noticing about the child’s wyrd. The question teachers should pose to their wyrds is not “Are you gifted and talented?” but “In what ways are you gifted and talented.”
Kahlil Gibran has a great line in his book The Prophet: “And I hunted only your larger selves that walk the sky.” That’s what I want teachers to do. I want them to hunt the larger selves of the children that walk the sky. I want them on the scent for every child’s glorious giftedness. I want them to track every child’s wondrous wyrd. |
Imagine what that might look like. What if every child had a 45-60 minute class each day called “Gifted and Talented”? What if they were encouraged during this class to explore different avenues for expressing their gifts and talents? Maybe a child like Pablo Picasso could go off and paint. Maybe a child like Martin Luther King, Jr. could take a speech class. Maybe a child like Nancy Pelosi could take a leadership class. Maybe a child like J. K. Rowling could read epic novels or take a creative writing class. Maybe a child gifted with patience could offer tutoring to another child. Maybe a child gifted with the ability to listen could offer peer counseling. Maybe a child gifted with the ability to build something with their hands could spend time in a hands-on creative space or help build special projects for the community.
Imagine a bell rings and every single child leaves the classroom for a chunk of time out of the day to go and explore where they are gifted and talented. Imagine the joyous sounds of children scattering, scampering off to the playground of their wyrd. Imagine this, and then you’ll know why I believe we have a failure of imagination when it comes to the education of our children. |
Our geniuses seem to understand how limiting school can be—not just in the US, not just now, but in general, in any education which calls for standardization, which is another way of saying normalization, which the wyrd in us resists. In the book Cradles of Eminence: Childhoods of More Than 700 Famous Men and Women, the authors estimate that over 3/5 of eminent adults had trouble in school or troubles with school. In James Hillman’s book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (really a must-read for wyrdos and the teachers who teach them), Hillman notes, “School failures are common; is this because the child fails school or the school fails the child? Either way, the gap widens between the innate intuitive ability of the child and the formalized tuition of the school.” In a talk I gave years ago on this topic, which you can watch here, I call this gap the gap between an education for information and an education for individuation.
In Hillman’s book, he uses the metaphor of an acorn growing into an oak tree. Inside of the acorn, there is a genius that knows it is meant to be expressed as an oak tree, and given the right conditions, it will grow that way. So too, he argues, inside of every child there is a genius that knows it is meant to be expressed in a certain way, and given the right conditions, it too will grow that way, grow to be its fully individuated and expressed self.
Hillman frames difficulties in school like this: “The acorn [re., the genius] draws the line, and no one can force it to cross into the territory of its incompetence. It is as if the oak cannot bend or pretend to be a lovely poplar. As the acorn brings gifts, it sets limits, and only if the school allows intuition into the tuitional methods of the teacher can a bridge be thrown across, allowing the gift to emerge from the limits.” He continues, “I only ask that the sadnesses of children in school be imagined not merely as examples of failure but as exemplars of the acorn. The daimon’s intuition often cannot submit to the normalcy of schooling and becomes even more demonic.” |
Think about Pablo Picasso, preferring the calaboose over the classroom because he could draw there. Other examples include Albert Einstein, who said “I preferred to endure all sorts of punishments rather than to learn gabble by rote.” His genius set limits—no to memorizing all prior knowledge, because he was meant to create new knowledge. He refused to have his mind cluttered with facts. In Cradles of Eminence, the authors wrote, “When asked about the speed of sound, he said that he did not know the answer to that question, but he knew where to find the fact in a reference book if and when he needed it.” Information wasn’t important to him—imagination was instead.
As restrictive and disruptive as school can be for the wyrd child, as dull and unimaginative as school can be for the genius in each child, there are of course many children who find their genius in school. Afterall, 2/5 of the people in Cradles of Eminence did not have trouble in school (which is not to say they found their genius there, but at least their genius did not rebel there). I loved school, for the most part. I couldn’t get enough of it, obviously, because I entered when I was five and I continued for my high school diploma, my bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, and a PhD. It could be that I loved school so much because it was on the job training for my genius. I had a lot of bad teachers which taught me a great deal about what good teaching might be. (Yep, that's me. First day of school. Wearing a tie. Clearly I thought I should be the one teaching!) |
I’m thinking here too of Martin Luther King, Jr., who showed up at school a year early because, as he said, he needed to get some big words—his acorn knew what it needed to grow into the towering oak and orator he would become. Many people meet teachers in school who do mentor their genius (we’ll talk about wyrd mentors in another love letter). The authors of Cradles of Eminence note that these exemplars of people with marked geniuses did have preferences and appreciations about school. |
“They best liked teachers who let them go ahead at their own pace and who gave them permission to work unimpeded in their area of their special interest. They remember affectionately all adults and classmates who challenged their thinking, introduced them to exciting books, or supplied them with materials for work. . . . They responded warmly to people who took time to listen to them and to those who had faith in them. Intelligent appreciation of their special interests was most highly valued.”
In other words, they preferred and appreciated support for their wyrd.
In other words, they preferred and appreciated support for their wyrd.
This week, I invite you to think back to your education, and to reflect upon and/or journal about the following questions.
- In what ways were you gifted and talented as a child?
- Did school support your gifts and talents, or suppress them?
- Did you have teachers who acknowledged your giftedness and perhaps fed it in some way? Were you supplied with materials or given permission to work in the area of your special interest?
- Did your genius rebel against school or have a stubborn resistance to certain subjects? Was it aware of “the territory of its incompetence”? Did it know what subject matters were a waste of time for it?
- If you were permitted to go to a gifted and talented class for an hour, where would you have gone? What would you have done?
- What were you rewarded for in school, if anything? What were you punished for, if anything?
- Did you have any sadnesses in school that were indicative of your acorn?
- How might these answers shed light on your wyrd?
Because our responses and reactions to school can vary year to year, teacher to teacher, and school to school, if you really want to dive into this line of questioning, I suggest you list each grade in school and if you can remember, your teacher/s for that grade, and apply these questions to each different grade. I suspect there will be certain teachers, certain subjects, certain extracurricular and elective activities where your wryd was more or less acceptable, when your genius was more or less activated, motivated, and appreciated.
If you’re interested in a more in-depth study of how to bring your wyrd and your genius into more congruence in your vocational life, consider my course Deep Vocation: Restoring Your Soul’s Purpose, Power, and Pleasure. Click here to learn more.