Word: quart
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...culture of ambitious parenting that has yielded prenatal child enrichment products (e.g., BabyPlus Womb Songs) and high-concept teaching devices (Baby Einstein DVDs), parents feel an increasing amount of anxiety about helping their offspring keep up with the neighbors' kids. But such measures don't necessarily work, writes Quart, and may even backfire. "Designating children as gifted, especially extremely gifted, and cultivating that giftedness may be not only a waste of money, but positively harmful," she writes. "The overcultivated can develop self-esteem problems and performance anxiety." An extreme example was Brandenn Bremmer, a teenager with an IQ over...
...Alissa Quart learned to read at three. By the time she was five, her father counted on her to offer presentations on modernist art. In elementary school, she taught her own friends to read. By seven, she had written her first novel; at 10, she was lecturing her companions on everything from film stock to astrology. She routinely read a book a day. When she was a 13-year-old high school freshman, she edited her father's writing. By 17, she had won a dozen creative-writing competitions...
...dream childhood that would handily prepare a bright youngster for the intellectual rigors of life, right? Not really, writes Quart, now 34, in her new book, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (Penguin Press). "Having been built in the fashion I was as a child - created and then deflated - has left me with a distinct feeling of failure." Quart is unflinchingly honest about her unusual childhood experience. "My father would have bristled at the notion that he was an overbearing puppet master. If I sat absolutely quietly and wrote lyrical verse about tree-tops, I was peachy...
...book, Quart explores the pressures that are brought to bear on those children designated gifted or prodigies. True prodigies are very rare, says Quart. Her definition of prodigy: "a child with a skill set or an ability that is incredibly accomplished, far beyond their years." They tend to be in chess, music and math, more in quantitative fields and less in qualitative disciplines, where "kids are gifted in ways that are hard to measure." But then there is Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old artist whom Quart visited, whose dozens of brightly colored abstract oil paintings have brought...
...OBESITY AND POP CULTURE. And waste, the American waste. I find myself very disturbed lately by the fact that restaurants give you more than any sane person would want to eat, and food is packaged in bigger and bigger containers now so that you try to buy a mere quart of ginger ale and you have to buy a gallon of it that won't fit in the refrigerator. I'm very aware, almost for the first time in my life, of consumerism, being a dupe of consumerism...