A Keen Mind

When I was three years old, so the story goes, my stay-at-home mother printed the alphabet on some flash cards and proceeded to teach me the letters.  I don't remember those activities, but I do remember riding in the front seat between my parents on a stool (no seat belts or kid seats back then) and sounding out and reading the names of the cities/towns that were illuminated just below the roof line of the Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Salt Lake City as we drove by.  I was probably four or close to being five at the time.

I went to kindergarten at Onequa School at age five and then was advanced to first grade months after turning six.  I was assigned to Mrs. Moore's class, and remember her as being a kind, older lady.  Near the beginning of the school year, perhaps in the first or second day of class, I was sitting in her class. I received a copy along with my classmates of My Weekly Reader, which I believe was a national publication for children to help us learn to read.

Of course, under my mother's tutelage and because of a keen mind I had been given from above, I already knew how to read.  Because this happened 55 years ago, I don't remember exactly what happened in those minutes, but I believe when classmates began stumbling in their attempts to read passages such as "See Dick run." "Run, run, run."  "See Spot chase the ball." I raised my hand and proclaimed that this was too easy for me.

What I remember happening next is that she called me to the front of the class and handed me her Teacher's Copy of the publication.  I began reading it, with no problem.  I was too naive and too young to look at her facial expression, but I imagine that she must have been very, very surprised.  Who knows at what grade level I was reading?

I don't remember if it was that very same day, but within the next 24 hours I was taken out of Mrs. Moore's first grade class.  What happened next has been blurred by time, but I am told that I was given an aptitude test, the result of which was a recommendation that I immediately be "skipped up" two grades to the third grade.  I don't know if it was because of some recommendation from a psychologist, from a friend or relative, or perhaps they felt they were inspired, but my parents decided to advance me not two grades but just one. I was placed in loving Mrs. Provostgaard's second grade class.  

As it was, I was a much younger, physically small, redheaded boy, but I seemed to be able to keep up scholastically with the other students.  In fact, in the fourth grade, in Mr. Beckstead's class, when we began to learn how to mulitply, my native calculating talent assumed front and center, and I quickly learned how to multiply numbers 1 through 12--the times tables, I guess they are called. I learned them much quicker than most of my classmates.

In Mrs. Slater's fifth grade class, I took second place in the class spelling bee, another talent that came easily for me.  On my last elementary report card in the sixth grade with Mr. Woolston and the delightful Mrs. Kershaw, I got straight As.  And as long as I am reminiscing about sixth grade and tooting my own horn, I was the only boy out of four sixth grade students to receive the local Kiwanis Club's Hope of America award.

Looking back in retrospect, knowing now about socioeconomic realities in education, I had a very fertile mind with great natural talent, but grew up in a blue collar neighborhood on the less than affluent west side of Salt Lake City.  My guess is that teachers and administrators at my elementary school knew of my abilities early on, but must have decided that skipping me up a grade was good enough.  

I must assume they had no understanding or knowledge of what to do with gifted children and how to take a child's above average abilities to another level.  I must assume that I wasn't seen as someone with a extremely high IQ (who knows if my IQ was tested?) but just a child for whom learning concepts was easier than those of my chronological age.

I have wondered through the years since then if I had been born on the east side of Salt Lake City, or like in Southern California, and/or born 40 years later, what might have happened to me scholastically. I do not regret my middle to lower middle class upbringing; I was surrounded by salt-of-the-earth people, by an ethnically diverse population, and I developed a good work ethic.  My growing up environment is an important part of the story of Bobby Davis. But whenever I hear of a story about a gifted kid and how he or she has flourished in a rich, rigorous, and nurturing educational environment. I wonder what if....