Opportunity Lost for Thai Gifted Children and Their Country
=============================================== Yesterday, I wrote a blog namely "An Art of Saying No" in the Professional Life sub-group. After I finished it, I recalled one story and I would like to share it with you.
When my family and I firstly arrived at the US. We had a female Thai neighbor. She was a PhD student in education. Her specialty was a studying of gifted children. She was a lovely, young woman who loved children and loved to work for and with them.
In that time, NB was around two and a half years old. Our lovely neighbor told us that we could leave NB with her at her place some times when both of us were busy.
So, she had some chances to babysit NB during those years. One day, she told us that " P'A.T., NB has everything for a gifted child". We were surprised a bit while she explained why she came up with that statement/conclusion. She said; "He had talent in math, which is the most crucial. He played with things systematically and arythmatically. Like, when an ordinary child at his age plays with leaves, he/she rips leaves off with no patterns. But, for him, he rips it off in patterns mostly with an alternating fashion. He can concentrate on doing things for a very long period of time sometimes more than an hour. He also has great fine motor movements. His hand-eye co-ordination is just beyond his age."
In that time, NB was not three years old yet.... So, we listened, kept in minds, and watched him more carefully.
Few months later, we bought a small upright piano for my wife... She also said that it might be close to a good time to teach NB how to play piano. But I didn't think that she would expect much about her piano lessons for NB.
I was flat wrong. My wife firstly put stickers on the piano keys (e.g. 1-5 representing musical notes). Then she wrote those numbers on real piano musical notes accordingly. Few days later, NB could play the piano using that "analog translation".... With my wife's great astonishment, she taught him how to read the real musical notes and took the stickers off from the piano keys. Not for long could he play piano with reading real musical notes.
After that, he picked up almost everything in his paths; reading, math, and sports. Of course, everytime when we saw NB growing up with these kinds of exceptional talents, I also thought about her, our lovely neighbor.
Let's go back to her then.
She also got a scholarship from the Royal Thai Government to pursue her PhD in the US. So, few years later, she was graduated and went back to Thailand to teach at her Alma Mater.
We're still in touch... Sometimes, I called her or e-mailed asking her for her expert opinions about how to taking care of these kids.... She always gave us great suggestions, always....
I'm a research bug. So I always asked her about her current research or initiatives on her extremely interesting expertise (at least for me). I was dissappointed a bit knowing that she wasn't doing anything about it much....
In her institution, it had a great demonstration school. Within this school, there were tons of smart, smart kids (they should be, because most of their parents held PhD or MD degrees.). But she had no chances to participate and exercised her specialty.....
She was appointed to work as an instructor... Well, it looked like a T.A. to me rather than an instructor. She took care of secretary jobs in departmental meetings, and that's about it!!
I felt very sorry for her, and, more importantly, for those gifted kids whose had lost great chances to be discovered and polished properly to be our "fine gems"....
You may not agree with me that one smart adult could "lift" a weight of 1,000 people in his/her society on his/her single shoulder. Yet one truly smart guy could singlehandedly "lift" more than 100,000 people, and one true genious could "lift" the entire humanity to another leap with a significant level for generations.
Well, you could see it by yourself that how we, the Thai, had used our own human resources extravagantly.... And, you may have known now how we had lost opportunity by this kind of approaches.
Could we afford to lose more than this, just to merely survive? ===============================================
Create Date : 07 กุมภาพันธ์ 2550 |
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Last Update : 8 กุมภาพันธ์ 2550 0:50:00 น. |
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I have seen a lot of Thai lost opportunity to shown their talent when they come back to our country after Ph.D.
Last two months, I was in the U.S. (for a family visit) and got a chance to go to NASA and really trills about their dream to push themselves beyond the limitation (i.e. the "mad mission to mars" project for example that >200,000 talented people gang up together to do their specialist in order to make it true)... Gossip: being there even made me trill on wanting to be a part of them because it sounds challenging...