It's been a rather interesting day, so far. When I came in around noon, I was confronted with a group of small boys, about seven or eight years old, working on their homework - school was canceled today, and they were embracing the opportunity to get to the library. I could see why; this was a tough assignment.

"It's the gifted kids," my boss whispered. "I've been helping them some, but there's a few questions I haven't been able to answer, and I've been searching for about an hour and a half."

Naturally, I was intrigued, having been one of those "gifted kids" (always said in an embarrassed hush) myself, and recalling those extra projects as some of the few things that made life interesting. In grade school we were given a monthly sheet of math and logic problems to take home; if we got a certain percentage of them correct, our names were listed on the back of the next month's paper. The little geek that I was, I looked forward to those problems every month and worked on them feverishly the moment I got my hands on them.

Ask me how much advanced math I now remember. Harumph.

Anyway, these kids had been given a booklet of biographical factoids about famous (and I use that term roughly) African Americans, whom they were to identify. Some of them were easy; when one of the bios mentioned that the person in question was the first Black female congressman, we knew immediately which sources to consult. Things got trickier when the bios got vaguer. We struggled for ages trying to identify one, whose main claim to fame was that she set up the first Sunday School in New York City. I finally found her (Catherine Ferguson, in case you were curious) in a trivia book about African American women. And the teacher expected these seven-year-olds to find this?

Oh, this takes me back. I remember being assigned grade-school projects which no kid was able or willing to do on his own. When I was about ten, I had a teacher who suffered from hyperactivity and delusions; she had a long-standing tradition of assigning an "International Fair" and a "National Fair," for which each student was assigned a country or state upon which to do exhaustive research. Currency, history, geography, politics, fashion, language...I remember doing about twenty different reports on Denmark, my chosen country, each of about ten handwritten pages. We then had to create a costume, come up with foods, brochures, and products of the region, and set up display booths with our reports and items all along the hallways of the school. The parents would parade past "our" work, oohing and aahing, while the teacher herself basked in the other teachers' praise.

What I remember, though, involved my mother's screaming at me to "just hold the pen and write!" as tears of exhaustion and frustration streamed down my face. I remember forcing my small, cramped hand to write countless letters to various embassies, trying to gain access to obscure information and coins. I remember shuddering in anticipatory agony when I saw my mother come through the door with more notes she'd taken that day at the library, because I was too young to know much about reference books beyond regular encyclopedias.

And I remember that year especially, because the parents had finally had enough, and they all cornered the teacher and made her see that it was just too much. One of the boys in the class said that he walked past the classroom later that evening, and she was sitting at her desk, crying in the dark. We didn't do a National Fair that year. I'm not sure they ever did again, though my brother had the same teacher some years later and had to do the International one; he chose Switzerland.

This same teacher was obsessed with flight, and organized a kite day, wherein we all designed and made kites to fly. She encouraged us to not make the traditional square kites, but to design huge, extravagant creations. Mind you, I say "design" because that's all we kids did; the work, as usual, was done by the long-suffering parents. My kite was about four feet across, and painted to resemble a little girl's face, with long, dangling, orange braids. The day we were to fly them turned into a windstorm, and the teacher refused to postpone and "disappoint the children;" we were all treated instead to the sight of all our lovely kites being smashed, one by one, into bits by the punishing gales.

Mom didn't like that teacher much.

I was in Odyssey of the Mind for years when I was an older kid, and I still enjoy going to the competitions. Watching the children present their creative solutions to the assigned problems is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. Still, there's always a trace of sadness when some of the elementary school teams take the stage. When the children present huge structures designed of PVC pipe and paper mache, with movable parts and special effects, it's enough to break my heart. The parents, in their eager desire to help their children win the competition, have robbed the kids of the chance to use their own imaginations to come up with an answer that is completely theirs.

It's sad for their own team, and it's sad for the teams that did their own work, and were proud of their results until they saw what the first team had done. The "parent" team usually wins, which is all the more heart-rending; the next year, they'll do the same thing, and so will a few of the teams that lost in the year prior. My coaches and my teams' parents never intervened, except to drive us to hardware stores and help us carry our supplies. We were fiercely independent, and we didn't suffer for it. The difference? We were in high school. Had we been in grade school, the constant competition against adults would almost certainly have robbed the contest of some of its fun.

Both parents and teachers tend to lose sight of what children are capable of doing. It's one thing to challenge the kids with hard work; it's another thing entirely to demand work of a level they absolutely can't meet. I've been guilty of this; when I was a Sunday School teacher, as a teenager, I tried to organize the two through five-year-olds into a small chorus for the church's Christmas pageant. I disdained the regular Christmas carols and chose a song of much higher difficulty level. Well, I learned my lesson; only one child even bothered to sing, and the rest of them either stood gazing dumbfounded at the congregation, or else wandered around, picking at the other children. It was a nightmare.

Tonight I have a storytime for two-year-olds. Last week, these kids were miraculously attentive, so much so that I considered adding a longer story for this week. I think I'll just count my blessings and save the tougher stuff for when they'll really enjoy it. They're only this little for such a brief time.