How to Cultivate the Genius in Your Child

Good morning, how are you doing, Ryan?

I'm doing okay, what about yourself?

Pretty well, pretty well. See, you've been traveling a lot recently, huh?

Yeah. Hi!

Hello, Elana, how are you?

Hi.

¿Cómo estás? Bien. Bien. Muy bien.

Sí.

Maravilloso.

Yeah, Elana's doing well, her Spanish is getting better and better. Her teachers keep telling us that that while she's at class, she's just barfing out sentences, talking and talking and talking, and telling them things in Spanish that they didn't know that she could say, like she wants a sister. Something she's not telling us at home, but—

Got it, the important stuff comes out there.

The truth.

So she went to you on one trip to Colombia, right?

She did. I went to Colombia in September, and circumstances dictated that she came with me.

Yeah, but she was able to speak Spanish a little bit then?

Yeah, and you know, she was able to understand virtually everything said to her. That was the part that was most impressive to the Colombians is that Alana could hear someone saying something 20 feet away and she'd look over and she was listening.

Yep. Does she have opportunity to speak Spanish outside of her daycare?

Yes, she hangs out, so she goes to her babysitter's family's house when possible, especially now with her brother getting a little bit older, it's easier for us to send them both or just Logan. Being in San Diego, you do hear Spanish here and there, you know, more than a little bit. Although, as I've discovered as someone who doesn't speak Spanish very well, it's more difficult to practice Spanish in California than it is in Colombia or traveling anywhere else in Latin America because here they almost all speak English and it's not their job to teach me Spanish. So please—

Of course.

Which I understand.

Does Marlo know Spanish?

No, but she has a better accent than I do.

Okay.

Though I actually speak more than her, but she has a better accent, so.

Good, good. So pretty soon Alana's gonna be ahead of you guys and you won't be able to keep up.

Spanish-wise. She already is, she already is. I mean, Alana, if anything, when we talk to her in Spanish, she's speaking down to our level. She understands much more than we do. Alana can watch Spanish television. Without subtitles and laugh at some of the jokes. Whereas I have no idea what's going on. You know, and so—

So yeah, what else is new? It's been a little while, so lots of good stuff.

Yeah, it's been a couple weeks. Well, since we last spoke, I've played Set with her many times. And she really likes it. And I don't know if we're playing the game exactly properly. I guess I kind of underestimated her. I thought it would take her longer to learn how to identify the cards as all being alike or as all being different. And we're playing with the short deck, so it's easier. So it's just about finding the sets that are different. So we lay out 12 cards, and I've kind of taught Alana a process to do it. Start with the 3-card and then find a different one that's with 2 and then 1. And she's very good at it. She gets the sets very quickly. She thinks it's fun. And then we put the setting aside and put up more cards, and we kind of may have a contest to see who can get the most sets. Kind of the next step is having her identify the sets without having to move the cards away from the layout so that she can do it in her head. Conceptualize it. But she started doing that too. So she's doing very well on that. We have applied to two different charter schools, one of which was started by Danielle Strockmann, and we really hope that she gets into that one. It's called San Diego San Diego Innovations Academy. And project-based learning, no standardized tests. Marla went to the parent meet and greet on Saturday. I couldn't because I was still traveling. She said about half the parents there were really interested in what was going on at the school. Half the parents were just horrified that they weren't getting prepared for the SAT in kindergarten.

So how can they get away with no tests? I thought charter schools had to do the tests.

Well, you know, I don't know. I wasn't at that meeting, but there isn't a focus at least on the standardized tests. They're not teaching towards them. If you want to teach toward them, they can go get a tutor they had recommended.

Oh, excellent.

I really don't know. I mean, I wasn't there. Marla was just relaying it to me.

And I take it Alana is still gung-ho about school.

Yeah, she really wants to go.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, at this point, unless it was a poor social environment for her, I feel like I would— thriving her. She really wants to, she likes groups, she likes teachers, she likes—

Yeah, no, that's fine. That's great. Yeah, and she will dazzle them all.

Yeah, you know, she's a very well-behaved child, she's an asset, she's a good traveler, she has strong emotional endurance.

As long as they don't kind of force her on this really slow track and as long as they can keep her engaged, Or she can keep herself engaged. That's the great thing about projects is there's kind of, she can do much fancier projects than the minimum, presumably.

Yeah, well, hopefully. And it's something that we can help her with. But that said, I still think of, I say, what would be optimum? For kindergarten, just to have her in school, she wants to be in school. But I think Alana very quickly will, I mean, unless it's awesome, I can see her you know, not wanting to go because we don't force her to go. Even her school now, I mean, it's like, it's time to go to school. She never once said, I don't want to go, or right, I'm not happy there. And if she did, we would totally reconsider it just because, you know, you're not learning anything if you're not happy, if you're not interested.

Yeah, the other thing is, when I was a kid, my parents would take me out for 2 weeks here, 2 weeks there, you know, I'd come back and nothing had happened. And, you know, I think schools try to, you know, be punitive. Public schools try to be punitive if you do that now, but I could see school as a great environment when you need it, and if you can have something cool to do, take off and make them deal with it.

Yeah, you know, it looks like we're gonna be here in San Diego for at least the next year, in all likelihood, at least the family will be. I'll be traveling a lot, but, so we'll see how the school works out. I still favor the option of doing personalized education in Balboa Park. I've spoken to so many people trying to get other children on board with this. And, you know, the parents, it all sounds nice in the first conversation. When I call them up to follow up, they're like, well, we're sending our kid to school. And so putting together a cohort is something that would be important to me because I don't want to just be the one child at home doing homeschool because she doesn't want that.

Of course, of course.

And we don't live in a, you know, we live in a downtown neighborhood, so we don't live in a city where there's, or in a suburb where there's tons of friends. She's not old enough to be on a soccer team yet. The students in her gymnastics class are all 2 or 1 to 2 years older than her, so not really peers. She's not getting invited to hang out with them, and class is only 1 day a week anyway, so they don't really form friendships. Yeah, so that's a big part of it is, uh, even at the school she goes to now, it's 4 half days per week. Um, that's the first group of children that she's ever made kind of friends with that she could maybe go to a have a sleepover with.

If you moved from San Diego, where would you go?

Possibly Colorado, because that's where one of my companies is actually headquartered. We're there for, it's not really for tax reasons, it's just because we have a potential manufacturing partner located there, so it makes sense to be near them rather than shipping things, and California's not so ideal for, my line of work.

For what was it, Colorado, Denver, Boulder area?

Yeah, Longmont, Denver, Boulder.

Okay. Yeah, there might be more sympathy for homeschooling, unschooling there. I think of San Diego, that may be unfair, but—

No, it's, I mean, there's a lot of homeschoolers here, I'm sure. You know, I Googled it anyway, I've seen a lot, but they're out in the suburbs and You know, we're not there right now. I mean, we like living downtown. We have a good thing going. Rents are so high throughout the whole county that it's not like you're gonna save any money. Right. So we're happy here near the water for now, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

Our family's growing. You know, Logan's almost 1. He's 11 months today. So he's getting big. He's talking a lot, Michael.

Wow, that's great for a boy to be talking a lot that early.

Yeah, we were— We were a little worried about that, or just we were open to the idea that it may not happen as quickly and not push him or what have you. But my mom, my mom, my mom, hey, he's trying.

I bet it helps to have such an articulate older sister, 'cause I imagine a lot of talking around him and to him all the time.

All the time. And she's sitting there reading, and he's coming over and ripping pages, but he sees her reading a lot. He sees us talking all the time. We don't communicate without talking. And he's a little boy, he's like, every time you grab him, not with me for some reason, but with Marlo, she holds him and the first thing he does is not hit, but just like wipe her face. And the older he gets, the more aggressive he gets. And she's like, ugh, boys. So I don't know if it's a boy thing or what, but we just say no, we're trying to use words, trying to make sure we're just as patient with him as we were with Alana.

Yup. And what kind of books is she reading these days?

So someone just, one of Marlo's coworkers gave her a set of maybe 15 or 20 princess books, Disney books. So right now she's just loving those. Before that, man, what are they? She has a series of books called "Rhody the Road Dog." It's like a cowboy.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Are most mostly still monosyllabic? Most words are monosyllabic in these books still?

No, no, no. These are 6, 7-year-old books, 8-year-old books. They're actually really hard for her. The princess books have, you know, 35 or 50 words per page.

There's a lot of words there.

And, uh, but Alana's reading, Michael. She reads even better in Spanish because it's so much easier for her to pronounce the words. Yeah, um, you know, there's no silent E's, there's no weird French spellings, and, uh, Germanic influence. I mean, Spanish, like when I was in Colombia, I found a bookstore and I bought her a book about pirates, piratas. And, you know, the words are this long and she's just sounding them out just perfectly.

Fabulous.

Yeah, no, I'm very impressed. Alana's reading and she's spending more and more time reading on her own. I mean, she always was, but now it's probably 35 minutes to an hour per day total. I'll just look over and see her in the corner reading a book. And if it's a, oh, go ahead.

Are they chapter books? No, I mean, no, that's kind of the next transition is, you know, actual books with chapters and, you know, then you're really, so it sounds like she's very advanced. I mean, I assume they still have pictures. They're still picture books.

Yeah, they still have pictures.

I mean, she's 4, so that's totally fine.

Yeah, yeah, well, 4 and a half, you know, to be fair. Yeah. But she's getting there. One of the books that— actually, the first book that she read start to finish was a compilation of Dr. Seuss books in a— or short books in a larger book. And it took several months to go through it, you know, 7, 8, 9 pages a night with a bookmark. First time she lost the bookmark, she was just gutted.

Oh, but still, that's really great. She has that sort of stamina. And with math, you guys playing around with arithmetic a little bit still? Marlo's doing a good job with that.

I regret that I'm so absent-minded on it. Marla does a good job. Nothing new to report there, mostly because I guess focus has been on reading and playing games. We've been playing Chutes and Ladders, and that's shown me how much better she's gotten at numbers. Just even, even 2 months ago or 3 months ago, you know, she couldn't just look at a number and say 82. Yeah. And now she can. So she's kind of learned her numbers up to 100. She's learned them in Spanish, up to 100. She still does her math before getting her vitamins, right, which she's so excited about because they're gummy bears.

What exactly does she have to do mathematically before getting her gummy bears?

Well, we used to just do, we'd ask her questions, what's 2 2, what's 6 10, then we went to using an abacus, and that's really how she learned her tens, her count by tens. 20, 30, 40, 50, et cetera. It's just, I mean, and that's all we've been doing. We need more work. I think she's at the point now with her reading and her math that if I go and buy like a little workbook from Borders or Amazon, something like a Kumon book, just something for her to fill out and see problems on paper, I think that'd be a good step. What do you think?

Might be, might be a little bit boring in some ways. One of the, see, a real tricky thing is, If she may have to go through regular school, there's a funny way in which, you know, if you get her super far ahead on conventional stuff, you know, then she'll be super bored in school. You know, in some ways I like the idea of developing the logical reasoning and the mental math. And, you know, somehow workbooks, that feels sort of school-like. Sure. So, and I've got some cool math exercises for when she's a little bit older. From something called the Comprehensive School Mathematics Project. But that's probably 2, 3 years from now, and that would be best if you could do, you know, personalized school, homeschool situation. But, you know, if per chance— and it could be she just loves school so much, you know, she will end up going to school. But then what you don't want is for her to go through year after year of math and just be bored silly by the math classes.

Hopefully she's in other activities where she's forming friends and maybe she gets a taste of school and sees that, wow, maybe it's not all it's cut out to be. So I'm kind of—

Also, some teachers in some schools are much more flexible in terms of allowing and in terms of personalization. And so if it turns out that, you know, she does want to go to school and that's what works best, then the project is, I would say, to be really assertive about finding teachers and schools that will make sure she's not bored silly hours every day.

Right.

And that can be found, and especially if the charter school is designed to be distinctive in this way, sounds like they would kind of get, you know, then project number one is Alana not being bored more than Alana learning, because she's already learning so much at home and it's so advanced at home.

I hope so. I mean, I've got pretty high expectations for this school. Started by someone who's very credible and has a similar view of learning. It's been around for quite a few years now, and from what I've read online, parents just adore it. It's in a good part of town, so hopefully the parents will be involved and the children will be motivated. Something else that we've been doing that Alana's really learned from, I think, is listening to podcasts. I've got story podcasts, I've got kids' science podcasts, I've got adult podcasts and British history podcasts for me, and we listen to all of them, anything that's appropriate.

That's phenomenal. How long are the podcasts?

Well, they range from 7 to 9 minutes on the very short end for her, and these are story times and poems and things. And the subject matter is something that she's really into, so it's good for her focus isn't as long as mine. But we've been in 2-hour car rides where we listen to 2 hours of British history, and she doesn't— she's not fully engaged in it. She's singing. I hear her singing in Spanish, but osmosis, I believe in that.

Oh yeah, for sure.

A lot of words, you know, a lot of thought. She's hearing a lot of dialogue. She's hearing a lot of adult, um, adult themes. Not sexual themes, by the way.

Of course, of course. History, real, real history.

Yeah.

You're modeling it, you know, she sees that she gets to do her podcast of, you know, stories, and then she sees you do your podcast of stories, and okay, yours are a little bit longer and different, but, you know, it's just part of normal— what the Garcia family normally does. And, uh, yeah, I think it's great.

And there's a middle ground too, like there was one podcast, and, um, it's children-oriented, but the children are probably more like 9 to 12 or something that's oriented at— and it's a debate, the Great Debate series. It's, uh, Lasers or fire, what's cooler?

Oh, very fun, very fun.

So it's the two kids debating it, they're clearly college debate team freshmen or something. They do a great job, they make the case as best as possible. So then I give them something to talk about. I'm like, so what did you think? Well, I think lasers are cooler. Why? Well, because you can't get hurt. Well, you can. I guess you missed the part where you can go blind and burn your skin. Really? You know? And then we talk about fire. Something else we've been doing is I've been using YouTube a lot with her. In lieu of, you know, she loves watching TV and when Marla's at work and I've got the little one and I'm trying to be on a call or get dinner going and things, we do let Alana watch Netflix shows in Spanish. There's a couple different series that she watches. But we've been switching and going to YouTube. You know, Alana doesn't— we don't go camping much, we live in the city. We watch videos on— we watch hunting videos, we watch butchering videos, how to butcher animals.

We watch—

there's kids in the Northwest Territories in Australia who are making videos of all their little adventures in the creek and, you know, pulling frogs out of the mud and stuff like that. She watches that. We watch how-to videos, you know. There was a video of a 12-year-old making a beautiful painting. And we watched that, and then Alana insisted that we reassemble her easel that had somehow been disassembled. So I feel like YouTube's been a really good tool. And whenever she has a question, or even if I have a question about how to do something, we go to YouTube, we watch a video. I feel like that's a really powerful learning tool that didn't exist when I was little, so I'm trying to use it for her.

That's fabulous. I don't know how difficult it is, but I can imagine you sort of creating your own channel or tagging things and so forth.

Yeah, Google's reading our mind.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, in the interest of keeping these reasonably linked, that's a fabulous update. Congrats on all the progress and news. Thank you. And let's check in again next week if we can.

Sounds good. I'll talk to you then. Thanks, Michael.

Thanks, Ryan. Bye-bye.