Art and Science

Medicine is an art, not a science. Urban planning, psychology and other things that fall under the header social sciences were historically called arts.

I began homeschooling in Southern California at the same duty station -- in other words around the same time -- that I hit my nope moment with my marriage and decided "I'm getting an education and then I'm getting divorced."

Prior to that, I did a lot of volunteer work that benefited my husband's career or my children. For more than a decade, I had been an active participant in Army Wives Groups (later known as Army Family Support Groups) and I did things like arranged the parties for the class one of my kids was in.

In my experience, doing the dutiful wife and mom type volunteer work is a really lousy experience where no one appreciates you or respects you and while I was good at those things, I didn't feel they were a growth experience.

So one of the decisions I made at that time was that my volunteer work would henceforth serve me and my career goals in some way and this was a factor in me volunteering to become a moderator for tagmax, a gifted homeschooling list.

Overall, this was a much more positive experience than my previous volunteer work. It allowed me to pick up some tech savvy that I was sorely lacking and I was a moderator a mere six weeks when Valorie King, founder of tagfam.org, asked me to consider a promotion to the role of lead moderator for ALL her lists and asked me to agree to be a member of the board with the spiffy title Director of Community Life and zero pay.

I said "Let me think about it and get back to you." and after two weeks I said yes. I had that role roughly six months when my health went sideways and my relationship to Valorie King went sideways and I decided "You're not paying me enough to put up with this" and I quit. 

Had I not been literally DYING -- and nearly did die about six months later -- I might have handled things differently. But I was dying and it is what it is.

On my way out the door, I gave her some blunt feedback about the social stuff she wasn't an expert in. She was a tech professional and that's what was required at that time to run the oldest gifted lists on the Internet and she had mentioned things like having been burned in effigy on her lists.

Yeah, people are butts. You offer them a free service, they bite the hand that feeds them, so she had BAGGAGE.

Given her lack of social savvy plus mountains of baggage, I figured my feedback would not really be appreciated and would not really be taken to heart or in any way benefit the lists but I also figured no one else was going to tell her, so what the hell. It's there and she can get over her hurt feelings and consider my advice or not. That's her decision.

Because not only did she see something special in me that she asked me to be lead moderator after just six weeks, but there were two other pieces of strong evidence that I knew my stuff and was extraordinarily talented at certain things and unmatched by anyone else, even though everyone on these lists were very bright yet I stood out even in that crowd.

One was the primary source of our falling out: I was loved and adored on tagmax and I think she was jealous. She didn't see what I saw, that this cost me something and people "loved" me because I served them well.

She probably thought they were my friends when it was something more like I was their bitch. And I chose to do that because it works and it helped me develop tech skills and have something I eventually put on a resume and it helped me get what I needed to educate my very challenging twice exceptional children, but, no, those people weren't my friends.

They loved my WORK and the fact that I was extremely talented at it, so they got a lot of benefit out of it. There was no personal loyalty there to me as an individual. It wasn't that kind of relationship.

I was moderator of tagmax for just two days when list traffic began ramping up dramatically because I instituted two policies from my experiences with Army Wives Groups:

1. Greet people at the door.
2. Reply to all questions to the best of your ability.

That second policy is not unlike the policy at the Fortune 200 company I worked at later: Address all issues. I didn't know that at the time but it's a robust enough policy that it can help you be one of the biggest companies on the planet if you follow it consistently.

If new people introduced themselves, I said "Hi". That's it. Talk to people who talk on your list and this made people feel comfortable talking in a way no one ever had before on any of her lists.

And if someone asked a question and no one replied to it, after two or three days I would reply even if I didn't have an answer and sometimes that got it answered because it effectively bumped the question back up to the top of inboxes.

So traffic on tagmax took off because I have social skills Valorie King lacked. To be fair, I have social skills rarely found in gifted communities of any kind because I'm an extrovert and most gifted people are introverts and the higher the IQ, the more likely they are to be introverted and also the more extremely introverted they are likely to be.

I was late to the party and didn't initially know the list history and origin story and blah blah blah. I originally only joined tagmax, their homeschooling list, because I began homeschooling my kids in the middle of fuck nowhere with the nearest town thirty or forty miles from base down a scary desolate road eerily covered in white crosses marking where people had died in car wrecks and there just was NO support on the ground for helping me figure out how to homeschool my kids. 

If you want some idea of the extremely desolate place where I lived at that time, you can watch Frozen by Madonna. I watched it with fascination when it came out because I knew I would soon be living very close to where it was filmed.

Local homeschool parenting groups were just NOT a thing in that time and place, though I was homeschooling initially through a charter school in Victorville, a seventy mile drive away.

If there had been adequate support in person on the ground, rest assured I would not have gone looking online because I'm a people person. I was forced at gunpoint into becoming Internet savvy and was dragged kicking and screaming into getting an online life because an IRL life was simply not an option.

So while I knew tagmax was their homeschooling list and their policy was that we ONLY discuss homeschooling here, the fact that I was late to the party and had a different cultural background and etc. meant I didn't have the context and wasn't on the same page as Valorie King about what that meant and why we "should" handle it that way and she and I never really discussed it in a meaty way.

Their explicit policy was you should ask parenting questions on tagfam, but homeschooling is a lifestyle such that it's not realistic to ask a group of homeschoolers to figure out if this is a homeschooling question or a parenting gifted kids question. There's no clear bright line there between schooling and parenting when deciding how to handle your gifted homeschooled little hellions who are making you tear your hair out and having you genuinely concerned for their safety and welfare because bright kids do shit like accidentally blow things up if you aren't on top of it.

No, I'm not joking and I'm not exaggerating. My high school physics and chemistry teacher was a woman AND one of her casual anecdotes was about, oopsie!, blowing up her college lab accidentally in the process of pursuing her PhD.

So having joined tagmax and only tagmax to start with, I always had a broader definition of "homeschooling question" than she had and, furthermore, the fact that I joined tagmax and only tagmax points to another big problem: tagmax was a separate list from tagfam and, no, these people didn't want to hear "You can't ask that here of people you know. Go ask that of some group of people you don't know."

I eventually learned that tagmax got spun off from tagfam when homeschooling questions exceeded ten percent of tagfam traffic and was causing friction. Most members of tagfam aren't homeschoolers and they felt it was cluttering up the list and didn't want it there BUT at the same time being ungrateful hand biting backstabbing butts, they also strenuously objected to LOSING potential parenting questions from the homeschoolers and didn't want a spin off list.

So trying to cut this Gordian Knot, Valorie King promised people that the spin off list would be solely for homeschooling questions and they would be required to ask their parenting questions on tagfam. Except she didn't require you to join tagfam first to join tagmax, so the population of the two groups differentiated over time.

Initially, tagmax was a subset of the population of tagfam but it didn't stay that way. People like me joined tagmax and only tagmax and didn't want to be told "Go join a separate list for parenting questions," especially when we didn't feel it was really a parenting question per se because it was a question we only had BECAUSE we were homeschooling our bright little demon children and trying to get them to not burn the house down.

So after some weeks of me doing the job I was asked to do and getting people to talk nicely on list, which had the side effect of dramatically increasing traffic, without consulting ME, her Director of Community Life, Valorie King decided to make people on tagmax behave themselves and follow the rules and crabbed at them about they need to only be talking about homeschooling here and not talking more generally and absolutely not asking about parenting on this list.

In response, the list had an epic meltdown of a sort I've never seen before or since. She got a Niagara Falls amount of outpouring from people begging her ALL DAY for HOURS to "please don't take my sunshine away" and similar phrasing because me fostering polite, constructive discussion was so life-giving and therapeutic for people who had been punished their entire lives socially for being bright and didn't want that for their children.

And she felt stabbed in the back when I tried to engage her in conversation instead of kissing her ass and saying "Yes master!" to her agenda to kill my handiwork of doing my fucking job and getting people to play NICELY and -- shock of shockers -- if you actually do that effectively, people want more of it.

People will talk to you a lot more IF it's a positive experience than if it's not a positive experience. Duh!

The second piece of evidence, aside from everything going down on tagmax, that I'm bizarrely talented at certain things is that I was able to foster conversation on a list that coincidentally happened to get launched while I was Director of Community Life. She had been planning it for some time and working on pieces of it, like what to name it, that I didn't really understand the importance of at the time.

It was called TAGPDQ and the PDQ stood for pretty darn quick. It was intended to be support for extremely, highly and profoundly gifted.

Those are three classes of IQ. They are technical terms for increasingly more extreme IQ ranges and people in those groups are few and far between and have social and personal challenges beyond what you find in the "merely gifted" top ten percent of the population.

And I appear to have been the only person who was ever able to foster conversation on that list because it's extremely hard to get people to say in earnest "I'm a freaking genius (or my child is) and it's RUINING my life. Please help me!"

And the reason I believe I'm the ONLY person who EVER fostered conversation on that list is because it was launched while I was Director of Community Life and I never unsubscribed, so I should still be a member and I almost never see anything posted to that list. Like YEARS go by between emails showing up on it and then no one replies to them.

My health went to hell and I was put on permanent review so a moderator could read my emails and decide if they would LET this post to the list because I sometimes had rampant foot in mouth disease. And it's an older list with technical differences from plug and play lists like yahoo groups, one of which is I would need to ASK a moderator to please kindly remove my sorry ass from your list, you hateful bitches. And I never felt like doing that because without me at the helm, it got no traffic ANYWAY.

There was bad blood between me and staff because I felt disrespected and unappreciated and without ME in charge, there's effectively no list anyway. So the lesser evil was just remain technically a member of a completely DEAD group rather than beg people I hate to throw my sorry ass out officially.

So unless they stealth threw my sorry ass out without notifying me, I should still be a member and I don't get emails. So I'm pretty sure that all these years later, the list is STILL dead because I'm not in charge and no one else knows how to foster conversation on it.

So Valorie King has plenty of hard evidence that I know my shit with which to judge my constructive feedback and decide that it has value and comes from a subject matter expert who has NO EQUAL anywhere else on planet Earth and no amount of hanging with people with PhDs and yadda will uncover someone my EQUAL, much less better than my sorry ass.

She is free to wallow in her hurt feelings and grudge and blah blah blah and cut her own throat as she sees fit. Not my problem.

Not really hers anymore either. She handed the whole thing off to Kitt Finn a lot of years ago who has more social savvy than Valorie King had when I knew her.

Running a list is an art, not a science. I pursue social things in a more rigorous fashion than is typical to try to get it closer to a real science than the term social sciences means.

But at the end of the day, it's just my opinion, man, that you should do stupid shit like greet new people at the door and correlation doesn't prove causation, so I generally don't bother to run around telling people something like "I'm the world's foremost expert in this!" because I can't actually prove that and the entire gifted community -- the people who SAW firsthand the kind of results I can get and KNOW from many years experience no one else can replicate it -- don't want my sorry ass and aren't singing my praises and blah blah blah, so there's generally speaking no fucking point in telling you my loser, social outcast self is AMAZING at this social stuff because why in the hell would you believe my bragging about this?

You wouldn't. Duh.

Popular Posts