Raising Future Adults

Anthropology has the terms high-context and low-context cultures . You may be more familiar with the terms Ask culture versus Guess culture. These days, you can search for the terms "ask culture and guess culture." My understanding is this originated with a reply on Metafilter to a question on AskMe. Low-context culture would be Ask culture. High-context culture would be Guess culture. It's not really that you are expected to guess the meaning. It's really that they expect you to already know a lot and be able to infer conclusions that aren't explicitly stated. My father and ex husband were both career military. This tends to be Ask culture where you explicitly state things. Like New York, the American military is more multicultural than most American towns and that contributes to an expectation of stating things very explicitly to avoid misunderstandings. But there are also lives on the line, so the military has a lot of protocols surrounding making sure you clea...

At one time, I had the spiffy title Director of Community Life for The TAG Project . So I was doing pro bono work in gifted education and was part of the fairly small online gifted community. I attended a Beyond IQ conference and was a low level presenter. I met Kathi Kearney  in person at the conference and she knew my name and backstory from our online interactions. I met the author and webmaster of Hoagies Gifted page who was also a board member for The TAG Project at a time when the founder was trying to turn it into a tax deductible registered charity, an effort later abandoned. Long story short, I was something of an insider at one time and had insider information. I'm not an insider anymore and haven't been in years and when I try to look up stuff online to support statements I once understood to be common knowledge, I frequently cannot find any supporting citations. In 1904, Binet took part in a commission set up by the French Ministry of Education to decide whether sc...

My mother was a German immigrant. When I was maybe ten or twelve, she told me her mother's maiden name started with  von . It clearly was a big deal to her. I could tell by how she said it.  It meant absolutely nothing whatsoever to me. I was born and raised in the US. I barely know any German. My mother didn't want to teach me. I lived in Germany briefly as a toddler. I have no memory of it. Von  means from.  As part of a German surname, it's a signifier of being a member of a noble family or of noble lineage. [1] In the US, we don't even HAVE that culturally as part of our social landscape. There's ZERO American equivalent for what that meant to my mother. Maybe some Brits would get it or kind of get it or think they did. Maybe if I had grown up in England I could have gone "Oh, she was a lady  or something very similar to that!" and have some kind of context for what that might mean to my maternal grandmother's children and their social experiences ...

I recently read this amusing story and refrained from replying because I'm just not up for figuring out how to engage with it on Reddit. I'm so sick of people acting like I'm trying to steal the show or my remark is otherwise somehow wildly inappropriate. But I laughed at the story because I've joked for years about "back when I had a pet dinosaur and rotary phone." That joke is rooted in human psychology, especially child psychology. From the perspective of my children when they were little, BOTH rotary phones and dinosaurs were equally "prehistoric" because it's before THEIR lifetimes. These days, they know better. But as small children, anything before their time was psychologically in one vast undifferentiated bucket. That joke is also sort of a Flintstones reference and subtext for "I grew up in a bass ackwards time and place socially." I had a 1950s style marriage in spite of being one of the top three students of my graduating h...