LETTERS

SUPER KID STANDOFF

IT SEEMS to Mary Candace Evans that the way to raise a super kid (“Jr. Achievers,” August) is simply to pipe stereo music into his/her nursery, buy him/her $250 outfits from a shop in New Orleans, and get the kid into lots of activities at Hockaday, St. Marks, or Greenhill so that he/she will be “acceptable to an Ivy League school.”

I suspect that most super kids from Dallas had none of the above. On the other hand, Ms. Evans devotes about one paragraph to the importance of a secure and loving family. I agree with the author that environment can be influential in a child’s development. However, I think that if we devoted more time, energy, and imagination into creating a good family and toward building confidence and high self-esteem in our kids, we’d have more super kids.. .whatever that means. It sounds like a super kid to Ms. Evans is one who gets into an Ivy League school. I personally think a super kid is one who is loving, humane, and capable of creating a successful life for him/herself not only in material terms, but also in human terms.

Betty Baxt Hirsch

Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania



I DIDN’T KNOW whether to laugh or cry as I read “Jr. Achievers.” Sentences such as “Super kids can’t be planned. They just seem to happen” have been coming out of my mother’s mouth for almost two decades. Except that private elementary and prep schools are generally considered pretentious in Oregon, my brothers and I were raised according to the prescription in Evans’ article. Result: two average boys who barely escaped from high school in the usual amount of time and one “super kid.” My parents will probably never understand why they didn’t get three over-achievers.

There is one very important aspect of the super kid question Evans failed to mention: What it’s really like to be a super kid. It is awful. I know; I’ve been one for 20 years now. Once a child becomes a super kid, nobody knows how to treat him anymore. He becomes a circus freak. A super kid can be amazing, intimidating, or entertaining; he can be respected or even admired, but he is often not liked and rarely accepted. It’s impossible to think of him as “just one of the guys.” Face it, a kid who skips a grade and still ranks sixth in his class, holds a student government office, plays three musical instruments, speaks three languages, is a local stage and television performer, and does the family cooking and cleaning is not just like everybody else in the ninth grade. Right?

Wrong. Everybody likes to be successful, but, a few hermits notwithstanding, the need to be accepted is more universal. In American society, being accepted means being part of some group. I have only felt truly comfortable in one group in my life, and that was with the cast of a play that eventually closed. Other super kids I know feel the same way. When it comes down to the bottom line, the people who live in the pages of Shakespeare and Schiller, Flaubert and Faulkner, or Cervantes and Chekhov, are no more interesting or satisfying than those who live in one’s apartment complex, work at one’s office, or shop at the neighborhood Safeway.

So parents, before drawing up the blueprints for your own junior achiever, ask yourselves if a 1460 on the SAT is worth having teachers and students alike quail before your child’s intellect (it’s not). If you don’t, while you’re out bragging to your friends that your kid was accepted to Yale, he may be deciding on SMU – or someplace else-because the people he met there treated him like a super kid instead of a Super kid.

My advice is a little different from Evans’: Give your child all those things if you really want to (although I still think private schools are silly), and yes, encourage your child to succeed, and yes, please love him. But two more things: Be sure to show him that everyone is special and show him that he is special, not because he’s a super kid, but just because he’s your kid.

Kurt-Alexander Zeller

Dallas



TESTING TEACHERS

AT LAST the truth is revealed. You are to be commended for exposing some facts in the July “Insights” that, as yet, have not entered the consciousness of the general public. Many people are under the impression that teachers have a relatively easy job and are reasonably compensated. It was refreshing to see in print, in a magazine of your caliber, that starting teachers should earn $16,000 to $18,000.

Obviously, you have done your homework well when it comes to the school budget. If only the public was aware that there is one administrative type for every three teachers in the DISD. Any corporate structure would be doomed to bankruptcy with such a ratio. As you correctly point out, the money is already present for better salaries, but in the wrong place.

I also wholeheartedly agree with you and Harley Hiscox in calling for a teacher test that would insure that only highly qualified people be hired as teachers. As a transplanted New York City teacher, I am able to speak from some experience in this matter. To obtain my NYC teaching license, I had to pass both a written test dealing with my subject matter and an oral test, which consisted of presenting a lesson to a panel of three principals. Needless to say, there are very few, if any, semiliterate teachers in NYC. In contrast, when I sought employment in Dallas, I was given a test consisting of word analogies and simple math questions. Since 1 am a history teacher, 1 have yet to understand the rationale for such a test.

There was only one point to which 1 took exception, and that was your support for and apparent admiration of Linus Wright. Granted, he has adopted one or two measures that may improve the quality of education. The fact remains, however, that he is primarily a bookkeeper, concerned with numbers. He worries about test scores, but refuses to push for higher salaries, which would result in better teachers and thus, higher scores. He is worried about the budget figures, but refuses to realign his budgetary priorities in favor of the classroom and away from the paper-pushing administrators that surround him.

Jim Capizzi

Garland



THE BLACK ISSUE

I FOUND IT interesting that Lou Ann Lee, your “stereotypical black welfare mother” (“The Invisible Man,” June) gets angry whenever she thinks about Reagan in the White House eating steak. It wasn’t Reagan who told her to cheat on her husband and become pregnant by another man. It wasn’t the President who advised her to have a third -and then, incredibly – a fourth child, all while she was jobless and living with an alcoholic who beat her.

It is people like Lou Ann, black and white, who make me angry. No one who is jobless has the right to bring three or four or five children into this world – and then complain because her welfare check isn’t big enough.

Lou Ann says, “Tell your readers I’m no dummy.” I beg to differ. She has no more common sense than a rabbit. When will people like Lou Ann realize that to stop their vicious legacy of poverty they have got to stop having so many children? She is quite correct when she says that love doesn’t pay the bills or put shoes on the children’s feet. She should have thought about that before she gave her love so freely.

Linda Davis

Los Angeles, California



RADIO MADNESS

THANKS SO MUCH for the space in your article! It’s one of the few articles I’ve read about our industry in which a non-radioite made sense of the madness we’ve chosen as our profession.

Christopher Haze

Program Director

KEGL



IN DEFENSE OF THE PROSECUTION

I READ with interest the fine article on the accomplishments of Henry Wade (“The Prosecution Can’t Rest,” July). 1 am pleased to see a fellow prosecutor get deserved recognition for his many achievements. I would like to point out, however, that the acquittal rate in Tarrant County in 1980 was only 7 per cent of the cases tried to juries and not the 20 per cent that was referred to in your article. I am also confident that a check of the records would reflect that there is less of a backlog of cases in Tarrant County than there is in Dallas. I bring these corrections to your attention not to diminish the praise Mr. Wade deserves, but in the interest of accurate journalism.

Tim Curry

Criminal District Attorney

Tarrant County