How to raise a prodigy?
In our youth, our parents would tell us that children were found inside cabbages. A beautiful, fluffy head of cabbage produces a good child – pretty, obedient, talented, who gets good grades and even plays the violin. A worse head of cabbage and the child is not so great: a mediocre student, red-haired, pugnacious, and chases a ball around from morning to night, leaving no pair of pants unscathed. Jokes. These are jokes – but every time my friend Galya visits me, she begins the conversations with complaints about her daughter – impertinent, willful, and stubborn. Her school work is haphazardly done. In Russia, she went to music school, played the piano and even performed on a children’s program. Here, her studies are pushed to the side; she isn’t interested in anything, doesn’t read, stares into the T.V. and eats chips. Galina’s daughter is 10 years old. She’s not even 15 – only 10. From my perspective, the child is a child. I haven’t noticed any specific manifestations of meanness in
