After five and a half years of sort of jokingly saying it and making my own private comic book mythology around it, the kid apparently really is some sort of genius, with an entirely objective outsider saying it too. Uh-oh. Here’s where it begins: An origin-story moment of discovery in the portrait of a young superhero.

I’ll try not to make too much of it, because ultimately I think it mostly came down to some simple numbers: Too many Kindergartners, not enough First Graders, a couple of wiz kids somewhere in between to make up the difference, my superhero son seeping some sort of radiation like a sieve during an early assessment process while the school worked to sort it all out. But I really did get that phone call from the principal, the one I’d been dreaming of and anticipating and partially dreading, the one that starts out, “We’ve been very impressed with your son’s performance in the first days of school and would like to discuss something unorthodox with you. We feel he is ready for a challenge…” Seriously? Does even the principal of my neighborhood public elementary school read The X-Men? This is straight from a comic book script, Charles Xavier broaching a sensitive subject with the parents of young Jean Grey and bearing brochures advertising his school for mutants.

I bounced this second-day-of-school phone call story by my friend Julia, a superhero spilling secrets as an aspiring comic book writer out in Los Angeles, and she wrote back, “Oh, crap. His powers are showing early. Hopefully he'll keep it real."

 

“Oh, crap” indeed. Were John and Martha Kent right to keep their Kryptonian son’s secret? Should Dr. John and Elaine Grey have trusted that well-dressed bald guy in the wheelchair with the education of their dangerous daughter? What good or evil might spring from this development?

Digression: My folks got some similar call when I was not much older than my son is now, and I subsequently spent a good portion of my elementary school years in a Gifted and Talented program within my public elementary school. The assortment of nerds and nerdettes I traveled with in this pack became some of my best friends for life, our superhero lives of educational privilege preordained from some 1st or 2nd Grade assessments, an early welcome to the Brave New World. It is true that my best memories from elementary school come from the creative enrichment projects we worked on in the “GT” program; and also true that most of my other school memories from the general-ed classroom involve being literally bored to tears, distracting myself by capturing a single drop between my eyelashes and squinting to refract the ceiling lights into galaxies of star shapes through the lens of the tear. Seriously: That’s the thing I remember. “My God, it’s full of stars.”

Never mind that whatever ways I might have been superheroically “gifted” or “talented” – soaking up books by osmosis, some early skills as a writer, dynamic daydreaming, gymnastic contortions, uncanny abilities to persuade a skateboard to do my bidding in largely underappreciated ways – obfuscated my superheroic disabilities in, say, basic mathematics. To every Kent his Kryptonite: Woe, when I look at my villainous credit card statements or profoundly unbalanced checkbook. If only I’d spent less time studying the stars in that solitary tear of boredom during those elementary math classes!

Another digression: I’ve mentioned here before that I once worked for five years as a high school teacher. It was in an impressive inner-city school, about which I should some day write a book, and this was paramount: We abhorred “tracking,” in theory, if not entirely in practice. A huge percentage of my students had special education IEPs, a huge percentage of them might also have been diagnosed as gifted and talented early on if their schools had been doling out such diagnoses, and it was regarded as a given, at least by me, that there would be tremendous Venn diagram overlap between the two and that they therefore ought to all be taught as such. I should totally be running a school, right?

Ah, schooling. Some of my closest friends and parental heroes are way deep in the unschooling movement; many others are public school teachers themselves and swearing by them for their own kids. Barring some future invitation and a scholarship offer from Charles Xavier, I’m going the public school route for my superheroes – for the same reason John and Martha bought Clark eyeglasses and sent him to Smallville Elementary – and then supplementing in any way I can back home at Action Academy, where Kal-A!dan’s superhero sis The Precocious Pre-K Princess is cooking up some genius of her own in Situation Room rehearsals for her debut appearance in a future issue from next year’s volume of The Kindergarten Crusader.

Anybody have one of those Fortress Of Solitude-sprouting crystals to spare so I can throw it in some ice somewhere, hand my young superheroes all the secrets of the universe, and skip the messy parts inherent in Earthling education? I’m winging it over here.

– Colin Bane

P.S. We took the principal up on her offer. Newly accelerated tales of adventure from the Kindergarten Crusader will be forthcoming.