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Many of you are familiar with some of my writing on early childhood education. Here, someone I’ve chatted with explains at some length her process for helping her children acquire absolute pitch. This is something possible for almost everyone during a narrow window of time; it and similar time-sensitive skills are worth serious consideration if you are a parent of a young child.
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My reaction to this is "that's nice, dear" but I honestly don't see the applicability, unless it's meant to be "growth mindset! grit! you can if you think you can!" notion of "mould your kids early into the genius, athletic, attractive, popular kids you want".
What's the purpose of acquiring absolute pitch? One kid seems to be talented for music, at least at this early stage, but he could still have been musically talented without absolute pitch. I found it to be a humblebrag: "oh yes, my trilingual kids learning Mandarin and composing their own music because of absolute pitch which I taught them to acquire".
Well that's nice dear, now are you going to tell us next about how they're whole-food organic vegan eco-warriors inventing the next AI advance to save the planet from climate change, all before the age of twelve?
EDIT: I realise the above sounds churlish, and I'm delighted that children get the chance to be exposed to an entire range of non-conventional educational attainments, but at the same time that piece does veer too near, for my comfort, to the "you can make your baby genius success for life" notion of what kids are for. Tiger moms are not the kind of role model I think we need.
"Oh, so you taught your child to read. That's nice, dear, but I honestly don't see the applicability of something like literacy. Sounds like a humble brag to me."
The above is approximately how your comment sounds to me. A kid might be talented at something even if he remains illiterate his whole life, but there are most likely multiple things related to the talent that become easier, quicker or even possible in the first place through learning to read and write.
You can probably do most of what people with absolute pitch do by learning to identify pitches relatively, but for some reason it seems that developing this so called "relative pitch" takes a lot of effort, but absolute pitch kind of builds momentum and just grows on its own once you get it started.
I think there might be some kind of fear of inequality behind a lot of the dismissals of absolute pitch, such as there were on hacker news commenting this same blog post. I think the idea of some people being in a completely different category and having an advantage due to it is terrifying to many people, and a way to cope with the terror is to dismiss the existence of such advantage.
Teaching your kids to read is helpful in today's world. Humblebragging about your trilingual kids who have perfect pitch is a bit much. How does it help them? Are they planning to be concert pianists when they grow up? I mean, it's nice to have, but it's more on the lines of "I can wiggle my ears" than "I am not illiterate in today's printed word society".
And yet it is curious how you consider it bragging while simultaneously claiming that you place very little value on the thing being bragged about. If the blog post was about a parent teaching their child to wiggle their ears, would you be commenting about how we don't need tiger moms forcing their children to become geniuses that accomplish great things such as being able to wiggle their ears?
One more thing...
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
Bragging is when you say something positive about yourself. Humble bragging is when you say something negative about yourself, but at the same time reveal things that make it possible for other people to infer some positive thing about yourself. Do you think the blog post we are discussing really is humble bragging, or is it just bragging?
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