What's the opposite of mathy?

This post was supposed to be titled, "Mathy kids vs. ______ kids," only I couldn't think of what to put in the blank. Wordy? Literary? Language artsy? Anyway. When my husband, Dave, was in elementary school, they had to create a special math class for him and one other kid, so uber mathy was he. He spent the summer after his sophomore year teaching himself trig so that he could take Calculus his junior year (which he now remembers as something of a misstep since that meant there was no math for him to take his senior year). He majored in math. He is now a math teacher, after a few years' sojourn into the equally geeky world of web programming. We have an enormous "mathlete" trophy in our basement, reminder of his glory days on the math team. He went to math camp at BU the summer he was 16. What I'm getting at is that my husband is undeniably mathy. His father is a number theorist at Dartmouth, so one might reasonably surmise that there is some kind of genetic component to this mathiness of his.

I put "English" down as my intended major on my college application and never wavered (okay, there was that brief period when I flirted with switching to journalism...until I wrote for the college paper for a couple of months and realized that my crippling fear of chatting with strangers might get in the way of a journalism career). After college, I started an English ph.D. program because, well, what else was I going to do? I never won any trophies for literary analysis, but I did win the feminist colloquium prize one year for a paper I wrote on elements of masquerade in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague. The prize was $100, which didn't last nearly as long as Dave's trophy has.

To sum up, there's really no getting around it: Dave is mathy, and I am...the opposite. No one could try to claim otherwise. Our SAT and GRE verbal and quantitative scores are nearly mirror images of each other. I was not terrible at math in school (I somehow managed to win the physics prize my senior year of high school, in fact. I think this was largely because I was one of the only people who bothered to study for the tests), but my ill-conceived attempt at Calculus in college lasted only a week before I fled to statistics. Dave took and did reasonably well in AP English. But it's pretty clear where our respective strengths lie.

When we had kids, I sort of assumed that things would be equally clear cut for them. Some of our kids would ask for slide rules for their fourth birthdays; others would toddle off to bed snuggling up with a copy of The Collected Poems of WB Yeats (okay, neither Dave nor I did these things when we were little; but perhaps the mathy/wordy genes would intensify in subsequent generations). But then we got Ari, and one of the things Ari is best at is keeping people guessing.

When Ari was 4 and 5, we'd find elaborate sheets of numbers all over the house, playing with all sorts of patterns, experimenting with negative numbers. He liked to take a calculator to the bathroom with him to entertain himself. "Ah ha!" we thought, "he's just like his Dad!" But then he learned to read early. He memorized nursery rhymed easily and eagerly. Maybe he was more like me after all. I figured time would tell, but, so far, it hasn't. Some years Ari will tell you his favorite subject is math; other years it's reading. It's never been writing, but only because he doesn't like doing assigned writing. He already has an impressive library of original stories and novels filed away in his room. I just started to write a sentence about how if I absolutely had to guess, I'd say Ari would end up leaning more toward....and then I realized I couldn't finish the sentence. I absolutely have no idea.

The other kids are not much easier to categorize. Right now Milo's toughest area is math, but last year he was struggling with reading. This year his reading has progressed to the point where I don't think I could tell the difference between 7 year old Ari's reading ability and 7 year old Milo's, even though Ari got a 2 year or so head start. Maybe next year the same leap will happen with math? And Gus is not quite 5, so I won't even try to stuff him into any boxes at this point. He's determined to do absolutely everything as well as his big brothers do, and I'm pretty sure there's not anything he can't be good at.

So then, here's the question: is it that my kids simply aren't as easy to categorize as Dave and I were? Are their interests and talents broader? Instead of getting some mathy and some languagy kids, did we get a messy soup of both when we mixed our genes together?

Or is it that mathy and....not-mathy are not quite the neat categories that they might seem to be? Maybe there is something in the human or societal need to categorize that makes parents/teachers/etc. subconsciously push kids toward math/science or language/humanities. I remember as I was going into 8th grade, that kids were discouraged from taking all honors classes. We were supposed to pick either social studies and English or math and science. I had a high enough score on my math placement test to take algebra, but my teacher didn't recommend me for it, so I didn't take it.

Maybe what I'm seeing with my kids is in some ways a by-product of homeschooling and of the kind of ultra-flexibility that homeschooling offers. Maybe is has to do with my kids being the product of one math focused parent and one language focused parent: we didn't know which way they might turn out and weren't assuming anything (although we both come from families with "one of each"...my brother is a computer engineer, and Dave's sister majored in comparative lit), so our sub consciences couldn't steer them in a particular direction, because they didn't know which way to steer.

Separated from a need to pick a major or choose which honors track to take, mathy and languagy don't look quite so far apart. I took an online quiz awhile back (long after I'd graduated from college) telling me what my major should be. I got math. This might be a sign that one should not make big life decisions based on online quiz results, but it might also be that my approach to literature is, actually, a little more mathy than most. My personal statement for my grad school application actually, somewhat clumsily, made an analogy between computer repair and literary analysis: "we take books apart to see how they work," I wrote. So if Ari's mind appears, on the surface, to have a mathematical bent, and if it's clear that he's drawn to concrete answers and finding patterns in things, I'm hesitant to assume that this way of thinking must necessarily be channeled into engineering or computer programming or medicine. Nor that Milo's waaayyy out of the box perspective on things dooms him to a future as an unemployable philosophy major.

On the other hand, two of my three kids are Geminis. So maybe that's all it is.

And you? Could you tell from the cradle that your kid was going to be a mathlete or a precocious young novelist? Or do you have a Gemini, too?