Here’s a safe bet: If you’re the parent of a middle schooler, you probably don’t share Alice Gustafson’s concern that your child might need a little more experience playing video games.
To be sure, it’s far from the Oak Park mother’s chief concern, but she sometimes wonders if her 10-year-old could be, well, a bit more well-rounded.
“So that he doesn’t isolate himself and not want to play — like, ‘Oh, I’m above it,’” Gustafson said.
It’s also possible Yael’s opinion that video games are “no challenge” and that they “rot your brain” wouldn’t go down too well with some kids his age.
But Yael, who is going into fifth grade at Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park, is hardly antisocial. Last month, he stood on a stage in Washington, D.C. and recited a speech by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass — from memory — a performance that earned Yael first place in one of two elementary-school categories in the U.S. National Park Service’s most recent annual oratorical contest.
His delivery is urgent but never bombastic, indignant but never shrill.
“There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour,” he said, standing on the front steps of the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, reciting the abolitionist’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech delivered originally in 1852.
Yael is, by any measure, an extraordinary kid. He was reciting Langston Hughes poems by heart at age 2, according to his mom.
“He could tell you all of the presidents,” Alice Gustafson said, at the family home in Oak Park. Yael jumps in to add context. “There were some things that I knew as a baby that I don’t know right now,” he said.
There’s a lot of back and forth between mother and son.
“It’s less disagreeing than more just sharing our different opinions. It’s not necessarily arguing,” Yael said.
Yael talks a mile a minute and, at the slightest suggestion, is delighted to show a visitor his collected art projects, various short stories and novellas.
Right now, he’s deeply into “The Mysterious Benedict Society” books by Trenton Lee Stewart, a series of middle-grade novels that feature a group of super-brainy orphans who are sent on spy missions.
Before he read the books, Yael watched the now-canceled TV show.
“I had really high expectations for the [first] book. It’s one of the few things where the book isn’t as good,” Yael said.
Talking to Yael, it’s easy to forget he’s only 10. Occasionally though, his wrinkle-free brows knit when someone mentions, say, an obsolete technology from another era.
Rose Coll was Yael’s second grade teacher at Francis Parker. She remembers the “magic” he would conjure in the classroom.
“His stories were these supernatural mysteries and they always ended on a cliffhanger. He was beaming watching us reading it and he’d say, ‘You have to wait for the next book!” Coll recalled.
Besides devouring books and writing his own, Yael also plays the drums, enjoys making menus in English and Spanish and hand-drawn versions of “Chutes and Ladders.” He also makes his own playing cards.
Does he ever find time to relax?
“I am not a person who enjoys sleeping. That’s my least favorite part of the night,” he said.
His parents aren’t overly concerned that his intellectual appetite might lead him to places they’d prefer he not go.
“He doesn’t like violence. … He doesn’t really push the boundaries on that. It’s more like trying to find that right combination of challenge and age appropriate,” said his father, Tim.
When chatting with a kid this smart, the conversation inevitably winds toward his future.
Has he thought about college?
Oxford, a key setting for Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” novels, comes up.
“That’s our dream,” his mother said in a hushed voice.
“That’s where she wants me to go college,” Yael said.
And where would he like to go?
“I have no idea,” he said.
No hesitation, though, on his future life path: “The primary one is definitely a published author. My original answer for that was, ‘an author,’ but I’m an author now. … I also want to study world music.”
For now, though, he’s considering what he’d like to do for his upcoming 11th birthday.
Maybe organize a junior Jeopardy-like tournament? Or do a reading of his latest novel?
“A bowling birthday party probably, which we haven’t done before,” he said.