Like Grandmother, Like Mother, Like Teen

Three generations of an Evanston family have enriched—and been enriched by—CTD

By Ed Finkel

Marsha Landau has spent the past three decades teaching mathematics and serving as a mentor to gifted children, and the last 21 of those years as a volunteer at Providence-St. Mel School on Chicago’s West Side, an institution that sends all its graduates to four-year colleges and universities.

Her daughter, Victoria, is currently a stay-at-home mother and elder caregiver—part of “the sandwich generation,” she says. In the past, Victoria has done marketing and advertising work, served as an assistant online editor for Encyclopedia Britannica, and—after getting a second bachelor’s degree in biological sciences—as a population scientist at Brookfield Zoo, and then full-time zookeeper at Lincoln Park Zoo.

Victoria’s child, Siobhan, just graduated from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School in Evanston, and will be a freshman at Evanston Township High School in the fall.

What all three have in common—aside from bloodline, genetics, and, as becomes quickly apparent on a joint Zoom call, a humorous and loving rapport—are ties to and fond memories of the Center for Talent Development. 

Marsha has taught math and problem-solving courses and led workshops for parents on Saturdays when their kids were taking CTD enrichment courses. Victoria attended the program’s early years in the 1980s and later worked as a teaching assistant during college summers. Siobhan has been a student in a wide variety of enrichment classes for the past several years.

“It’s nice to have this shared experience, and to see how things have changed over the years,” Marsha says. “As a teacher, it was very exciting for me, to have students who were always with it. … What I enjoyed about those parent workshops was that I could share my enthusiasm for mathematics, but also my experiences as a parent of a gifted kid, and what the issues are that they are dealing with.”

Having been through CTD courses herself, Victoria has reveled in knowing what she’s passing down to Siobhan. “My mom and I were almost co-creating what it’s meant for us,” she says. “I know that for Siobhan, it’s an opportunity to learn a thing that’s not normally available, and it’s an opportunity to find a cohort that you’d have to dig around to know—who are the people who are like me, who are intellectually curious about this, that, and this completely other thing?”

Siobhan is taking an architecture course this summer similar to one their mother took back in the day and was able to personally and heartily endorse. “They know what’s happening,” Siobhan says of their mother and grandmother. “I think it will help me with my art, being able to draw buildings and understand buildings.”

Marsha says that for her, an important part of being connected with CTD has been the people she’s met and had a chance to work with. “Paula [Olszewski-Kubilius, CTD’s director] and I have been friends now for more than 40 years,” she says. “That first summer when I was teaching pre-calc, my teaching assistant was Amy Wilkinson, and she is now a professor of mathematics at University of Chicago. … To have contacts with people who were intellectually stimulating, and also fun to be with, was one of the great benefits.”

Victoria’s first experience came as a Latin student in the program’s first summer, after she completed fifth grade. “I remember thinking it was the best three weeks I had spent in my life, in a really-not-air-conditioned room in Harris Hall, learning Latin,” she says. “We had a toga party, and it was just fantastic. I hadn’t experienced that kind of joy or challenge in my classrooms before.”

After taking Latin 1 and Latin 2, Victoria went on to learn computer coding in the 1980s-era language Pascal and took an archaeology class that involved excavations at former Native American sites along the Fox River—where she found a 4½-inch-long projectile point—as well as the aforementioned architecture course, and AP Language and Composition. She was a teaching assistant in literary analysis, creative writing, and AP Physics. 

“It was great to have those opportunities of helping in a classroom, because I think it’s made me a much better parent of a kid who’s studying things that are just unexpected,” Victoria says of Siobhan.

Among Siobhan’s favorite courses over the years have been a fantasy writing class delivered over Zoom in 2020, a forensics class from several years ago that involved analyzing DNA from fingerprints and blood and even “lipstick prints,” and a fabrication class that included “really cool hands-on projects,” like making a functioning machine out of cardboard and circuits.

They’ve purposely chosen enrichment rather than acceleration courses, knowing that Evanston high school will provide a wide range of the latter, Victoria says. “What we’ve really wanted for Siobhan is just the ability to learn about something that isn’t available through the usual means,” she says. “You really have to find something truly weird that you’re interested in to get enriched. … I felt like it helped me find a way to be the parts of myself that other people might call ‘nerdy,’ in a way that was really fulfilling.”

Victoria recalls science courses that Siobhan took as a youngster, “classes in biology, and chemistry, and physics, and you were throwing things down stairwells, and dissecting fish. Remember those?” she asks.

“Yes, I remember the fish,” Siobhan answers. “I don’t even remember what course that was, but I remember the fish.”