Slashdot Mirror
The Prodigy Puzzle
theodp writes "Once neglected, the NY Times reports that America's smartest children have become the beneficiaries of a well-organized effort to recognize their gifts and develop their talent. Programs like those offered by the Davidson Institute, run by Bob and Jan Davidson of Math and Reading Blaster fame, have sprung up to nurture the intellectual development of profoundly intelligent young people. But do we know how to identify the child whose brilliance might change the world? And do we really want to?"
I was one of those gifted kids (nothing exceptional, just precocious). I found school itself rather accommodating. For the most part, I was either giving more challenging work or simply challenged myself. The real issues I had were dealing with peers. I simply could not relate to anyone my age as they were all interested in mentally unstimulating things. Of course, I have adjusted in my adult years and now get along with just about anyone, but I wish I had had more like me growing up. Finding things ridiculously easy did have its effects. Until I went on to post secondary education, I had a great deal of hubris. Not having needed any studying skills for the very relaxed pace in high school, I was quickly blown by by those who high school was geared for. Of course, I could have done the work, but didn't. I am not blaming the system, but I think the system could use adjustment. Smart kids are definitely left out.
Be relentless!
Yeah, but personally I think the whole thing about "gifted kids being underserved" is overblown. Fact is, smart kids will generally do quite well for themselves - that's the advantage of being smart. Those who are also ambitious will do great things - but I don't think ambition is something that any kind of "gifted" program can really inculcate.
But of course, I'm an unambitious bright guy who hasn't really accomplished anything (but has used his smarts to enable his extraordinary laziness), so what do I know?
I'm posting anon so no one can claim I'm bragging. My IQ was pegged at 176 when I was 5. This was enough to get me a scholarship to a private school. By the time I was 8, I'd not done well enough in the private school to keep the scholarship and transferred to publich school, which was no better, despite scoring 188 on another IQ test. Why? Because despite the better curriculum, there was still the cookie-cutter, assembly-line, mass-production mentality of teaching: "All kids are the same, churn them through the machine, no one needs special treatment." And that's not true. Really smart kids need special attention just like kids with learning disabilities or mental handicaps. Later in my school career, I did manage to find some teachers who recognized different kids perform differently, and with some adjustment, I wound up with 100+% scores at year's end.
With the proper attention paid to these smart kids' needs, we can help their brilliance flourish, and we WILL find ourselves in a better world for it. I knwo my life would have been significantly different had the proper resources been spent on my development. Not every kid grows up with two rich parents who can spend the amount of time/money to tailor an academic curriculum to their kids.
Hell, in general the US could use a major overhaul of the educational system. It's way too focused on conformity and process than on results.
It is a good thing we have ritalin to fix them.
I have AD(H)D, and I take Concerta (time-release Ritalin) because it lets me focus on things long enough to actually get them done. It hasn't made me less creative, or less odd, just less flakey.
I'm an adult, and I never tried it when I was a kid. But I wish I'd had the opportunity to, because I know I would have done a lot better in school. It's what let me focus enough to work with math, finally =).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Your IQ has probably stayed about the same. Children are usually given a version of the Stanford-Binet test which tops out at around 170 with a standard deviation of 16. Adults usually take a version of the WAIS which has an SD of 15 and tops out at 155.
I've given hundreds of IQ tests and this experience has led me to the conclusion that scores above about 140 are fairly meaningless. I don't think you need to be worried about a 'frusterating loss'.
Also, IQ tests tend to weigh short and long term memory and duration of concentration very highly, while not really measuring complex analytical ability. It's not just the horsepower, is how you drive the car.
Both of my level whatever boys have gained from participation in their respective gifted programs. One displayed the hubris mentioned earlier, and became quite lazy due to never being challenged. It was a good awakening for him to interact with other talented kids doing more difficult problems. The other spent all of second grade being mostly playfully teased that he was the smartest kid in the class; now that he spends some time with kids who are even smarter than himself, he's feeling much more at home in his own skin. Plus, his MO occasionally includes some off-nominal behaviors and lots and lots of intense energy. Prior to his entrance into the gifted program, the early teachers just wanted to get him into special ed and drug him up. Now he is accepted and is loving school. Benefit to society? Probably not, just happier, more engaged kids.
Non-sequitur. Most world-changing is done by loud, charismatic jackasses of only average-plus intelligence. Those few world-changers who make great scientific discoveries aren't generally super-ultra genius material, but rather tend to be the hard-working, driven variety of the more common "lesser" genius. "Super-genius" people tend to not be able to apply themselves at education to build a knowledge base from which to make such discoveries.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
He's speaking in general, and I agree with him. My biggest problem with school is that it was all just so incredibly boring that I gave up. I tested to have an IQ of 186, but have trouble in classes because I can't bring myself to do the incredibly repetitive homework when I've learned it by watching the teacher do it once. I've found that this is generally true of people with very high IQs, though not always. When you spend 12 years doing something that is neither interesting nor challenging to you, yeah, you tend to just stop caring. In fact, that's the reason I'm taking a year off of college. I need some time to refresh and prepare myself to continue this. I go to a very good and "difficult" tech school (University of Texas at Dallas, easily the best tech school in Texas and the surrounding states), and after my second year of college, I've yet to take a class that actually challenges me, so I'm having hte same problems. The best I ever did in school was the year my teacher just let me take the tests at the beginning of each unit and spend the rest of my time reading. I got straight As that year. And, in case you're wondering, I never got moved ahead a grade because of my bad grades. Ironic, I think. Medication helped me to actually do my work, but it wasn't worth it to me to change my personality (which it did... drastically and definitely for the worse) for my grades. You know something's wrong with your schooling system when it sucks the life and motivation out of the brightest kids.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
I've heard more intelligent and original discussion over trucker band cb radio. :)
I've got an uncle who was a trucker for 40 years and his IQ is off the charts...
Then again you probably wouldn't have heard much from him on the CB, he always said he liked trucking because it was the only job where 99% of the time he didn't have to talk to anybody!
When I was 13, I had a choice: I could either stay in high school, or I could drop out in order to attend university full-time. I decided to stay in high school -- which is to say that my time was divided roughly equally between high school and university mathematics courses -- and I think this is one of the best decisions I ever made. Over the following four years, I learned far more at high school than I did at university, and while I ended up graduating from university at age 19 instead of age 17, I came out knowing vastly more.
No, I'm not going to talk about the merits of a well-rounded education, or the benefits of socialization. Over those four years when I split my time between high school and university, I learned far more mathematics at high school than at university. What very few people understand is that smart people learn as much by thinking as they do by being taught. By spending half of my time in a completely unchallenging environment, I was (albeit not by design) allowing myself the time I needed to discover mathematics on my own which went far beyond the undergraduate curriculum.
If my parents had pushed me into studying full-time at university, I'd have finished at age 17 with a 4.0 GPA, but I wouldn't have become a Putnam fellow, calculated the quadrillionth bit of pi, discovered a new algorithm for polynomial GCDs over number fields, published research concerning floating-point rounding errors in the FFT, or developed any of the ideas which have become central to my ongoing research. Aside from being a few years younger than average, I would have turned into a completely normal mathematics honours student.
Obviously, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with a 1st class honours degree in mathematics; but in terms of changing the world, a 19 year old doing brilliant research is a far better position than a 17 year old who knows the undergraduate curriculum but has never had to think for himself.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Bitter much?
I never had any trouble entertaining myself in school. The trouble I had was stopping entertaining myself and actually doing what someone else expected of me, especially if it was way below my challenge level.
I'll never forget the day I had a sub for math in fourth grade, and when I asked to get my workbook (which was 5th grade level) to work from instead of doing the (stupid) worksheet she'd handed out, she took an attitude with me. So I tossed it right back, and told her the recent results of the IQ test they'd put me through. "Oh! Well you ought to be able to finish this in no time then!" she said, tossing the worksheet back at me.
Guess what? Tedious is tedious. If it's also difficult, then at least there's some thrill of accomplishment, but how many of you do long division for fun just to prove you can these days? I created an impressive doodle on the margin of the paper, and didn't do a single problem. Why should I? The teacher wasn't going to look for my worksheet when she got back, because I wasn't supposed to be in that class. And to this day, I still remember the total lack of respect I had for that sub, who obviously didn't think that it was important for me to actually learn anything.
No, it's not a child's job to both (a) do the tedious busywork the teacher expects them to do and simultaneously (b) come up with their own challenging and fun projects to work on. We have teachers for a reason... because raw intelligence doesn't do you any good without some education. In fact, some careful studies have found that you actually gain IQ from formal education (or lose it by missing out). To control for self-selection bias, they studied the effects of multi-year school closures in a few places, due to disease outbreaks or fear of desegregation. The difference is small, but significant.... I think it totaled to about 10 IQ points over 12 years of school. (Source: What's Going On In There , by Lise Eliot.)
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I spent a year teaching in college, and I have to say that one of the most difficult things to do is pick a good target when teaching. If you teach to the top 10% then the rest of the class suffers, and the same is true when you teach to the bottom 10%. The problem is greatest at the entry level, where you have everyone from the student who thinks that maybe they'd like to learn how to program a computer all the way up to the kids who have been coding since they were ten years old and know at least six computer languages. My solution, which some might criticize, was to target something around the top 25%. My goal was to keep the class exciting for those who understood the material, and to use those students who picked up the material quickly to help the others along. To some degree it worked, but I also failed nearly 1/3 of the students in my very first class. I suspect that most of them never had the heart for it anyway, but you always wonder about those few students who may have succeeded had the class not been so tough.
When you spend 12 years doing something that is neither interesting nor challenging to you, yeah, you tend to just stop caring.
Or maybe you just got lazy. At the end of the day, there are plenty of things that a kid can do to keep themselves occupied. In math class, I used to go to the end of the book and do problems that I knew we'd never get to in class. Then I'd visit the teacher after class to verify my answers. It was a great way for me to send the message that I was bored. It never changed anything, and after a while I also became lazy, but I really could have kept myself challenged if I wanted. When I was teaching I always used my assignments as a "minimum" for my students. I'd say something like "Here's what I want you to do, but if you do more then that's great. I'll look over the code, but you don't get any extra credit. In fact, if you screw up the original assignment then your grade will go down. I want you to do more because you want to, for the pure enjoyment." I often had students take me up on the offer, and I think that they benefited from the exercise. Often, I think recognition of work that's well done is more of an incentive to a student than getting a good grade.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
It's Thanksgiving and I'm going to go back to my hometown. I get to go see some slackers and jocks who never tried hard enough-- they'll be pumping the gas.
Really? Or is that just a convenient way for you to remember them as you get your revenge.
I detect a bit too much hubris and I'm sure you must be a big hit with your generation, what with the showing up in Ferraris with supermodels and stuff.
If everyone was an intellectual rock star like yourself, well, the guy that gave you wedgies way back when would just continue to do so while quoting Hegel.
Be sure to flip the unwashed plebe a quarter after s/he fills the tank and polishes your fender.
It really is just a matter of discipline. I watch my daughter work on homework at school in the gym while the volleyball game is going on, totally oblivious to what's going on around her. She makes it a priority, even though she's plenty smart enough to skate through her classes without any real effort. To her credit, she knows at age 15 what she wants to do in life and is preparing herself for what's ahead. And I think that's a problem with most kids who are smart. They have so many options to chose from that they can't pick just one thing and stick with it. So I'd suggest that you consider finishing your studies, even if the only thing you'll get is a sense of accomplishment. I suspect that taking time off may just be an excuse for not fulling committing to the task at hand. If you're really serious about coming back and just need a little time to rest then you'll probably be ok. But if you still need to "find yourself" then you may have a problem with commitment.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
"I have yet to meet a genius who knows what KISS means"
I belive genius is an overused category. I am 46 and I don't think I have met anyone who would qualify as a genius. As far as I can see there are only ever a handfull of geniuses alive at any one time. These people are considered great minds specifically because they have revolutionised our thinking by simplifying existing explanations, eg: Maxwell, Einstien, Newton, Turing. All the great scientific minds I can think off belived that the Universe must be governed by simple and elegant rules.
Lawyers on the other hand have a financial interest to strive for complex and contradictory rules, as do many of the other "geniuses" running the planet.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Is this a troll?
Look, unless you have some other mental deficiencies, your 151 IQ should be nothing but a boon to you. Social skills are something that is just as readily learned as riding a horse. Just because it's not hard science doesn't mean you can't apply your brain to it. And your excuse about "losing the will to learn" and not wanting to memorize facts is just a cop-out. If you're such a genius, figure out a way to make memorization easy. Sure, it's mind-numbing, but if you're a genius you'll realize that a 4.0 GPA has a good chance of getting you a free ride through college and a good job afterward, instead of years of student loans and shitty jobs. The X number of crap hours you put into memorizing shit you don't care about is well worth the increase in the odds that things will pay off.
I'm sure there's plenty of people out there with IQ's up in your range that have no problem with either social skills or motivation. I may not be a 151, but I have tested as high as 146, can pick up new concepts so quick it scares people, and am still fun at a bar and have no problem getting laid. And shit, I moved around so much until 5th grade I was pretty much a poster-child for maladjusted socially stunted kids everywhere. Take your big-ass brain and apply it to real life, and stop making excuses. Learning how to deal with people is not some magically different subject that's impossible for smart people to figure out. Hearing crap like that is what kept me a socially retarded little fuckhead until halfway through high school.
Most people would love to have an excuse like yours. "I'm too smart to deal with normal people and normal subjects." Do you have any idea what a dickhead that makes you sound like? Parents love to shove that down your throat because it makes them feel special. Teachers love to shove it down your throat because you're not threatening if you're some idiot savant freak instead of just being way smarter than them and able to see through their bullshit. Some genius who applies their intelligence to social skills and reading people is a teacher's worst nightmare, unless you turn the charm on full blast and make them like you. You know what though? If someone likes you, they'll never think you're a genius, at best they'll think you're really smart.
Stop with the BS excuses. Even if you do actually have some kind of deficiency, with your IQ you should at least be able to pull off normal. Try it, you'll have more fun.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
First off, IQ is quite poorly defined above about 125, because the set of 15 or 20 skills that make up the IQ spectrum become increasingly uncorrelated. I won't say what my IQ is, but let's just say that that my score on a test of verbal IQ is way different than on a mathematical test, and way way different than on a test of visual reasoning. So I'm not really buying your distinction (or Mensa's for that matter) between 99th percentile IQs and 99.9th percentile IQs. At any rate, if you quote your IQ as "151", I think you need to go examine some material on significant digits: it's an easy concept, and someone like you should get it right off.
Second, if you believe that "Coming up with good ideas for projects and entertaining yourself have [sic] very very ["Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." --Mark Twain] little to do with intelligence," I think you probably are overestimating your own intelligence (perhaps with professional help). All of the brightest people I've known (and I've known some scarily bright ones) are full of this kind of creativity and energy.
One thing you said that did resonate with me, though, is the idea that it might be better to help gifted students develop coping skills for their unique societal situation rather than simply help them further develop their intellectual capabilities (which they can usually do fine on their own anyhow). My biggest problem in childhood was mild episodic depression resulting from getting taunted and beat up a lot and excluded from the society of my peers. Teaching me basic psychology and sociology to help me handle relations with my peers, together with effective self-defense for when that other stuff didn't work :-), might have been a vast improvement for me. I don't know.
Certainly providing a physically and socially safe school environment is at least as important to gifted kids as to the general populace. I find it amazing that many parents put up with sending their kids to schools that can't even guarantee simple safety from physical brutality. Fortunately, my boy's public school seems to be first rate in this regard so far. I'm having huge fun watching this immensely gifted kid learn like crazy and really enjoying himself.
I agree wholeheartedly. This isn't just an issue for younger students either. My girlfriend (a college senior by credt, Junior by year) had to have a paper peer-reviewed in one of her classes. She got a grand total of two comments on the 15 page paper. One was about a semicolon, the other told her to split a well-crafted introduction into two parts because it was 'to long' and 'took up most of the first page'. We talked about it, and I told her that it wasn't a peer review. She should take it to the graduate class she was auditing.
I always gravitated towards the grownups as a kid, as I'm sure many did. I was the kid who listened to NPR, and skipped down the street singing Boutros Boutros-Ghali because of the alliteration.
What we also don't realise, is that smart kids who aren't challeneged can self-destruct, or do dangerous irresponsable things. In highschool, there was a group of maybe 7 of us out of 2,000. We all ended up dealing with our boredom by doing illegal things. We had school blueprints, schematics for the security system, more random hardware then could be hidden safely in our houses, and we forced a change in the rule book. because of us, the plenum spaces above the drop ceilings are now off limits. If somebody hadn't moved the keys at the last minute, we would have had 4 drivers-ed cars inside the gym, in front of the stage, up on blocks the night before grauation. We had the doors open, and the cars ready to roll, but no keys, nor the time to hotwire the cars safely.
Anyway, the point is, if we were had the opportunity to build MOSFET based circuits, carbon soap box racers, or work on any type of school-sponsored project at our level, it would have been better for everyone involved
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
No it's not.
And Bush's "no child left behind" has made it worse.
In order for everyone to Pass, you have to teach down to the lowest common denominator to the class, meaning that 90% of the students are bored and 30% are bored off their ass and asleep.
I believe the right approach would be to actually fail people out of grades until you did have 16 year olds sitting in the third grade and simply eject anyone from the school system who can't graduate by their 20th birthday.
Getting an education requires some investment on the students part.
I'm not so worried about these uber-smart kids. I'm more worried about the rest of us. As a nation we are quickly falling into a second world tier of educated nations and it is only getting worse.
The idea of "No child left behind" is a sensible one. The problem comes when trying to define "Ahead and Behind".
It's funny, I've read this thread up to this point and every single post thus far speaks in terms of acheivement in education as success in the acedemic subjects. We have posters saying how "gifted" they were at school, gifted at sports? gifted at wood/metal works? I suspect not.
What the education system needs to do is provide the core skills, basic (and I do mean basic) mathematics and language skills (reading and writing to a level that allows a person to function in modern society), after that, specialisation is required. Trying to teach a future labourer, sportsman or even salesman advance calculus is a waste of everyone's time.
My personality type is 'problem-solver'. I enjoyed basic to intermediate maths (never really got into the advanced stuff, didnt see it as practical) and of course, IT. If my education had been focused on this then I would be a far better software developer (my choosen career) than I am now. Instead, I wasted hours analysing poems or running in circles around a damn field.
When we accept that children have their own strengths and weaknesses, and we cater to them, then we can say that no child is being left behind.
What good is an astronomical IQ if you have to drag yourself around everyday doing what you hate and getting underpaid for it?
I wonder who this article will please more, the exceptionally bright or those with narcissistic personality disorder? Slashdot seems to have more than its share of both. Put me in whatever category you wish, but here is my story.
I went to the best high school in my city. They had a program for gifted students although no one as exceptional as the students in the NYTs article. As I guide, I was about the median of the group and my IQ is 148. I did nine subjects final year high school including three first-year University courses. Then I went straight into electrical engineering. I was bored then and little has changed now. I haven't been to a lecture in 2 years. I rarely hand in an assignment earlier than three days late and always write it during the day before the 4:30pm deadline. I study for exams the night before and do the rest on general knowledge and logical extension. After initial success and a high GPA this is my 5th semester of straight passes. I have used twice as many electives as I am allowed on, literature, law, managment, communications, international relations, journalism, etc. I have two part time jobs neither challenge me. One quality analysis for an engineering firm. All my work there is done in the last hour of my sixteen hour week. The other is working for security at nights to fill in time I rarely use to sleep anyhow. Both allow me to listen to music, read and write.
Not content with decribing the physical world and applying that knowledge to design I started reading. I am now so socialised with the 'western cannon' that real people are starting to bore me too. For instance, I read all of Shakespeare's 38 plays last semester and quoted the 'tis sweet and commendable in your nature' to my mother when her father died. (As an aside 'As You Like It' is more humourous than any Swartzwelder Simpsons episode and if you changed the character of Isabella in Measure for Measure to a male it would make a nice commentry on the current gay panic in America.)
The University is demanding I complete three more core subjects and then graduate. I have little ambition to be successful in the traditional sense even though I have more than enough job offers. Of the students in the program in highschool, one went to London to become an actor, failed and now owns a pub. Another went to Prague didn't find any great truths and now is studying law. Another got a very modest job working for a telco and married a pre-school teacher. Few are all that happy and any reunion is likely to be sad and dismal affair of finding the easy way to the middle. I don't blame anyone for being bored and frustrated, yet just sometimes I think that raw intelligence has little advantage in our soceity.
"No, that is complete fucking bullshit, and is partly responsible for the decline in public education in the US. That does not happen -- instead, the teacher must go over the same material over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, until she finally gives up, and the year is over."
You just nailed it.
I am leaving public school teaching for two primary reasons.
1) Mainstreaming. This is the worst god damned idea in the history of education, worse than corporal punishment, worse than rapping knuckles, etc. It's an incredibly bad idea, that has never been shown to help students, for the reasons you mention.
2) ESOL. This is the second worst idea in the history of teaching, namely that you can take a non-english speaker and turn them inot an english speaker simply by putting them in a room full of other english speakers. IF YOU CAN"T SPEAK ENGLISH, YOU NEED TO LEARN THAT FIRST. Why is a student in Chemistry, when they can't even converse about the weather? Give them the tools they need, or else they have NO chance.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
I once read one of Turing's colleagues describing him as a genius. According to this account (uncited because I can't remember where I read it, despite my own 168 IQ), there were a lot of very, very smart people working at Bletchley Park, but Turing was the only genius. He said the difference was that when you are very, very smart and see someone else who is very, very smart do something very, very smart, you think, "Oh, well, right, I would have come up with that eventually." When you see a genius do something that is an act of genius, you realize that you could have worked on it for the next 20 years and not come up with that. Geniuses, he said, are very inspring and very annoying.
Most people who are very, very smart are usually the smartest person in the room at any given time. It's only under special circumstances that a collection of very, very smart people are brought together, and it's even rarer for there to be a true genius among them.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Let kids take classes in elementary school and middle school like they do in college and high school- able to pick the classes that they want to take. Then you don't need three levels per grade for smart, dumb, and average kids. If someone flunks 7th grade math they can take it over again. If someone feels their 6th grade english class is too easy they can take 7th or 8th grade english. My school let me take 8th grade Science classes in the 6th grade- and I actually learned something in my science class for the first time in years. Upping the grade level is usually all that is necessary to make a class challenging for someone. (Sometimes you need to go 2 or 3 levels higher, but it's still basically the same idea).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
As someone else with teachers in the family, I agree 100%. It's not even the teacher ratio, primary school ratios here are typically ~ 20:1. As long as the entire focus is on the standarized test scores and minimizing at any cost the percantage that fail - you get stuck. You can't teach, all you can do is re-drill the things that will be on the test that 15% of the students still are not getting.
The 15% are unteachable, not primarily because they are "stupid", but because they have no support structure at home at all. A kid that hasn't eaten dinner or breakfast is not a good learner. That kid with a parent that always gets the kid to school late can't get the school's free breakfast. Teacher's, in the real world, have no power to change those things.
As someone with gifted kids in the family, I can tell you that those programs don't help. My kids schools have a "gifted and talented" pullout program. They are supposed to be excused from drudge work in the normal class to do mare challenging work in the pullouts. That doesn't happen. The drudge work is still required but there's now additional work. The work is typically not useful - a class project on a borking book that's a couple grade levels higher, no additional science education but a requirement for a science project. The message is clear "shut up and be average or we will assign you more work". To no surprise, my kids no longer want anything to do with those programs.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan