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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!
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
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
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.
"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.
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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.
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.