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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?"
You better believe it! :)
If you must answer that, just watch "Village of the Damned"!
http://imdb.com/title/tt0054443/
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
When children say things like "This is boring" or "Will I learn anything this year in school?", their needs should be accommodated. It seems criminal, yet all too often such children's pleas simply go ignored.
Back in my youth, every year every kid took the Iowa test. Eventually, my grade school district used those test results to start a program for gifted kids. They took the top-scoring 3 percent of all kids in the district into this class. Both I, and my younger sister, made the cut.
My IQ tested out about 165-ish, until I got multiple sclerosis. Now it's down to just 148. Frustrating loss.
Did my intelligence change the world? Nope. I never wanted to change the world. I just wanted to be left alone to tinker with computers and gemstones. I rather suspect many other brilliant kids will share those ambitions. BTW, my brilliant sister is now an RN. No world-changer there, either.
Lemon curry?
We'll know the most brilliant -- and useful -- ones if they *don't* get totally freaked after they find out the 'simulated' games were real and contact the queen.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Do we know how to identify all of them? No. But better to identify the ones we can, and give them every advantage we can, rather than simply running them through a system that, to them, would proceed at a glacial pace.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Being smart is good and all, but it is not IQ that makes people "productive".
By far, the most productive people who are either Manic, or Manic/Depressive. It is this hyperactive brain that creates schemes and schema, that create song and prose, and code and invention. It is those that sit outside the norms that find the future.
It is a good thing we have ritalin to fix them.
Hey, I understand that the more enlightened children should be groomed or challenged to help them reach their potential but they are still children and should be given time to grow. Also what about helpping out the other 97 percent. I think America would be better off with 97 percent average or above children then 3 percent genius and 97 percent retarted. ... then again ....
Michael
Linux: For those able to think out side of a window
Those types of programs should be offered for everyone. The founders of Google attended a 'special' schooling system; one that made use of alternative teaching methods. (use of various hands-on projects, etc. As opposed to rehashing books.
Once neglected, the NY Times reports that...
If you ask me, the Times asked for it with all that required registration crap.
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.
This is another effort to accommodate kids who have the brains to start college way younger than usual. The program isn't just to open doors, it builds roads as well. Kids who are used to learning everything effortlessly get coaching in what "study habits" are. They also have their own dorm, so they can do same-age socializing with people they can actually relate to.
It's fundamentally an intense conventional undergrad program, so it's only for the subset of brilliant people who can work in a normal structure.
Sure, there is a certain amount of smarts required for those nifty inventions, those startling revalations and those 'hot damn why didn't I think of that' moments, but more often then not its about having the motivation. My sister who isn't too bright and barely grasps the concept of shared printers, got a UAI of 99.3, and was working 2 jobs, while studying at Uni. Me on the other hand, prefered to read slashdot and ended up working as telemarketer for a couple of months.
Motivation is what changes the world. Attitude is central to survival, not always intelligence.
Karma whoring
How long until every parent asks why little Johnny or little Mary isn't in the "gifted" program. Surely they are the smartest in their class. Why does it seem like we hear about some sort of drive for the gifted every few years, but then it amounts to nothing? I'd bet that it's simply that people are unwilling to tell parents that their kid doesn't know jack, if only because of the lawyers.
I wish I had been in something that would've challenged me when I was younger, rather than simply being bored to tears after either already knowing things or figuring them out after 30 seconds. Yes, it's a shame that smart kids are still relegated to the same level of classes as the below-average kids, but can you really blame school districts for not wanting to go out on a limb and classify students? How many lawsuits would that bring up?
Instead we get education that suits neither the brightest nor the dimmest, nor pretty much anyone for that matter. We just get simple, boiled down cookie cutter lessons for everyone. No wonder public education sucks.
Compare the article to my experiences of being entirely bored with the subject matter, and being told to "Just sit down". Recently I've thought about how horrible that statement is when told to a child who has completed a task. As long as we have teachers and curriculums that are static, we will be wasting away hordes of human potential.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Is the implication that the next Doctor Evil might be out there among the prodigy? Kill the smart ones first I say!
Yes, and yes. We know how to identify gifted children. Will a couple slip through the cracks of any real-world system? Sure. But from an overall, statistical perspective it can certainly be done.
But the last couple decades haven't been kind to cognitive science. Standardized intelligence tests put a lie to the concept everyone is equal, and that makes people uncomfortable. It's easier on your self-esteem if you refuse to believe the validity of the test instead of facing up to uncomfortable facts. The very idea we don't know how to identify gifted children is a political construction - we could do it more than 50 years ago. We haven't lost the science, we've lost the will.
Are there really the resources in the public system at this time to make this a reality?
When I was in grade school, one of my classes had 2 students in my grade becuase it was rural, we were given a lot of attention because the teacher was in charge of 3 grades but only ~12 students. As things go, the school closed and I was moved to a regional school with ~25-30 other students. Turns out, I had already comlteted half of the material for that grade in my previous school, and had much higher understanding of the material. This lead me to being put in a higher level of class(no gifted programs) that was designed for students at a higher level, without skipping a grade. I think I got a better education than most because my learning was aided by lots of attention in the early stages, rather than me being smart(really hate to say that...).
When you hit the level of genius kids, not just the ones that are well above average, I'm sure it is a whole different story. They will be easier to spot, but who's to say that they will contribute more to society in the long run?
I'd have to say that the hardest workers are the biggest segment to benifit society, not the smartest, but hey, that's just me.
Geniuses are human beings -- and every human being should be allowed to rise to the level of his own potential, rather than being forced to conform to the herd.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
I disagree. They simply need to be put into a position where they are actually learning something. If that involves "separating them from the herd", then so be it. I am one of those gifted kids, and I want to be separated, because I want to be able to learn.
As a beneficiary of "gifted education" throughout my elementary and junior high years, I can say that these types of programs are wonderful.
I am not sure that I would have done as well in school if I didn't have a place to go and be challenged... the normal classes were just too slow and I found myself just treading water most of the time. My Gifted classes offered an environment that was both challenging and encouraging while also providing a place for me to be among other people that understood how it felt.
I don't know if they are still doing "Gifted Ed" out there in public schools (I know that in my home town the program got killed shortly after I left Junior high... due to budget constraints)... anyone know? Anyone have a child that is currently in a public school program built specifically for higher IQ children? I'd be interested in hearing about it.
Friedmud
PS - I guess I never really explained what "Gifted Ed" was... basically it was a bunch of kids that were determined to have higher than average IQ's... once a week we met and learned about "other" subjects in "different" ways... I "tested in" when I was in 3rd grade (as did most of my peers)
Well, there are several kinds of "This is boring"-types of kids.
- The dumb slacker or jock, who doesn't bother trying.
- The timid kid who is scared to try and fail (my sister).
- The smart kid who is unchallenged by the course.
It is sometimes very hard to distinquish which kid is which.
- The unchallegned smart-kid may try to find entertainment in smoking pot, and end up a slacker-- when I was in school it wasn't cool to be smart.
- Nobody admits to being timid, so they act like a cool slacker instead.
- Some dumb slackers like to pretend that they are smart slackers and are just too cool to care.
We need to help all children, certainly. But there comes a time when the kids need to help themselves as well. If you're a 16-year old slacker who doesn't bother trying, I see no reason to give you special treatment because you're old enough to know better. Grow up, or you're going to be pumping gas when you're 30.
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.
If I was bored in school, I simply found other things to do. I did Boy Scouts, track, marching band and concert band. And I read alot.
We didn't really have this Interweb thing back then, but I probably would have geeked out a fair bit if I had the chance.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I thought Professor Lucas had once and for all established that measuring midichlorian counts in the child's blood are the only true way to determine if said child is in fact a prodigy. Please see the Jedi archives for further reading on the subject.
I know a lot of very smart people. Unfortunately, most of them will not amount to much. I mean, they'll be moderately successful, but they won't make the news or anything like that. Why? They have no ambition and no work ethic. What was that quote? "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
But do we know how to identify the child whose brilliance might change the world?
We've been identifying those we think of as brilliant and world changing for centuries. We've also been laughing at those who think of themselves as brilliant or world changing and telling them to go back to the patent office or selling their lousy paintings and hanging out in Munich's beer halls.
This implies:
1) What we see as brilliant or world changing (whether world changing is good or bad) often isn't. What we don't understand and therefore, in our arrogance, can't identify as brilliance often is.
2) Ever notice how the truly brilliant ones are the ones who faced adversity? The ones who make a real difference seem to do so because they've learned to fight damn hard. The ones we tell are geniuses tend to expect things to be handed to them, are obsessed with their own genius, and rarely seem to really do anything that truly amazing - as opposed to simply being pretty successful and massively bipolar.
Given the second, perhaps the best thing we can do is not identify those poor kids? Adversity seems to harden the amazing ones; over attention seems to lessen them.
In a previous story about a brilliant Korean kid, there were a lot of Slashdotters who were like, "Well, most prodigies probobly don't amount to anything", or "How do we know if they'll contribute much to society". I think that is looking at this from the wrong perspective.
What we should be trying to do isn't trying to get the most out of these kids like we're shareholders in a company, what we should be doing is helping them go where *they* want to go. I am reminded of Dilbert's trash man, who is more brilliant than Dilbert, but works collecting garbage. If he's happy doing that, why should we lament how much "talent he's wasting"? You or I are probably not living up to our potential, either.
Some people were saying that putting kids in advanced classes were a waste because it doesn't lead to smarter adults in the end. I think that's not the point. Imagine doing 5th-grade level math for a whole year, when you can do much harder math. Even if it's easy, you'd be bored to tears and intellectually starved. It's thins kind of thing which leads a lot of bright kids to underperform or become discipline problems. For their sake, I think we should let them go to classes at their level.
a child gets... left behind?... :)
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
If someone is truly passionate about a subject, their interest and tenacity will allow them to accomplish a great deal on their own without a lot of external guidance or support. The most important thing to do is just stay out of their way. If you look at most great achievements, they happened when someone interested and talented just sat down and thought about them for a long time. If we structure people's interests too much, they will become obsessed with meeting artificial milestones, winning awards, and other things not all that essential to the process behind discovery and invention. The best way to support the gifted is to give them the tools they need to work on what they are passionate about, then quietly step out of the way and see what they accomplish. It is important to realize that not getting in their way may mean giving up attempts to balance their lives. If someone really wants to get into something deeply, normal social interactions and such will suffer and that is normally that persons choice. Using the gifted for PR is also not getting out of their way. The most amazing people and discoveries are usually the ones no one hears about until after work is complete on their personal project. 15 minutes of fame would be an annoyance at best and a real distraction at worst to someone who just wants to hit the books, hit the lab, and get some fun stuff done.
It seems to me that it is dependability which really differentiates those who excel and those who don't. I mean, people who have average intelligence but are very dependable and who works well with teams, seem to get much further than those with very high raw intelligence but are either anti-social, or plain unreliable.
By dependable, I mean - keeps his word, is honest, does not shirk, is conscentious, consistently delivers the same good results, knows to keep his mouth shut, delivers under pressure, does not overcommit, tends not to exaggerate.
Add good abilities to work in teams, now they are unstoppable.
How likely is that?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
That saddens me. Why would you not want to help bright kids acheive their full potential? Are you afraid of change? Do you really prefer this current state? Or do you fear that bright kids will bring about the downfall of civilisation?
I am truly at a loss to understand that state of mind. Really.
I think America would be better off with 97 percent average or above children
Oh, wait...
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.
The genius that will change the world will not be some child prodigy that has never seen the world out of some limited elitist vision of the world.
The geniuses that will change the world probably understand the system, are in the system, and manipulate the system, social and academic, to their needs. It is they who will change the world.
There's no point in identifying those students who are smart and going to change the world. Just look at Bill Gates - he dropped out of school, and look at how he's changed the wor.... Oh wait, nevermind.
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.
I was lumped with the prodigies for a while -- at least as long as the term still made sense for my age group (i.e., until around senior year of high school.) I was never the "top" of the prodigy heap, but that was the word that was liberally sprinkled around my recommendations and so forth.
I saw a lot of prodigies, even "true" prodigies, and I learned one thing (I'm now 26): it doesn't last.
Some people have brains that switch on earlier. You absorb things at rates far in excess of your peers, and you just can't stop it. But it doesn't mean you're smarter; you may have a head start, but others rapidly catch up. Now, ten years on, I would be hard pressed to remember exactly who of my friends were "prodigies" according to the powers-that-be, and who were just regular students. On every measure -- and I include things like getting Ph.D.s and having sharp academic careers in the hard sciences -- having been rated a prodigy is at best a very weak predictor.
(You can see this another way: apply for a job with one of the hot shot consulting firms. Do they care if you were a 15 year old genius? No. They don't want to hear it. If there was any predictive power in these things, D.E. Shaw would be on it like a demon.)
So I think these foundations are wasting their money (and probably wrecking a few lives along the way.) Being labelled prodigy is tough enough, and you're smart enough to cause yourself a huge amount of trouble -- I was fortunate in that neither I nor any close friends really got into deep water.
What to do with prodigies? Keep them busy, give them interesting things to do, and keep them out of trouble until the peers they'll meet at their hot-shot universities catch up.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
I think the major problem with this kind of thinking is that gifted programs generally are mostly just trying to take up more of a kid's time. They basically just seem to give extra homework, and are maybe advanced by a year or so in terms of what they are studying.
I don't know anybody who's public school 'gifted program' gave them what they really needed, self expression. Smart kids generally will give that to themselves, but gifted programs, in my opinion, actually stifle their ability to do so by trying to fill up all their time with academic busywork, as if somehow rigid structure is going to make them smarter.
Intelligence is next to nothing without creativity. The benefits of being a couple years ahead of your peers academically diminish greatly as you age. Missing out on the freetime of youth is something very difficult to make up for.
The proponents of such systems of course believe that their own children are going to be the primary beneficiaries--and to heck with the rest of the people. The tragedy is that many people have been indoctrinated to accept the fate of mediocrity, not just for themselves, but for their own children.
The societies that avoid this are going to win out in the long term, and probably even in the mid term, though in the short term it may look "efficient" from the quarterly-profit MBA perspective.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
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 will have to respectfully disagree with you. At least in my town, although I'm sure it was different in yours, the gifted program only really served as a form of mental masturbation. It was a gathering of children of higher than average intelligence children who marvelled over how smart they are. Anything that ever made people think I was a "smart kid" I learned on my own without the benefit of any of these programs and I'm sure it's the same with many others. I certainly wasn't challenged in school so I challenged myself and learned many things above and beyond what is taught in any public school outside of university. I think the people who are most successful are those who are self motivated, just as many of the great programmers are those who were motivated to learn programming on their own, although proper schooling certainly does help.
I tested far, far above my peers in virtually every area when I was 8 years old. My intelligence was equivalent to someone in their 4th year of college.
That being said, there was one horrible catch.
I was, and always have been terrible in math. Absolutely awful. It just doesn't click in my brain.
As a result of this, I was denied access to more challenging work in school, and in fact, I was shunted to the lowest-rung classes while anyone demonstrating above-average aptitude in mathematics was shifted to the gifted program - despite any significant and obvious weaknesses in reading, writing, etc. Since then, I've recognized a widespread belief that anyone who is considered uncommonly intelligent is automatically a math genius and that if they do not possess extraordinary math skills, then they should not be seen as deserving of any extra positive attention in school regardless of their other strengths.
Now now, let's not bring MATH into a discussion of statistics.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I don't mean to be mean, but I think if you think the lower 97 percent can be average or above, then your math skills might not be that great.
first off, being smart enough to see through to the truth of the world (that humanity does not really deserve to live, yet at the same time has potential) can put one off of everything real nicely.
Ok, for the record, my IQ is ~130, or at least that's what I've been told.
When I was in the first grade, my mind never really was on the work at hand. I always wanted to be else where doing other things. My teacher, et al., came to the conclusion I was "lil-yellow-bus special," and proceded to put me in special ed.. I must say, it was the most stemulating classes I've ever had. While the "regular" kids were in learning something useless, I was working on learning Logo on the TRS-80, and learning some more advanced social skills I use to this day. I had problems relating to other kids my age.
As I grew, school was boring. My teachers would consistently put in "C" classes, which I would sleep through and get A's. If I showed much initiative, such as taking the Apple IIe BASIC program home and porting it to my Commodore 64, then turning in both copies, it was met with but little more than a pat on the head, and a laugh from the class. That's when I figured out it was useless trying to do more that what was expected.
In highschool, I had little interest in basic academia, and delved into the arts. Music, theater, public speaking, jewelry making, etc... Why? Because they challenged me, and they were free classes. The whole "C" class hell was boring, and I needed something to keep me from going nuts. I feel like I never really had the chance to do what I know I could have done. They placed me in a box, labeled me "special," and forgot about me.....
I always thought there would be more to life than being expected to be (less than?) mediocre. Maybe they've come a lot farther now than back in my day.... At least that's what I hope.
This reminds me of a Dilbert comic, in which he's asking the head of Mensa why, if they're so intelligent, don't they more or less rule the world.
The reply was, "Intelligence is less useful than one might think."
Being able to absorb information and solve little logic puzzles quickly may give some measurement of the facility of the brain, but persistence is a necessity, as is a deep interest in (love of, even) the area in which accomplishment is hoped for.
After all, it's hard to do well at something you don't like or don't put much effort into. And the rewards for doing, say, esoteric physics are rather abstract, so it takes a rare breed.
Maybe it's not so much a case of hoping every extra bright kid will flower into an Einstein so much as that, by exposing them to a wide range of interests, those annointed few of them won't miss their golden chance.
I second your theory on this .. I was tested several times in a G.E. program when I was young, and was given an I.Q. that I am always embarrised to share in mixed company, lets just say its a signifigant number.
:)
That out of the way, I SWEAR I have gotten dumber as I have gotten older.
First there were girls,
then money,
then 'advancing my career'.
With each step on society's ladder, i've shed IQ points like water off a duck.
I recently had a kid, He seems pretty bright, and thus will probably bring be down to a nice society average I.Q. in record time
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
ion
Funny how things work out.
I'm a hardcore skeptic, too, but I admit sometimes I hope to find sone hint of something greater, and some proof that this civilization is not just a pack of marching morons, as Kornbluth called it.
Morons
Too negative? Who give a fuck?
Your Uncle is in good company. Einstien was working as a patent clerk because he couldn't find a University that would take him. Getting a formal education and a "good job" has a lot more to do with persistence than IQ. Also there are many differing opinions as to what a "good job" actually is. If your Uncle enjoyed his 40yrs of driving he is not only smart but wise too.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Call me naive, but it seems that if we were to apply more of the university paradigms to K-12, this would not be so much of a problem. Paradigms such as:
Here, gifted kids wouldn't have to be "identified" and put in special ivory-tower classes, but rather could just take courses faster in the subjects they're good at.
My mom grew up in Argentina, and the schools there used a bit of this. There was one classroom for K-5 (small school). The teacher taught stuff. Each student was given assignments based on their abilities, the older or more advanced ones helping out those not as far in their studies. Class went until noon Monday-Friday with the mandatory subjects (Reading, Writing, Math, etc.). Optional courses (sports, music, art) were offered in the afternoon. Kids could go to school as little as four hours a day.
She immigrated to the U.S. after fifth grade, with very limited English. Skipped sixth. Insists that she was an average student back home.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
"What to do with prodigies? Keep them busy"
Please don't do that. Let them do what they want to do. Give them free time. Real prodigies naturally know what it is they are good at it. Heck, I think this applies to most kids.
The best thing I think you can do with them is to pay attention to what it is they are doing on their own and help facilitate that to some extent without taking over what it is they are already doing.
I think the most dangerous thing affecting 'prodigies' is that they are put aside and told how smart they are. That's just plain wrong. It gives them a false sense of superiority and busts their natural incentive to be creative.
Unless your parents make you do LOTS of chores, the vast majority of your work up until your teens is learning. Your job is to learn, and it is pretty much a full-time job. If you are a really gifted kid, the learning you're typically called on to do is easy. Even trivial.
For example (not to toot my own horn), in elementary school, I was recognized for academic achievement at some kind of school-wide assembly. The principal or whoever was presenting said something like, "I bet you spend a lot of time studying, don't you?". And I said, "Not really." He got annoyed (I wasn't setting a good example or he thought I was being flip), but I was just telling the truth.
Anyway, the point is, if most of the "work" you're called on to do for the first 15 years of your life is trivially easy, then you don't establish very good work habits. You have no need to. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity doesn't exist.
So, in my mind, that is one reason why a gifted kid program could be valuable: they can present you with mental tasks that are difficult enough that you do learn to work. With some luck, you'll establish good habits.
"Other investigators have also demonstrated the relative independence of academic and practical intelligence. Brazilian street children, for example, are quite capable of doing the math required for survival in their street business even though they have failed mathematics in school (Carraher, Carraher, and Schliemann, 1985). Similarly, women shoppers in California who had no difficulty in comparing product values at the supermarket were unable to carry out the same mathematical operations in paper-and pencil tests (Lave, 1988). In a study of expertise in wagering on harness races, Ceci and Liker (1986) found that the skilled handicappers implicitly used a highly complex interactive model with as many as seven variables; the ability to do this successfully was unrelated to scores on intelligence tests." -- Stalking the Wild Taboo
Thank you! Carry on.
I am originally from Russia, and over there the education system is much more strict than in the USA, namely in that you have no choice or control over your personal advancement. You are placed in a class with 30 kids, and you, and all of those kids, go through a set program of classes, where you have no control over the level of difficulty or direction of study, i.e. Everyone Studies Physics in 5th grade, everyone studies English in second, etc, etc. The difference with the USA schools is that there is plenty of room and possibility for someone willing to advance to do so, from taking honors classes and having a selection of the elective field of study, to even skipping classes through testing, which I quickly took advantage of, and finished AP Calc BC in 10th grade, after which I attended a Stanford-Sponsored program called EPGY, a program for gifted youth which allowed kids to take advanced classes. So, I can see where these news are coming from, the possibilities are certainly there. And these kind of things should not be confused with raising the standarts of mediocrity. They are possibilities, created for those with enough of an intelligence and work ethic to undertake the challenges of participating in the programs.
Well, at my university we have a program which admits highschool and middle school aged kids (youngest I have heard of is 12 years old). Many of these kids are extremely intelegent, but I must say that (to different degrees) all of the kids I know who came through this program (many of which are my friends) are socially maladjusted.
;-)
On a day to day basis, many of them are able to interact with the normal aged college students, but it is not so much at the social but the academic level. I am not saying they have to aquiece to social norms, but they still need to develop the social skills to interact with a broad range of individuals and make friendships if they are going to be successful.
Being in this program these highly intellegent kids are effectively being retarded socially. Social skills are developed by interacting with a broad range of people much of which I believe happens in high-school and college. By isolating them from kids in their age group they are unable to learn social skills. It is hard for a 15 year old kid to make friends with a bunch of 20 year old college kids. The age gap in social and personal maturity is staggering.
For example, one of the kids coming out of this program (age 13 at the time), had the impulse to find out how much energy would be produced if he turned me into pure energy. Now, being a science nerd I was understanding, but your average kid would think he was wierd.
Anyways, I have ranted and not really said much. Still, I think it is important to support smart kids (I came away with a good education because I went to a good private school, but most kids aren't as lucky as I was), but I think there needs to be programs established in highschools and middle schools to support advanced children where they can still interact with their peers and hopefully develop social skills important later in life. Plus it will be easier for them to get girlfriends/boyfriends in college
--Nerviswreck
A lowly IQ of 120 is all that's needed to become a successful scammer or CEO. Politics is the great equalizer in the real world.
Preface: The profession for which I am currently receiving training (Ph.D in Neuropsychology; look it up) involves the measurement of cognitive functioning; the assumption that there is some meaning inherent to these sorts of tests is part of my bias. Also, I'll be refering to intelligence as defined by the Western world. Different cultures have different ideas of what constitutes an "intelligent" individual. What many in this discussion fail to realize is that genius and IQ are two very different things. In addition, the way IQ is measured is very important for this discussion. "Genius" is a social construct. Genius is defined as one who has significant acumen in a certain area, while simultaneously being prolific in their participation in that discipline. Einstein is properly labeled as a genius because of the amount of significant work he published in 1905, NOT because his IQ score was 180 or some such arbitrary number. Currently, it would be very inappropriate if a psychometrician were to label someone as a "genius" based solely on their test scores. IQ is a number, supposedly measuring overall intellectual ability. The Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children III (WISC-III) is the most effective measure we have for measuring intelligence in children. HOWEVER, it has been repeatedly shown that the accuracy of this test breaks down past the fourth standard deviation in the upper range; that is, anything past 160. What I'm trying to get across is that genius is a label given by society, while a high IQ is something that is earned by scoring well on a test. Someone who is a genius need not have a high IQ, as IQ measures very specific things, and one can be a genius without excelling in those areas. Likewise, an individual with a very superior IQ need not be a genius; the main character from "Good Will Hunting" spent his time as a janitor in the beginning of the movie (if memory serves), and thus would not be considered a genius at that time. Jon
Psychology is really Biology, Biology is really Chemistry, Chemistry is really Physics, and Physics is really Math.
So I would argue that looking for all deviations from the expected is helpful - provided that information is used to help people through their weakspots and encourage people to develop and push their strengths.
Yes, it would cost more. Yes, it would mean you'd need a LOT of additional staff on hand and a MUCH broader skill-base, and you'd have to be realistic about how broad a base you could realistically provide the additional support for. In the end, from a purely financial perspective, education is an investment. Therefore, what you get out of it (through benefits to the ecomony, extra taxes owed through better incomes, etc) has to be equal or less to what you put in to be worth it. If a person has a 35-40 year working life and the difference in income between menial jobs and highly skilled jobs is $40,000+ per year, then you can see that you can actually invest quite a lot before it becomes unprofitable to do so.
(You'd need some extra-sharp pencils and a good afternoon's work to get a decent calculation for what is possible, but I am guessing that a school could probably double or even triple staffing levels to provide the extra support and drive necessary, so long as the gains were recycled into the educational system. My gut feeling is that you'd find that such an increase would have enough of a positive impact to offset the costs and complexities.)
From a humanitarian perspective, a social perspective or just a "let's do the best we can" perspective, then what I'm suggesting is the absolute minimum you'd want to do. It's a starting point, nothing more. Its chief benefit is that it provides the best possible outcome that is self-sustaining. Better outcomes could be produced, but they'd cost more than they'd gain. I'm not going to get into the argument of whether that is worthwhile or not - I don't believe I need to, because I think the scheme I'm proposing is a massive improvement while not requiring one political or economic philosophy or another. Once you've raised the thinking ability of society, the new thinkers should (if they're so damn smart) be in a better position to determine where to go from there.
I would throw in one other thought. Students, kids, etc, should be looked at from the perspective of their mental age in any given field. One famous mathematician got her first BSc when she was 13, another at age 15 and her PhD at age 18. She is now at the University of Israel. She was the youngest student to graduate from Cambridge University, she clearly hasn't burned out, and there is no evidence I know of that such an early education caused any harm whatsoever. I do not believe she is an isolated case in terms of ability, but rather an isolated case in terms of being listened to.
Although you've got to be careful when biological, emotional and intellectual ages differ by such wide margins, I believe too many countries put stock ONLY in biological age and ignore when the others are advancing far faster. For that matter, they also ignore when the emotional or intellectual age progress much slower. Age is not just one thing and to group all such notions into a single, linear, calendar-based concept is just plain wrong. (Even biologically, it is wrong. Physical aging is not linear and does not respect the Gregorian calendar system.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was in a similar situation years ago.
I entered UTD as a national merit scholar, under a full scholarship with a stipend.
I made absolutely no use of it.
Nothing.
I dropped out a year later to participate in the dot com boom.
Absolutely the biggest mistake of my life.
I now spend hours each day trying to crib from the web information that is taught in college.
My advice is as follows,
No matter how stupid you think your fellow students are,
no matter how smart you think you are,
no matter what you think you know,
the hunger for knowledge is always going to be there
and the advantage of spending time at a learning institution
far out weighs the minor disadvantage of being held responsible for your thoughts.
I think most people have a strongly distorted view of what constitutes 'intelligence'.
And there are many, many ways to "change the world" that do not require any of the sterotypical quality of 'intelligence'. Was Mother Theresa unusually intelligent? The Wright brothers? What about Hitler? What about Bush?
Also, what is "intelligence". It is really a mental disease...
So called "intelligent" people lie awake at night pondering topics that most people don't bother with... The reason they do well at things like computers, math, science, arts, etc is that they put a heck a lot of their spare time into these areas... Even the teenager that "wastes" his childhood blowing up stuff (or torturing bugs) is still exercising things such as scientific thinking and parts of his mind that most people otherwise wouldn't. These "intelligent" people are inherently motivated to study/do "X" and willing to forgo other things/pleasures/luxuries/options in order to do this... Something usually suffers, and it is not necessarily social skills. (The lack of which is likely to be more prominent than other lackings...)
Their internal motivation for doing such things is extremely high (even bordering on obsession) -- far higher than the motivations provided by money/parents/society/etc... So to the "common" people, "intelligent" people appear to do difficult things easily... But it only comes "easy" because they have exerted themselves far more than most people... Also such "intelligence" tends to be a result of some type of shortsightedness (What drives a CS grad student to spend 5 years of his/her life to come up with an idea that improves CPU performance by 5-10%?) What drives people in this day to write software to ensure that our nations nuclear weapons are still capable of mass destruction?)
Of course, such "hellbent" people tend to do well in graduate school and in R&D groups in companies... They are the ones that often drive technological (and even social) innovation. Meanwhile, the rest of the community focuses on their families, leading balanced lives, etc...
I applaud the garbage man in "Dilbert" (even though fictional). When his workday ends, he can go home and completely not think about work... How many "intelligent" people can really do that?
So please, stop talking about who is "intelligent"... You are only describing people with "obsessions".
If you are still skeptical... Picture a typical dog and (human) owner... The dog doesn't worry about politics, world destruction, corporate layoffs, taxes, etc, etc... The dog is regularly fed, bathed, and kept in a heated/AC room. Who is getting the better deal? But which would typically be called more "intelligent"?
I think this thread is in desperate need of recent quote from Mr. Stephen Hawking:
"People who boast about their IQ are losers."
"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.
I actually participated in the Johns Hopkins Talent Search that the article mentions. I only scored an 1190 on the SAT in 7th grade, so I guess I wasn't that 1 kid out of 10,000 they were looking for, although I remember I did score well enough to be honored at a special ceremony. However, I also didn't really take it seriously, much like most of school from about the first grade on. I never ever felt "challenged" mentally by school until I took AP physics in high school (a calculus based class) before I had taken pre-calc. I honestly just wasn't interested enough to make it worth my time to study the material, I generally just remembered what we'd talked about in class and that was enough. I would never study, as I could easily get B's without opening a textbook, and I never saw the point in actually working just to get an A, when I could spend no effort and play computer games and get B's. I took the SAT junior year of high school, and scored a 1400, without any sort of review or prep, and figured that was fine for any sort of school i'd be applying to. Now, in the middle of my final year of college, I realize (to considerable dismay) that I am significantly smarter than just about all of my peers. Mind you, I attend a small, selective liberal arts college in the north-east, which was ranked somewhere around number 35 in the country by US News and World Report. Yet even here, I don't ever feel like doing the small amount of work I would take to consistently get A's, when I can pull a 3.2 GPA without trying.
Basically what I'm saying is for the small group of very intelligent young people out there, the current educational model does not encourage excitement and interest in learning for the "average" kid with an IQ in the 140+ range.
First off, I.Q. is a great way to measure a person's ability to do well in school. That's what it was designed to do, and it still does it fairly well. I hear that a person's university grades correlate better with their high school grades than with their I.Q., though. No surprise there, since grades seem to be influenced by intelligence, but grossly altered by study habits and time management.
Those that will change the world through brilliance are few and far between. Most of the great names in science should fall under this category. Presumably you could have a great change through literary genius or musical wonder, but we'll leave those alone.
If they are going to change the world through their brilliance, then no matter what you give them, they're going to be looking in a direction that you haven't gone. Any attempt to nurture them will have a negative effect on their ability to do it themselves, which they invetably have to do, because they are changing the world! If you constantly prepare challenges for someone, then they never have to figure out how to prepare their own. Similarly, if you stuff a genius in high school, they never have to bother with studying, because they can understand the material without.
I consider myself somewhat bright, so maybe this will shed some light on your genius friends' point of view. My personal goal is nothing more than to have a happy life; a number of smart people around me think the same way. I think it comes of philosophizing about life and trying to cut through the social pressure to work and achieve ambitions. I'm not saying this is the only answer or the one true attitude to have - I'm just saying it's a remarkably tempting answer that many people who bother to think about the issue adopt.
I'm not criticizing the program, I'm just saying that intelligence is "overrated" a bit. I too was a very successful student and I am currently working on my MS. I may be a bit different than some because even though I understood stuff easily, I worked my *** off. Maybe it was because I had nothing else to do (growing up in the middle of Vermont is somewhat isolated). However, the vast majority of the work I was doing I found extremely interesting. Of course, once I came to college, my suitemates destroyed my work ethic rather thoroughly :)
My previous comment was not directed at the gifted kid program at all. I just think that it's your work ethic that is most important and intelligence is secondary.
I'm posting this to the original parent because I can't find a single post that hasn't taken a partisan viewpoint. Whether everybody here has IQs in the 150s or not is not the point; the point is, do kids with high IQs need different treatment?
I think they do. "Smartness" is not a single thing, it's a collection of abilities in analysis, cognition, synthesis, etc. Some kids are amazingly fast at some things and surprisingly slow at others; the common "math whiz with no social skills" syndrome is just that, one of those combinations.
I was considered a nerd in grade school, an idiot in high school, and a genius in college (where I flunked out). Now I consider myself well-adjusted, and I am careful to avoid judging young people regardless of what they appear/claim/is claimed of them. Some supposedly "brilliant programmers" that I have taught were really, really slow in some areas, such as 3-D visualisation, whereas others got it in one minute. Others were never able to fix their English grammar, and got upset when I told them how important I considered communication skills.
I have two sons who are both very bright, but with marked differences. One is fairly balanced, impatient, quick; the other is moody, extremely quick and intuitive -- and has a learning disability. Very luckily, his teachers alerted us to the problems and we're working on it; but just imagine if it had been left to the teachers to conclude, "A is bright, and B is dumb?"
I guess I feel that children are a resource, our investment in the future. If we fail to develop our investment in every possible way, we're not being good "talent managers". And in order to maximize the potential, we need to know what that potential is, or at the very least get a rough approximation of it. We need better tests. We need more specific tests. We need more sensitive teachers.
And I feel we really need a more educated public. And, no offense intended, I think all SlashDotters should consider themselves an educable public. After all, most of us consider ourselves kids -- don't we?!
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.
And do we really want to?"
That question encapsulates the insane attitude our society has about intellect. If we were talking about identifying and nurturing kids with talent in basketball, football, or ice hockey this would be a non-story. This country has a multi-billion dollar machine to do just that, and nobody finds it an odd use of resources.
If we were talking about musical prodigies, it would be a story, but nobody would find in controversial. It would be a publicist's press release. People expect and accept a certain percentage of kids will have profound musical talent, and people will buy their CD's. (Unless the CD installs rootkits, but that is another story...)
Yet, when it comes to the intellecutally gifted, people refuse to let these children soar. These children are often viewed as freaks. Frequently they are simply ignored on the assumption that they will take care of themselves. What is so bad about nurturing their talents the same way we coach youth basketball?
Knowledge for knowledge's sake, good for goodness' sake.
I think that this comment is an accurate description of the ethos that motivates highly intelligent people.
I was chatting with a friend of mine awhile back, and he made a comment that all that really matters in terms of a person's achievements in life is knowledge. Intelligent people achieve the thing they value: knowledge. Sometimes this might lead to diseases being cured or physics being revolutionized, or sometimes it might just lead to someone becomming the world champion on Jepoardy.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I'll make a list.
Canada
George Bush
Global Warming
Trey Parker
Those packets of salt that turn out to be empty
Fundies
Inner City Violence
Inner City Violins
Spelling/Grammer Nazis
The XBox 360
Mom and Dad
Chaos Theory
Someone hates these cans.
Seriously, do you guys realize that getting a 140 on an IQ test at age 5 merely means that you are smarter than you should be, i.e you think like a 7 year old instead of of a 5 year old (I don't know if the 7-5 ratio is correct, it's something like that though so don't quote me on it). This doesn't mean that at age 18 you will be smarter than any other person, just that you had a head-start, which could fritter away very easily by wasting two years of your adolescence doing things that don't help your intellectual development (depression due to social issues, pot, alohol, pick yer poison). Having an IQ of 195 after you're 20 though, that's something...
I was in the Duke University TIP, and I scored well enough to be invited to attend the TIP activities at Duke. Did I? No, I assumed that it was expensive and couldn't see the real benefit, so I chose to just attend the regional awards ceremony and forget the Duke stuff.
Through most of school, I was able to perform to A or B level with little to no work. The only things that challenged me in high school were foreign language and, maybe, the higher level math and physics. Even then, I was so frustrated by how sloooooooowwww the math class went, that I couldn't maintain any sort of enthusiasm.
I pretty much assumed that's all there was to education, so I placed little to no importance on the choice of a university. Thinking very practically, I dismissed out-of-state public schools because tuition would be expensive. I dismissed expensive private schools because tuition was ridiculous--how could my family possibly afford $20,000+ per year? Based on that, I had just decided to concentrate on location. I looked for universities that were relatively near my home town, that had the program I wanted to enter, and that I was reasonably competitive at for scholarships. Ended up choosing a mid-sized regional state school.
Fast forward to college. I had crappy study habits, and a host of other things that happened and situations that came up that resulted in me earning less-than-stellar grades for several semesters. I pulled out of the nose dive and wound up with a relatively decent GPA, not great, but not terrible either.
After college, I decided to work for a year as an admissions counselor for my university. Again, chosen mainly for location rather than ambition...but what I learned while helping students look at college options was that I had other options in high school but no one told me about them. I realized that I could have gone to any of those state or private universities. Just based on my ACT and GPA, I could have gone to Duke, possibly even Stanford, CalTech, or MIT...but I thought I couldn't afford it.
If I had gone to the Duke University program, rather than dismissing it as having little value, I probably would have had a stronger link with Duke. I probably would have talked with them about going to some place like Duke. I probably would have been told, by someone, somewhere, that universities go out of their way to create financial aid packages to help worthy students attend...
Hindsight is 20/20, and you don't always get a second chance. I hope students and parents recognize the importance of these types of programs and don't let fantastic opportunities slip by...
Jim
If nothing else, I'd suggest this as a dandy strategy for those reality show games - play it stupid until the final four! Every time I saw a contestant letting out the full stops the first week, I'd groan for them. Don't they know that's like a target on their chest?
When I was about 7 years old (in 1985), I was diagnosed with ADHD and thus immediately put on Ritalin. I didn't get off the medication until 1994. In 1999, I was diagnosed with major depression. At this point, I was 23 years old. Though I've always suspected I had depression starting around 19 years of age. Being that depression never runs in the family bloodline, I've always suspected that it was Ritalin that physically affected my brain during development. Now after an article was released in Dec 2004, I feel my worst fears are validated.
k ed+to+depression
Folks, I think my brain is fried on legal (and encouraged) medication. If so, I have Ritalin to thank for me being stuck on Paxil to prevent suicidal thoughts due to waves of depression and despair. Even worse, Paxil has a nasty chemical addiction property to it so I will not be getting off it soon. I'm suspecting that my "cures" are nothing more then civilized version of a crack habit in that my mental state is going down a downward spiral.
Now don't get me wrong, I may not be the sharpest knife on Slashdot, but I feel I've proven myself more than brilliant on occasions. But fact is, I will never get over myself thinking what my life might have been like had I've never taken Ritalin and just let nature take its course. So here I am my life and my mental health shaped and molded into a perceived vision of how humanity should conduct itself
I now present myself as product of medical hubris. Mentally, I'm raped and I didn't get the pleasure of feeling fucked either.
For more information, check out this google search link. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=adhd+lin
Life is not for the lazy.
When I was in grade school (East Coast US) I was put into a program called "ATP" (Academically Talented People). Basically they gave everyone in Kindergarten and later the 1st grade half of an IQ test in the classroom. The kids who did well were called into an interview to complete the test. Kids over a certain threshold were put into the ATP program.
Once a week we would leave our regular classroom, and board a bus for a spare classroom in another school, along with kids from other schools in the district. We would study things like Dinosaurs, try to work out puzzles and riddles, and do special "creative" projects like breaking into groups and writing, drawing, and filming our own cartoons using drawings or cutouts and a mounted camera. In 5th grade we were asked to do a project on any topic of our choosing, alone or in a group. I think one of the groups learned how to tie-dye shirts and that was their presentation.
The program also afforded us a second special "class trip" each year, to a museum or something generally educational. I think in the end the jealously from the other kids over this second class trip, plus the physical distinction of dissapearing once a week on the bus balanced favourably against the benefit of the specialized education.
In later years I was diagnosed with ADD (not ADHD), after trouble with grades and paying attention. The high school I attended put me into the "second track" because of it - mainly with the jocks and average students. The "smart" kids were placed in the first track. I think that too happened a just the right time. I spent most of my high school classes in the back of class reading novels, paying just enough attention to get reasonable grades. The jocks looked at me as one of the "smart" kids but I never acted like I was "above" them and made it through all four years without anyone giving me so much as a hard time - despite being a generally shy person.
In the ATP program I learned that I was "smart" and was rewarded with more interesting material and an extra class trip. In high school I learned that I wasn't "better" than anyone else and in a way it was "smarter" to get good grades without having to try hard, since in the end colleges didn't have any concept of which "track" I was in - it looked like I was putting in more effort than I really needed to.
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Perhaps because athletic prowess is considered 'fair' by a large enough portion of the population; these people believe that anyone can become a great athlete with a little talent and enough hard training, and therefore athletes who succeed are role models for their hard work and dedication. Natural talent is acknowledged as a factor, but always overshadowed by the athletes own training and drive. Athletes are better than non-athletes because they are vastly dedicated to the pushing about of whatever ball catches their fancy, whereas 'genius' is considered a pretentious declaration of superiority, and asking for education that is different from the standard fare is tantamount to calling all of the other students stupid.
Extremely intelligent individuals are to be feared and shunned, for who are they to claim that they are inherently better than everyone else? This is America, where everyone is equal and has the same chance as everyone else of being great. It is the same 'reasoning' that prevents serious discussion of the difference in thinking patterns between men and women, or the possibility of inherent aptitudes based on genetic factors.
Yes, I am probably the most guilty of the charges you level. I can see that. I hasten to point out that the bitching about how-hard-it-is-to-be-smart is just for this thread: in every other thread, you'll find us happily chirping about how our gifts enabled us to win our successes. I wouldn't trade how I am for the world, and the others (most) here who are smarter probably wouldn't trade it either. I think many of us have fessed up our horror stories just to point out, since the topic is about how best to manage the smart kids, how horribly wrong it can all go with the best of intentions. But moreover, our backgrounds also indicate how we *overcame* those obstacles and learned how to deal with the world in our own way, despite how we were mismanaged. How we eventually come to find mates who love us for who we are, jobs where we can be at our best (or self-employment, even better), and ways to seek out our kind. Note, that most of the success stories in here seem to be pretty indifferent to educational methods.
Thanks for putting up with us. Were we at least better than the script kiddies, consumer-cows, and flaming fanboys you usually see in this space?
My tale is sad as well. I was one of the top winners of the Canadian Math Olympiad when I was in high school. But my high school was much worse than most. It was in an intellectual backwater and since the principal was accredited he could set his own grade 11-12 finals. This allowed him to water down the phys and chem and he didn't finish even the gr 11 curiculum by the end of gr 12 in either subject. Since the ciriculum already started out watered down you can well imagine what it was like.
For me, being in that school felt like being in prison. I thought of dropping out many times. Marks above 98 in math, chem, phys, trig didn't trigger a response in any of the teachers. I was never challenged ever. There wasn't even a decent reference book in the school library.
If I had been challenged I would have wrapped up high school maths and sciences by the middle of Gr 10. I would have completed my undergraduate math, phys and chem by the end of gr 12.
Instead, when I got to uni I had no idea how to study because I never had been challenged in my life. So I started out by skipping classes thinking this would be little different than high school. Well - I did get my degree but it took almost 2 years to start to undo the damage that school pupetrated on me.
I missed my calling - a career in theoretical physics/engineering. Instead I wandered into IT and my career has been fine. But I feel there is a hole in my life and in this hole is the career and the feild I love the most.
I was really screwed over by a badly broken system. That principal should have been fired for non-performace. Where we to look at this legally he is guilty of fraud. When you falsify final test results to cover up that you never taught the subjects in the first place - then this is fraud. Instead he draws a nice pension.
Frankly, I think that streaming kids because of intelligence is a criminal act.
This is probably a contentious, inflammatory statement to the slashdot crowd, but there are good reasons behind it.
It has been my experience to watch the results of this misguided, hunchbrained thinking. They are not pretty.
Merely developing intelligence is a cowardly act of dastardly proportions because people are more then just a disembodied intellect. If the entire person is not cultivated, then the classical "brain" shows up; socially inept, emotionally shallow and oblivious to the consequences of their actions.
Contrast this with some of the more colorful characters that established new grounds: Claude Shannon ( Information Theory), Richard Feynmann ( quantum electrodynamics) and others.
These people had real personalities, were socially aware of the rules they were breaking, and why those particular circumstances could accept that challenge in the playful spirit it was offered.
Frankly, enriching the sterile classroom environment would benefit all learners, even if they were a bit slow. This is especially needed at the elementary level, when the realisation of the world as having both order and mystery can forge the best from every person.
Lose the calculators, use the slide rule which gives a tremendous feedback as to the "feel" of arithmetic. Make it real, not abstract and the illiteracy, innumeracy and "common nonsense" bugbears suffer a major blow.
Or, keep the things as they are and we can have our surgery done by educated fools.
Your call.
JB
This is progress?
I think the mental problems is partially an excuse invented by the people with normal intelligence (100) to 100+2x standard deviation (about 136). IQ is a standard deviation test afterall. For the last decades the 100 line has been shifting up compared to the previous years. The general IQ is rising. That means people with an IQ above 140 2 decades ago, now with recalibration of the tests will score about 5 points lower (stats out of memory). Thus being considered a genius is relative. Most of the associated mental problems come from non-understanding the high IQ people. In general higher IQ does not only mean you can do the test good, but also that reasoning works on a higher level, so you will take bigger logic steps and people with lower IQ will loose you along the way.
/.ers instead of complaining about this piece of poor communication!)
In a way people with an IQ of 100 look really intelligent from the point of view of a person with an IQ of 80 (definition: Still able to care for him or herself, probably even having their own company and not really get noticed by others), let stand from a person with an IQ of 60, for whom the world is a big miracle all the time. They can not follow the logic of this IQ 100 people, but they are gullible enough just to do what they are told.
People with an IQ of 100 are just not as gullible as people with an IQ of 60-80. They rather claim that you do not communicate well, it is easier than trying to understand, and than coming to the conclusion that they can not grasp the concepts what you are talking about.
Cultivation of people with high IQ is important for science. And science contains all possible directions from politics/management (Average IQ of a CEO is 150, do they communicate so bad? (Ok, Enron did)) to quantum physics (Stephen Hawking is pretty understandable).
I think in short that a person with normal IQ who communicates poorly is just considered an ***hole or just considered dumb, while a person with high IQ who communicates poorly is considered socially inept. Same problem, just the IQ is different.
(Read between the lines you grammar
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
You have no clue whatsoever my friend. For someone who lacks the "brains" so to speak it is about the same as being blind. So your comment is akin to a blind person suggesting that people who can see are really just as blind as everyone else however they have an obsession. How cute.
If I were to ask you for instance to write a world class poem then given you have ordinary talents in this esoteric undertaking, you could sit at your desk for the next millenium and never be one of the monkeys lucky enough to strike shakespear's keys in the right order.
See? See? This proves that it is possible to give 110%, provided your IQ is high enough! You tell 'em, Mr Genius!
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
It is very common for little girls to be precocious at an early age in the area of language. It is very common for little boys to be retarded. This is one of the reasons that all the way through the elementary grades - where language arts are enphasized - little girls typically out perform little boys.
The scales swing the other way after puberty. Pubecient girls language skills are still typically ahead of pubecient boys. However the mathematical and logical skills of the male of the species start to shine.
So while your little girl may have tested over 180 when 4 and is undoubtably a smart little girl, do not be surprised if when she gets to gr 9 she will be pretty close to and a little above average.
Most likely she will end up being somewhere in the neighbourhood of where her grandmothers and mother is. If your wife has an IQ over 180 then odds are your daughter will fall between 100 and 180. It is only rarely do the genetic factors combine to yeild a child with an IQ significantly greated than his parents and ancestors.
Don't do it. The world has enough sociopaths already.
Where would you be if you were denied the option to study at the university level?
It sounds as if you were given the best. You are one of the lucky ones.
The main problem with I.Q. is that it seems to be more of a measure of education and diet than intelligence (see The Milwaukee Project). Secondly it was developed to discover mental deficiency, not identify super bright people.
It is also interesting to note the popular misconception about I.Q. scores. I.Q. values between 80 and 130 comprise about 90% of the population, so if you are within these values you are defintely simply 'normal' - note I didn't say 'average', in I.Q. terms that's a score between 90 and 110. You are not anything special until you have a score significantly above 130 (130 is still a surprising - to some - large segment (2.5%) of the population - in the U.S. there are about 7.5 million people with a score of 130 or above, so 130 is hardly exceptional !), perhaps 150 or above and you are starting to be a real stand-out.
Of course, the opposite side of the coin is true too, you would need to have a score below 70 to be considered 'extremeley low' intelligence..
There are many other problems with I.Q. tests, namely that they rely upon linguistic abilities that many people do not posses, or acquire until later in life - since in order to answer a question correctly you must not only understand what is being asked, but also communicate your answer. It has been shown that females acquire linguistic prowess more rapdily in life than males, yet no-one would suggest that it makes sense to say that females have higher I.Q.s than males at the same age - or if they do, they fail to grasp the purpose of I.Q. tests.
What I did in school is to avoid writing the answers at home and then trying to guess the correct answers to the problems thrown by the teacher by hearing the other pupils discussing about it. It worked, and it was great fun: the rest of the other children struggled with difficult (at the time) math and geometry problems, while I was playing the easy and relaxing guy; when it was time for someone getting to the blackboard to show his/her solution, usually I was the only one to reply. I usually solved the problems with the hints I overheard, the knowledge I got from paying attention to lessons and some luck.
I remember one time, after having solved a very difficult geometrical problem, the teacher said the other pupils that I was the brightest pupil the teacher ever had. Those were the times...
Of course it has led me to nowhere; other pupils hated me for playing clever, and that trend continues right into my professional life: I've got into tremendously heated battles in work trying to explain how better software could be built, the others hated me for my clever ideas, and as a result, I've got no one to communicate to at work.
I'm 16 years old, and have an IQ of 137, and the state has been very helpful with their public school system to help me. I take 2 AP classes in my junior year, and our school has different "phases" 5,6,7 7 being the hardest. Isn't that a good way to find the smarter kids, who will solve the problems of the future?
I was top of my class (well there and there abouts) and identified as an under achiever when ten years old. In these circumstances I was offered a place at an "opportunity school" which was designed to provide a more challenging educational environment for a couple of years before going to, perhaps, an equally selective high school (high school takes one up to matriculation at age 17 or 18 in Australia). I turned down the place, I would have to leave my friends, travel further to school, etc etc. My parents left the decision in my hands, I have never really asked why, I guess since my results were still excellent they weren't too worried. Anyway, my path through high school got me into whatever course I wanted at University, had scholarships been necessary (University education is essentially free in Australia, even though small tuition fees applied even back then when I studied!!) I am sure I could have made one on an academic basis.
But my point is this, I had a great time growing up. I got to discover what it was like to be a child, got hassled a bit at school for being studious and more than a little awkward, got smashed on the rugby pitch, smashed a few people likewise, worked out that I was no athelete, discovered the benfits and perils of the whole boy/girl/man/woman things, did some hard, non-intellectual, work and made friends that I still have 25 years later. I think that kids are kids for a short enough time that "guiding" them into different high achievement streams actually serves very little purpose (selective grouping within their peers probably has its place in making the teachers job easier). Most people I know (myself included) have no real idea what really interests them until they are in their twenties and, even for a mathematician, at that age there are a few good years of productivity left in most of them. But I think that participating in the normal social stream (even if one is screwed a little by it at the time) makes a better adult, and someone better able to contribute later on.
Those that are going to change the world are going to change it regardless of whether they get exposed to the "good oil" five or ten years earlier than they do in the normal course of things. History is littered with smart people whose contribution shines regardless of the point at which they start and I think that our society is better for letting kids be kids rather than driving them to excel because it is "their potential".
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I almost flunked out of college for the same reasons. I picked up "Where there's a will, there's an 'A'"
That program was not magic, but it helped me see the "game" of college differently and gave me some strategies - socially, politically, and academically that helped me win that game. I was on the dean's list in no time.
I finished college with a good GPA, and have been successfully in the business world for almost 15 years since graduation. Work is a similar "game."
You can learn to study and develop the discipline you missed due to the deficiencies of the educational system. Don't give up on college - play the game to win!
Regards,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
The article started out as a bit of a PR piece for the Davidsons' institute. Johns Hopkins and Duke split up the better part of the country into territories on a "gentleman's agreement" and have run talent searches for decades.
I worked for three years, over four years, at Johns Hopkins CTY during its first decade. Julian Stanley is a bit of a mystery to me. Although he gets credit for starting the math study, CTY seemed quite distinct from his work at the time and I can't remember that I ever laid eyes on him, much less was introduced. Bill Durden ran the Center from a _very_ "cozy" rowhouse off-campus on Charles Avenue back then.
How could serving the needs of a highly qualified group be anything but a win-win situation? Sure, the kids get their intellectual needs met. But the social benefits are huge. It was estimated that kids at the summer school came away with address books of 100 other students. Imagine the odd kid at school suddently having a national network of equals. Elitist? Well, there is another side to the coin. First week "blow back" was a serious concern of the on-site counselors when the kids realized they _weren't_ so special now and all the other kids on site were their equals. Maturity opportunity there.
Easy, just have a monitor installed in their heads, thereby seeing everything they see, hearing everything they hear, and observing everything they do. Up until a certain age of course, and only for any child who shows "promise." ;-)
It's easier on your self-esteem if you refuse to believe the validity of the test instead of facing up to uncomfortable facts. The very idea we don't know how to identify gifted children is a political construction - we could do it more than 50 years ago. We haven't lost the science, we've lost the will.
Or, maybe we have partially discovered a thing or two about whether it is useful or wise to exalt those who are merely most able to manipulate symbols. IQ is basically the ability to manipulate symbolic identifiers. While a useful talent in many ways, it says nothing about a person's wisdom or goodness, which are ultimately far more important traits.
I have an IQ of 151, and thanks to the public education system, even in the gifted program, I lost all will to learn anything outside of the few topics that are extremely interesting to me, none of which I had any exposure to academically until college since even the gifted programs are aimed to the lowest common denominator, which is the 125-135 people, who aren't too bright.
So you are surprised and disappointed by the mediocrity of the public school system. How smart can you be? You are dumb enough to allow yourself to be a victim. I assume you can read. Get off your high horse and be actively involved in your own education. Develop interests on your own.
an ill wind that blows no good
I identify with that statement well. Even with a fancy "College Preparatory" certificate,
I was not prepared for the studying required to get through college. If I could get "A's"
and a "B" or two without even trying, what incentive did I have to learn good study habits?
It seems to me that part of that College Prep certificate should have required a class about
good study habits. But then again, if one could pass the "Study habits" class without
studying... errr. Yeah.
-Shawn
Have already been taken by 'The Centre' for research.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Things were rejigged back in the early 1900's to produce good factory workers. Hence the bells, report cars, raise your hand,
http://reason.com/0110/fe.dp.schools.shtml
Don't forget... Part of the reason nobody wants to change the education system is that most people can't envision a system other than the one they went through.
Every country's school system represents the values that country holds. Chinese citizens are taught to quite, respectful, non-disruptive, etc. The poor bastards won't raise their hands in class to ask a question because it would disrupt the teacher's lecture. Now I've had classes like that, but not an entire educational system.
If you didn't notice, most educational systems do not place the priority on education.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm so ridiculously brilliant I had a computer when I was 3 and was programming the little stick figure to walk across the screen but --- now I work as a programmer and I fall roughly on the same pay curve as every other American techster and worry because I know there's a whole bunch of Indians who didn't learn Basic in pre-K that can do everything I can only cheaper and better.
Yup. Welcome to the real world, where it's not what you can do or how you can do it, but how much you can do it for that's most important. And hey, those Indian programmers do some fine work, so don't be so dispariging. Besides, someone so intelligent shouldn't have gotten themselves into a position where they are competing with other codemonkeys, whether from the US or abroad. Shouldn't you be in a computer job "more suited to your abilities"?
I hate, HATE, the term "book smart" because people have had the tendancy to peg me with it because it carries this connotation that you're not smart-smart, just smart about certain things and naive about the rest but some of you posters strike me as book smart in the most basic, unglamorous way... the kid who can memorize Washington's birthday but couldn't change a tire if they wanted to.
I am one of these "book smart" people. Though I've never heard it euphamised like this. Nerdy, wierd etc, are more the terms I recognise. I learned long ago that I can't do things other take for granted, just as they can't do things I seem to take for granted. Very often, I feel those who can't solve partial differential equations, but can change tires and deal with other people got the better end of the bargin. But the grass is always greener right?
May the Maths Be with you!
You should NEVER assist the very smart because they will then just open secret labs and look for kyrptonite or bring the dead back to life.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I think it's ineffective to try to identify who the 'gifted' kids are and to try to 'nurture' them. It's much better to set up the whole system so that gifted kids can distinguish themselves. Nobody should be able to get 100% on an exam, thus maxing out expectations, and there should always be options available for extra work/credit.
This is not difficult. Anyone who's gone to a halfway decent college has seen this system in action: the average students get through, while the gifted/hardworking ones get the A's, the good grad school admissions, and the nice job offers.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Well .. quite honestly, I was just joking about :P [Although I did have a slight stroke a year or so ago due to a head injury - no faculties were lost.]
..even slash-dot *grin*, looks at you like your nuts if 'that's all you have done'.
When I was tested, I was very young, 7 and 8, and it was actually the late 70's. Standardized testing wasn't used much at the time. The California Achievement Tests were the only ones that I could remember at an elementary school level. I was actually tested on I.Q. by a person, one on one, to be included in a G.E. program.
My obscure point (and the resulting joke) was, that as you get older, and other responsibilities take over, it becomes less and less important how 'smart' you were as a child. No one cares on a job interview what your I.Q. is, and its not going to keep your newborn children from waking up every 3 hours wanting to eat.
And when you were told, constantly, throughout your childhood that you have the potential to do great things, the realization that mundane tasks await you every day can be frustrating or disheartening. I, for example, have not done anything of historically significant value with my life to date. (Who knows what will happen next year though.) The stigma of 'why are you wasting your life' runs high amongst folks with 'above average I.Q.s, apparently if your lower than 150, its ok to just have two kids and work 9-5, but once you branded with higher than that - society, your peers, and hell
It must have been a crappy joke if I had to explain it.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
One of my major complaints of education in the United States is that it largely aims to teach facts before teaching logic and reason (critical thinking).
See Dorothy Sayer's The Lost Tools of Learning.
We should be teaching children how to learn first, then feed them various subjects.
I did well in my private school through eigth grade - definitely top 5 of my class. I did fairly well in public high school, too, finishing in three years by taking summer school and full course loads - with little effort expended. I learned basically one thing: how to be lazy. I developed an excellent work ethic over the years, but this took some effort on my part. I am just now going back to college as an adult, and the things I am learning about learning itself and critical thought are so basic that I wonder exactly what exactly I accomplished during the last 12 years of education except a smattering of random facts. With the proper learning skills developed, I could probably learn all those facts in just a few short years now. Why drag it out so long?
When I was at MIT normal was 140. It was the guys 160-180 that freaked us out. Like the guys who do physics problems sets in their heads after a few minutes of getting them while the rest of us had to toil all Thursday night. Or that 15-year old kid whose voice was still changing.
Overall it was a pleasant experience to be surrounded by smart people and by those who cherished intellectual pursuit. If I didnt have the Net, being back in general society with the intellectual curiosity of dead fish who drive me crazy.
Weiner was a classic prodigy; spoke Greek and Latin by age 5; he graduated Tufts at age 14, had his PhD from Harvard by 19. Weiner said that the Prodigy syndrome is something a parent, frequently the father, does to a child. It involves bing very demanding, and vary very sparing of praise. Weiner said it got him a 5-year head start in his research, but cost him his whole childhood. He said he would never do that to his own child (though apparently he was a relatively demanding father). Weiner also said he believed the prodigy syndrome could be worked on most kids; that there was nothing exceptional about himself. He also mentions some tragic prodigies he knew personally who burned out and stopped trying.
My first point is this: don't confuse having a pushy parent with being really smart. The difference will not show up until one gets beyond regurgitating book learning and into original research. My second point is this: don't steal anyone's childhood; they are irreplaceable.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
I didn't intend to suggest that the post was by someone who had been pushed into the prodigy syndrome. In fact it sounds like quite the reverse; the poster was able to plot his own course.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
*rolls eyes* That kind of question always bugged me. Really, what good does asking little niggling details like that do for you other than force students to find old tests and study to the test? Moreover, I feel the problem is more wise-spread than that. Take history, for instance. How often do you really need to know the exact date of a battle in the Civil War. If you know the year and the general location, maybe a significant event or two, you're perfectly well set. If you should need more detail, all you have to do is pull out a reference book.
Yeah, it's true that a kid could keep himself occupied doing math problems, but how many kids are actually going to do that? That's just asking too much of a kid. Call it lazy if you want, but in the end, it's human nature. Especially since I don't enjoy math anyways, I certainly wasn't going to do more voluntarily. In the end, I would just sit and think/daydream, which kept me both occupied and happy, at least until the teacher got on me about it. I'm perfectly capable of keeping myself occupied, even with nothing more than a blank wall, just not in the ways our educational system considers valid.
I completely agree. Kids are people too, and give them an easy out and they'll generally take it. Yes, I enjoyed some parts of my classwork. I still occasionally derive the quadratic equation or the division rule for derivation when I'm bored. But, quite frankly, if the teacher had asked me to do the minimum work, I'd only do the minimum work. ^_^ Give me a chance to show up the teacher and you would have been much more likely to get me interested... Too, I was and still am one of those people who often listens and understands better when I'm not devoting my full attention to the speaker. One of my math teachers recognized that and didn't object to me reading a book in class so long as I could answer when I was called on and as long as she approved of my reading choices. (She was very big on classic sci-fi and fantasy) Because of her, I tested out of the first two Calculus classes at my university, despite only having had a year of Calculus in high school.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
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.
hey, that's how my job works now!
Nah, he mentioned they do the work BETTER than Americans. I, personally, can't tell the difference but I'd really, really love to talk with someone NOT at HP's South Indian Call Center (and yet, still calling themselves Max, Joan and Ethel... no kidding) when my 33 day old laptop totally powers down because of a faulty power converter.
Other than being called booksmart (in my pre-contacts days), I think I'm pretty well rounded... I could fumble my way through a tire change (probably. I think) and with some discipline in the coding area I could probably learn that too (twice I've tried the "learn C++ in X time" stuff, both times to quit around day 7 because I had other stuff more important to me) but I can also pass for a low-end jock on some days and would have no problem beating down at least half of the guys on here. Girls too, maybe, but some geek girls are pretty butch... not like the G4 ladies.
Just wanted to add my view of the smart-smart-kids vs. book-smart-kids argument and now I'm going back to slacking... not because I want to look cool or because I'm not challenged enough but because I'm just a slacker lately.
Weiner said that the Prodigy syndrome is something a parent, frequently the father, does to a child.
My experience directly contradicts this. I was pretty much a classic child prodigy -- when I was 9, I took Canada's grade 7 "Gauss" competition and was one of only five competitors to obtain a perfect score; the next year I repeated the trick with the grade 8 competition. At the same time, I was learning violin, and by age 16 I had competed against university music students (playing Ravel's Tzigane, no less) and won a chance to perform the Sibelius violin concerto with a professional orchestra.
I mention this not to boast, but rather to emphasize the following point: My parents did not push me. I did not work hard -- indeed, where most violinists practiced three hours or more each day, I rarely went beyond half an hour in a day. If I was a prodigy, I was a natural prodigy -- not one manufactured through hard work or demanding parents -- and thus one whom Weiner claimed should never have existed.
My second point is this: don't steal anyone's childhood; they are irreplaceable.
What is a childhood? A child doing what he wants, or a child doing what most children want?
When I was young, countless people told me that I was wasting my childhood; in elementary school, some teachers even tried to coerce me into being a normal child by playing (athletic) games with the other children. Naturally, they were utterly wrong. My childhood was exactly what I wanted it to be; while I played Beethoven symphonies instead of baseball, I did so because I found it to be more interesting and more rewarding. If I had been forced to be "normal", that would have been robbing me of my childhood.
Weiner railed against parents who -- failing to be entirely exceptional themselves -- try to achieve their dreams by constructing exceptional children. He was quite right to do so, but we should not fall into the opposite trap. As much as parents who try to construct exceptional children do those children a disservice, so do also those parents who try to construct "normal" children.
Let children choose their path and support them along it; but whether that path is ordinary or extraordinary, we should be very cautious about trying to deter them from it.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
This might be below some of your thresholds, but the parent AC's link really shoudl be read.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I am slightly surprised that I have not seen a single comment (although I filter out less than 2) about the effect a brilliant or inspiring teacher has had, although I have seen LOTS of comments about, "I was young and brilliant, the system sucked, and then I wound up here rather than where I should have been."
/.ers want to become teachers, to try and find those brilliant young students and guide them so they don't have the same frustrating experiences so many of us have had?
I don't mean to impugn the people with the stories at all - I have a similar one, myself (short version: finished HS math by age 9, became pilot instead of physicist, regrets). But if anything, it should illustrate that being brilliant at a field of knowledge has little to do with self-insight, what makes you happy or having empathy toward others. These are the critical abilites/insights that lead to a worthwhile and satisfying life.
But to the topic - I have found that the greatest leaps I have made in knowledge and/or insight have come from some brilliant teachers who knew just the right trick to lead me just far enough down a path to intrigue me to follow it further on my own. The biggest trick about teaching, I think, is less the spewing of facts, but inspiring/inducing/threatening/cajoling a student to THINK on their own about something - that is where true learning occurs.
Now, how many fellow
I sure don't. I have tutored people in math and physics for many years, and the horror stories I hear from both teachers and students in at the H.S. level, coupled with the low pay, lack of respect, and general atmosphere of prison vs. learning make sure I would never, ever want to teach in a High School.
So, perhaps we should talk about how we pay and treat teachers in the U.S. If a high school teacher who was great was paid $150,000 a year (sadly, the same argument even works for University profs), and we assured the class size in High School was only about 15 - 20 so every student got individual attention, and allowed broad latitude in what is to be taught, what do you think would happen to the quality of education? How many more of us would be tempted by a career in teaching? To think of teaching as a PROFESSION and not just something the untalented drift into?
(Of course this would cost a LOT. I personally think it would be worth it.)
I resigned from the gifted program in middle school because I got along better with kids outside of it, as did the few of my close friends that were placed in it. Those of us who dropped out actually did much better than those who stayed in, and anyone was allowed to take the gifted courses if they had the prerequisites, so it really just kept us out of the mandatory 'gifted' study hall/problem solving/bullshit/student segregation blocks. There was one exception who stayed in the program, though he dropped out and went to home schooling in high school. He works for Google now, but that's a different story.
I was doing fine until my second year of college. Then I got electrocuted by the nearly deadly combination of clumsiness and an elevator power line, and was out for about two days. I felt crippled after that: I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't do math, and I failed all of my exams that semester (it was near the end, so I still got low Bs/high Cs in my classes, but it hurt). The whole summer I felt like a zombie (I spent most of it running Cat5 and building hundreds of desks, for several dozen computer labs), and it really took a bit over a year to reach a point where I could program well again, and teach myself again. Due to the math difficulties, I had to leave computer engineering, and I went to industrial/systems engineering, which has math, but its mainly deterministic/probabilistic OR and statistics, which are more games than they are math. No terrible ending; I did very well in ISE, graduated and whatnot, and had no difficulty getting a decent enough job to pay my few bills, so I'm doing alright. In some ways I wish that I had stayed in school and worked on an MS, and I might go back in a year or two.
Thing is, I think that being electrocuted changed me for the better. ISE was a much more diverse and interesting major than computer engineering (mainly because it consisted of subjects that were non-obvious to me, which I would never have taught myself), and after I recovered I was able to use my programming skills to complement the modeling and simulation courses. I also took some odd electives and learned a lot of machine shop skills and relay ladder logic, so now I can make (and have machines make) nifty metal things too.
I also relaxed a lot while I was zombiefied, and I'm told that I'm much easier to get along with now. I know that I'm less antisocial... before I walked around listening to music all day (usually some selection of generic antisocial 'alternative rock' on the pinnacle of MP3 players: the Rio 500) and ignoring people, now I really don't want to hear music most of the time (though I will always stop to listen to Dire Straits, Xploding Plastix, or post-Miles Davis jazz), and I'd rather just hear what's going on around me and talk to people.
Unless its a ringing cellphone.
I still hate those things, and I think its a holdover from when I was a kid. My family had a sheepdog that threw fits of homicidal rage whenever a phone rang, but was otherwise very friendly and easygoing. Most of the calls were jerks trying to sell things, as this was before the 'do not call' lists, when telemarketers called rampantly during dinner hours. I respected the wisdom of my elders, so I tended to agree with the dog. I still agree with the dog, for it was truly a prodigy in phone raging, squirrel ignoring, mud rolling, and flea gathering.
I'm not so sure. A lot of smart kids are universally praised at every difficult academic task the accomplish, and often rightfully so. However, many young geniuses turn this into a positive feedback loop and decide that everyone expects them to succeed 100% of the time, and that if they try but fail, then they're failures as people.
That bug bit me, and hard. By the time I got to the end of high school, I would much rather ignore a task (exam, term paper, project, etc.) altogether than try to complete it and not get a perfect score. Then, I could still claim that I could have aced the task, but I just didn't care. I actually cared quite a lot, but I was terrified of finding out that I might not be the best in my class at something.
I've got three young children that I desperately hope to help past this problem, but I don't really know how to go about it. I don't want to set them up to fail at certain things to show them that it's OK to not be the best sometimes, but I don't have any better ideas. Any Slashdotters have any great suggestions in this area?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As someone with Aspergers syndrome I have to both agree and disagree with this. It's true that I can lose interest in some subjects in favor of ones I do well in (Science, maths,English, and history). At the same time however, if I want to I'm able to memorize facts that are in other fields if a need arises. It's helped a lot because I'm able to scan quickly the text of a paragraph or a lecture and pick up the basic points and from there I can use common sense and do well on the tests. Being able to basically set your brain on record helps lots in school :)
As a total aside here, I think the first clue we had about my AS was when my mom had a friend and her husband visit us. He installed PBX systems for large businesses in NYC. In the course of the conversation he was detailing one of the installs and using all the technical terms that had his wife's eyes glazing over. After he was done, I proceeded to repeat back to him word for word what he said and then discuss it with him. I was eight at the time.
Does that make me gifted? I don't know, but it's sure handy to have.
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
Despite what you may have read in Workers World or the New York Times, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is still taught to every public school student in the United States.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I guess you could say that I majored in "Pump and Dump". Sad but true. I can remember cramming my head full of facts, to the point where I was probably high on adrenaline and couldn't sit still, only to dump them to paper really quickly. I got great grades but to this day have problems with long term memory i.e. I exercised my short term memory extensively and convinced myself that only the things I was truly interested in were worth retaining. Not a good approach but one that served me well in my younger years.
Is it my fault? Most certainly. I take full responsibility for my actions.
What about the school? Well...I think the school established a system of rewards that, once you learned to game the system, ensured that those of us with good memories were going to succeed. I received so many awards, certificates of recognition, accolades, etc. during my K-12 education that recognition means very little to me today: give me time off with pay or give me money. Do not give me a pat on the back in front of my co-workers. During high school, I was in the top 3 students (of 550+) without even trying; I fell further back my senior year because I ran out of AP classes to take (that I wanted to take) and because I received a very poor grade in an Photography class (the teacher and I had differences of opinion over what constituted "art").
My experience in the public school system of America (private schools may be the same or different, I don't know, I didn't go to one) was that it does not teach students to think; it demands conformance and teaches facts. At the High School level, you would think we would challenge our students more and worry about their egos less; other nations do and, as a result, America is slipping further and further behind comparatively.
Mmmm... Bacardi...
Who knows how many children that are potential geniuses die each day in 3rd world countries. Or how many grow up in a ghetto in the States? We should be concerned about that. True genius genes don't seem to be inherited. They are probably random mutations so they probably occur in all populations regardless of socio-economic status. Later..
As we're all well aware, there are many brilliant people who end up doing nothing of significance with their lives. You see it all the time in the Mensa ads, where they talk about the genius truck driver, or used car salesman. What we really need is a way to instill a motivation to apply all that brainpower. What can we do with our kids to spark the drive that makes them want to change the world? Obviously, Edison's quote applies: "Genius is one percent inspiration,. and ninety-nine per cent perspiration."
In a way, I'm dealing with a bit of this at home. My 14 yr old is rather bright (not brilliant), and been in some gifted classes. Motivating her has been a challenge for me because I know she can do well in any class that she's interested in. The trouble comes when she doesn't like an instructor and just stops trying to do more than the minimum. It's also often difficult to decide if we should have her in the GT class (which is frequently using the same text, and just doing more with it), and possibly only get average grades, or go with the regular classes and end up with A's. I wish I had insight into how college admissions officers viewed a comparision of someone in regular classes with a 3.75 vs. someone taking all GT classes with a 3.0...If someone does, I'd be grateful for their feedback.
Just another day in Paradise
They miss it so because they are focusing on the capabilities that allow people to perform work rather than the capabilities for deciding what work should be done. This isn't the fault of the Times or Slashdot, as both have audiences among the Intellect Worker classes who are paid for mind work. Fact is that Einstein helped to discover nuclear energy, but he wasn't able to keep anyone from building an atomic bomb with his discovery. His job was the how of the matter.
The link to John Taylor Gatto's work has been posted in two places in this article's comments, and I recommend everyone read it. Our society has a special class of people - government officials, corporate managers and others - whose job it is to guide activity. They require no special amount of intelligence in any sense Slashdotters have conceived of it here and no special IQ score.
If I may digress for a moment, during the summer I was at a conference on homeschooling in Massachusetts and saw a talk on Multiple Intelligence Theory. The speaker went through all 7 standard intelligences: linguistic/verbal, spacial, logical/mathematical. kinesthetic, musical/auditory, intrapersonal and interpersonal, but also mentioned a theorized 8th intelligence: the existential. It is linked to intelligence that manifests itself in the study of such fields as philosophy and religion, giving insight into the what should be done and why areas of life.
Postulating the existence of that faculty for the moment, it would seem that our society nurtures a special upper class of people to use their Existential Intelligence, letting them decide what should be done and why, while the other classes are left to implement their decisions. This is where the focus of schooling needs to change. If the Existential Intelligence is real programs must be created and adapted to train people in its use. Even if it is not, we do our children a horrible disservice by depriving them of what up until this very century was considered the most important domain of the intellect, the study of philosophy.
My own ex-high-school was an example of the dismal state of why and what teaching, possessing only 1 single-semester (half of a school year) class on philosophy, which was linked to nothing else, unpublicized and generally only met if by chance enough students signed up each semester. This must change. Students must graduate high school knowing as much of Socrates and Locke and Huxley (examples off the top of my head) as of Physics, Mathematics and English Literature. Orwell's "1984" should be read as more than history. The philosophes of the Enlightenment should be read and debated as more than mere history. Students should even have the opportunity to swim the seas of Talmud if they desire so and have no sectary objection.
Then perhaps the Einsteins of today and tomorrow will be able to keep the Bomb from being built off their work if they so please. The greatest gift we can give students is the ability to make decisions for themselves, and that is the tool we hand them when we teach philosophy. It may not win them a $50,000 scholarship now, but it will probably help them earn just as much money later. After all, it does so for the business and political elites.
We need to learn the reasons WHY we are the way we are, not learn how to deal with it.
We need to 'evolve' on so many levels, acceptance without understanding is stagnation and death.
a kid can learn is to question the foundation stones of the system.
There are good teachers out there; I've met a few and was lucky enough to have been taught by one or two of them when I was a kid. --Long after I left the school system, I asked a teacher I know if he is able to have a positive impact in spite of the politically inspired curriculum and various restrictions and idiocies built into the school system, and he told me that, Yes, when the classroom door is shut, a teacher can ignore the rules and follow his/her own instincts; Just be sure to give a nod to authority once in a while. The trick, I think, is in getting teachers into the system who also know how to question the foundation stones.
The system is about control, not liberation. In my view, that's a universal given.
Assuming I am correct in this, it is also a given that high intelligence in a student is a potential danger, because such a student is more capable of seeing through the veil and causing problems; disrupting the matrix, so to speak. So such students, from the system's point of view, must be carefully subdued with an extra dollop of mind-programming; give the kid extra attention, tell the kid just how special she/he is, and keep that flavor of 'love' flowing by making high marks seem like the most important thing; make high marks and adherence to systematic rules the valve through which 'love' and social acceptance flows. This works really well, particularly as the regular student body has been programmed to ostracize kids who appear too-smart, (or as it really is, to ostracize those kids who have chosen to not waste energy on fashion and playing the popularity game in favor of following their own interests and paths in life), and thereby starve suck kids of love and social acceptance. Thus, such kids turn to the adult world for love; When the System and Authority Figures become the sole providers of 'love', even a highly intelligent person can easily get sucked into the mind-game.
--I narrowly escaped the gifted program after being tested on two occasions. My brain, despite the elements it contained which made teachers notice me and send me for testing, turned out to not be quite fast enough, or be able to manipulate numbers well enough, or remember facts (unless I found them interesting), in enough quantity to place me among the ranks of the 'gifted'. So I lucked out and stayed among the ranks of the invisible muggles, which was easily one of the luckiest thing which could have happened to me.
The weird result at the tail end of the gifted program, (and I had several friends which hailed from those hallways to observe), was that the very kids who had the brain capacity to grasp the odd details and rogue patterns of the world were also among the most heavily and successfully mind-programmed; programmed to not see those same patterns. After all, you don't get good marks for noticing that which the Authority gets grouchy about. The regular kids, by contrast, were too immersed in fashion and social dramas based on the 'popularity' game to care about questioning the foundation stones of the world. They just wanted to get laid, get jobs, get pregnant, be 'cool' etc. The only kids who managed to slip through all these various herding techniques with their brains relatively un-washed were a paltry few in-between cases.
Ender Wiggins and crew, had they been processed the way our 'gifted' kids are processed today, would have been singularly ineffective in saving the world from aliens. --And this is precisely because everybody today has been heavily programmed not to believe in any paradigm outside that described by Officialdom, in which an alien reality is a marginalized possibility at best, and one which (if it were allowed to exist), could only do so within the false and deeply limited parameters of scientific possibility as enforced by our education system and the media. Spielberg's 'Men in Black' being a typical case in point. Linear thinking simply does not apply to aliens.
'Bean' m
The word "Smart" seems to be the buzz of this techno society. Suddenly there seem to be a lot of highly gifted kids, if you would believe all of their "proud" parents. How can smart people be detected. Not by their grades. Nor by their abbillity to adapt. And even if they would have a tattoo on the head saying:"smart" would they want to be detected? There is no stereotype of smart people, nor is there a stereotype of stupid people. Some "smart" people want/do to live up these stereotypes and others don't. Putting pressure on kids to have them perform to the max is simply a bad idea most of the time. Because "smart" and "highly gifted" is such a buzzword, real "smart" or "highly gifted" children are harder too help (if they would need help). And in the Netherlands there is so much pressure, as the result we see too many children almost burn out because they have to have the higest achievable level of education. As a result we have to much low quality universities and a shortage of plumbers, etc. In the Netherlands it is so overvaluated, even in the lowest level of education we see teachers who have to let them read books and take exams on theoretical subjects. These kids only want to learn by doing, not by understanding theories. A lot of them become very stressed and unhappy, being unable to fill the ideals. If you're extremely smart it doesn't mean you have to forfill others expectations. It would be nice if there was more focus on that part. Parents: don't fuck up your kids.
We (my wife and I ) do not trust our chldrens enrichment and life welfare to so called 'Gifted Guru's' especially those whose CV's include the creation of Reader Rabbit.
Perhaps suprisingly our local public school have been great at giving our kids a well rounded school experience.
mitd -- Made in the Dark
"One good thing about spam... You don't gotta answer it"
While I certainly admire / envy such folks, I prefer here to take a more utilitarian approach, especially when we're talking about socialized government tax dollar supported educational systems.
What good is having a high IQ, really? Admittedly, a few truly brilliant people have changed the history of the world through exciting theories and discoveries. But that few is quite a small few. Clearly, in an elementary school of 500 children, there aren't going to be 100 such individuals. Probably not even one. And yet these 500 children need to grow up to be useful, contributing members of society, or at least a hefty fraction of them, or society is doomed (leech vs. contributor can't grow to be a very large ratio if society is to continue).
I think society has regressed a bit. Life is so convenient and so easy for so many, at least in the united states I'm familiar with. Not many hundred years ago, people had 80 hour workweeks on the farm or at similar labor, and that was how it was, and most importantly, I think, the children were involved, rather than being prohibited from working. I think the idea that the students of today can come home from school, knock out an hour or two (at best, for the vast majority) of homework, and play 3 hours of XBox and watch 3 hours of TV before going back to bed is killing society. The need for brilliance, in my opinion, is far overshadowed by the need for people who are willing and able to work, and work hard, push themselves, and make use of what they have at their disposal, both in terms of physical resources and innate capabilities.
I know lots of intelligent people (I sometimes fancy myself one). But I'm sitting here typing a slashdot post because I'm too lazy to better my mind (I have a solid C++ textbook just begging me to do some exercises). I have a comfortable, reasonably lucrative full-time job, and have almost finished an MS in CS. And I still only do what I have to to get by. And pretty much everyone I know does the same in my upper-middle-to-middle class suburbian circle of friends.
My point here is that society doesn't need more true geniuses. It needs more people of character and work ethic. And really, I think the value of work for its own good, rather than purely for money, is one of the least taught and most needed principles. Now that I'm out in the real world and practically finished with schooling, I find that what really matters at work, etc., is the ability to show up for work, and work, do the job, and do it well. The people who do that succeed, by and large, and the people who continue to get by, as the educational system promotes (I think), find themselves in a different place than they expected.
Your experience may be (and likely is) different than mine. But one thing seems clear to me -- innate brilliance is nothing compared to how it is used. How do we teach that?
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
They give everyone a chance to go on self-righteous rants. Or rants criticizing other rants...
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
The New York Times? Neglected?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
My e-penis is in excess of 12". While that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I wanted to brag about it.
By the way, here are my other stats:
7 feet tall
180 IQ
305lbs
1% bodyfat
Was Time Magazine's "Man of the year" 20 consecutive times, from 1985-present
"not sure I agree with Turing as an example at all in your explanation"
You call yourself a genius and yet you can't recognise the simplicity and elegance in Turing's Universal computing machine. A genius is distinguished by their ability to see what is right under everyones noses, spacetime, evolution, gravity, ect. As another poster pointed out art, music and litrature all have geniuses who can communicate deep concepts across cultures and time. A "genius" of cheap DVD technology cannot even hope to be seen alongside that kind of brilliance.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So we have one genius with an IQ of 151 and another with an IQ of 160? Since when did the average geek IQ reach such high levels?
I'd hate to burst everyone's bubble, but online IQ tests are not authentic. They inflate your score so you will be more tempted to purchase their custom intelligence profile. A girl I dated in high school got a score of 125 using one of these sites, yet she wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed (but the bell curve peeks at an IQ of 100!!). I iterate again, these online IQ tests are definitely NOT accurate and can be SEVERELY INFLATED.
Just as my observation, if every slashdotter's posted IQ were to be taken as fact, then /. would be the greatest think-tank on the planet today, and indeed the greatest in all of human history. To put it all in perspective, an IQ of 135 is in the 99th percentile.