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How Do You Educate a Prodigy?
Nethead writes "When he was 8 years old, Gabriel See got a score on the math part of the SAT that would be the envy of most high-school seniors. When he was 10, he worked on T-cell receptor research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He's built a Genomic Lab Liquid Handling System out of Legos. He's studied chaos theory, string theory, quantum mechanics and nuclear science. He's 13 now. How do you fit him into the American school system?"
He seems to learn enough on his own.
You could possibly fit the entire American school system into him.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
You fit him in by daily ass kickings to remind him how much of a nerd he no doubt it. Something like that.
Not trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?
Anyway from what I've read, the guy is a pretentious little git who can't stand working with mere mortals anyway and ends up finishing projects on his own. Maybe one day he'll grow up and realize that even he has very real limitations.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Seriously, you don't. You just treat him like a sponge. Leave books around and let him absorb them.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
You don't enroll him as a normal student.
If your local school district allows it, you may enroll him on a part-time basis for non-academic classes, club activities, and if the state school-sports-league allows it, non-academic competitive events like sports, marching band, and the like.
If your district doesn't have any way of accommodating this, try a private school or home-school association.
As for academics, try college, home-school, self-study, on-the-job training, and the like.
Heck, he may decide he wants to quit full-time academic study well before age 18 and well before getting a Ph.D. or two. Once he has the skills and attitude to earn a living and live independently, let him quit school. Just insist that if he quits school that he pay his own rent.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"How do you fit him into any traditional school system?"
Corrected that last bit for you. In all sincerity, there are few schools where someone of this genius would fit in (academically and socially, I imagine).
Honestly, the best path for this kid will be his own - clearly he has knowledge of several possible fields of study... so let him decide where he wants to focus his efforts for now, before he moves on to something else. If his work ethic is every bit as good as his intelligence, you can be sure the world will be a better place for allowing him a little latitude.
How do you fit him into the American school system?
If you have a shred of decency/humanity/mercy within you, then you don't. Maybe some reading or also some more reading will help to make the point. Public school in the USA basically amounts to training in subservience and passivity. This one is likely to have a great deal of friction with it.
Otherwise having him instructed in a martial art would be a great start. It will provide two benefits: discipline and focus, and the ability to deal with bullies who will hassle him because he stands out.
And make him show them what he's got. I'm pretty sure he would be accepted for a degree, as long as this is what HE wants to do...
It'll only slow him down. He's destined for great things, and will carve his own way in life to whatever destination he wishes.
Don't dare subject him to the state brainwashing the rest of us proles have to endure.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
you put him in charge of it.
How many podigy's do we know who have contributed to the society? I would think none ...
The reason is they don't have the structured education to fall back on... Yes even if it's mediocre structure.
To fit him into the American Education System you need to dumb him down a bit. Try some Electroshock Therapy.
You don't; and neither does most children in the US. Our school system its horribly broken.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
The plural of Lego is 'Lego' damn it!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Send him to college.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius
One thing I've seen with several "prodigies" when they are fete'd by the press is how socially awkward they appear.
Being an intellectual high achiever doesn't obviate the need for development of social and communication skills.
The kid needs to get punted outdoors with Bear Grylls for a few months.
What's the need to? He would not benefit academically from doing so, the only downside I would consider is perhaps the social aspect of school. But then, his social skills may suffer but if he is already working alongside other people in a workplace then they should develop over time as normal. In fact his social skills may benefit more from being in a mature environment and not at school where the academic stereotypes can be more susceptible to bullying.
I would advice him to study just one of those fields well - quantum mechanics or string theory take a lot of time to master. Get him to work with a good scientist - I know couple of people that would be happy to guide him in theoretical physics. Also we have couple of unsolved problems in maths if he finishes up the physics. The greatest danger with these prodigies is that they seem to get bored early and get incapable to progress after a certain stage. Not trying to put you down, just sharing my experience.
The school system is not designed for people at either end of the spectrum.
He could go to college, and he'd learn something. However, he'd need to be in a phd program before he got to "interesting" studies. Is he willing to wait 6 yeas to start learning? Is he mature enough to sit through a "health" class in college where they tell you to wash your hands after using the bathroom (that really pissed me off)?
The real question - is he ready for the American school system?
Despite the kid's obvious mastery of academics, social skills are something that are learned by experience and interaction with peers - something that I'm sure this kid surely lacks. His education should focus not on academics, but on social interaction - get the kid into sports or summer camps, teach him how to be a kid and what it means to have fun. Too many books are a double edged sword in this case.
"Fit" him into the American school system so that he can held back by silly things like No Child Left Behind. I'm sure a lot of us here had enough trouble dealing with the school systems because of this, I know I literally slept through classes because I was bored and I had already learned the lesson without two extra days of explanation. So, for a prodigy, actually fitting him into the system wouldn't seem very practical. As some others here already said, let him educate himself.
Do you purposefully miss out the important parts of linked stories just to pad it out with science buzzwords like quantum, chaos, and string theory?
The actual part of the story which is important:
"That kind of off-the-charts intelligence comes with a conundrum, though: Because he's only 13, Gabriel is not emotionally ready to handle programs designed for older students. His intellectual abilities raise the question: How do you map out an education for a boy at the extreme end of the gifted population?"
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Have him start taking CLEP tests. That way he won't get board in a class.
I dunno the answer, but I sure could use it.
I can't afford to home-school or that would be the obvious solution.
They seem to be thinking about emotional adjustments and age appropriateness and social skills too. The parents seem to be sensible, so I am sure this boy will make some lasting contribution to science and math, unlike other child prodigies and idiot savants who burn out or end up as curiosities.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why would you design a school system for a 1-in-million kid?
Seems to me he is doing find on his own, though I am guessing some socialization with kids his age wouldn't be a bad thing.
You do not 'fit' a kid like that, but rather do your best to understand what his needs are, even if these are unconventional. In terms of learning, he will do well on his own, you just need to support him with the appropriate resources. What he will likely need help with is with developing healthy social interactions and integrating to society. It you focus just on his intellect, he will suffer later on.
You could possibly fit the entire American school system into him.
Except that he's highly focused on sciences. How about some history, art, music, or languages for a few years? Heaven forbid the kid learn something besides science.
Speaking as someone who works with a lot of very smart people focused in very narrow fields: the kid's going to be a lot happier if he has at least some general background.
Didn't any of you read Ender's Game? Remember how, among other things, Ender often longs to just be a kid?
Please help metamoderate.
This kid is a prime candidate for home schooling. In many communities, the public school system, or other social organizations for kids are available to the home schooled to keep them engaged in activities with their peers.
The biggest problem with integrating kids like this into "The School System" is that the system doesn't deal very well with those whose performance lies outside the social norms (particularly on the high side). You have to have the option of putting him into activities where he will fit and pulling him out if he's a mismatch for their culture.
Have gnu, will travel.
He seems to know what to do.
If there is a high school that has academic courses at his level AND where his social maturity won't interfere with other students' learning, go there for academic classes.
For example, maybe he does NOT speak French and would like to learn. Maybe he's not super-fast at picking up languages. A typical "honors" high school French class with his age-peers would be okay.
On the other hand, if he'll just race through 4 semesters in 4 months, then it's probably not a good idea to have him in a class that goes at the normal "honors" pace. Likewise, if he's as socially mature as most 13-year-olds and the only honors French classes available are mostly junior- and senior-classes, then maybe this isn't such a good idea as he'll be a distraction.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My daughter "dropped out" of high school at 14 and started at a good university. It was by far the best choice she ever made. She was able to graduate college at 19, taking time out to travel and live for a time several other countries, and had better than a 4.1 GPA. So long as a kid is reasonably emotionally mature and has good support from their family get them out of high school and into college.
You dont. If you have a kid that smart, it's time to send him to a place where he can grow.
Send him off to do research. Ask him where he wants to go. Then do it.
The public school system is no place for him
You provide the tools s/he asks and access to the information s/he desires, and let his mind roam free.
Read radical news here
One of the symptoms of Asperger's is "genius syndrome": repeating without understanding. How much "studying" of the subjects has he *really* done? I was reading encyclopedias at 8 and repeated back what I read. Big deal.
FTFA:
Nivala would give Gabriel a textbook on a subject — say, chaos theory — and Gabriel would read the book in a few days. He could then answer specific questions and open-ended questions on the subject. He even remembered the exact page number in the book where certain formulas first appeared, Nivala said, hinting at a photographic-like memory.
A) Don't. Give him the opportunity to explore and find his niche.
B) Do what we do with the rest and drug him into fitting the norm.
We spend insane amounts of money and effort to mainstream those that shouldn't be, and little on the best. A gifted and talented program isn't when a parent can request little Johnny be placed there so he's not with the "riff raff". Never mind he won't keep up.
I think the American public school system would benefit extensively from someone like him... teaching.
I remember graduating with a couple VERY smart individuals, at least according to school measurements. However, once they entered the "real world" they got quite a shock learning that their high IQ and 4.0 GPAs meant almost nothing because they had very little street smarts. They spent all of their time trying to please their parents and teachers but they had not learned what it takes to actually survive.
My point is, we need to make sure kids like this learn how to do things that translate into a means to not only make a good living for themselves, but also contribute to society in general.
giggity
You don't learn in school. School is about socialization and indoctrination.
You should ask HIM.... duh!
Check out the Davidson Institute. Their goal is to assist profoundly gifted kids. They've been a wonderful resource for my son.
sig: pv qid
His schooling doesn't matter because past 120 on the IQ scale people don't contribute proportionally more to our rate of innovation. This is fact, check Myers psychology textbook. This is because we don't innovate by learning, but through memory error. It's all in the book "On the Mystery of Innovation." and the theory of innovation by memory error.
The parents said they want to have a normal upbringing?
Hey parents! Your kid is a freaking prodigal genius! Normal isn't going to enter into any part of his life. EVER!
Best thing his parents can do is let his mind go free. Yes, he needs structure till he's of legal age, but until then, let his grey matter machine run full speed!
Don't worry about fitting him into the school system; worry about getting him into a Sperm Bank. The more of his DNA we can spread around, the better.
Lord knows he won't be getting any offspring the old fashioned way, at this rate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I took college classes from 9 to 13, then my parents pulled me out entirely. There were good and bad aspects to my path. At 13, actual graduate math classes were a bit over my head, and I felt a lot of pressure and feelings of failure because I couldn't quite hack them. Also, being isolated was hard, and it wasn't until I came back to grad school at 22 that I felt I developed my social skills properly. But being allowed to focus on intellectual pursuits was really nice in a way, and I actually look back on that fondly. Now I have my PhD and work for Google, and I do geeky things for fun. As one example, I'm noodling on keyboards, and, being me, I'm writing a DX7 synthesizer emulator. Most people consider the math of it to be impenetrably difficult, but, I'm like, "oh, _Bessel_ functions, I can dig that shit!"
I hope he does well and finds a path that makes him happy. One thing my parents did was keep me out of the newspapers (and off the front page of Slashdot, although we didn't have that then). I'm not sure whether that was entirely good or bad - publicity is valuable coin in today's society :)
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
At this point he has no place in a normal classroom... *BUT* there is an example you can eliminate.
When I was in highschool at West Anchorage High School they had an alternative high school called Stellar. They were too small for any sort of afterschool extra like band, choir, theater or sports so many of the students their would participate in West's programs.
Have him participate in a nearby school in the programs he wants but bypass the normal class room curriculum. Kinda like a playdate if you will but it will allow him to interact in a way he enjoys and not have to deal with the rudimentary education part.
One of my best teacher's used the following phrase: "The best thing we can teach you is the ways to navigate and find out how to educate yourself on what interests you."
This kid obviously has it. But he can participate with school kids his age in the other stuff and learn to socialize. Junior High / High School may work the best but I remember having sports, competition and band even at the elementary school level. As an extra bonus or workload if something he wants to do whether it be sports, theater, or band doesn't exist he can work to make it exist by organizing it.
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
I was a "gifted" child, did all of the extra work, a grade ahead, graduated at 16, etc, etc.
The problem is everything is geared for the average student, which around home was redneck fisherman getting grade 12 only so the could be a captian.
Junior high? Hell. You have to pretend you're at everyone else's level or you're the nerdy kid with no friends. It took me until high school to realize that.
Then you have the issue of, because you've done all the relevant grade 12 courses by the end of grade 9, nothing is challenging and you're in the system getting the required number of credits, not useful information.
University hits, and you're not prepared whatsoever. The average kids are used to studying hours per night so it's not such a shock. The "gifted" kids have been spoiled their whole school life and don't know what the hell to do. Since university praises regurgitation not understanding, the "gifted" kids are screwed.
This may seem a little cynical, but it's a sad truth. I'm now a web developer doing very well for myself, but wondering how I'm going to pay 2 years of student loan back.
There are 50 states, each with their own rules, not to mention Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and other territories and possessions.
Within most states there are dozens to hundreds of local school systems with varying degrees of autonomy. Then there are private schools.
In some school systems education quality varies widely from school to school. Even within schools you can get wide teacher-to-teacher variation and even class-to-class variation with the same teacher, same course, and same grade-level.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
All the geniuses go there.
Just kidding. :)
always brings to mind the iron bed of Procrustes. So, to make this "prodigy" "fit", we'd have to cut his intellect down to size. A task, I believe, public education is well-suited for.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
How do you fit him into the American school system?
You don't. You build a new school system around him.
Maybe that new school system will also be useful for those students that are too intelligent to fit into the current school system.
You don't subject a kid like that to our educational system. Instead you hire private tutors or enroll him in a private college. Eventually he will show the institution what value he is and earn full scholarship through and even possibly become a fellow/researcher for that school. Do NOT send a kid like that to public school, it will only hurt his thirst for knowledge.
And he kind of burned out. He lives with his brother (my good friend) now and hasn't ever really had a real job. After he completed college, he decided to independently pursue his own interests and sort of realized that the whole educational path he had taken was really him just quickly absorbing other people's works. Striking out on new ground was far too uncomfortable for him. What was worse was that this totally destroyed his confidence. He's never been unhappy with his life but outside of his mother's reach, he's really just kicked back and played video games. I think the greatest work of the last five years of his life has been editing TVTropes -- a site that he became obsessed with after he discovered he could spend all day watching television with no consequence. Jay has never had peers really aside from his brothers. I'm no child psychologist but I think it has had a devastating effect on his understanding on society and also his work ethic.
The other person was a coworker, Tom, who was a very talented software developer. I met him when he was 40 and one time he told me at lunchtime about his childhood. Tom had burned out as well but in a more problematic way. Tom also completed college (Physics) at a very young age but upon having difficulty his senior year, he became depressed and had suicidal thoughts. So his parents flipped out and brought him to a psychologist who diagnosed him with Asperger's Syndrome (which he clearly did not have when I met him) and gave him a bunch of drugs. He discovered he was great at programming software and decided to make a career out of it. He still said his mother's disappointment that he didn't "cure cancer" or discover a universal filed theory was probably the most regrettable thing in his life and it was ever present in their interactions.
"He'll probably find a cure for cancer," Sleight said. "Or something bigger."
I think a more positive statement would be something along the lines of "He has accomplished so much and already done such great research that even if he stopped studying now he would be an accomplished academic." Not to suggest that he should stop studying but to relieve a bit of the pressure. What if he doesn't cure cancer or something bigger? What will this news do to Gabriel the person then? Haunt him?
I would advocate trying to keep him involved in school as much as he desires with external stimulation to help his specialties. Why must geniuses be removed from society? Was Einstein removed from interacting with children his age? What exactly is the hurry? Is Gabriel asking for more time to study -- time that regular schooling is interfering with? Does he have a network of friends to rely on? Is he expected to live a short life like Ramanujan?
My opinion is to let him excel at school and take a more normal path than complete removal and its unavoidable isolation.
My work here is dung.
Jealousy rears its ugly head. That anonymous thing works for you, by the way.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My nerdy kid would be bored in a normal school. Instead he's doing a language immersion program, which keeps him interested, and encourages social interaction as well. Sports are good for that too, as a few others have mentioned. One risk with really smart kids is burnout, so there should be plenty of time for fun stuff.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
So he's a crackpot.
How do you fit him into the American school system?
Please don't try... You're neither doing him nor the school system any favor. The best you can do for people who don't fit the system, is to allow them living productively outside of it.
A good system is capable of exception handling....
The American public school system is terminally broken and not fixable. Don't believe it? Just look at the end product of the system. Keep this kid OUT of public schools and put him in an academic environment that will nurture and push him. His social development is another question altogether.
Why should he fit into the system? Or more importantly, why should the system be made to be a fit for him?
Education is only feeding our lower animal brain. Only spiritual building will benefit the higher levels of an individuals being. if the child is already gifted in education(Meaning he/she has the ability to breakdown processes inherent in all educational disciplines), it makes more sense to work on the spiritual (READ NOT RELIGION) portion of his/her being, since intelligence is already mastered. Knowledge of self, inner discipline and relationship with others is by far a more useful exercise for the child.
`dividing and developing his genome into several areas of modern advances needed to further the human species. Energy technologies, economics, Resources exploration, Physiology and Health, and Hollywood could all benefit from his high intelligence. It seems a waste to be using his powers to further string theories and chaos, etc.. Or wait.. We'll have to wait until he figures out how to clone himself.
After his frontal lobotomy, he should fit in just fine!
While I'm sure that a lot of us have heard of prodigy horror/early burnout stories, it doesn't always end up that way.
My best friend entered Harvard at the age of 15 as a Sophomore. He took some of the hardest courses available; Math 55, Physics 55, Organic Chem (by the way, I believe Bill Gates took Math 55 which is one reason why I don't think he's a dummy) and did extremely well on them. He had a great girlfriend and was an excellent foosball player. (I didn't have a girlfriend, barely got through Math 21C and couldn't play foosball to save my life).
I think in his post-grad research he worked with a Nobel Laureate. (Sorry, don't know the details, not my field). Now he's a fully tenured professor in Chemistry doing work in Nano-Tech (I introduced him to Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation").
So give Gabriel the opportunity to do great things and he just might.
put him in a great, capitalistically driven private school, what could be more American besides public school?
I had such a prodigy as a friend during my undergraduate education at the University of Texas. He took honors math classes and science classes at UT in the mornings and attended regular high school classes in the afternoons. He was a fantastic kid and I believe had great experiences at both UT and at his high school. He is now a law professor because a law professor advised him at one time that if he wanted have a carreer that maximized his time to explore what ever the heck he wanted then he should be a law professor.
Some day every child will be exactly like this one if we could figure out how to recreate the conditions present in his body at the time of his birth right through to his first steps. My guess is that every child could be this way and what great things we could accomplish as a species with such advantages.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Clearly the technical stuff he will educate himself on, and ask for the things he needs in order to do so. The only thing you have to be concerned about is social skills, and having some semblance of normality in childhood.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
For god's sake, don't cripple the poor kid by subjecting him to our conveyor belt of education; he needs someone or someones who can keep challenging him... and, beyond that, the opportunities to teach himself using application. (Learn by doing.) Maybe he'll need a social and sociological curriculum on the side to make sure he can interact with the rest of humanity... but, all that said, our educational system is designed to create automatons who subject themselves to the whims of the few; opportunity is created as much if not more often than given, and he needn't necessarily rely on rote and proscribed methodologies to succeed or surpass.
Get his little butt into a apprenticeship type situation; learning is clearly not his need - developing practical know-how and intuition about his craft (science, math?) is.
You don't educate him. You provide the tools and let him educate himself. Require some basic stuff, but anything beyond highschool level, he should be allowed to explore at his pace.
As for the social aspect... I don't buy it. I certainly didn't learn to be social in school, and he won't either. He will simply be bullied until he withdraws and avoids everyone. He won't learn to get along with them.
On the other hand, clubs and meetups would be very good for him. The people there don't have to put up with his bullshit and he'll probably get kicked out of at least 1 before he learns to deal with others, but those clubs will probably offer enough for him that he's willing to learn to behave to stay in them.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
nuff said
with a giant wooden paddle
Seriously I think I see like 10 responses pointing to the same point: Don't follow the normal path because he isn't normal (but in a really really good way.)
Face facts, there is a strong possibility that this young person won't have a normal life ever. Either they will fall back to "normal levels of achievement" and just underperform their intellect or they will continue on a path of exceptional-ism.
Just advertise for what he is, very smart and potentially a great scientific mind. If the claims can be validated most research universities would love the PR to have a "little genius" on hand. But just make sure he is still socially trained.
The simple fact is that most of these structures are built for normal, and this kid is clearly not normal he's above that in education at least.
Consult with the experts: http://www.davidsongifted.org/
There was no reason to try when there wasn't anything on the next level.
Obviously you weren't a prodigy at logic.
"Because I was lazy" appears more often than it should in your condemnation of the public school system. That's a pretty big sense of entitlement ya had yourself there, what is stopping you now from discovering everything now? Lemme guess: lethargy?
I'm sure we all could have gone further if Richard Feynman had given us hand guided tours.
There are actually a few schools in the country that might be a good fit for a math genius, and would give him the critical socialization he'll need to be a normal adult someday. For example, A.R. Johnson Health Sciences and Engineering school in Augusta, GA, is a school that teaches pre-med and engineering classes in high school, omitting other activities such as art and PE (students who want those classes need to go to its rival school, Davidson Fine Arts.) I'm sure they'd love to have him on the Math Decathalon team.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Maybe he will be happier being the absolute best in his field, thanks to an education that was focused on his interests and aptitudes?
A general education isn't for everyone. Specialists should be able to specialize.
The only aspect of his education that should not be sacrificed is social interaction. Our ability to relate to others is more determinative of our success both professionally and personally than any specialized talent. So, make sure he gets play time. He can study history, art, and music if he decides he wants to, but he should not be forced to. A special focused program makes sense.
First off, do what will make him a well rounded, happy human being. Doing so includes being socialized -- even if the best way is to make him deal with the drudgery and tedium that is the American public school system. Second, please don't send him to _any_ university. I'm afraid that if he follows and focuses too much on contemporary science he'll get lost in the trees and won't be able to see the forest. Newton and Einstein followed some precedent but managed to forge forward with brand new, world-changing science. This is what the world needs. Try to find an environment that will stimulate his curiosity about the universe -- let him find his own way. A university will most likely force him down a certain path into areas that have already well been charted. Just my 2c.... Hope all ends up well. Make sure the kid is happy. Don't put too much pressure on him. Remember to have fun.
He should be held back to ensure that he is not any more successful than the rest of us. Why should we suffer when people like him make it more difficult for the rest of us to get jobs? Just because he is in the top 1% of people in terms of smarts does not relieve him of the responsibility to care for the rest of society.
This kid is clearly a rebellious brat who hates the system. Sit him down, force him to go through school like everyone else, and kill any drive he has before it gets out of hand!
or else!
He is obviously smarter than me, lets ask him how best school can fit with him and his learning.
This boy knows more about the things i wish i knew in depth than i know of their existance in breadth. Obviously he is going to need specialty attention from people above and beyond the understanding of his high school teachers, if he ever even sets foot in one, and if he can move through subjects that fast, he is going to need the mobility to get who and what he needs. Otherwise he would be better served learning all that fantastic knowledge however on earth he got it so far.
1. I was a prodigy...not quite of the same level. College classes at 9, but nothing more impressive than that. Went through the normal system.
2. I have taken over the education of a prodigy. Quite Elementary school to homeschool after 4th grade. I was the homeschool tutor (Like Aristotle for Alexander). A year later, he went to college.
3. I've been in education at almost all levels, almost all subjects since.
Fundamentally, there is no system that will handle all the kids. Allow them to escape.
You send him up to battleschool to fight the bugger menace.
I think there is a bugger election here in the US every 2 years.
Get him a library card
I don't know, he is the prodigy, ask him.
Don't fit him in the American school systems.
Show him some problems that humans --no matter how genius they are-- can't solve in their lifetime and that modern computers make fun of.
Show him some of the crazy long solutions to hypothesis that have been solved by automated theorem solvers.
Then he'll realize --if he hasn't already-- that a lot of the future progresses in science will inevitably be done thanks to powerful computers, who dwarf the computational abilities of human brains by several orders of magnitude.
Then the kid, armed with his own genius and the computational power of modern computres, will go on to write a software that shall eventually become the next Skynet ; )
Seriously, he's already finished it. Give him a GED and let him start attending college. They say he isn't "emotionally ready to handle the problems designed for older students", but I'd say give him a chance. If he has a breakdown or wigs out, then give him some time off and a research grant.
Put him in a hackerspace :-)
For God's sake, leave him as far away from the American education system as possible. That's where good ideas go to die. The kid will be neglected in middle and high school. Why work with the genius kid when you still have other kids that can't read? No, get him a private tutor or send him to college early, but please DON'T send him to middle or high school.
Re-define this kid as "normal". Put everyone else into remedial classes.
In 5th grade, at the request of my teacher, I took my SAT's. I scored higher than 88% of college bound high-school students. I was put into an "accelerated program" that took myself and all the children like me (the smartest 0.005% of children age 7-11 from the entire school district) by bus into a single classroom 3 days a week. We were issued a "class project" which was to promote recycling. We gave speeches at places like MIT to push the agenda, and ultimately our class project worked. Prior to us there was no recycling in schools. Now, you can't visit a school now without seeing blue recycle bins.
At one point, at age 12, I was offered a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins University when I finished high-school provided I maintained my grades. That was the positive aspect...
Now the negative...
The extra work they forced us to do frustrated and stressed us. They talked down to us when we didn't understand things. It took away our childhoods, as we spent long hours doing extra homework with no pay-off other than to assess our individual limitations. In the end, most of the kids burned out by the time we were halfway through high-school. I kept in touch with most of them for years and none of them did any better in society after school than our contemporary classmates. What it did do, however, is make all of us, and I mean ALL, social outcasts and misfits.
Personally, prior to the program I was in, I had a handful of good friends and was on little league basketball and baseball teams. Dare I say, I was actually popular. After going into the program, it was school work only. While my friends would meet up after school to hang out and play, I was inside doing extra homework. The trend continued for a couple years and by the time middle school came around, when all the schools in the district dumped into one, I was the loner in a much larger crowd. A year or two later high-school rolled around, and I was jumped (group assaulted) repeatedly before, during, and after school at least 3 days a week. Why? Because I scored higher on the tests, because I turned in my homework on time, and because I knew the answers to questions asked in class. I moved schools, but it just continued. I was just a loner nerd, and let's be honest, teens can sniff that stuff out. My parents had long talks with school administrators on all levels, but none helped or even seemed to care. I eventually started skipping classes to avoid beatings, no joke. Ultimately, I dropped out of school in my junior year and got my G.E.D. and started community college while my classmates were still starting their senior year.
I wish someone would've stepped in and told my parents that just because I had more aptitude than the vast majority didn't mean I had to use it immediately. Let the child live his life. With the way that life expectancy is rising, and retirement age is increasing he'll have to work for 80 years. He gets about 10 years to actually enjoy life, let him while he still can.
Get the kid a job as a janitor at MIT. That oughta do it.
Until this kid does/creates something of his own, I'd say it's quite likely the correct scenario.
Quick answer: You don't. The American school system is designed for an average student, and he's definitely not average.
In reading the article, it seems as though his parents have come up with a good educational plan: they're keeping him in non-math pursuits at an age-appropriate level and getting special classes and tutoring for the maths and sciences, where he's excelling. Basically, he's half-homeschooled (because homeschooling doesn't just mean the parents as teachers.) They're catering to his needs while looking out for his emotional stability and development.
The American educational system still has enough flexibility to allow parents to do these things. It just does them by allowing the parents to work in parallel to the system rather than within it.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
"He'll probably find a cure for cancer," Sleight said. "Or something bigger."
Umm, last I checked cancers were a class of hundreds of diseases. I can't see how you could find something bigger than one method to cure all of them given the multitudes of really smart people that would be happy to come up with a cure for just one. (Like liver, lung or pancreatic cancers. Hey, did I mention each of those organs has multiple cancers that affect it? Hell, they'd probably be happy to add a cure for one cancer of one of those organs to the tool kit of modern medicine.)
Oh well, guess it's one of my pet peeves when people think cancers are actually one disease.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Sounds like you are aware of the educational issues and can get the help you need. The problem will be with socialization. Guess what, that is a valuable skill also. No matter how smart one is, it is imposible to do everything oneself. Learning to work as a team, learn from as well as mentor others, being empathetic and having fun are all important skills. Although I would never claim to be a prodigy it took me awhile to learn that being smart and good at something is just not enough. I also do not think that academic success has to come at the expense of social success or vice versa. If you want your prodigy to be able to achieve his/her potential being comfortable with social skills is just as important.
If you did then he would be ahead of the rest of the children. That would mean the other children would be "left behind". That is against government decree. Hence he will have to be dragged back so that no one is left behind.
Chances are he doesn't need such schooling anyway - from the summary (yeah ,yeah that's all I skimmed) he's motivated enough not to need a school environment to learn in. Just find some venue for him to learn the non-scholastic stuff we also expect people to pick up in school ("playing nice with others", "coping with idiots in authority", "meeting girls", etc).
If he already knows more on any given subject than his teachers, then there is no point wasting his time. Let him take undergrad college courses, and put him into groups with other kids his age for fun socialization (band, soccer, etc.). If the college academic courses are easy, let him continue. If they are hard, slow or stop them for a while. He has time on his side. If he's finished undergrad studies at 16, you could consider letting him start a PhD, but make sure he has time to do other things with kids his own age, and also is well adjusted. Its no shame to start a PhD at 17 or 18.
Didn't any of you read Ender's Game? Remember how, among other things, Ender often longs to just be a kid?
You are using a fictional story about a prodigy written by someone who was not a prodigy and likely has no special insights into raising one as a guide? Should we next consult the Fellowship of the Ring for advice on raising an adopted nephew?
Seriously, your point about exposing him to other things is fine but using Ender's Game as a parenting guide is beyond ridiculous.
You give him a computer and the internet, let him research away.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Give him a position as a professor at a well equipped major university and give him access to everything and ask him to come up with something impressive.
Why are these child prodigies always so loved and revered before they do anything? You've judged at a potentially successful human and deemed him as 'carved for greatness'. Such horseshit. These kids come and go. I almost choked on my water when I read the last line of the article "He'll probably find a cure for cancer,...". ....Really?
He's a smart kid, tell him he's still pretty worthless and make him become "great" by actually making him do things he ISN'T good at (I'm sure you can find a few). Have him go to private tutoring with a hard ass tutor and make him go to many children's social events. See if he can hack it or instead become some no-name researcher doing pretty mediocre work with the story about how smart he was when he was 8.
That should do it.
Contact this place, they can probably give you better advice than most anyone on slashdot or anywhere really:
Davidson Institute
They're funded by the Davidson family who after making a mint in education software (enough to buy Blizzard in the 90s) moved onto more directly charitable endeavors. The institute runs a school for the gifted in nevada, provide nationwide help for gifted children and also give out a yearly fellowship. Probably other programs as well.
Basically, they know more about all the options that exist than anyone here and are very friendly people. The last one is key, btw, since some programs are run by bureaucratic cretins who actually consider it a waste of their time to help people. These people aren't like that.
I could try to summarize the options I know of but, frankly, it'd be an incomplete and a waste of time compared to what people who deal with this full time can tell you.
This person you are describing is university-grade material (and the dreaming goal of plenty of university graduates). I am not from the USA but I went to study university at the USA and I can clearly say: USA High School will be EXTREMELY easy for him. You can and probably should send him to a university to study. But, and this is a HUGE "But", he will NOT have any friends. You should pose a question to him: would you rather go to a high school where you will get the highest level material possible, and still be bored, but also have friends (I don't know what sort of high school (which private? which public?)), or go to the university and risk not having friends.
without being caught. That's the next step.
Einstein was 40 and working in a patent office when he concocted special relativity. As a kid, he was not very brilliant. How do you fit HIM in the american school system. You should get rid of that ridiculous thing about IQ tests and stuff. When your country produces an Einstein, a Newton or a Gauss we'll see. P.S. I follow string theory publications. I haven't seen any kindergarten kid publishing yet. Don't bullshit people.
I passed the normal school system, no issue. You just learn how average people do.
...by something as meaningless as their "date of manufacture" (as if one's age should be used to judge one's level of talents and skills) and start teaching them according to their abilities?
I went to high school with one of the founders of Excite. He took his science and math classes at the university (conveniently just a mile and a half from the high school), and took AP humanities classes with the rest of us. Seemed to work okay for him.
I also went to college with someone who started college at age 13. He's now a community college professor.
Don't underestimate the value of socialization.
Question your beliefs.
He's obviously the one person best suited to figure it out. He knows more about the range of topics that he has studied than his parents or his teachers. Where he might need help is in getting access to the resources that he chooses to take advantage of, given his young age.
As for extracurricular activities, the article already states that he participates in other non-academic pursuits. I'm not concerned about the need for balance in that regard.
The one concern I do have is that for all the academic and extracurricular activities, the one thing he needs to learn to be HAPPY in life is how to relate to others. That's not something you get while doing scientific research, or by doing sports. It's not something you get by overachieving in any sense.
I didn't learn that lesson until relatively late in my teenage years. I was miserable throughout my childhood and adolescence. I still carry the emotional scars. And the problem is that, for all the compliments that others pay me, calling me "talented" and "intelligent," I feel paralyzed, like everyone is always expecting something great to come out of me, and all I ever do is disappoint when I don't meet those expectations. So I stop trying.
Granted, I'm not saying this kid is going to end up the same way. All I'm saying is that he needs to be given the permission to NOT do something grandiose with his life. He doesn't owe anything to anyone but himself. I've come to realize that the most successful and well-adjusted people in life are the ones who are not only talented, but also have the drive, discipline, and perseverance to continue despite past failures. It's not enough to simply have one or the other.
... a good mentor who is wise. IMHO as well as reading classic greek philosophers like Socrates/Plato, etc.
Just because you are a prodigy doesn't mean a lot if you don't gain any kind of maturity. There's a history of prodigy's believing they are a little too special and distant from everyone else when it is really about their own toxic perspective. The kind of a philosophy a child adopts affects his worldview, so he should learn from excellent examples and mentors to help him/her along to not become a jaded cynical bumpkin who can't co-operate with anyone.
We shouldn't worry about educating the gifted, we should just let these kids go as far as they want to go. I don't believe we should push people with talents and mine them for their ability to work. I really hate this 'genius/prodigy' obsession people have like these kids somehow owe their lives to become something society finds socially useful. Work is still work even to talented people - they get bored, they get tired, they get annoyed. Just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you're not human.
IMHO many of the greeks had it right, one can look around today and see many intelligent people who can't even approach the simple wisdom of the greek philosophers.
"Socrates believed the best way for people to live was to focus on self-development rather than the pursuit of material wealth.[citation needed] He always invited others to try to concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace.[citation needed] His actions lived up to this: in the end, Socrates accepted his death sentence when most thought he would simply leave Athens, as he felt he could not run away from or go against the will of his community; as mentioned above, his reputation for valor on the battlefield was without reproach.
The idea that humans possessed certain virtues formed a common thread in Socrates' teachings. These virtues represented the most important qualities for a person to have, foremost of which were the philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates stressed that "virtue was the most valuable of all possessions; the ideal life was spent in search of the Good. Truth lies beneath the shadows of existence, and it is the job of the philosopher to show the rest how little they really know.""
Socrates wanted people to focus on treating each other like human beings instead of means towards some material or utilitarian end. Many problems in the world come from our obsession with trying to one-up, out-compete and out-screw the other guy. What we often really need is to tell the world to fuck off and just live our lives and enjoy them while we are here focusing on improving our relationships rather then our productivity and capacity to destroy ourselves via work and material competition.
As a semi-prodigy (I skipped high school and went directly to a two-year college at 15, scored a 34 on my ACT at 16, and went to a regular private college at 17 with scholarships), I have one major piece of advice: Don't push that he is special. Because he is a prodigy, putting him in any standard system will make him feel incredibly special. And with incredible specialness comes an incredibly inflated ego that will pop once he is no longer something really special, which is currently based on what he achieved at his young age. When he gets older, unless he makes some amazing advancement in whatever field he chooses, his specialness will fade which tends to cause emotional distress. So, choose an educational system that will challenge him just as hard as it would challenge a 'normal' student but without making him feel special. This could be tough as even professors tend to gloat over such students, but I think it could be done. I think home schooling during the early years is a must, but switching over to college courses later is really good. It allows some intellectually equal interaction that is really appreciated since most of the same age peers will not come close to understanding him.
Be got board / had a hard time with the required classes and dropped them but still took drop in's for other courses that he liked. Also Some parts of college are to much theory loaded and are geared to research / being a teacher. Also some of classes are boring just read from the book and take a test on. Other some one like this can do real good in.
But How much does Prodigy like stuff like art history and or music as college also alot filler that does not really help people that much in a job or even in a research role.
Now high school is dumb down to the slower kids and this Prodigy may not like it at all to be slowed down.
The college / high school systems has become alot about just pushing people though and you end of with smart people who get lost / broad with it and others who just limp / cheat though it and end not knowing much more then how much there loans are.
Now college can be alot better by having a mixed tech school / Apprenticeships to 1 have a better fit for people who can't do all the high level math / don't want to sit in a class room for the next 4+ years and they want to get out there and do real work. 2 free up college so people who are good at research and high level design can not be held back by others who in the past would be labeled not college material.
Also for stuff like tech the old fashioned collage is just not that good a fit any ways other then the high level theory / design parts.
But you end up with programmers who are not that good / don't know that much about coding languages and are lacking alot of the hands on work.
Now with stuff like networking, systems admin, desktop, help desk, and so on. There is a lot that is hands on and a lot of stuff that tech schools are a much better fit but that should also be a mixed school / Apprenticeships system as course books are slow to keep up and there is alot that you need to do real work to learn about how this system works in the real work place.
At least tech schools / community college tend to have teachers that for tech classes have people who do or have done real IT work but most old fashioned collages have teachers who do research or have been in collages all there life and have not done real IT work that much.
You discover that child prodigies often as not do not go on to become the great people in their field. For every one you can name there are tons more that didn't and tons of just "regular" genius adults that did. Like take Wolfgang Pauli. A brilliant physicist and a child prodigy. Worked with people like Feynman, Einstein, Bohr, and Oppenheimer. Fair enough but notice that among those names, he's not the greatest, and none of the rest were prodigies.
Also take a look at one of the current greats in science: Neil Degrasse Tyson. He's famous not because of his research, but because of his work bringing science to the world. A genius and a brilliant researcher, but what he's really done is helped to enlighten and interest people. His talks are filled with passion and are accessible to the everyman, and inspire people to wonder about science. His day job is running the Hayden Space Planetarium.
Well he didn't get those skills by focusing 100% on science. Though he loved the cosmos form when he was a little boy, he did other things as well. Dance, wrestling, and so on. He is a well rounded individual with a gift not only for science, but for communication. That is what makes him so great.
Public school. the one in his neighborhood. He can learn to deal with normal society, im sure it will keep him occupied for most of being a teenager.
Kids are not encouraged to maximize their potential. They are encouraged to respond to the bell (like in a factory) and to process the learning work in synchronization with the others (like in a factory).
Rather than try to fit him in.... we should have him redesign the education system.
Try something different like the ancient Gurukul system, kids are encouraged to express themselves and grow as a person as well emotionally and physically and spiritually, his natural intelligence will find fertile ground in that.
As a father of a pair of very bright boys (now ages 12 and 16), I have struggled constantly with this, We have tried several different schools and systems and have learned a lot along the way. I have learned that the "secret" to maximizing interest and learning is to keep the students continually engaged with ever more challenging activities. If you think about a traditional school environment, you realize that with systems having many students working at the same pace, you are guaranteed to have many of the students at least partially un-challenged. Also, with traditional environments, a forced schedule guarantees that either you have significant empty time between activities or that you are often interrupting activities. For very young children (ages 3-6+), we have found that the Montessori system of teaching does a great job of continually challenging students due to the individualized approach. Also, some computer based tools do an excellent job of challenging students at a pace tailored to their specific needs. After the Montessori years, we have founds the best approach is a home-schooled environment supported by some of the excellent available online curriculum and/or outside coaches (i.e. music, language, sports or specific focus areas). In the early high school years we have achieved excellent results by simply adding college classes to the program.
Is that just because you are smarter than everyone else, doesn't mean you are better. That is an important lesson I learned at public school. I was no prodigy, not even a genius, but I was a bright child, smarter than most of my peers (about 98% of them if the standardized tests were to be believed). Well part of the problem with that is it lead me to be, well, a smartass. Much like a bigger kids feels he can push others around because he's bigger, I felt that being smart made me better. I got picked on a lot in no small part because of that attitude.
In time, I learned that just because I was smart, didn't mean I was better, and that just because someone isn't as smart doesn't mean they don't have plenty to offer. I learned, well, to be a functioning member of society.
That was pretty valuable, and is a large part of why I have my job, which I love, today. It requires interaction with people all the time. If I was a self-superior asshole, there's no way I would have got it.
Also as you note, everyone will hit a wall with their abilities. Everyone hits a point where things aren't easy anymore. It is important to develop some skills for how to deal with that, including working with others, or you are in a world of hurt when it happens.
First thing I would do is find a school where the teachers really are interested in the growth and potential of their students. This will give them support that they will most likely see for their future in any field. Let's face it there's teachers out there that plain don't care and just go to work for a paycheck. The second thing would be to find a Mensa organization near your area. Usually applicants under 16 are evaluated in different ways rather than IQ and SAT scores. But the Mensa organization has meetings quite frequently and everyone and anyone is allowed to attend those meetings. Whether or not your child will be allowed into Mensa membership is up to them but attending the meetings is almost just as good in terms of expanding their knowledge.
Many science/numbers prodigies are social idiots. They end up in dark cubicles working on sisyphean tasks set by idiot managers or worse as assistant drones in research programs headed by idiot PhDs. Education and brains are valued at $0 if you don't have people smarts. You want your kid to be able to first find his place (go to people who sorely need his particular combination of talents, his knowledge) and second, to be able to negotiate for what he has to offer. In the U.S., I've seen plenty of jobless over-educated idiot savants. 3 college degrees, a polymath, a renaissance man, $160K in student loans, prospect of finding a job befitting his education/experience: Nil. You need to find out what is (and what will be) in demand and orient your kid toward becoming THE GUY in that field. He'll have no trouble later in life.
This seems like a narrow solution space problem from society. Well the kid is too smart to be in high school, guess we should throw him into a more advanced learning institution. Many advanced kids need a mentor just as badly as many children who are behind their classmates. Even moreso, many parents aren't equipped to be a mentor for an advanced student particularly one this advanced. Bouncing me from school to school to find the best fit for my abilities and my family's income hampered me both socially with my fellow students and my connection with teachers who could have mentored me. At 31, I'm still playing catch-up to my potential.
Seriously. He needs to find something physical he enjoys and pursue it. Education is not limited to books and classes. Young Gabriel needs to learn how to train everyday, to push himself, to take care of his body, to win with modesty, and to lose with dignity.
This individual is an extreme outlier. That you would want us to have some sort of educational bureaucracy to solve the educational issues of one, is bizarre on face. It is even bizarre to be asking here, other than what do the masses think of educating such an outlier.
The fact is, that there already is an infrastructure out there of sorts. People that are used to dealing with outliers, both in their problems, their needs, and their successes. It is known that outliers like this, present their best work before the age of 25 when the shackles of wisdom start holding back the innovations of youth, innocence and ignorance of failure, and why it shouldn't be.
There is the davidson institute in Arizona I believe, but there are plenty of colleges and universities that can deal with this as well. But certainly, this isn't really an issue of the educational "system". Which needs to cover the bell curve, and not the tiny edges way out there.
And you should own a copy of Real Genius. Seriously. Really. This movie actually is genius in its understanding of young genius, and those that want to leverage it, and the social issues that come from being outside all social groups, and the success that comes in the end, even in spite of, and maybe because of genius.
So, the question is, how do we fit into a system a freakishly divergent statistical outlier? I don't think there's a good answer to that. I doubt "mainstreaming" will work any better for the tremendously gifted than it would for a student with dramatic developmental difficulties. And then there's the problem that we're all individuals and respond somewhat differently to challenges (and lack of challenge is a challenge); we'll never have a large enough data set to make good decision. I'll offer my anecdote. I am a National Merit Scholar, scoring in my HS junior year in the top 0.5% in the US, and I won scholarships left and right. I'm no super genius, just moderately gifted. My advice is this: if you have a smart kid, don't live in a rural environment if you can avoid it. There's simply not enough there. I loved nature, fishing, hunting, walking, and all that. I just loved it. But the schools sucked, the culture was backward, and there was nothing to do other than school and TV. Maybe it's different with the internet now. I think I would have loved the opportunity available in a more urban setting, like bigger libraries, for one thing.
There is only one thing this or any other 13 year old boy needs: A dirtbike!
This is an issue the world OVER. Few schools in the world are geared for such kids. The best thing is to contact the ivy league schools, esp. any known for education (brown?) and see what they say.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
See previous article on "School stops color coded cards for students."
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
The prodigy educates you. Just tell him what you'd like to know about, probably by mentioning what you already know.
Just don't leave any subjects out.
It's already too late for that kid and I feel sorry for him. I raised some above average kids. At least I got letters home from the school telling me they were above average, one very much so, and I should hothouse them. I looked at hothoused kids. They were all miserable because like any kid they wanted to play, but they were being forced to study and learn crap way beyond their years. Kids develop maturity, it's not a function of your IQ. What's the value to a kid of a phd at 15? No value. What's the value to a kid of a normal upbringing? Immense value in life. I binned those letters and let my kids have a life. They reach their potential now in everything they decide to do.
Don't just throw him into a standard classroom with average students and assume that "socialization" will just happen. It won't -- you'll just crush the kid.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Pushing him will burn him out. Not challenging him will make him never learn how to really work for something. He has to learn life's lessons as well as as much as he can possibly learn of all the stuff taught in schools, university and all those places. I was never challenged in school and turned out too damn lazy for my own good. It took me twenty years to learn stuff I should have learned growing up, before I started to succeed in dealing with every days challenges. Just don't push him against his will, make him want it himself. Make sure he has enough social interaction with people his age, but also people that can challenge him on his own mental level.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I want to suggest something that I did not read here:
Teach him how to play Bridge!
Believe it or not today there are a lot of very bright teenagers playing Bridge. The game is a great mental challenge and it will get him exposure to a lot of smart people, young and otherwise.
You dont fit him in American Education System!
Basically, trying to fit him into the system is probably very futile thing to do. At best you can use the education system as a support system.
"He'd always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how cool they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably like a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because they hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem."
From Harry Potter and the methods of rationality by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
Teach the child social skills. Otherwise, stay out of his way.
I consider most of my relatives and acquaintances "smart", that is got good grades in school and scores on tests. But these people mostly passively absorbed what the educational system gave them. The really smart people take the initiative to educate themselves, going beyond what the standard system offers. I place myself in that category along with one my nephews. Thats probably why I got into MIT.
Then the question is how do you make the riches possible environment for these people? The internet helps a lot, providing lots of resources. I grew up pre-internet and had to do with reading most of the local public library. The other opportunity would be a research university where you are surrounded by other curious, smart people.
"How do you fit him into the American school system?"
And by American school system you mean High School?
I am not sure how that could even be considered at this point.
Like if for some weird reason you wanted him to have his high school diploma then just have him take some equivalency test and study on his own or with some specialized help in any of the subjects that he is not at super genius level at.
But at this point it seems more like a next step would be to start in a masters program for physics or similar at some major university.
But there is one thing that I can guaranty you, and that is that there is not a single teacher in the entire school system that is likely to be any help in teaching him in even subjects that he is not good at and the difference in intelligence will likely make any interaction with his peers impossible and fulfilling if it does occur.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Seriously. He won't be able to figure them out either.
Social skills, friends, and relationships are an important step at that age. If you miss out, it will mess with you at around 25.
There were a lot of things that the below average kids didn't learn until later in life either.
Here's the thing: I think that we judge the excellent far more than we judge the mediocre. Some times those judgements are complimentary (intelligent, hard working, conscientious). Yet they are often derogatory (arrogant, competitive, weird). Because of that they are separated from society, either because society feels that it is better than the excellent or society feels inferior to the excellent. So rather than reaching out to embrace them for who they are, society would much matter reduce the excellent to the mediocre. A path that may produce better people, yet may also create people who regret lost dreams or have strayed down a path of impulsive self-destructiveness.
The feynman lectures on physics is a perfect starting point.
The Davidson institute of course.
The most important lesson a child prodigy learns the hard way is that they cannot always be the best. Or even remotely interesting at every thing.
Beceause the child has always been smarter than and different from society we regard them like a circous act.
And from that act the child gains an identity and self worth. Once he has to play with the experts in adulthood, the child is no longer considert special or different and usually loses that cornerstone of his persona and is in serious risk of becoming depressed and confused.
like an athlete who can't sport anymore beceause of an injury.
Feynman himself coatched students who where the best of their college but found themselves struggeling to keep up at the university.
No he does not need a special mentor, nor does he need special schooling. He needs to learn to function in the normal world. This means learning to deal with people that might be less smart than he is. How many child prodigies have there been that fizzle out as adults because they simply cannot deal with the real world? No matter how smart you are you have to learn to deal with people to get anywhere - humans are social animals. If he is smart and motivated (and not being shoved by parents which I highly suspect otherwise why take exams?) then he will learn extra things on his own time according to his own interests.
Seriously, your point about exposing him to other things is fine but using Ender's Game as a parenting guide is beyond ridiculous.
The question posited by the Slashdot story isn't even "how should you raise a prodigy child?" - it's "how should you sharpen this tool?", and the insidiousness of that reminds me exactly of the book. Ender's Game is about turning a child into a tool, and that is exactly what is happening here.
I don't think the kid is a genius. I think he's a kid who has no social life, probably has no friends or play time with them or by himself. It's easy to see how the energy a child uses to develop themselves as a person could be focused to produce results like this, but I think the end result is that he won't be a person. He'll be a tool, one who will probably be plagued by mental health issues the rest of his lonely life.
History is rife with such examples.
Please help metamoderate.
Get him a girlfriend.
An intelligent, hot, geek girlfriend.
Problem solved.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
It's never too late to learn, or to reach your potential. I know of people who've started PhD's when they've retired from their working lives.
If somebody was a highly intelligent / talented child and didn't have the opportunity to flourish when they were young, they may be able to push themselves later in life. Certainly this is more likely in the developed and wealthy parts of the world where adult education opportunities are more widely available.
There are many people across different ability spectra who didn't have the opportunity to reach the goals they were capable of as a child. This is why giving people the opportunity for life long learning is important.
Let me brag about my child by pretending to ask a question about his phenomenal abilities.
"What's the best way to display my son's trophies, giving prominence to the national championships while still maintaining visibility of the state and regional trophies?"
"What are some good books for a 6 year-old reading at a collegiate level?"
"Should I spank my toddler when he deliberately fudges the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem?"
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The problem: 2 excessively bright and energetic boys Symptoms: The first time we really noticed it was when the oldest enrolled in kindergarten. There constant trouble. But, what could we do about it? We did not have the money for private education so we had to figure out something on our own. We called it homeschooling.
We discovered that there are 2 groups.
The first wants more structure in a child's life than school offers. These people tend to be religious types.
The other group wants less structure. These tend to be the unschoolers.
In the end, it does not seem to matter. Both groups get involved with the kids. The kids benefit.
When our friends reacted to the fact that we were homeschooling, a few things happened:
1. Is it legal?
2. You don't have a credential? How could you possibly be qualified?
3. How do you tolerate being with your kids all day?
4. My kids don't listen to me. You must be a saint.
5. What about the "socialization?"
6. And (mostly from teachers) If I had to raise my kids again, I would definitely homeschool.
Fifteen years later, we have our 2 sons (now 18 and 20):
1. Each of them has 2 black belts (Iaido and Jujutsu)
2. Both of them are Eagle Scouts
3. One of them started college at 15. The other started college at 13.
4. Both of them are straight 'A' students.
5. Both of them are employed.
I enjoy their company. We have great fun talking around the kitchen table. They bring their friends over and we enjoy them too.
We did make compromises. Homeschooling does take time. My software business would be more successful if I had devoted the same time to it.
My wife and I don't regret a single minute we spent homeschooling our sons. And, we could not be prouder.
Google homeschooling and unschooling and you'll find out. Buy him a copy of the Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn, and let him start plotting the path to get his own unique educational needs met.
Google the story of Art Robinson for more pointers. I'm sure Robinson's published materials would be beneath him, but the kid might love to try educating himself with some of Robinson's methods.
Bringing such a kid into a classroom would destroy him, just like it does every other kid. Having a popularity contest to decide who is going to make educational decisions for everybody else is an ineffective and suboptimal way to run a school system, especially for motivated and intelligent children.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
...out of the way.
at 8 years old I started university,
at 10 I was managing the department,
by 12 I was teaching at a teachers college
and by 16 I had my PhD
none of this has helped me: get a job, girlfriend, or be any good at relationships or fitting in at all in the slightest with the "real world"
plus, there's no help for people like me.
If I put my background on my resume I'm told I'm overqualified or that I should be working at some research institute, except, they're never hiring.
so I'm one of the few that "un-pad"s their resume, yeah, I've stripped entire decades off my resume just to get a mediocre job.
I'm now making a lousy $40 grand a year, I'm $25 grand in debt, and can barely make ends meet, plus i go through girlfriends like most people go through socks.
it's no way to live, and there's no way to learn social skills this late in life (I'm 45), basically - I'm screwed.
if I had it to do over again, I would have gotten out of school and focused on social skills, too late now...
Feed the prodigy to the psychopaths in the public school system, where the other students and adults will just ignore everything that goes on because his intelligence threatens them. This way, when he becomes an adult, he will be ready for much the same life in the corporate workforce. That will fix him, make him another 25 year burn out.
Apparently, he has studied string theory and quantum mechanics, but he is now enrolled in applied linear algebra? Something here does not compute. I think the boy has read popular works of those subjects and the article is exaggerating his accomplishments.
...this kid could make millions in the stock market.
Whatever you do, don't send him to military school. The buggers haven't arrived (yet!)
- Demosthenes.
You think he'd be the go-to guy!
http://www.seattleweekly.com/1999-03-31/news/microsoft-s-new-brain-project/
A prodigy like that usually knows (or will find out) what to learn himself. Involving him too much in some established academic system will just ruin his curiosity by imposing too much structure. Just get him everything he asks for and drive him to whichever conference / library / museum / zoo / etc he wants and he'll be fine.
Oh yeah but force him to do some sports and stuff...
You have limits, and finite paths to take. You still have to have your life, while giving your child the best chance to succeed.
I'm having my first boy now, and I intend to show him as many different fun things to do as possible, and the sciences involved in performance around those hobbies.
I.E. RC flight, so that he may learn some hand eye cordination, and get a lesson on aerodynamics, thrust to weight, stall speed, pitch vs. diameter, etc... in more arbitrary terms like better battery, smaller prop, etc..If he is interested, he'll want to know "why" does a smaller prop work better for speed, but not thrust.
What the tradeoffs are for a bigger heavier battery can be illustrated in a more scientific manner. Then we can show him how to do that work when he's curious as to how these things relate to his hobby.
I say give him the options, show him the laws of economy as it relates to the choices in his life. You can have anything you want, but can only pick it's qualities from 20 pts in this scale:
Good(10), Fast(10), Cheap(10) (or the variants as situation deems necessary).
Don't try to influence him w/ your prejudices (which you will do just by a slight twitch in the eye anyway). But instead explain how people who spend time doing this activity increase their abillity to do this while decreasing their abillity to do that.
If he wants to do Ballet, we're O.K. w/ that too. And as he wants to do better, we can help him by showing how form takes strength, self control & discipline. How a story can be told w/ the motions of the body, etc.. (It's not for me, but were he to so choose, I say smart kid, great way to meet lots of girls...)
I hope it'll be the "right way" for our son, and I hope I can stick to this plan.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Check for public schools in your state that have online learning programs. My son took classes from the Houston, Minnesota school district, even though we live several counties away, because they have a distance learning program using the K12 curriculum. The great part is that the school provided all his required materials, including a laptop, a stipend for broadband, and kits for doing experiments, at no cost to his parents since it is a public school that is ultimately funded by the state.
As a bonus, he could take the classes at his own pace and was able to finish his high-school requirements by the time he was 11 and move on to taking university classes using state dollars as a PSEO student.
If he's showing any interest whatsoever in peer interactions, then school-sponsored sports and art clubs and such are a good option. More likely he'll thrive even MORE in group activities that include people of a range of ages such as Parks & Rec sponsored sports and arts clubs loosely affiliated with your local university. Examples from my own life that I still have fond memories of include karate training at a dojo that had three age categories (under 5, kids, adults; teenagers got to choose which class they wanted to go to) and a board gaming group that were all ~20 years older than me.
DON'T FORCE him to go to public middle school and/or high school... that's a recipe for coming out with PTSD that'll take a long time to resolve. If he's got friends and likes it there, cool; if not, pack him off to community college. Because community colleges have a wide range of non-traditional students, that's a better integration to adult life than a four-year college where the idiots who just got out of mom & dad's house have nothing better to do than drink way too much. College will also offer more options for diversifying education in the arts and such than middle & high school... look up what the generals requirements are for a science degree are and have him get started on those in addition to the technical classes.
I was homeschooled until 2nd grade. I went to private schools until the middle of 4th grade, then switched to public schools and remained there until graduating 7th grade. After 7th grade, I decided that I wasn't learning anything in school, and I convinced my parents to homeschool me for my remaining 5 years (my siblings were homeschooled from start until 8th grade, so it wasn't such a leap for us to consider it).
Immediately after I quit school after 7th grade, I went to a computer science summer camp for high schoolers at my local university, IUPUI (a joint-campus of Purdue and Indiana Universities located in Indianapolis). The teacher in charge of the program noticed me and recommended that I take some college courses via a little-known program called SPAN (Special Programs for Academic Nurturing). SPAN at IUPUI allows for high school students to take college courses and receive dual high school and college credit.
I was 13 at this time, and I had complete academic freedom due to our decision to homeschool me, so what I did was take a light load (~8 credit hours) for two semesters. At all times, my university professors were very supportive, people were very friendly (in retrospect, I was probably lucky to have such accepting seniors at my university), and my experience was positive enough that after those two semesters, I just decided to drop homeschooling and take a full load at IUPUI. I was taking a full college course load at IUPUI by age 14, getting both high school and college credit. Essentially, IUPUI was my high school.
I have since changed majors twice (Computer Science --> Computer Graphics --> Japanese individualized major & Physics dual-degree), spent a year studying abroad, and after graduating last year, I am now enrolled in a Geophysics Ph.D. program. I believe that I am reasonably successful.
I was the first one ever to participate so young at IUPUI in the SPAN program, and after the success of my performance, IUPUI has become rather more aggressive at recruiting young homeschoolers and young prodigies with great success. They have certainly recruited much, much more intelligent and motivated children than I was, and I think this is of great benefit both to the university and the young students involved. No doubt you have heard of the 12 year old astrophysics researcher, recently. He is part of the SPAN program, and the Physics department is well-prepared to integrate him into its culture after dealing with my strange college career.
I also want to say that under no circumstances did I or my parents do this on our own. I have to commend the excellent and extraordinarily flexible staff at IUPUI for allowing me to participate at such a young age, and so many people at high levels of both the IU School of Liberal Arts and the Purdue School of Science were very accepting and worked with me. If you have a child that you think is capable of entrancing college at such a young age, or know of one, I would highly recommend going down to your local university and talking with them. You might mention my story, or contact IUPUI's SPAN program and talk to them about it. I know that other universities are starting to be more accepting of this kind of practice. It is not an easy thing to do; my mom had to drive me to class every day and pick me up afterwards -- IUPUI is largely a commuter college, so no dorm rooms were necessary for me. You should establish good rapport with the administration in your department and be flexible; remember, they are already being flexible with you to allow your child to enroll in classes as such a young age.
There are lots of bureaucratic hurdles to overcome (especially if you're in a state not friendly to homeschooling -- fortunately, Indiana is good), but very early entrance to college is achievable. There are some things that I missed
I'd find something for him to do that *doesn't* come easily -- it would probably have to be something outside the academic realm, maybe a sport or martial art.
Why? Because eventually, he's going to outgrow his genius and reach a point where he needs to study and work hard in order to succeed. That seems to be the point where most child prodigies burn out. Their whole ego/self worth gets tied up with being "smart" and succeeding effortlessly -- when they fail, it can be devastating, and they may decide that they're not so smart after all and give up.
If he experiences some failures early on, he can develop the resilience to keep working when things get tough. There's a lot of evidence that, in the long run, success has a lot more to do with effort and focused practice than innate talent.
The best answer I've heard so far was in the tag "lethimfixit". But besides that, realistically, tutoring or homeschooling is his only hope.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I see a lot of people talking about intelligence and laziness. I have studied a number of inventors from the 19th and 20th centuries. My favorites are Philo T. Farnsworth and Nikola Tesla. Based on my own investigation of the topic, I found that self-motivation and self-control appear to be much more important factors in success and accomplishment than intelligence. The issue isn't that the educational system fails to accommodate prodigies, the issue is that the educational system isn't very good at teaching students how to motivate themselves. This applies to any student, not just those that are gifted.
In terms of raw academics, smaller schools provide a better quality education to the overall student body. In terms of social climate, smaller schools tend not to have as many of the large scale social problems experienced by larger institutions.
As a consequence of No-Child-Left-Behind, some school systems have really been struggling for financial support. Lately they have been using gender-segregation to improve test scores with dramatic results. There appear to be a lot of negative social mores influencing student achievement in mixed-gender situation (junior high/high school level). A lot of students intentional under-perform to avoid certain social stigmas, especially those related to the perception of the opposite gender.
I agree with a lot of the other posts that demonstrate concerns about the prodigy not being able to handle social and societal interaction beyond their prodigy. Based on my understanding of such matters, I would say that a small same-gender school would be the best way to proceed. It allows them to learn the rules and experiences of social interaction and society while limiting some of the academically detrimental factors.
Answer (2 words): You don't.
Alternative (2 words): Khan Academy.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
One good way to integrate a prodigy with the rest of us regulars is to have the kid attend some classes and write up a paper comparing and contrasting how he learns and teaches himself versus how teachers propose to teach the public school children. It may be an interesting pedagogy study.
He's going to need survival skills so pick your favorite outdoor youth program be it Boy Scouts, Campfire, YMCA, etc. He will need balance in life to survive.
It is "Lego bricks". Want proof?
http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/corporate/fairplay.aspx
snip:
I am jealous. I really am. Gabriel See was able to take advantage of his mind as a youngster. I'm nowhere near that smart, but had issues dealing with the educational system that will be of similar nature. The easiest way to destroy that mind is to stick him in public school. After 8th grade the public school system is predominantly a warehousing system that is more interested in teaching children to be workers than educating them. There are a few good teachers out there who might be able to cope with him, but they are overworked and underpaid. His best bet is custom schooling.
Possible solutions:
- Libraries are your friend. Let him spend as much time in a library as he wants. Learning will probably be one of the few things that will make him happy.
- Arts: Don't "stuff" him into anything he's not interested in, but expose him to it. Take him to the occasional art museum, concert, etc. Play classical music.
If he likes it, he'll research it. Might even dabble in it. But don't do the "if this is Tuesday at four pm, it must be violin lessons" stuff so common in today's society.
- Private schools.
- Take him out in the world (state parks, fishing trips, bicycle trips, family vacations, und so weiter). Team sports probably won't be interesting to him.
- He's a kid. Let him be a kid. Encourage him to have a group of friends that are his age as well as friends that have his interests. My friends fit into three cohorts: Personal (my age, or there abouts), Academic (from school), and Professional (People in my job field). The ones that are my age were the hardest to deal with at first.
If he does not already know chess teach him, get home a good chess coach.
Encourage him to take part in chess tournaments, but as a hobby rather than as a potential professional.
Chess will give him a competitive intellectual outlet. It will also further develop his planning abilities.
have you considered selling this prodigy to AT&T? he wouldnt be the first.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Let him study developmental psychology on the side and then let him tell you what's best for him? Since he'll have a better understanding of his own needs anyways.
The systems are set up to accommodate the largest segment of society. It is the lowest reasonable common denominator. Sadly, this means it is not set up to handle the extremes well, if at all. It is a fact of life. What is sadder still is that school systems will try to pull up the lower extremes through "mainstreaming" while ignoring those who have the most potential and talent on the idea that they can fend for themselves.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I hear The Centre is always looking for young talent.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sounds like he is in desperate need of getting his ass kicked. He also needs time away from the tiger mommy, get him a girlfriend, put a down payment on a good future therapist.
He was nowhere near this particular level of brilliance but he was doing things that was unheard of for all those around him. Unfortunately the school took his bored goofing off demeanor to mean he was stupid and dumped him in special education. He would be quite a few years further along had they not done that and to this day I'm puzzled how they could keep him in such a class for 2 and a half years before realizing they had stuck a genius in special ed.
Puberty and sex will take care of that its the true anti-thesis to any prodigy, it will show him intellect will not get the girls and he will feel more and more out of place as he realized those theories make the hot girls yawn and that it doesn't get the same response it once did when he was 13 effectively ending his high yield achievements. It will also increase the frustration he will feel as he keeps seeing the fun spirited flunkouts who only goal in life is to score the next joint and end up scoring the same girls he is attempting to win the hearts of. for these flunk outs will entertain the girls with there own theories of how the steering wheel melts while your drive hammered with 3 hits of X. For the hot girls of this generation like money and instant fame and RUN from intellect as it doesn't bring money quickly, a prodigy is just a geeky version of fame they can not grasp.
Being a prodigy is double edge sword, you either focus on playing which most attractive girls do, or you focus on understanding which the majority of girls do not. Most the prodigies have weeded themselves out of the gene pool due hard research times and depression.
Its the Heisenberg theory of uncertainty at its best, just with a social spin to it, the more you play the further away you get from being able to focus, the more you focus the further you get from social skills..so the moral of the story is, to chain up a few bubble gum cheer leaders and reward them to those prodigies each time they discover a new theory correctly. I call it my Volcano Theory of Social Engagement for a better world.
To Sum up, So basically for the poor kid to be happy, you will have to dumb him down by a factor of 10x so he will have any hope of one day getting laid, so go ahead and order the entire volumes of sponge bob square pants and thow in a few episodes of glee and a maintatory facebook and twitter update each hour, that should break his mind in a month and give him a small hope to understand the minds of the common american hottie.
The One Prodigy who gets laid to stay in the gene pool - abut doesn't do research any more...
I never had to deal with this genius thing... Sounds tough.
A prodigy, or even the very intelligent, will easily be destroyed by any usual school system.
Think of school like a gym. He is a 300lb muscle bound athletic freak surrounded by 100lb kids, but he is judged by how well he lifts weights compared to his classmates. He will always win, and will never need to train. Whenever he wants, the weight goes up, without any effort on his part. His only effort is containing his boredom. He learns that work, effort, motivation, are not required at all in life. And he is still *wonderful*, because what matters at a gym is how *strong* you are, not what you can *do* with that strength.
Ask yourself - will this super freak ever be a great athlete? No. He will never learn how to work, or how to motivate himself. He will never learn the joy of accomplishment, because he will never accomplish anything. He will leave the gym exactly as he came in - an athletic freak with the will, drive, and determination of a 5 year old. No, that's not true - a 5 year old hasn't been emotionally crippled by a decade of living in a universe where he is "better" than his peers by the virtue of being born as he is. In many ways, he'll have the emotional development of a spoiled little teenage princeling. He will be fawned over for an accident of birth.
The difference between an athletic super freak and an intelligent super freak is the athletic one is forced to go to school and think, something he is not as good at. The intelligent super freak can get by as a brain in a bottle for his entire childhood.
The 300lb athletic super freak should be in athletic competitions where he is challenged. The intellectual freak should be in academic competitions where he is challenged. But the easiest way for both of them to learn about hard work is to work outside their special gifts.
Have the prodigy play sports. Take martial arts. Learn how to dance. Then start showing him *books* about on theory of movement. Physical training. Anatomy. Kinesiology. Start connecting *thinking* to *doing*, to making the world *better*.
What the prodigy needs to learn is something that going to school will *prevent* him from learning - will, drive, motivation, determination. How to control his mental focus to achieve something over the long term. How to control *himself*.
IIRC, UW Seattle actually has one of the best "early college" programs around. In essence they take something like twenty or so 12 and 13 year olds, put them through a year long academic "boot camp" and then allow those who get through (usually 18 or 19 out of the 20) to enroll as freshmen. Unlike places like MIT, which enroll the occasional prodigy but have no real special services for them, the UW program provides services and specialized advising to the kids throughout their entire time in school, while also encouraging them to take part in extracurricular activities and maintain a social life both with their age-peers and academic peers. The program seems to work, so could that be an option for a kid like that?
Sit him down and force him to watch Fox News for a few months... should dumb him down enough to enter the normal school system, which is of course not intended to produce people who can think for themselves (that would be dangerous to the people in control).
Don't worry about edge cases.
While it would be nice for him to rub off on the rest of us - it is unlikely to be beneficial for very long.
You don't. Have him start his own company. He's ready to leave the school system altogether, and it's only going to damage him at this point.
Find him a g/f. /. like many others that think they were genius at a young age. /. than be intelligent and only have /. as my social outlet.
After that, he will decide what to do of his life.
He has time, a lot of it. What's the need to finish up school so quickly? Is not that genius goes away or has the use-it-or-lose-it omen to it.
There will be a time when he will be able to put his intelligence to good use. Now it's time do do what all kids do: goof around, find a g/f, get on with life.
Seriously, kids are kids, independently of their intelligence they have to grow up in all aspects of a men's personality.
Social skills all all the more desirable if coupled with intelligence, but smartness alone will get this kid nowhere.
I've been there and done that. I was a burnout...
Now I am on
I'd rather be normal and be on some other social media than
Really!
Tell him to build a robot.
Here's the REAL problem with educational philosophy. The true question is NOT how you educate a prodigy. The true question they should be asking how a prodigy can educate US!
But the academic community already knows everything evidently. Some may espouse how much they have yet to learn, but all you have to do is watch attitudes to know that they pay no respect to that concept.
Word of Advice do not listen to most people here, they are either jealous of your kids achievements because their own kids are not as talented you will find plenty of this and so will your kid. I agree being well grounded would be good but sometimes people that are to bright will not be liked. In our current society that all that is valued is power and control i would say take your kid out of public school, put him in privet school it will make sure he gets properly challenged rather than bullied or made into some one he is not. AM not sure Jobs was a football jock but had he had a different path do you think he would have been who he was. Also what ever you do make sure you are very good friends with him because am sure he will need one for the journey he will experience of hatred bickering, malice will not be easy. Anyway get him books kindle legos, and mave allow him to make sure he also makes funds through projects that way he can achive fully what he is capable of. Money is always needed if the write brothers did not have the bicycle shop they would not have been able to poor their own funds and make the first flying machine. Ok well good luck man.
If he's like me, then get him into college and grad school ASAP and get him on with his life before he's 18.
If he's like my wife, then leave him in the normal school system so that he can enjoy the rest of his childhood. He'll thank you for it.
Both my wife and myself were at the top of our respective classes and went to top tier colleges. We're both well above (though not as much as this kid) what society would consider genius. And we both would have been better served by completely different approaches.
There isn't a single answer for this. Thinking that there is one answer for "what to do with a genius" is making the terrible assumption that all geniuses are alike.
How about we just ask the kid what he wants? He'll be better qualified to answer that question.
All anyone really wants is validation. Most of us are in school to prime us for a career to earn a living. I think this kid's got it covered. Figure on whatever's going to feed the prodigy the human validation he needs, and he'll probably be fine. I guess.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Being a prodigy at math and it's applications shouldn't excuse him from learning the things that everyone spends time learning from the social sciences and creative disciplines. Keep him in school and let him develop social skills while studying things that still require basic memorization.
Jhyrryl
3 words:
Emm.
Eye.
Tee.
I teach physics at a community college, and I get a few students now and then who are young teens; because of their age, it can be more practical for them to take community college courses than to head straight to a university at age 14 or 15. I started college (at a university) at 16 myself, and I think it worked out positively for me. I was pretty immature at 16, and living on my own, cooking, doing my laundry, etc., helped me to become more mature. Because of my own experiences, I'm predisposed to be sympathetic to these kids.
However, I've noticed several negative things that can happen.
One is that parents, and other adults who deal with these kids, have a tendency to exaggerate their capabilities. Their high school principal may not be comfortable with basic algebra, so to him/her, anything the kid does mathematically seems like it's superduper incredible. This clearly seems to be happening here, if you read between the lines in the article. The article claims that he's already studied string theory, but it also says that he's currently taking linear algebra. Well, people don't really learn string theory until they've got a *lot* more math under their belt than that, and even extremely smart grad students tend to take about 6 years to master the techniques of string theory. (This is one reason why many people tell bright physics grad students not to go into string theory, because it takes them such a long time to become fluent enough to start research.) So I think what really happened here was that he read a popularization such as Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, and now the adults around him describe him as having studied string theory. I think parents also start to exaggerate about their kid's abilities because their own egos get tied up in it. It's the same type of psychology that says it's not enough for your kid to win the Contra Costa County beauty pageant, she has to be the most beautiful in California, or the United States.
Another negative is that the parents are too involved in their kids' stuff. I've had parents stop me in the halls and try to talk to me about how it's really a problem that their kid is getting a B in physics instead of an A, it's not fair because their kid is a genius, it's going to be my fault because their kid isn't going to get into Harvard, etc. Parents should not be driving to the college to drop off a homework paper that their kid forgot to bring to school. This is the age where the kid needs to make his/her own mistakes, experience the consequences, and become more mature.
A third negative is that kids tend not to be intellectually mature at 14 or 15. With some of them, there's the risk that they are learning about Newton's laws or Shakespeare at a superficial level, not at the level they really need as a foundation if they are going to go on with upper-division work. Maybe they haven't had the life experiences they need in order to understand Shakespeare at a deep level. Or maybe their brains just haven't developed to the point where they're really ready to grasp Newton's laws, and instead they understand physics as a set of problem-solving procedures. Or maybe they are capable of deep understanding in one subject, which is where their talent lies, but in another subject they're not really getting a college-level education.
I'm in favor of letting parents and kids make their own decisions, but I think sometimes the decisions are really made by the parents, and they're the wrong decisions.
Find free books.
1. Don't try to fit him in. He's such an outlier that the ROI on accommodating him in the public school system doesn't justify the cost. Let his (or interested private educators) fund his education and call it a day.
2. State-funded academies for the extremely gifted. Public education in the U.S. is primarily funded at the state and local level, but most localities lack a sufficient threshold of "extremely gifted" kids. That's less true when you're talking about an entire state. Problem: these would be boarding schools, which some parents will balk at. That means an extremely high expense per student, which might be hard to justify politically. Also some states lack a large enough cohort of students to make such an academy worthwhile.
3. Same idea as #2 but funded federally and situated "regionally" around the country. Given how rare these kids are you would probably only need a handful of schools.
Personally I tend towards option #1. Kids like Gabriel are so uncommonly rare I'm not sure how much sense it makes to plan around them.
On a related note, this kid is currently the world's number 1 coder in the site TopCoder.
You can read more about this fellow from here: http://petr-mitrichev.blogspot.com/2009/10/gennady-korotkevich.html
I sometimes wonder if this kid will solve an NP-hard problem and amaze us all.
How about worrying about the other end of the spectrum? How can we ensure that the 8-9% of US high school dropouts (wow, is it that low?) become productive, fulfilled members of society?
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16
Worrying about the 0.001% at the top-end seems like misplaced attention.
There is no real easy answer for this. I was gifted in school (no way near like him) but I was placed in our gifted program in elementary and middle school. I regret it to this day. The first school I was in, they assessed me as good in English and Social Studies, so they put me in gifted classes for that group. Unfortunately, I was much better, and more interested in Math and Science. I don't know where the lines got crossed. At least there, it was my actual class. In another subsequent school, instead of it being one of my classes, they took me out of class twice or 3 times a week and had me do research for some test I would take in the future. My grades in the class I was being taken out of began to tank. I finally quit and went back to my normal classes. If I had know what it would cost me in self esteem and social standing during that time, I never would have left my normal classes.
It really depends on the individual and what your school district is going to do about him. Make sure your son is happy with whatever decision you make. Talk to the scientists he worked with, and see if they can give some suggestions. And by all means, let him be a kid. Don't let him burn out. There are lots of home school groups that he can get together with for socialization. Even better, he can assist in teaching them.
The only other thing is if he has not gotten his GED, let him do it.
IMHO
I had some intelligence tests with my girlfriend and she got better marks than me, but in the real society and world, she reacts much slower and learn things slower than me,,,it is said that those kind of testing is mainly for math skills, so if a people get high marks, he/she is regarded as a prodigy!? Forget about the topic and find a time to enjoy this tour! http://www.visitourchina.com/
...unless schools have changed dramatically in the 10 - 12 years since I was in school. I was in a similar situation, way ahead of my classmates and had to start school a year late on top of that. I had to be 5 by a certain day to start school that year; I turned 5 literally the day after the cutoff. But, with all of that said, I hated school because it was so boring and hum-drum. A lot of the kids I went to school with were rather...rural?...I guess you could say. This resulted in my dropping out of high school after the first week of my sophomore year. I went on to get a GED score high enough that the local community college gave me a scholarship. It wasn't much, but it worked out much better than public school did for me. I've since gone on to have a fairly successful IT career (probably the only place a guy with my level of "formal" education can make $60K - $100K per year), and have no regrets. If the challenge of school was the lesson - instead of the mouth-breathers - I probably would have stayed.
A friend from Uganda immigrated and worked here, while her husband and kids stayed home in Uganda until she could bring them. The kids came to visit for a year. They were bored to tears in school here. When they went back home to Uganda, they had to get a tutor, they were so far behind.
So the answer is he has no place in our public educational system. He needs to go to Uganda :)
Private schools will give bend over backwards for him.
The enormous number of private schools in America is strangely not talked about.
Keep him in school with kids his own age, he needs to develop social skills too and maybe have a girlfriend and a real life one day.
Almost all the comments show that when a one-of-a- kind genius appears, there is no established and proper way of handling that person. All educational systems are created for the average and above average students. Steve Job does not fit the normal student type, yet he achieved things no recent living person had done. Similarly, this boy will find his own destiny. The parents are doing the right thing. When his father said, ".. he will find a cure for cancer.." he must have meant that the boy will find some very useful thing benefiting the society and not "cancer cure per see". One can see a hidden jealousy, insecurity and self doubts in many comments. This boy is unique and just appreciate the fact such prodigies come very rarely and let us be happy.
Why try and fit him in the American education system?
Former child prodigy and current Fields medalist Terence Tao agrees that genius is overvalued when compared to hard work:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a-genius-to-do-maths/
As he says, "attributing success to innate talent (which is beyond one’s control) rather than effort, planning, and education (which are within one’s control) can lead to ... problems." (particularly for children; cf. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/ )
Let him decide! He has to find out what he wants and what is best for him. That's in my opinion the most important thing to learn in the teenager years. He doesn't need anybody telling him what to do, but somemone offering support and options. Later in life, if he's successful and can tap his talents, he'll find himself in a situation where nobody else can tell him what to do or what is right, but where people look up to him and expect HIM to give directions.
For now, he should relax and enjoy the privilege to go through the education system with ease. He should integrate with "normal" people, pursue activities of his liking, like sport, music, art, science beyond the school curriculum, social activities, technology, computers... Whatever he likes. Like everybody else, he has to find motivation within himself to excel at something, and he has to build strong ethics and moral values to guide him in the future.
School has been boring for him ever since. He should know that he is different and that it is OK for him to feel bored. He should find ways to deal with this boredom. Maybe he can support his classmates, for example by tutoring? I believe that teaching and guiding is one of the prime responsibilities of gifted people, because it helps and supports other people around and creates much more value for society than just going ahead alone.
Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is with his undergraduate team's iGEM project. It wasn't anything incredibly creative or unique. It was essentially the development of a "cheaper" tool. He (and his team) designed a relatively inexpensive robot that could be used to pipette small amounts of fluids into a 96-well plate. Ostensibly, from a biomedical research perspective, this would be useful for lowering the cost of high-throughput assays. Unfortunately, the interface wasn't very user-friendly. That clearly hinders the usefulness/scalability of the design.
The article makes it sound like the kid is the second coming of Albert Einstein. He is undoubtedly a very smart kid, but there are a number of gifted kids out there with similar abilities. All of them project unbridled enthusiasm for learning and possess an enhanced capacity to retain/manipulate information. It's pretty exciting to consider their collective potential. With gifted children, the trick is to allow them to explore on their own...but with enough guidance/support so that they still feel connected to their peers, friends, family, and community. I think it's a really bad sign that the kid's father is describing his son as "out of the norm for the supergifted." That's proud-parent talk. That statement reaches too far, even if there may be some truth to it. What kind of impact do you think these words and this attitude have on a 13-year-old kid? Think about it.
I hope that Gabriel has the opportunity to get really engaged in non-science (e.g., liberal arts) and extracurricular pursuits. His parents should see if he's interested in learning one or more of the Romance languages (with origins in Latin). I understand the reason why Gabriel is so enamored with Latin. It is a wonderfully ordered language -- declensions and conjugations just seem to make sense. Its study offers a compelling sampling of the Classics and a window on world history. However, it is limiting in that no one speaks it anymore. A "living" language has far greater potential in making present-day human connections. If the family has the financial means, they should consider taking him on a family trip to a foreign country so that he can get exposed to other cultures and perhaps practice his language skills. His parents should encourage him to participate in team sports so that he can experience camaraderie and learn the lessons of hard work, cooperation, compromise, and self-sacrifice. It might also be his first opportunity to develop leadership skills. He'll find those skills critical for success when he transitions to adult life. Like any kid, It would also be a good idea to get him involved with some type of community service activity. It would be a shame to waste a gifted intellect on selfish pursuits.
On the academic side of things, Johns Hopkins University has a program called the Center for Talented Youth (CTY). Gabriel and his parents should check it out. CTY presents smart kids with an impressive array of learning opportunities. The program is renowned for its summer camps. CTY also has something called the Study of Exceptional Talent (SET). Gabriel's SAT Math score would make him eligible for entry into SET. Working with CTY would get the family hooked into the right kind of academic network.
The parents are in a tricky position right now. They need to do all of this without stressing out Gabriel or placing burdensome expectations on him. He's still just a kid. Let him make mistakes. Let him have "regular" friends. Let him goof off a little. He's more than just an intellectually gifted student.
If his parents are patient, he'll meet a bunch of smart, highly motivated, talented peers in college. There are a few excellent schools out there that put together such a dynamic student body. If Gabriel decides that science is what he wants to explore in college, then he should choose a school which offers such research opportunities, i.e., has an affiliated graduate program. I'd recommend that he wait a few years to gain some maturity and then apply to some of the colleges on the East Coast, particularly those in the Boston area. It would be a great opportunity for him to live on his own and find out what _he_ wants to do with his life.
Academically, the school system appears to have little to offer this child. He will be bored out of his mind and will find the mundane tasks assigned to him/her in school to be mind boggling awful. But school has far more to offer this child than simply academics, don't forget that this person is in fact A CHILD.
I have been tested since I was a child by multiple shrinks and educational workers to identify my IQ. As many on Slashdot will know, the standard IQ exams pretty much top out at around 150 since it's the point on the IQ scale which pretty much certifies that the personal is above normal and therefore should be tested using more "extreme" tests. I have been given multiple different numbers as to what my IQ actually is, but that is thoroughly irrelevant. What is important is that in my old age (in my mid-30s) I am fully aware that I can pretty much figure out whatever I need to and that I have a sound ability to grasp and cope with the concept of cause and effect which in my personal opinion is a far more accurate method of judging a person's capacity than a silly pattern test such as that offered by the IQ people.
My son is very similar to myself. His thought patterns and problem solving abilities are very similar to mine. He however has the added advantage of virtually unlimited resources for learning. I was confined to the limited public libraries (lived near one of the best in the U.S., but compared to the internet, even the library of congress is limited) and lacked having adults near by capable of providing me scientific and computing information. He is years ahead in math at his school, he reads and writes his two native languages at a level well above average for his age. He grasps complex concepts in math and science at a level which college graduates would envy and yet he takes for granted since he doesn't know otherwise. He objectively evaluates events within history without assigning silly adjectives like "Good" or "Bad" to things. He instead can instead take the events which he learned about and identify cause and effect. He can even suffer through the mandatory religious education in the school system and treat it instead as humanity lessons to better understand people who are religious.
The point being, I send my son to a public school and provide him all the academic resources he needs to move at his own pace while he's not in school. For him, school provides areas of education which are less interesting to him but should be taught to him to provide him a rounded education. He learns to see himself as just another kid without seeing those other children as more or less than him. While he detests sports, he still is forced to play them in gym class and learn a bit about them. If nothing else, it will give him an insight into the nature of people who lack anything in their lives other than sports which sadly accounts for a huge part of the worlds population. He takes music classes where he gets to bang on drums and blow into wooden flutes making sounds which have little resemblance to music but still is entertaining. I want him to socially see himself as just another kid. When he reaches puberty, he should chase girls. When he reaches adulthood, he should find himself waking up on park benches wondering how he got there. He should have all the opportunities to live life and have a great time without the stupidity attached to being labelled "special".
He knows how to learn. All he really needs academically is a more experienced nerd to point him towards more information and help him to learn to research more efficiently. I provide that for my son. If I couldn't or eventually can't, then I'll hire a tutor that can. What he can't learn from books, computers and other informational sources is how to live a fulfilling life. For this, he needs to learn to associate with others and learn about the world around him.
Therefore, the best option for a kid like this is.... send him to school... make him do his mundane assignments just like the other kids and feed his brain as f
I think that is very, very, very important that he socialize with children of his age. Maybe school, is the best place for that. At least part time. In my opinion he should use his intelligence to fill the gap that separates him from less talented children, the rest of the world. His happiness is the most important goal, not the productivity.
What the fuck for?!? Humans are disgusting, filthy creatures of greed, egotism and pleasure pursuit; I despise all of them - myself included! Science is clean and neat, it also enables this pathetic creatures to be little more than dirt they are and so is always needed. I say, let the kid be himself, another Feynman maybe, or some kind of autistic thinking machine, just DON'T make him into human! Please. Wrestle in your mud-bath of emotions, dreams and social activities all you want, but don't drag those who have chance of being something else down to your level!
And came quickly to the conclusion that school was the least important thing in his life. I concentrated on loving and respecting him, teaching him that although he didn't really fit in with the other kids, that they all had things that they were better at than he was, just as he was better at math and programming. SATs? almost 1600 at age 12. (He missed a word.) I sent him to community college classes in everything from programming to jewelry making. He stopped going to school after 9th grade, dropped out of Oberlin and Stony Brook in succession due to terminal boredom, ranked in the top 5 in competition coding for years. Got a job doing games coding, went to work at Google before the IPO, now senior coder at a games studio. He's a happy, well rounded person who does what he loves. He didn't cure cancer.
Love your kids, respect them, have confidence that if you raise a good person, everything else will fall into place. He's smart enough to manage his own life if you can see the child first, before the intellect.
Oh, and the schools? Seattle's gifted program? Waste of time. UW Comp Sci? Not interested. UW gifted program? Sorry, no math for a year while you become well rounded. (We need fewer well-rounded people who roll in any direction they're pushed.) We tried everything, including local gifted school (Lakeside? Sorry, too inconsistent.) Mostly, the schools try to slow kids down so that they will fit into their pigeonholes. Our only support came from NOVA, where they were happy to ignore him - as his advisor said, "Why kick him out? He doesn't even come, so there's no strain on our resources, and every time we have standardized tests, he blows our scores out of the water." Thanks, Nova, and SCC - North and Central. You both helped.
He has a wide variety of interests. Where would you steer him? Biology? Looking for cures? Or engineering?
How Do You Educate a Prodigy? It might just be an omen but maybe he can help with why the invaders should die when out of space. We can teach him to change his pitch up, smack his bitch up, breathe and be the fire starter. What evil lurks in voodoo people's poison is no good, Charly. So teach him to be a Dr, because Baby's got a bad temper and hit me, so take me to the hospital in a hotrod before I start to spitfire or blood of something.
It's refreshing to see so many other prodigies expressing their opinions on this matter. That's one thing that I like about slashdot--everybody is smarter than everybody else, and it's one of the reasons I love reading everything everybody else has to say.
However, I feel that there is an underrepresentation of the majority at work here: the stupid people, and being one of the token few who make it to slashdot, I feel obligated to express my opinion so that all the smartypantses can understand the perspective of the child's peers. If you stick this kid in too many classes with dumber, older students, you'll de-motivate and humiliate them, which will provoke us into retaliating through socially ostracizing the student. This will deplete his social resources and inevitably drive him to a future of loneliness and depression that will be the cause of his burnout.
I recall fondly the many nerds I de-pantsed in the hallways during my sixth year of high school. Sure, I may not be able to install an operating system without a GUI, but I CAN throw rubber balls in gym class with enough force to smash a kid's plastic frames in two after she makes me feel stupid in math class.
I always feel we under value the importance of social development. School isn't just about grades, it's about learning to interact with others and develop those social relationships that give our lives depth and value.
I think all of us who were branded exceptional felt a certain amount of isolation, that we didn't fit with in with our peer group, but I'd hate to imagine what it would be like to be as exceptional as this child and be completely separated from children my own age growing up.
I've always felt like we should have two systems to figure out where children should go, one that evaluates emotional development, and another that covers intellectual development. Maybe even split kids days up between the two slices if they don't intersect well for a particular child. (I'm thinking right now of a friends child who is a highly functioning autistic child. He's got something like a 140 IQ at 7 years old, but he's struggling particularly this year because he's just not emotionally on the level of his grade.)
People don't understand prodigies and try to fit them in the world that they know. It is like fitting a square peg into a round hole.
I believe that prodigies are genetically superior to us. They are the next step in evolution. It has been proven that intelligence is related to the number of bundles in the anterior corpus collosum which is 100% governed by genetics. We criticize them that they "burn out", have no "street sense" or have no "social skills" later on in life. But I can imagine the Neanderthals criticized the early homo sapiens for being weak and emotionally sensitive.
The government should gather all the prodigies and nurture them in an institution that provide them with whatever they want. They should make a prodigy colony and encourage them to marry each other. The first generation might not produce anything sensational, but within two generations, I believe the prodigies themselves would have figured out what they want and found a sense of purpose.
If you think that a prodigy colony is too frivolous as a government program, think of the other "colonies" that the government maintain that return little value to the world, like the penitentiary system, the mental institutions and the retirement homes.
How do you fit him into the American school system?
That's simple. A troublemaker. Wise-ass. Smartypants. Te one who puts teachers in a bad light.
Me, bitter? No, not at all, why do you think that?
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Concerning getting through school too easily and then giving up when hitting the wall, this following article is quite important....
https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/system/files/Intelligence%20Praise%20Can%20Undermine%20Motivation%20and%20Performance.pdf
QUOTE:
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.
Two more stages of testing provided this startling finding:
Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.
However where I live they don't let asian immigrants (or humans of any race) in unless they're part of the judeo-christian tradition.
christian asian immigrant = OK, buddhist or free = No.
I don't believe you. Buddhists have been in Boy Scouts since 1920. I can't speak for the troops near you, but I knew Asian immigrants in scouts. If they really are blocking Asian immigrants, then it should be reported to the national organization, who will no doubt put an end to it.
http://www.scouting.org/About/FactSheets/operating_orgs/Buddhist.aspx
http://www.scouting.org/filestore/pdf/02-209.pdf
He should be home-schooled and also put into some college programs for his benefit. And let him play out with his teenage friends. Let him evolve and develop his emotional quotient as well. Don't make a movie about him. Ok?