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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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 provide the tools s/he asks and access to the information s/he desires, and let his mind roam free.
Read radical news here
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
pfff... even if string theory doesn't pan out; one of the best ways to discover 'what is' is to examine and study 'what isn't.'
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.
John von Neumann? Although I'm not sure whether his life history will satisfy the homeschoolers in this thread:
Although he attended school at the grade level appropriate to his age, his father hired private tutors to give him advanced instruction in those areas in which he had displayed an aptitude. Recognized as a mathematical prodigy, he began to study advanced calculus under Gábor Szeg at the age of 15.
So, normal 'restrictive' school, plus tutors.
There are a few modern Americans in this list. Oddly enough, Ted Kaczynski is one of them.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies#Legendary
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
Because the current school system is only fit for students of average or below intelligence. Any student smarter than average has to pretend to be dumb just to fit in.
Schools exist mostly to crush the youth into compliance with social norms, providing education is a secondary and far less important task.
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
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.
I think many people would look awkward in front of the press, unless they are already quite outgoing, or used to it. However, yes school is useful for more than just learning
The kid needs to get punted outdoors with Bear Grylls for a few months.
Can't he learn to drink his own piss indoors, comfortably surrounded by books?
No, it's because they don't know what society is. They never fit in, so they never learned about it.
Make the kid go play a sport. Make him learn to be a teammate, human, part of society.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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.
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.
That is a brilliant idea. He might learn some social skills with it too.
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!
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.
Get him a library card
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).
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?
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.
...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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
What good is saying you know a couple people when post anon? I know, don't feed the trolls :/
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
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
Maybe he will be happier being the absolute best in his field, thanks to an education that was focused on his interests and aptitudes?
Maybe.
The problem is, he would have to be autistic for it to actually happen. Not to mention that when he needs inspiration some time in the future, he might have nothing to draw upon. Many a natural scientist drew upon something taught in the humanities he might have scorned as a student; you do not get to know what knowledge is useful until you gain it.
A general education isn't for everyone. Specialists should be able to specialize.
General education is for everyone. Specialist education goes above and beyond general education.
Many good universities adopt the T-shaped student policy: broad general surface, great depth in the chosen field. Because you do not only live to work – unless, I repeat, if you’ve got Vingean Focus. Or if you’re autistic. Other people also need to socialize; to communicate with others; to live outside their work.
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.
Quite so. And where do children socialize? Schools. Where they learn stuff he’d mostly find boring and/or too easy. Which kind of sucks, but that’s life.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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 never said it's the only place, as you say there's tons of options out there. Various places will even create options for you if there are none there already.
The Davidson Institute however was founded, asfaik, to help parents and students find and evaluate those options. They do more than that now but that is still their core program. They know what's out there and they have actual experience so they can give you well-founded advice. And they have enough money behind them to give at least reasonably unbiased advice (ie: they're not in it for your money, future name or future donations).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
That was me not logged in!
have you considered selling this prodigy to AT&T? he wouldnt be the first.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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 ----
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.
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?
Yes, contact them. They don't have all of the answers, but they do have a lot of useful programs!
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
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.
It is not just social skills. Trying to communicate outside of the most basic pre-cooked concepts to your average person is draining and frustrating for both. It eventually gets to the point where they treat you expressing yourself honestly as a personal attack and will act in kind. The most starkly intense instances of loneliness have all come at times I was socializing with people and realized that I could not act nor answer honestly without facing some kind of egomaniacal backlash. And, I am not even close to your level.
But, yeah, learning social skills can at least help you pass under the radar a little better. But, still, that's not the point is it? We are looking for people we can be close to, are we not?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
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.
When people are intelligent and actually interested in learning, learning things out of order is a common hazard. Frequently, more basic subjects are skirted through just enough to make it possible to understand the more advanced ones. And, then later one falls back to the basic subjects later on to improve comprehension, or at least bring it up to the standards other people set. Subjects are also frequently thoroughly studied well before the actual course is taken.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
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/
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 :)
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/ )
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
The only aspect of his education that should not be sacrificed is social interaction.
But make sure he interacts with people he chooses.
Sending him out onto a football field is probably the worst thing you could do to him.
Spending time with people like Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman would be ideal. Let him go to places where the other smart people hang out.
No sig today...
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.
Seriously, reading comprehension, learn it. The Davidson Institute provides multiple free programs which is why I said they're probably the best starting point. Granted, they are for highly gifted students although I expect they'd happily provide general information for even less gifted students. Also, asking people questions is in fact utterly free to do. They may or may not answer but you'll never know unless you try. Certain information is also vital to know which is why I pointed out a place that probably knows most of it.
For example, having your kid take the SAT (and get over 700 on either section) before they're 13 qualifies them for SET. I got $50 college courses in middle school thanks to that. Or maybe not anymore, SET was dead for a while. This is the sort of information that people who deal with this in a full time basis could convey to you. You can, and should, research things on your own but you'll probably miss various opportunities that way. Also, just because your kid doesn't technically qualify for something doesn't mean they won't be allowed in if you ask.
As for being poor and white and male, my poor white parents found a decent number of programs for my white male self to participate in. Granted, programs for younger kids (read middle school and below) may provide only financial aid. However once your kid become advanced enough, college courses at your local college can become a very economical approach. They can also participate in college level summer programs which actually pay for them to attend (not an official option but many programs are flexible, talk to them). It's also vital that by the end of high school they have a project done that'd they'd collaborated with some professor on (contact these people, only one out of fifty is friendly and helpful but you only need one). Such a project qualifies them for ISEF, Intel Science Search and the Davidson Fellowship. There are application caveats so it's very important to have found someone who knows about this stuff before starting.
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.
Thank you, I will check!
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?