Pizzagirl, you mentioned earlier that you could run rings around the other students in math (or words to that effect). Didn’t you ever encounter anyone who could run rings around you in math? It is unsurprising that you did not encounter anyone like that in your early schooling. But I would have thought that at some point, you would meet such a person.
If you did know such a person, do you think that the educational enrichment that you have said was fine for you would also have been fine for that person, and why?
(I am directing this at PG, because she seems to be the most vocal of the anti-acceleration group, and not for any other reason. So I am happy if other highly gifted people who oppose acceleration respond, too.)
I have some skepticism about relative IQ scores once they are very high (say, three standard deviations above the mean, and higher). The tests are not really designed to identify differences in the extremes, though the differences do exist. For one thing, you would need sufficiently clever people to come up with the tests; and beyond a certain point, I doubt that hyper-gifted people want to spend their time designing IQ tests. The tests have ceilings, in part for this reason, and in part simply because the number of questions is limited. (Now available for a limited time only–QuantMech’s patented 60-day IQ test. Highly reliable! )
You went to school in a different era from mine–yours was more recent. When I was in school, students were not told how they had scored on any IQ or related tests. Their parents could not find out, though the teachers did know. But in my era, for one of them to reveal an IQ score to a student’s family would almost certainly have caused the USSR to win the cold war! At least, the scores were closely guarded enough to give that impression. I do recall that I figured out the pictorial “which one does not belong” question that had bothered me, some years later–however, I was unable to submit an erratum to the test designers.
This boy’s ability is clearly way above the typical +3 (or however you choose to measure it since IQ is just another test and not some verdict handed down from God).
I don’t fault his parents at all for accelerating him (especially since it sounds like he accelerated himself) or for choosing an Ivy League school for him. My only criticism in this is that I feel he could have spent more time doing advanced coursework before entering college (as many less talented students do in their last year or two of high school), and every extra year of maturity would be helpful in getting the more out of his experience there and in making the best choices for his education and career.
I also feel they could perhaps have tried harder to connect him with peers, even some who are merely +3. I thought it was rather sad that in the 60 photos posted in the article, while he’s shown in interesting international locations, other kids are conspicuously absent and there is no mention of friends in the article. You don’t have to be studying calculus to enjoy building legos together.
@mathyone it’s the friend issue that bothers me-not just about the kid in the OP, but in the posts here that seem to imply that it’s not possible for a highly gifted person to have friends who are not also highly gifted, or that these friendships are not deep because the “average” kids can’t possibly understand them enough to be real friends. Or something along those lines.
My profoundly gifted ex had friends like himself, but also skiing friends, music friends, hiking friends, etc. My highly gifted son has bright friends, boating friends, music friends, and even a same-age cousin with whom he seems to have nothing in common-but they have a great time together.
It’s sad about the OP because I agree that this kid could probably have found same-age or nearly so friends in his own community. My own D has friends from so many interests and walks of life-her own interests are wide-ranging and not devoted solely to academics, just like her brother and his dad.
This really is YMMV depending on the pool of people in a given area. For some, the pool of people in a given area may not provide a critical mass of people who would be good friends, whether for gifted or non-gifted folks period.
For instance, if I had gone to my local neighborhood middle*/high schools, the dominant peer groups would be violent bullies/drug dealers/future felons as I’ve witnessed/heard from older kids and my visits to those campuses as a child/adolescent. Heck, I got a taste of some of that at the middle school I attended despite the fact it was regarded as one of the academically better middle schools for gifted/above-average academic kids in the NYC area.
In such cases, parents trying to force friendships in such contexts would actually be hurting their kids and causing them to end up like some college classmates/work colleagues who are still resentful/tramatized by their parents’ “forced socialization”/anti-acceleration efforts back when they were kids a decade or more ago.
Attended a funeral for an elementary school classmate who ended up being caught in a cross-fire between two rival drug gangs while walking home from a local neighborhood middle school.
I do understand that, @cobrat. We live very close to a similar area. But my D has friends from places not close to home-dance, church, etc. The kid in the OP MUST have some interests that are not solely academic, I hope so, anyway. D’s dance friends live nowhere near us, but I always made a point of driving her to meet up with them. Surely the 12 yo in question could have been offered a similar way to meet friends.
It sounded liked the boy was offered other things but the only things that stuck were math related, math group, math camp type of stuff. That’s the kind of stuff that clearly would come easily to him- other types of stuff, maybe not so much.
Some folks are like that…and that’s ok. Different people have different interests.
If anything, he would have likely fit in fine with the most hardcore math/STEM classmates at my public magnet…except he’d probably find that too easy for him. Hence his perceived need to attend Cornell at 12.
Having known some kids like him in HS, undergrad, and post-college life, one of the worst things parents/educators could to do them is to “hold them back” for the sake of “socialization” with kids their own age/overlapping ages.
Most such kids from my observation would prefer being accelerated academically and interacting with older peers while waiting for their same aged peers to “catch up” to them in the areas of maturity, civility, being accepting of their differences which tends to be more likely to be present in educational/work environments where a critical mass of peers* are past the K-12 stage.
I know there are some adults who never outgrow the K-12/HS behavior/ways of relating to people....but after K-12....it is those folks who tend to be left behind in post-HS adult world with the exception of some corrupt "good old boy" geographic regions and toxic work/social environments one has a theoretically greater ability to avoid as an adult.
Look, his parents are engineers. I’m sure it is well within their means, even with only one parent earning, to live in a nice area with other upper middle income families. +3 kids are not such a rarity in these areas/schools. I don’t know anything personally about the schools in Ithaca, but I have to believe that with such a large population of University faculty dominating that area, there must be plenty of bright, academically inclined kids in that town. He might not have been able to find another kid as advanced as he is, but he certainly would find kids just a few years older who are academically at his level, and he would also find kids his own age, with his age-appropriate interests, that are very bright. By definition, a kid that bright is not going to find a lot of true intellectual peers but he could certainly have some friends who would appreciate him rather than ostracizing him.
"It sounded liked the boy was offered other things but the only things that stuck were math related, math group, math camp type of stuff. That’s the kind of stuff that clearly would come easily to him- other types of stuff, maybe not so much. "
And that’s not unusual for gifted kids-some tend to be perfectionists and stick with what they’re great at rather than taking risks. Same thing with some 12 yo’s of any ability. That’s why I do hope the kid’s parents help him branch out a little. It took my gifted niece until college to take such risks, but some kids figure it out sooner. Friends from a variety of interests and backgrounds can really help with that.
Here’s an observation about very gifted kids. It’s a general observation and not about any one specific child. Not trying to offend anyone. I’m certainly not referring to the 12 year old who’s going to Cornell, who I have nothing but good wishes for.
I’ve met lots of these types of people because of my past experiences and my current career. Just as these people are born with a set of intellectual gifts, they’re also born with a set of social gifts. There’s lots of variation in the combination that each person has. A lot of people have talked about how the decision to accelerate depends on a kid’s intellectual gifts. No question that truly brilliant kids need to be nurtured to make the most of their gifts. But the social dimension is a very relevant part of the decision too, at least in my opinion.
First, there’s the stereotype - socially nerdy and/or somewhat isolated. I think this stereotype is often accurate, but I also think it moderates as these kids get into their 20’s. You want to do a lot of enrichment and accelerate as needed, but I think you want to balance that with helping them develop their social skills with their age peers.
Socially poorly adjusted - I think it might make a lot of sense to rapidly accelerate these kids. Seems like it’s just torturing them to try to get them to interact with their age peers. The success they’re going to have in life is probably going to be based on their academic accomplishments, so might as well maximize those.
Socially brilliant as well as intellectually brilliant. - Very rare. But these people kick butt and often go on to be leaders in business, politics, etc. Other than people in solo professions (like university professors or medical researchers, etc.), most of the other brilliant people will end up working for them. Don’t think these people should be accelerated much if at all … perhaps by a year or two at most. They need to learn how to be leaders so they have a shot at leveraging their very rare set of skills. Can’t learn to effectively lead 20 year olds when you can’t see over the lunch counter.
Now I’m going to say something a bit harsh, but I think it’s good for parents to keep in mind when they’re thinking about these issues. From the perspective of someone who (say) runs a very successful business, intellectual giftedness is just another commodity. A valuable commodity, but still a commodity. For example, for a starting salary of between 80K and 150K+, you can hire what for all practical purposes is an infinite number of the top recent graduates of all these elite colleges. There are lots of brilliant Ph.D’s, researchers, etc. that you can hire. It’s true there’s a bit of compensation bubble in high tech for very top end software talent right now, but every market bubble dissipates eventually. The truly valuable part is being able to figure out what they should do and how to make them into a happy, productive group who are productively working toward a common goal. Just take a second to look around at who’s calling the shots when you’re thinking about what advice to give to your kid.
The family of the OP kid traveled a lot so maybe he wasn’t in local activities. It did say he liked video games and reading, so maybe he is interactive online. He even said that one of the challenges will be to have a schedule, to be on a schedule and not just doing work when he wants, or taking off for a week without responsibilities. He also seems social as he said he liked going to the graduation at Tx Tech and meeting all the people he’d only met online. Let’s hope that he finds a good social life in his new town.
Just because middle school age kids are smart doesn’t make them nice. I’ve seen a youth soccer team formed from the highly gifted class and those kids were awful - pushing, shoving, arguing. They’d bully a teammate or classmate just as much as the ungifted kids, maybe more. They’d throw things and have melt downs at a higher rate than the general classroom students. I wasn’t interested in my kids being social with them
No, it doesn’t necessarily make them nice, but exceptionally gifted kids are pretty likely to be identified as different and ostracized by normal kids. My point was simply that other very gifted kids would be unlikely to do this.
sseamom, of course I believe that a highly gifted student can have friends from many different activities (skiing, music, hiking . . . ). However–and I already know others will disagree–there is something different about having a friend who really “gets” the young person and clicks with him/her. Another young person who has limited overlap in the set of interests may not fill the need for such a friend. Saying that the highly gifted student might be hoping for a “soul-mate” (as I did earlier) might be overdoing it, but on the continuum of friendly acquaintance, to casual friend, to friend, to good friend, to very close friend, to life-long friend, there is nothing wrong with a talented student wanting to find someone toward the deep side of that spectrum. Others may be quite happy with a group of friends and good friends.
And my experience, although limited to just a few programs that either my kids were in or my friends’ kids, is that it can be worse. Maybe it is because these highly gifted kids are all competing to be the best of the best, maybe it is because there is no one else to pick on so they have to turn on their own kind, but several I know were quite brutal. My friend’s daughter was in a class of about 30 highly gifted kids. There was just a lot of tension, competition, anger and the other 29 quickly learned that they could pick on this girl (and probably a few others). Her daughter lasted one (horrible) year. She ended up in a regular, not magnet, high school and felt much safer and much more included by all students, or at least ignored but not bullied. She wasn’t popular, but she had a few friends and didn’t feel like a small group who was supposed to be her peers had gone all Lord of the Flies on her.
If I had a 3-4sd+ “gifted” kid in the house, I’d read and think about carefully what @al2simon wrote in #350. However, I suspect I couldn’t comprehend fully what’s there as a first time parent.
I can’t think of a person who’s brilliant both socially and intellectually. The closet that comes to mind is a recent former president who I’m not sure is even more than 3sd above.
@twoinanddone that’s not unlike my own D’s experience. A few of things set her apart in the highly gifted program in our district-her race, her age (she was a year younger than her classmates), her religion (most weren’t religious) and the part of the city where she lived. Man, some of these kids swooped in and went after her before the first week was over. We stuck it out for two years, but she absolutely thrived once we got her out. She ended up at a public school with a niche focus, but there were kids of many races, ages (it’s a 6-12 school) and abilities. Thank goodness D had “outside” friends while in the gifted program, because the friends she did find there were very few, and none were very close friends.
@QuantMech of course there is nothing wrong with looking for friends among “like-minded people”. It’s just that in my observation, no one, regardless of ability, has friends from only one area of their lives. In fact, those with many friends and active social lives are the ones with friends from the most varied interests/backgrounds/abilities. My own D’s very best, closest friend actually struggles academically. So while D talks to another good friend for “deep” conversations, it is THIS friend to whom she turns for genuine companionship. Of course, everyone’s MMV.
So I don’t see any issue with having the young man go to classes at Cornell, where he can find friends with whom he can discuss physics, while having extra-curricular activities that are age-appropriate, where he can find younger friends.
Indeed. In fact, from my experience and those of most people I knew, it was actually far easier to get and maintain such a rich varied social circle once one’s gone past the K-12 stage than while one’s in the midst of it. Another thing is that with few exceptions, it’s far less likely peers/folks will look askance at you for having friends from a wide range of age groups or social/SES backgrounds as I’ve have had from a very young age.
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