12-Year-Old Headed to Cornell University as a Student

Parents Forum
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Learning to cook is not something that one can do at home?

I have vivid recollections of my 7th grade home ec class cooking lessons. One item we all made (in groups of 4) was “Lemon Cake Pudding.” I still recall it, because it was horrible. It’s not that it could have been made well and then it would have been delicious. It was just bad. Julia Child as a member of our group could not have improved it. I also recall that in another group, a bright girl mistook tsp for tbsp of salt in making biscuits. I related this to an aunt, who felt that a 12-year-old should already know that was wrong. We made a hamburger, macaroni, and tomato sauce dish that was the culmination of our culinary efforts. Someone who missed that could just buy Hamburger Helper and follow the instructions on the box.

I cooked at home with my mother often, and on multiple occasions with my friends, making something special.

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My kids learned to cook from the internet. They are pretty good cooks.

adding: now I think about it, it seems to me social skills can also be learned on the internet :slight_smile:

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Well, I take part of that comment back. Julia Child could unquestionably have improved “Lemon Cake Pudding.” But not if she scrupulously followed the recipe we were given, as we were required to do.

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There would be no way I would let a 12 year old child , male or female, cook, or spend time with 17 or 18 year old college students without supervision. Library , study groups, might be one thing (still not sure I’d be crazy about that). There was always adult supervision for anything I let my sons participate in when they were underage.

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The point is not learning to cook, it is doing an activity with others in your age group. The baking was the experience, not the cake. In fact, is probably better when something goes wrong and the group of 12 year olds has to figure out what to do with the disaster - eat it? hide it? feed it to the dog and laugh about it? Forever after, “Lemon Cake” can be the code word for ‘disaster’ with this group. One of my favorite memories of home ec cooking disasters was when we made oatmeal (something most of us had done a hundred times by ourselves, as most of us knew how to cook) and it was terrible. A miracle happened and the fire alarm went off (it wasn’t our cooking, I swear!) and we buried the oatmeal in the snow when we evacuated . A great time with a bunch of 12 year olds, probably not nearly so funny to 18 year olds.

When the abilities of the group are so different, they need something they can do together. Math games might not be fun for some, sports could be a disaster, but find an activity they can all do equally good or bad and some social interaction might happen. A 10 year old can cook with his grandmother, or a babysitter, or another 10 year old, but it is going to be a different experience with each. I think all of them are important experiences.

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I will ask some of my old friends, and see whether any of them recalls anything about “Lemon Cake Pudding.” It did not become an in joke. We also had to sew and then wear dresses–we all wore the dresses on the same day. I don’t know if anyone has vivid memories of that. I recall the color and type of fabric I used. The dress was okay. I wore it once, as was the fate of most of the other dresses.

twoinandonedone, I am still of the opinion that the young man’s parents are planning to arrange for him to participate in activities with other people of his age. I don’t see a reason why this has to be in school. Probably the other young people will be more relaxed and happier outside of school.

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Cooking wasn’t on the agenda in the Home Ec classes I took due to liability reasons. Learned a lot about housing laws and tenant rights, procedures on how to hold landlords accountable, claymation, and a bit about budgeting household budgets…though nowhere near deep enough IMO.

The absence of cooking in our home EC due to liability was probably a great call considering the critical mass of students in my 7th and 8th grade class.

Considering how my 7th/8th grade classmates were and their inclinations, we’d probably end up getting the entire middle school evacuated because we accidentally started a fire or explosion and the fire department had to be called or what started out as a foodfight escalates into a massive group fight requiring the cops to be called in to break them up.

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@QuantMech I definitely remember Home Ec and sewing. I picked a floral cotton print for my dress. I hated that class. My maternal grandfather was a tailor, long line of British tailors. He took me to wholesale type downtown stores with him to get fabric for suits when I was little . He was a perfectionist. He turned my mother ( his only child) off to sewing. Ripping out an imperfect zipper more than once was not fun.

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I hope the OP parents do get him involved in the community. It’s unclear what his interests are, and maybe he has lots of friends in his age group or decides he wants to be a boy scout or take up swimming on a local team. I don’t think a 12 year old who is in college (or in high school, or home schooled) should skip the peer group interactions and just do things with adults or older students. I think the social interactions with kids your own age are very important.

Our sewing project was a poncho with trim or skirt with an elastic waist. Yes, a one time wearing was one time too many. Still, it was my introduction to sewing and I still sew so I think it did its job as an introduction to a skill.

When I was in school, the special ed students were in any class they could handle. Some were in math or history classes, but most often we were together in gym, home ec, typing, band. Whatever classes they could handle, they were included. In a gym class there might be someone with an IQ of 80 and someone with an IQ of 150, but we were all in the same groups. We learned to socialize, to be inclusive, to work together. Were some students better at volleyball or swimming? Absolutely. Were the more typical students better at the written tests? How do you think I got an A in bowling? It wasn’t for my fantastic gutter ball form, but attendance and the written test, baby!

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The whole testing stuff has gotten crazy. When I was a kid , it was the Iowa tests and I scored very well. You might score 98 or 99 percentile but parents, teachers did not go crazy and think they had the next Einstein in the class You just got placed in the highest reading group. The SAT’s -most kids took it once , twice tops, and were done. Now we have test prep, even kindergarten prep, kids doing very advanced math in elementary school. I do think there is a very small subset of people with genius type abilities, but it may be overblown Ellen Degeneres likes to have very precocious young children on her show that are cute and can name all the Presidents, or state capitals, or break dance or play the piano,etc. It is interesting to see what kids are up to as children and will be interesting to see what they end up accomplishing as adults.

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And if 99.9 or 99.999? Is it so hard to imagine that they can be different?

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Anybody can be different. Everyone is different.

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I was just watching on of those 20/20, 48 hours type shows (it was an old one) and it was about a guy who was a genius but a psychopath too (minor flaw). As a young adult he was on Jeopardy! and won some money. Years later he married a woman and figured out how to kill her (nicotine poisoning) and got away with it for about 20 years. He collected her life insurance, her pension, sold her beach front home. They finally figured out the poisoning method and convicted him. Turned out he’d never graduated from college and didn’t have a masters or phd, but had fooled employers for years.

I’m sure he was gifted as a child.

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@sevmom I think you very well know that I used word “different” for a different meaning. But in case you really don’t, let me restate it.

And if 99.9 or 99.999? Is it so hard to imagine that extremely higher iq kids generally need more than what 99% kids need in terms of intellectual stimulation to be emotionally healthy?

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I have no idea @SculptorDad . I am not a genius.

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It depends, people were sexually active in my middle school. On the other hand I have many friends who still haven’t had their first relationship even years after graduating college. None of these people were accelerated, or held back. There are a wide range of experiences. And just because you are a freshman in high school doesn’t mean you can’t find a 19-year-old senior to date.

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As a general rule, a score of 130 on an IQ test places a child 2 standard deviations from the “norm”, or roughly in the 98th percentile. About 1 child in 50 will score this highly. This is usually the cutoff for calling a child “gifted”, and kids in this range are usually referred to by the gifted psychology/education community as “moderated gifted”. These are bright kids who are usually fairly normal socially. These kids are often in G&T programs, AP courses, and programs like Johns Hopkins CTY or Duke TIP. Elite colleges are full of them (and full of a lot of kids who score just below this; Duke TIP uses a score of 125 as a cutoff for it’s programs, which is about the 95th percentile). Many of these kids have great leadership qualities, as they are bright and talented, but not so far from the norm that they are isolated. Many are socially extroverted.

A score of 145 on an IQ test places a child 3 standard deviations from the norm, or roughly in the 99.9th percentile. Ab out 1 child in 1000 will score this highly. This is the cutoff that Davidson uses - they call it “profoundly gifted”, though the general parlance in the gifted psychology community is “highly gifted”. This is also the rough minimum that you usually find kids who qualified for Johns Hopkins SET. Kids in this range tend to accelerate more, but may or may not stand out.

A score of 160 on an IQ test places a test 4 standard deviations from the norm, or roughly in the 99.999th percentile. These kids absolutely need acceleration, and will be terribly bored if grouped with other kids. They tend to be more introverted, and to have more social difficulties because they have more synchronicity compared to the general population. Above this level usually increases these aspects.

These are gross generalizations, and I’m by no means advocating IQ testing as the sole arbiter of giftedness. But in general, the 4SD+ child is as far removed from the “normally talented”/“moderately gifted” as those children are from the norm.

Julian Stanley (formerly at Johns Hopkins) developed the concept of above-level testing to identify the highly, exceptionally and profoundly gifted. Two 12 year olds may score in the 98th percentile on a standardized grade level test; but give them both the SAT and one may score a 350 and the other a 750. The first kid is “normally talented” and will generally do well progressing through the standard curriculum at grade level through G&T, honors courses, APs, etc. The second child needs acceleration. It’s not perfect, but it remains a decent screening tool.

The child in the OP is in the 1 in a million range by multiple measures - the age at which he learned to read and learn math and languages, his scores on above level tests, his degree of acceleration. Nothing will change that. Socialization is good, but he’s going to be an extreme outlier, and expecting him to develop socially according to the norms of less gifted kids is probably an exercise in futility.

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Interesting. Were there any citations to studies of profoundly gifted children earlier in this thread or did I miss them? What makes them happy?

I can see the academic acceleration or even finding creative outlets, but still worry about social and emotional development. Profoundly gifted kids will want friends and want to fall in love. When they are young teenagers, they will act like young teenagers in some ways, not like mini adults. I wish the parents of the OP kid the best of luck in finding what is best for their child.

I have been lucky enough to know a few profoundly gifted people, using the definition above. Wasn’t easy for them, especially in finding friends and companions. When they hit adulthood, it was better.

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I think it is possible for a quite gifted person who sticks with the normal school pace not to encounter anyone who is significantly more gifted cognitively than he/she, at least until college.

I don’t think PG ever responded to my question about whether she had ever encountered anyone who could run rings around her in mathematics, in the same way that she ran rings around the other students in her high school in math.

It bothers me that some posters cannot seem to conceive of an intellectual range where the student is just not well served by normal age progression plus gifted and talented programs and AP classes. Perhaps their school systems were better than the local ones.

It’s not beneficial for a student always to be the one who knows the answer in class when no one else does. For a seriously gifted student following the normal age progression, in high school math it’s not impossible for the student to understand the subject better than the teacher does. This is a real problem. I have the impression that PG went to a school where that did not happen. However, there are many schools in our area where it definitely could happen.

A student who scores in the 99th percentile is likely to learn academically, occasionally, from the other students in a typical class. There will be times when someone else sees something that a student at that level of giftedness doesn’t get. and can clarify it. This is good to have happen. It is much less likely to happen with a student who is “severely gifted.”

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Alternatively, the second kid may not be intrinsically smarter than the first kid but may go to a Saturday Chinese school that has already been prepping kids this age for the SAT for a couple of years. Thus, this kid has a familiarity with SAT questions and content that the other does not, and that accounts for the higher score.