If it’s important for a top gifted 0.1% student to be around his intellectual peers then is it equally important for a gifted 0.5% student to go to highly selective schools where he’ll have more intellectual peers than his state school?
While Marian’s scenario no doubt does happen, a friend of my daughter’s scored 750 on the SAT math in 7th grade with zero prep. Some students just are that intellectually capable.
@WorryHurry411, many state schools are big and full of 0.1%, 0.5%, and as i personally know, many 0.001% and beyond. Highly selective schools are good. But they won’t be lack of intellectual peers at many state schools if they want to find. It will be harder of course, at a community college.
Very true. The single smartest person I know to this day was my undergraduate classmate and good friend in our state flagship. His talent dwarfed everyone at the HYPSM where I attended grad school.
Ironically, he almost ended up at a community college instead of our state flagship–his average IQ parents had no idea just how strong he was.
^^ The day dd got her first registration after interviewing her community college VP at 10, passing through a large lawn field in the college, she asked me how many other students are at this school with her age. I told her that I know a few in colleges at her age, some she met, and there should be a lot more, but probably none here and now. She said, “Yes I know there are others, but I feel as if they are a handful of sand grains scattered in the lawn.”
@Lizardly, I don’t believe particular studies have been cited in this thread, but several posts included links to websites such as Hoagies that have references. I mentioned earlier Linda Silverman’s book Giftedness 101, which provides a detailed overview of the gifted population and cites many studies in a variety of areas including testing, acceleration, socialization, and emotional needs. Dr. Silverman is a PhD psychologist who has studied giftedness for over 50 years, and is director of the Gifted Development Center in Colorado, which has tested over 6000 gifted children and which has the most comprehensive data base on gifted development in the world.
I think it’s difficult to generalize, but from what I’ve seen most highly/profoundly gifted individuals crave being challenged, the satisfaction of growing and developing, being accepted, and relationships in which they don’t have to pretend. Commonly disliked things include being bored, having to “dumb down” in order to achieve social acceptance, being ridiculed and/or bullied, feeling socially isolated, and feeling like something is wrong with them.
Regarding @Marian’s comment, I don’t know of any formal SAT preparation that goes on for the under-aged population, though it’s possible that such exists. I’m not sure that preparation would help most 12 year olds that much, regardless - the material is too far over their heads.
Only 2 people have been recorded as scoring over a 700 on the SAT math exam at age 9: Terrance Tao and Lenhard Ng. Tao is an Australo-American math professor at UCLA who is a Fields Medal and MacArthur Prize winner. I believe his IQ has been estimated in the 230 range. He started taking college courses at age 11, was the youngest recorded International Math Olympiad medalist, and received his bachelor’s and masters degrees at 16, and his PhD from Princeton by 21. By 24 he was a full professor. He’s also happily married (to a NASA scientist) with 2 children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/the-singular-mind-of-terry-tao.html?_r=0
Leonard Ng, a professor of math at Duke (once called the smartest kid in America), is also married. Ng started taking college courses at age 12 at the University of North Carolina (where his father was a physics professor), though he didn’t matriculate at Harvard under the ripe old age of 16, and was 25 when he got his PhD from MIT. He apparently enjoyed writing, music and sports as a child, and had friends of all ages, including many in his own age group.
Tao and Ng reflected on their talent development in a 2006 article:
http://gcq.sagepub.com/content/50/4/307.abstract
Another profoundly gifted person is Eric Demaine, who was the youngest faculty member hired in the history of MIT at age 21, and a MacArthur Prize winner by age 22. He started college at age 12 after being homeschooled by his artist father - his father also enrolled and took classes with him, now has an appointment at MIT, and still lives with his son (who has a girlfriend). Demaine’s work is at the intersection between computational algorithms and art, and has applicability to areas such as protein folding; he generally approaches problems that pique his curiosity.
http://news.mit.edu/2003/demaine-0226
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/dazzling-sometimes-absurd-always-playful-genius-erik-demaine
These people are all at the extreme end of the giftedness spectrum, but they’ve all achieved academic success and been highly productive, and seem fairly well adjusted and happy. But I agree with you that it is quite difficult - and not just for these extreme cases, but for most of those who are profoundly gifted, probably around the > 4SD range - and that many of these individuals are at risk for isolation, alienation, and being stifled by an educational system that not only doesn’t understand them, but often works to undermine them. So I’m personally in favor of any approach that allows such people to thrive.
I absolutely know 6th and 7th graders going to SAT prep classes. I live in crazy land.
^ That’s very sad, though not completely unsurprising. Still, I would argue that it is unlikely to account for the kind of difference that I mentioned above. It’s hard enough for a 16-17 year old to improve their SAT score by 100-200 points with test preparation. Going from a 350 to a 700+ as an 11-12 year old probably requires more than just familiarization with the kind of questions asked. I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s probably a decent screening tool, which is what organizations like Johns Hopkins SET use it for.
I can’t help myself. Even though I asked for studies I have to offer a few anecdotes.
I went to HS with a kid I suspect was profoundly gifted. He had a rough childhood. Bullying, no acceleration or outside stimulation, and worst of all, an ES teacher who egged on the bullies. He reportedly (didn’t know him then) had a breakdown in second grade. What saved him? A good friend. One good friend. There was a bright but not crazy gifted kid in his class who was having trouble at home (divorce, mom started dating and made bad choices) who became his ally. The friend was a tall, good looking, but very countercultural kind of guy (it was the seventies) who explained gifted kid to the rest of the world until the boy was old enough and sophisticated enough to explain himself. (Gifted kid went to big state U but was named a Rhodes Scholar while there. He always loved art more than science and now is a painter living abroad. I think he is married.)
I suspect my FIL was profoundly gifted. What makes his story interesting is that he fled Poland and thus survived the Holocaust. He escaped from Poland with an uncle at thirteen yo right after the Nazis rolled in and spent the rest of the war in Russia. His formal education, spotty up until then since he was sickly and from a poor family, ended at thirteen. He did enroll in college after the war, but had a family to support so had to go to work. Nonetheless he was the CFO of a big engineering firm that he founded with some other refugees. Amazing to think he learned all that math, accounting, and even some engineering, on his own.
My own father was a solid three deviations above normal. He grew up in a small, southern town where no one knew quite what to do with him academically. Teachers wanted to accelerate him a few grades, his mom refused, arguing his emotional and social development were not so advanced and he would suffer. (And she was right! He was pretty immature and backwards.) Other interesting tidbits about my dad: 1) he was incredibly nearsighted, and no one knew until he was in third grade. He had such intelligence and such highly developed coping skills no one even suspected. 2) his tight knit family was involved in various business enterprises, legal and illegal ( we will leave it at that) so that his childhood was very strange. He got sent to the movies for hours and hours at a time to get him out of the house until it was safe to come home.
I offer the last two stories because they depict gifted people in different environments than the ones we typically think of.
^ “Other interesting tidbits about my dad: 1) he was incredibly nearsighted, and no one knew until he was in third grade. He had such intelligence and such highly developed coping skills no one even suspected.”
This kind of story is not uncommon. Gifted kids who have a physical are often able to compensate, or mask the problem by virtue of their analytic prowess, and still achieve above the norm, so they are not identified has having a problem. Auditory and sensory processing disorders are fairly common. Here’s one example:
http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/blogs/bobbie-and-lindas-blog/ear-infections-can-lower-iq-scores
Why don’t we hear from a 13 yo Communications Fellow of an eminent grassroots organization on his perspective?
http://blog.savesfbay.org/2016/08/my-journey-to-save-the-bay/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQbP3_R0stY
I know this thread has kindof died out, but I just saw this article, and I thought it might be interesting to people reading this thread:
What are the rest 81.4% reasons why people are successful, grit, luck, connections? Nice report and I hope I read it correctly.
Late to this thread, but I do think some are misunderstanding the difference between gifted, even very gifted, and profoundly gifted. With all due respect to PG, I don’t think you can translate your experience to that of the boy in the OP’s article. It’s a very very small number of children who fall into the profoundly gifted category and for those children, I think traditional schooling can be very uncomfortable. As the article cited further up in the thread points out:
"Differences between moderately and extremely gifted children are not, of course, confined to the cognitive domain. Hollingworth (1926) defined the IQ range 125-155 as “socially optimal intelligence.” She found that children scoring within this range were well-balanced, self-confident, and outgoing individuals who were able to win the confidence of age peers. She claimed, however, that above the level of IQ 160 the difference between the exceptionally gifted child and his or her age-mates is so great that it leads to special problems of development which are correlated with social isolation. These difficulties appear particularly acute at ages 4 through 9 (Hollingworth, 1942).
DeHaan and Havighurst (1961), examining the differences between what they termed second- order" (IQ 125-160) and “first-order” (IQ 160+) gifted children, reinforced Hollingworth’s findings. These findings suggested that the second-order gifted child achieves good social adjustment because he has sufficient intelligence to overcome minor social difficulties but is not “different” enough to induce the severe problems of salience encountered by the exceptionally gifted student. Janos (1983) compared the psychosocial development of 32 children aged 6-9 with IQs in excess of 164, with that of 40 age peers of moderately superior intellectual ability. The findings of Janos emphasized that the social difficulties experienced by this highly gifted group did not stem from a pre-existing emotional disturbance, but rather were caused by the absence of a suitable peer group with whom to relate. There are virtually no points of common experience and common interest between a 6-year-old with a mental age of 6 and a 6-year-old with a mental age of 12.”
I think it’s incredibly challenging to parent a child who differs so extremely from his peers, in intelligence or in any other fashion, and so I feel for parents of the profoundly gifted. If anyone is interested in getting a glimpse inside how one family dealt with their precocious son (child who became the youngest to produce nuclear fusion at the age of 14 and ended up attending Davidson school for the gifted) check out this article, http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-fusion. There’s a book by the same name which really gives you an inside view of the life of a profoundly gifted child and his family.
The problem is while a 9 year old with an IQ of 165 may have little in common with other 9 year olds, he’s not likely to have much in common with ordinary smart 20 year olds at a university either.
^^ on the contrary, I personally know a dozen radically early college students (7~12) or their parents, including my own. They all seem to find much in common with ordinary smart (or just ordinary) 20 years old, and quite enjoy the seemingly odd friendship.
A person with an IQ of 165 is going to learn 10x faster than a college student with an IQ of 120 and the physics class they are in together is still going to feel painfully slow.
I don’t agree that people with an IQ of 165 are going to learn 10 times faster than some one with an IQ of 120. There is no evidence to support that metric. You can be a slow learner and still be really smart.
I also don’t agree that really smart people cant have anything in common with people who are not as smart. I enjoy playing golf and I don’t care how smart the person is that I am playing with. They just need to be fun to be around.
At an iq of 165 you are talking about approximately 25 babies in the US each year. Most of us will never meet anyone in that cohort.
There are some posters here who are implying that their kids are in the 165 + range so there must be more than 25 babies a year?