<p>just thought this is somewhat comparable to another kid. look at video on sho yano: [Prodigies</a> …on 60 Minutes; Exclusive Video Only on Yahoo! News](<a href=“http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/29/prodigies?comment_offset=541]Prodigies”>http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/29/prodigies?comment_offset=541)</p>
<p>the kid got into an md/phd program when he was 12</p>
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<p>If I were a college administrator, the potential issues raised by this kid enrolling as a fulltime student chemistry major would give me a lot of headaches. College administrators already have enough headaches on their plate–they don’t need more. They haven’t been given the funds to support the special needs of precocious 7-year-olds, it’s not their mission, and I can easily see why they’d look for the quickest and simplest excuse they can find not to enroll this kid.</p>
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<p>It seems to me that a gradual approach of accommodating his needs makes a lot more sense. If he’s ready to do college level chemistry but not the labs, he could take an on-line course at home or perhaps enroll in a single lecture class as a nonmatriculated student. If that works out well, he could perhaps increase the number of classes he’s taking as time goes on or get involved in an independent study or some sort of research project where his role could be limited to computation rather than benchwork.</p>
<p>But plunging in at age 7 to a fulltime matriculation in a chemistry degree program just seems totally unreasonable and totally inappropriate.</p>
<p>A gradual program that could be tailored to his interests and needs seems a whole lot more sensible to me.</p>
<p>The mention of the International Chemistry Olympiad by a previous poster reminded me that the I Ch O study resources are probably far more sophisticated than the first two years of a garden variety college chemistry major (in an analogous way that the IMO study resources are more sophisticated than the first two years of a garden variety math major). Perhaps his family could obtain those recommended resources and let him pursue those at whatever pace suits him.</p>
<p>However precocious he may be, enrolling him in a fulltime college degree program in chemistry (in a country with an educational system where college students do not study any subjects unrelated to their major) strikes me as educational neglect–for the reasons described by other posters. There are broad areas of intellectual endeavor outside of chemistry to which he should be exposed: literature, the arts, history, and other social sciences.</p>
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Yes, that’s exactly what I think he should do. He should just go into hibernation and wait until they’re all 18 and ready for college… Or maybe I think he should do the things I said in my first post and every post following. </p>
<p>I do not think it is impossible that he will find peers who are close enough in age, interests, and ability to make true friendship possible… Others were saying that he’s bound to spending time with either intellectual peers, with whom he can talk about chemistry but little else, or age peers, with whom he can’t talk about his biggest interest, which is chemistry. I’m saying that it’s not out of the question that he can get the best of both worlds and find other gifted little boys, especially if the family makes use of gifted programs and the internet. </p>
<p>I’m 18, Keshira. I’m a college student, not a parent. You are correct that you can’t just throw people together and expect them to be friends. This is especially true with girls. Girls bond over feelings; talking and feelings tend to be at the base of girl-girl friendships. Boys bond over doing; they find common interests and they do things together, and their common interests serve as the foundation of their friendships. Think about your dad or brother talking about his “football buddies” or “golf buddies.” Men seem much more ready to form friendships based on common interests and activities. Anyway, I wasn’t really saying that this boy would necessarily be friends with any other boy who was on a similar intellectual plane. I was saying that boys like that may exist, so he may have or find peers who are appropriate on an age and intellectual level.</p>
<p>Keshira, perhaps you have had some negative experiences as a gifted child in primary school, but that does not have to be the case for all gifted children. Many gifted programs starting in 4th grade attract intelligent children with a love for learning, and extend through the last years of high school. Growing up as a (relatively) bright kid, I never felt uncool or pressured to act dumb because I was often around other people who valued education like I do.</p>
<p>In any case, it’s worth mentioning that to shelter an intelligent child from ALL taunts and teasing on the playground won’t do that child any good in the long run. Kids are all teased and poked to some extent. That’s how we learn to toughen up, how to treat bullies; there are many real world lessons to be learned from the playground. </p>
<p>Exposing young children to a host of germs and nasties at an early age builds up their immune system. Part of the reason scientists think we are seeing more and more severe allergies in the population is that we are becoming ‘too’ sterile. I think there’s some merit in giving prodigies exposure to the world of other kids so they know how to deal with a variety of intelligence levels - or at the least, to understand that not everyone has an intense passion for academics. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give prodigies the chance to take a few courses with older students who DO value education.</p>
<p>And about whether he can find companions - I think that a child with the emotional maturity of a 7 or 8 year old, like this prodigy, would to a degree enjoy being around other similarly aged kids, especially other bright ones. I don’t think even someone who loves chemistry as much as he does wants to spend all day talking quantum mechanics and orgo. Again, the combination of time spent with kids at his emotional maturity, but perhaps slightly below his academic maturity, and older students at his academic maturity, but more emotional mature than he, would do him well.</p>
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There’s a lot of stories like this. The articles address many of corranged’s concerns, too. Young kids can be successful in college - if this college wants to make it happen.
[CNN.com</a> - 12-year-old begins medical school - Aug. 26, 2003](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/08/25/sprj.sch.wonder.kid.ap/]CNN.com”>http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/08/25/sprj.sch.wonder.kid.ap/) Sho Yano (started college at 9)
[ON</a> EDUCATION; Reading at 8 Months? That Was Just the Start - New York Times](<a href=“http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E2DA1030F931A15752C0A9659C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Organizations/S/State%20University%20of%20New%20York]ON”>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E2DA1030F931A15752C0A9659C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Organizations/S/State%20University%20of%20New%20York) Alia Sabur (10)
[Real</a> Genius | The University of Memphis Magazine](<a href=“http://www.memphis.edu/magazine/v20i2/feat4.html]Real”>http://www.memphis.edu/magazine/v20i2/feat4.html) Alex Brueggeman (9)
[Washingtonpost.com:</a> Young Mr. Smith Goes to College](<a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/sept99/greg7.htm]Washingtonpost.com:”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/sept99/greg7.htm) Gregory Smith (10)
[Profiles</a> Online - November 1999 - Dispatches: Gee Whiz! Kid](<a href=“Communications & Public Affairs | York University”>Communications & Public Affairs | York University) G</p>
<p>I think that there may very well be gifted boys, not necessarily as smart as this kid, who have not yet shown themselves. They may not have learned to read exceptionally early–not all gifted children learn to read at an abnormally young age, or may not have had access to the learning materials they craved. These boys may just be undiscovered. This is especially easy to conceptualize if the family is uneducated, or maybe it’s their first child and they see that their son is smart, but they don’t know how smart until the boy is taught to read in school and given access to hundreds of books, the internet, and textbooks. This was really a very small point I made in my first post that sort of ballooned… All I’ve been saying is that peers may exist for this boy who are similar in age, interests, and abilities. The family could find these children through gifted programs, by utilizing the internet, or these boys may exist in their local schools but are just unrecognized as of now. He does not necessarily need to choose between age peers and intellectual peers, as others have said.</p>
<p>There are certainly parents who don’t have a realistic, objective perspective on their own kids, however, I’d still bet they have a better idea about their child than their neighbors and friends do! Like NYMomof2, I have a child that elicited those nasty remarks. People who took the time to talk to him usually changed their tune pretty quickly. People seemed to think I spent my free time doing his science projects for him, writing his essays, etc. There was one parent who persisted until I told her what SAT score S got in 7th grade. So the fact that this prodigy has some objective test results as an indicator is important. Sometimes the only way to tell how smart/capable/ready a child is, is to give him the challenge and see how he performs.</p>
<p>I would still let him conquer HS before I sent him to college. And I would still let a 7year old be a 7yr old.</p>
<p>Even if he is intellectually ready to attempt college, I doubt he is emotionally or socially. (As to the latter, I HOPE he isn’t ready socially!) :eek:</p>
<p>I’ve seen lots of kids who were brilliant in one area or another at an early age because they had a huge interest in something and had the brains to pursue it. Nobody suggested they should go to college on that basis, for heaven’s sake. </p>
<p>This is in fact one of the indicators of a “gifted” child–uneven development. At some point (perhaps earlier than expected, perhaps not) their other areas will catch up and then they can have a succesful college career and beyond. If the other areas do not catch up, perhaps because they’ve never been nurtured, then you have a problem and a societal misfit.</p>
<p>Yup, yup and yup to Mommusic’s post. I have my own opinions about how to nurture and educate a highly gifted child, but let’s just say that sending a 7 year old to college would not be the way.</p>
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At this level of giftedness? Alas, the chances are negligible… Read the story:
[Hoagies</a>’ Gifted: Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Students: An Underserved Population](<a href=“http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm]Hoagies”>Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Students: An Underserved Population | Hoagies' Gifted)
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<p>BTW, I don’t recall the Times article ever mentioning that Ainan’s parents are looking for full-time college option… And part-time college (and better yet - a mentor) is probably just what he needs. I agree with marite that part-time high school could be much, much worse socially for this kid. So far the parents did a good job catering to his needs; looks like they know what they are doing.</p>
<p>Here is some definition of exceptionally and profoundly giftedness and its incidence in the general population. It illustrates how difficult it would be for someone in either of these categories to find others similarly gifted where they live. </p>
<h1>Exceptionally gifted: 160+, or 1 in 30,000 (99.997th percentile)</h1>
<h1>Profoundly gifted: 175+, or 1 in 3 million (99.99997th percentile)</h1>
<p>It is worth remembering that this story was posted on the London Times website. It’s not talking about “sending” the kid to college because, save for Oxford and Cambridge, there are very few residential universities in the UK (or, for that matter, the rest of the world). Most universities expect students to live either at home or off-campus in apartments. There is nothing in the article that suggests the parents would want their kid to go off to college on his own. One has to assume they would be there for him to take care of his daily needs. University life for him would consist of taking classes. </p>
<p>Although it is obvious that he is not capable of working at college level in the social sciences and humanities (or even at high school level), the UK system and its international variants are more suited to the kind of focused study he is interested in at the moment. I don’t see anything wrong in nurturing his love of chemistry. He must already know how to read pretty well to pass the O-level in chemistry, and a good bit of math and probably physics and biology as well. He can go on to study literature, history and the rest at the same age as other students.</p>
<p>I have to ask what it means to let an exceptionally gifted 7-year old to be a 7-year old. Does that mean letting him be an ordinary 7-year old? The fact is, he is not an ordinary 7-year old. I don’t think Yo Yo Ma became the cellist he is today by being allowed to be an ordinary 4-year old, or more precisely being forced to be an ordinary 4-year old, as indications are that he was the one wanting the music lessons and practice.</p>
<p>Cross-posted with marmat. We know our kids! :)</p>
<p>I have been introduced to this story almost a year ago.
Here is his father’s blog:
[The</a> boy who knew too much: a child prodigy](<a href=“http://www.scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/]The”>http://www.scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/)
I think one of the reasons this father started blogging was too look for avenues his son could take. They were teaching Ainan chemistry at home, but very fast they run out of the resources - there are only so many chemistry experiments you can do at home with even the most advanced chemistry kit. So he started looking for ways for his son to join either HS or university lab. He run into tons or road blocks, as anyone who was ever involved with a gifted child can imagine. I believe that he had Ainan take O levels as a way of proving his capability and opening some doors, the same way we here in the US have our kids take SAT in middle schools.</p>
<p>Sure labs aren’t designed for kids. For a while there was a dwarf working in my husband’s department. He stood on stools to look through microscopes. He adapted.</p>
<p>Having had a gifted kid myself who was entirely self-motivated, I can speak to the issue of attention span. My son spent hours teaching himself computer programming reading computer manuals and math books. I gave him a normal childhood too. He read plenty of novels, played soccer and watched TV. He would have been fine taking advanced classes if we could have found any. He had a knack for finding adult computer programmers at parties and blowing them away with his conversation. For him staying in regular school seemed like the best compromise as his writing was never in the same league as his reading or math abilities. But it wasn’t perfect. He came home every day from elementary school complaining that he wasn’t learning enough. (I offered homeschooling, but he didn’t bite.) Things got better when education got compartmentalized by subject. And I finally realized why we’d had such a hard time finding peers for him when I saw his 7th grade SAT scores, (he never had an IQ test), his scores were way over on the right hand side of the bell curve.</p>
<p>As for what I’d do in these parents shoes, if he’s ready for university chemistry that’s what I’d want. But I would make sure he’s got a good general education as well. And I’d probably be dragging him to soccer (or cricket) on the weekends.</p>
<p>Marmat, we do not know this kid’s IQ score. As other posters have said, it sounds as if he has a basic high school knowledge of chemistry. I don’t know what IQ score that corresponds to. In all of my posts on this topic, though, I stated very clearly that it was unlikely the boy would find other boys as smart as he is; instead, I said that he may be able to find other gifted boys–not necessarily as gifted as him!–interested in science who can act as peers. Anyway, I was just saying that an appropriate peer group may exist for him. </p>
<p>Good post, Mommusic.</p>
<p>The link posted by kelowna to the father’s blog provides a vast amount of detail with many anecdotes on the child’s history. The child does sound extraordinary and the parents have clearly spent a lot of time reflecting on the best way to provide for his educational needs.</p>
<p>At this point, the father says in the post below that they are conducting “a worldwide search” for a college that can provide the right educational experience for their child. It sounds as though they are not necessarily looking for matriculation but for an academically appropriate yet flexible and nurturing environment for their son and they are apparently willing to relocate with him–it’s a little unclear as to whether they propose that one parent would relocate with him or the entire family. </p>
<p>[The</a> boy who knew too much: a child prodigy: A Global Search for a University](<a href=“http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2007/11/global-search-for-university.html]The”>The boy who knew too much: a child prodigy: A Global Search for a University)</p>
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A kid is teaching himself high-school-level Chemistry? Which requires excellent high-school Math and reading comprehension? At six? Well… all I can tell it’s not the “Oh, Johnny got into the gifted program!!!” IQ. Did you actually look at the article about the difference between gifted and profoundly gifted? You are not PC in this question, you just don’t realize how rare those kids are.</p>
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Sure. It exists right now, his father says he plays with lots of kids of different ages. Intellectual peers? That, too. But they are not his age peers. </p>
<p>Is it possible to find some kids who are his intellectual AND age peers? Yeah… if his parents join a gifted network and take him to one of their gatherings. But it’s very unlikely that it will happen the way you describe it - “Other very smart students may rise to meet him…” </p>
<p>As for “not necessarily as smart as this kid” - that’s the point! That would not be enough to keep Aidan intellectually engaged in conversations he needs to be engaged in. “You like Chemistry? That’s wonderful! Jessy likes Chemistry, too - she’d made molecules out of marshmallows!” Oh yeah, he may discuss the molecules with Jessy (as well as he may discuss Pokemons with her) - but after that, he’ll need to go and discuss Krebs cycle, or sp3 hybridization, with somebody else… </p>
<p>As Keshira noted, “he would feel like how a ‘normal’ gifted student feels in regular classes” if he’d be placed into a gifted class.</p>
<p>After reading posts on the father’s blog posted by kelowna, several thoughts occur to me:</p>
<p>a) They don’t seem at all fixated on matriculation, which strikes me as a very good thing. It sounds like they will keep his education flexible and are open to the possibility that either something like Terry Tao’s path (exploratory college coursework as nonmatriculated student followed by very early matriculation) or Lenny Ng’s path (more extended exploratory college coursework as nonmatriculated student followed by later matriculation at closer to a conventional age, though still a bit young) would be best for their son. (Professors Tao and Ng are now close to 30, successful young mathematicians, with apparently happy personal lives and no regrets about the paths their parents enabled for them. More details are in the article below. The parents seem to have researched the subject widely, so I imagine they’ve read this article.)</p>
<p>[Insights</a> From SMPY’s Greatest Former Child Prodigies: Drs. Terence (“Terry”) Tao and Lenhard (“Lenny”) Ng Reflect on Their Talent Development – Muratori et al. 50 (4): 307 – Gifted Child Quarterly](<a href=“http://gcq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/4/307]Insights”>http://gcq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/4/307)</p>
<p>b) The parents seem rather desperate, given their willingness to discuss relocating almost anywhere for their son’s sake. It is one thing for a local college to accommodate a nearby student (as U of New South Wales did for Terry Tao and U of North Carolina did for Lenny Ng) and entirely another thing for a far distant college to sponsor the student and all or part of his family in relocating to study there.</p>
<p>c) Some of the posts by the father strike me as rather invasive of the children’s privacy. I have to wonder whether it’s really necessary to post the children’s full names (including rather unusual first and middle names for the boy and for his siblings) on the open Internet along with so many detailed anecdotes that they may not care to have publicly accessible forever (via Wayback Machine searches.)</p>
<p>As I’ve said many times, Marmat, it’s the balance that I think is important. It is not an either/or with regards to age or intellectual peers. It’s both, plus something in between. I think that that is very possible.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the blog yet, and I may not have a chance to. It sounds as if the parents aren’t looking for full matriculation, which is good. I hope that the parents are also interested in letting him grow intellectually in other areas, letting him grow socially, and getting him involved in some non-academic activities.</p>
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And they probably will find it. The colleges are willing to work with prodigies: Randolph-Macon College made all the accommodations for Greg Smith (personal office included), and other colleges demonstrated lots of good will in other cases. And there’s a lot of professors who may be interested in becoming a mentor for the child.</p>
<p>The parents might want to contact the Davidson program [Davidson</a> Institute ~ For Talent Development ~](<a href=“Davidson Institute | Programs & Support for the Profoundly Gifted”>http://www.ditd.org/) - I believe they help finding mentors for those kids. Well, the father seems to be very knowledgeable in the area of gifted education, so they will be fine. :)</p>
<p>corranged: nobody is fighting your thoughts about the importance of the balance (and the boy’s family is already providing the balance all right). But your ideas - that in couple years the kid might just find himself surrounded by others like him - do not agree with the data from gifted research. That was the point in your reflections which generated all the response.</p>
<p>wisteria: I agree about the privacy issue. Most of the families of profoundly gifted children prefer to keep a low profile. I don’t know, maybe the father hopes to attract more attention from the universities…</p>
<p>Did I miss something, why do you think that they are looking for a sponsor? My impression was that they are just willing to relocate if they find a college that agrees to work with the child.</p>