It’s always great to hear such successful stories. You might feel good that UCB bureaucratic has improved enough to allow freshman to declare math major and even allow modifying the requirements.
Learning psychological principles might not be a bad idea for them. It can be a very practical life skill for them.
A gifted student watched The Teaching Company’s Great Ideas of Psychology by Prof. Robinson (a lot of humor in that course), and studied college level developmental psychology for CLEP exam, and then took a CC Social Psychology (with good coverage on developmental psychology and bell curve for gifted) at very young ages when the knowledge could be very helpful for the student as it answered so many questions about the student’s “differences” and the surrounding environment.
Although the student wouldn’t have been able to actually managed to stay in elementary school classroom everyday.
My kid took calculus when they were 12 and a whole variety of math classes from combinatorics to algebra (groups, rings and fields) while in HS. We are fortunate enough to live close to a major university that allows for that. So yes they enjoyed learning math. They never thought of it as essential as breathing. Not even close. They are graduating this year from college with an honors degree in math . They also enjoyed learning art history, dance, APUSH, many years of French and English literature while in HS.
The behavioral issues are more than a stereotype. The tech field has had major problems dealing with sexual harassment and discrimination. Fields such as math have been accused at least in this country of gender bias and discrimination against women and blacks and Hispanics. So I do not think HS is too young to start learning about those issues
A student I know is the same as yours. But then I have met several other students who do think of it as essential as breathing. You can’t make a generalized argument in that. It is a stereotype even if it conforms the majority, if there are still substantial samples that don’t conform.
@collegedad13, but it has nothing to do with being gifted. If it did, my gifted D would be exhibiting those behaviors. She hates the taste of alcohol and has never sexually harassed someone in her life. Plus, all the people working for those firms are not highly gifted. I don’t know how you got your wires crossed, but tech bro does not equal highly gifted. I think you are on the wrong thread.
Also, some students are highly gifted on the verbal vs mathematical side. They are not in the tech field – are they running around sexually harassing other people? I haven’t heard of that trend.
You are just melding two things together that are not related.
Oh, and that discrimination you are talking about in those field? Some of it is socioeconomic – those students may not have parents advocating for them like the parents out here do. A solution to that probably lies in people like the OP on this thread making sure their schools identify and support ALL the kids who are gifted in their system, not just the ones whose parents’ are clamoring in their office.
Finally – I see no relationship between learning another foreign language or developing skills in sculpture, and not growing up to harass or discriminate. Again – it doesn’t make sense.
What makes you think that math prodigies are more prone to such undesirable behavior than others? Plenty of these issues show up among politicians, entertainment industry types, academics (in non-math fields), factory workers, etc…
@collegedad13, please, please, please stop trying to explain sexual harassment in tech as a potential outcome of advancing gifted students. Tech worker does not equal gifted, and gifted does not equal socially maladjusted, and socially maladjusted does not explain sexual harassment. Please just stop with this.
Which math formulas are racist or sexist? Area of a circle? Pythagorean theorem? Distance formula?
Wait, I think I figured it out: It’s differentiation isn’t it?
Back to the topic at hand–cough.
In my practice as an independent college consultant, I work with a number of gifted homeschoolers whose parents really did want to make it work within the public (or even private) school systems, and who really didn’t want to homeschool, but came to homeschooling as a last result because the school system was failing their child.
We are one of those homeschooling families that started from the get-go. I was inspired by Lisa Rivero’s gem of a book, Gifted Education Comes Home: A Case for Self-Directed Learning.
We seriously considered home schooling for S2 – he is a humanities/social sciences guy and it’s difficult to get appropriate acceleration in those areas in most schools. He wound up in a humanities HG program and an IB program whose strength was social sciences, so it mostly worked out. (he has some non-verbal learning disabilities and executive function issues which the public schools would not accommodate, so we had to provide a lot of support. Whether that was a good idea is an open question.) DH and I enjoyed enriching a kid who loves history, geography and politics, since that is all up our alley, too – whether it’s PBS, books, traveling, talking about current events – it was a lot of fun for all of us, and S1 picked up a lot along the way as well.
For parents of gifted kids, if you are not homeschooling( hence don’t have formalized curriculum), one resource is the Great Courses ( someone mentioned it above). When they go on sale, you can get courses similar to college lectures. For kids who are interested in esoteric subjects, you can often find a course. The thing my kids like is the depth. They can also pause it. But, the person teaching the course matters. Some are odd professors and young kids can lose interest if the voice is monotone.
Has anyone ever been able to split a public school day with homeschooling? To me sending my kids for a 1/2 day to school and then having them homeschool the other half would be ideal. Instead, they are in school and do their other learning after school. Despite a long foray into public education, I think we have prevented the bad stuff from happening- low expectations, loss of interest in intellectual stimuli, detachment. But we have definitely met the admin side of education and hit the wall several times. Kids realized it very early on. You cannot lie to a kid and expect them to believe you. Lol.
I don’t expect it to change as it gets worse each year. But we are expanding our horizons ( private school). The message there seems to be very different. Private schools seem to have a lot of “parental achievers” applying ( parents who make their kids advance) and that is fine. But they also want the gifted kids. I think they realize that gifted kids win the national merits and science awards and the like. This makes their school look more academic to the parental achievers ( many of whom think they can step into the same category via hard work-and many can). The private schools have really reached out. They seem to love a kid who can do many things well. Don’t know how the money will work out. Seems crazy to pay that much. Then again, education might be the best/only true luxury.
I’m enjoying reading this thread and hearing about all these truly gifted kids. It’s a shame that parents have to advocate so much to find solutions. Learning algebra by oneself at such an early age is quite amazing.
I think of the these special kids mentioned on CC when I am working with families who are convinced their 7 y o is headed towards HYP. I have given up with one family whose DD is aiming for top colleges, and has no safeties. I encouraged that she apply to the state flagship, so she would know she had one acceptance in hand before ED decisions came out. But no, she won’t. And she was denied by the ED school. I’m not a college adviser, so I will say no more. They have a paid consultant (of course, I wonder if they listened to her).
Default safety is community college for this student?
People thought I was a bit loopy when I told my sons that their safety was the local community college, but my boys were not idealists with “dream” schools. Yes, my eldest son got into all his college including several Ivies, MIT, Caltech, etc., but we went into it with no expectations.
It is much harder for top students coming from good public or private schools (where everyone knows how amazing they truly are) to have no expectations about getting into top colleges because everyone around them-teachers, parents, friends, GCs- are expecting them to be admitted to X, Y or Z school…but college admissions is a crazy competitive business right now, and unless I’m working with a completely hooked student, I tell my students to have a good list that includes matches and safeties- true matches and safeties (which often shocks people when I tell them things like UCSD/UCD/UCSB are not safeties for an in-state kid).
Nonetheless, it’s hard for these students who’ve never experienced perceived failure to suddenly be met with a “no” in college admissions.
As I pointed out way above, there’s only about 350 Highly or Profoundly gifted seniors graduating every year.
MIT/Cal Tech/IVY/Stanford/Berkeley or whatever you consider the elite pack of colleges take in FAR more US based freshmen than that every year.
You don’t have to be a genius to go to one of those schools. And not all genius kids go to one of those schools. Some chase merit at other schools, or don’t go to college at all for various reasons.
After all the difficulty in getting appropriate support and placement for my kid, we were all about fit in college, not brand name.
That’s my motto, as well, @intparent.
Another unpleasant first encounter for some high school students is finding that college selection is the first time that their choices are significantly cost constrained.
@VickiSoCal , What are your criteria for hg/pg and how did you get 350?
3 deviations above the mean is 99.74% or 145 in iq test. Applying that to yearly high school graduates of 3.5m, you get 9100. Usually a lot more due to the test usually normed with years old data. That’s at least HG level regardless of standard.
HG or IQ >160 is about 0.01 % of population.