Our S was the only 3-year-old who tried to “help” design a better test for the preschool director who was attempting to administer a placement test to him. She was shocked and stopped the test and told me that she’s never had another child try to help improve the national test. I’m not sure what we did to have that result, but we were consistently told that both our kids were NOT representative of their chronological ages. 
As a young adult, our S is thriving on his own–he works full time at a job he enjoys and has a part-time hobby that last year netted him more than his salary. He was reading the newspaper cover to cover when he was 7 or 8 and challenging college students to chess matches. He has never to this day been as good at reading people or social situations as his sister, who is amazing at it. She would come home from preschool at 3 years old and told me how EVERY child in her class was feeling and why.
I didn’t read the whole thread, but I think reading isn’t always true as others have probably said. Personally, I hate reading as an activity. I love what I can get from it, but it is a tiresome process and I choose what I read carefully as a result.
However, I was playing with Excel from a young age. And that has had a huge effect on me IMO. I still have calculated baseball card games that I made myself that used the stats off baseball cards to simulate fake baseball games with certain teams.
So, I would revise reading to just me early and consistent mental stimulation / challenge of some form. If you challenge a kid to think, pretty much regardless of what about, they develop critical thinking skills. I mean that in the sense of the phrase “critical thinking” as well as in the crucial skills of thinking sense. Basically, just get them thinking early and they are well on their way.
Also, let’s not equate intelligence with grades. People can be very smart but also disorganized, and thus struggle with daily work or completion of it but have very firm grasps on the ideas and how to use them to creatively make original ideas.
Sorry if all of this has already been said, I plan to go back and read the full thread later.
Piano lessons…And probably a lot of everything else already posted…
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Einstein was dyslexic, not autistic. He may have had Asperger’s traits/attributes but we will never really know.
There was a game called [Pursue the Pennant](Dynasty League Baseball | Board Game | BoardGameGeek) that basically did that for the 1984 to 1994 MLB seasons, plus some extra sets for selected previous teams. The successor is the [game[/url] used by the [url=http://www.ibl.org/]Internet Baseball League](IBL Game « my zombie plan).
I haven’t read this entire thread, but agree with the folks who have credited reading, a love of reading, and fostering reading/a love of reading at an early age with making a difference in their kids’ lives.
I have 2 children, one of whom we had to push constantly with academics, while the other has always been self-motivated. The former is in college now, and is an average student. The latter is an accomplished competitive athlete, and will be a 1st year student at one of the top 8 prep schools next week.
My prep student hates to read.
He had 3 honors classes his freshman year and scored A’s and B+
He is at the top of his sport statewide.
He is a procrastinator
We are middle class, with one parent a self-employed HS grad, and the other a college grad
I told him about this topic today. I said “what makes you so smart?”
His answer “yard work”
He said, “I was left alone and expected to complete a task by myself at an early age. I knew what was expected from my parents”
He is not one of the uber bright prep kids, but he is an extremely hard worker in the classroom and in his sport.
He later went on to clarify that it is the work ethic that he learned at home, that has put him ahead of his peers locally
I will also add, that we have offered him nothing but encouragement since he was a toddler. We have always promoted the “sky’s the limit” attitude with him
“Not really. With 2 kids of difference genders and huge difference in age and environment,both adults now, and 2 grandkids, again different genders, close in age and the same environment (I guess, my family situation covers a lot of different scenarios in sibling combinations), I cannot say that there is a difference in inborn talents and definitely there is no difference in capacity to perform in k-12 and beyond.”
My guess is your ability to perceive inborn talents is minimal, since you discount them. You’re rocking a serious case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to that, in my opinion.
I have two daughters 18 months apart in age. The only thing that is similar about them is the test score numbers they got on the Cogats and the ITBS’s when they were little. Everything else about them is remarkably dissimilar-to the point where when #2 came out I had to learn how to parent all over again because nothing that worked with #1 worked with #2, and vice versa. They are still amazingly different, even though now they come up on the Meyers-Briggs test as both, um, ENTJ’s.
But in real life, people ask them if they’re related because they don’t look alike, they don’t talk alike, they don’t learn alike, they don’t behave the same way, they excel or fail very differently, and the way they get to good grades is through entirely different processes.
You can say I used different processes with each kid to teach them, but I would reply that they FORCED me (in a good way) to figure out what worked optimally for teaching each kid, not that I experimented on each kid and made them different (mwah ha ha, how much work would that have been).
There was absolutely no Tabula Rasa going on with them, that’s for sure. They popped out like Athena, fully formed in spirit and just waiting for the rest of their exterior to catch up. My job is to not mess that up too badly. That’s the value of nurture, I think.
S2 was in remedial reading at the start of second grade, but was moved to the highest reading group by Christmas. Basically, he refused to start any book he couldn’t finish in one sitting. Once he learned the world would not end if he used a bookmark, he went from Quick as a Cricket to Eragon in about a month. He now reads very quickly and prodigiously, as many as four books each day. He downloaded 35 books on his Kindle for our six day vacation.
Another early cognition story - We live on the end of a cul-de-sac and often played in the road. I was outside with the older kids and started rolling a ball to S2. I accidentally rolled one off-line. He left his spot and went over to where the ball would eventually be, not toward where it appeared to be. As a soccer and baseball coach, I can tell you that this was well beyond most 8 year-olds in spatial capabilities. He was not yet 1 year-old. I was so impressed I went inside and got my wife to show her.
ETA: I should add, emotionally he is probably a bit behind his 16 year-old peers. He is just starting to notice girls, only saw his friends about once/week this summer, mostly read and played video games when he wasn’t out climbing.
- Genes
- Hardworking
- Strong family support, stable parental relationship
- Resources / Money
My daughter works diligently to get good grades and likes standardized tests and is excellent at invoking her will on teachers and adults in authority. She is also a lousy driver, befuddled by handyman tasks, and is completely rigid in her political ideology. Per the OP, if we use the term smart loosely, we can all parade some version of brilliance. Being a “smart” 17-year-old who gets into a “good” college is just one float in that parade.
miamidap-
If you think so little of US k-12 education, why would it matter if the student did their HW. Does that make them smart or does it simply teach them to follow instructions and do as they are told.
Well, a bit of both. Lil column A, Lil column B. While homework certainly is less than fully indicative of a student’s ability, it doesn’t do anything but help the student learn.
It does also teach following instructions specifically, a skill in many fields. Not really a bad thing either, though I suppose it helps prep the youth for the modern 1984 if you’re worried about that lol
Right, pengsphils. Doing HW is a good thing, and helps students learn. The dichotomy is when a person thinks the educational system is the lowest quality, but apparently it is still good enough to teach our children how to learn.
“Does that make them smart or does it simply teach them to follow instructions and do as they are told.”
- I never understood a term “smart”, I have no idea what this mean. There are people who happen to develop certain skills, one of them is logical thinking, the other, great intuition, third might play piano unimaginably well and 4th hold many team records in certain sport, fifth person decided to be engaged in everything possible and another one was exposed to so many languages earlier in life that another language just going to be very easy for her. All of them would be called “brilliant” or doing certain things brilliantly, are they “smart”? What is a measurement for those who never took an IQ test?
On the other hand to “follow instructions and do as they are told” is absolute must if one wants to succeed in school and get into places like Med. School, Law School, other Grad. Schools. Are they smart? Definitely, because they adapted their behavior to their goal. In my mind, those who adapt the fastest to their environment in order to achieve their ultimate goal, those people are definitely very smart.
Was Beethoven smart, was Van Gog smart, was Chopin smart, what do you think? They were not happy people, they were tragic people with certain degree of mental instability.
There are plenty of tragic people with mental health issues who are not smart or gifted.
Here’s to smart hockey players! Many in our neck of the woods wasted a lot of time and money because they were certain that their kids were headed to the NHL…hardly anyone even plays club hockey in college from our area! Studies were ignored and resources that could have been spent on a college education were spent on exorbitant travel hockey costs. Our kids always knew that school came first…above anything hockey related. They were readers and inquisitive about the world. I agree with others…probably a blend of luck (genes) and nurture (a family appreciation of reading and seeking knowledge).
A lot of people in this thread are confusing correlation with causation.
“I read a lot as a kid and this made me smart.” Hmmm. Maybe you were smart to begin with, and found reading easy and enjoyable and therefore you read a lot. Same thing with those who say that “I made my kids read and therefore they are smart”. Those kids were probably smart anyway. The reading may have made them more educated, instilled curiosity or other desirable traits, but I’m not sure it made them smarter.
Then there is “My kids did their homework and did well. Therefore the way to do well is to do your homework.” Did you think that maybe your child would have done well without doing all their homework? There are many kids who do all their homework and don’t do as well as your kids did.
Also, does money make people smarter? Well it gives them access to better opportunities, good medical care and better nutrition which certainly helps. But, I think in most cases the parents are smart and give birth to smart kids. Since the parents are smart they also figure out how to make a good living. So the money doesn’t make them smart, but smarter people in aggregate tend to have more money than people who aren’t smart because they have more ability to go out and earn it.
As a parent of one biological child and one adopted child, I am firmly of the opinion that kids are born with certain aptitudes and not all of them are born with the ability to be “smart” in the way our education system measures it.
@Felicita, that’s a problem in Northern NJ also, although we’re not usually considered a hotbed of hockey mania. My kids played travel at a reasonably high level, which we could afford. Many parents, though, were after the supposed scholarships and acceptances to schools that their kids wouldn’t otherwise get, and it only worked out for very few of them. I remember getting a phone call from one mother who was spending every spare penny on hockey calling me in a panic because their van had broken down en route to a tournament, and she didn’t have $1000 to fix the rolling deathtrap.
Kids both gave up travel hockey during HS; one plays club in college and the other is enjoying Krav Maga.