“A long-running investigation of exceptional children reveals what it takes to produce the scientists who will lead the 21st century.” …
Lady Gaga!?!?
Oh yeah, Stephani Germanotta (Lady Gaga) has some serious prodigy creds.
Does this really surprise anyone? If you’re a potato when you’re a kid, you grow into an adult potato who enjoys tailgating and knocking back beers with your buddies and not considering the world’s big questions. You’re not innovating, because that’s not how you’re wired. I’m not knocking potatoes (ok, I am, a little) because the world needs potatoes, and potatoes do the world no harm.
But if you’ve got a superpowered brain, and you can make it to adulthood without crashing and burning (the dark side of high IQ), it makes sense that you’re going to continue that quest.
^^^I’m glad that they mentioned Lady Gaga. The one aspect I didn’t like about the article or study is the emphasis on STEM. It so happens that my own kids, who were high achieving students and now young successful adults, participated in the John Hopkins Talent Search (mentioned in the article). Lady Gaga so happened to attend the same BFA in Musical Theater college program that my youngest kid also attended a few years later. My kid is not as successful as Lady Gaga, but she is doing quite well in her field for her age. She was a gifted student who accelerated and so on. I wish they focused a bit more on the fact that very intelligent students may go on to success in any field, not just STEM.
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So the rest of you useless eaters, just let us handle things.
I find stuff like this mildly elitist, class-driven, and condescending (despite their arguments against socioeconomic factors).
The two most successful people I know, IRL, never graduated from college much less attended Duke TIPS. If you tested them they probably both have a specific learning disability.
Nothing against crazy smart people but gosh . . .
ETA: OK, I posted too soon. I do agree with what the article is saying about spatial ability being an under-appreciated metric.
And nothing against average or those with learning disabilities,many of whom become wildly successful as well.
However, the article does mention something (among other points) that I do find to be true, and that is that our educational system puts a great deal of attention into those with learning disabilities (rightfully so) with policies and programs, etc., but not as much into those on the so-called “gifted” (I dislike labels) end of the spectrum, who often need accommodations in their learning programs as well.
Thanks for sharing. Lady Gaga is a real life rock star, but my daughter and I regard Camilla Benbow as an educational rock star for her work with gifted kids. I will be interested in seeing what the new study of “gifted kids” in midlife reveals.
@soozievt and then there are the 2e kids who really perplex the system . . .
@SouthFloridaMom9 ha, so true. 2 of my so called wildly successful friends barely graduated high school, and one did have a learning disability.
I’ve met a lot of “crazy smart” people who seem like they might have hard time figuring out how to open a bag of chips. My BIL is a crazy smart person, went to UMich for engineering on a scholarship and had a brain melt down. He works at a big box hardware store today.
I like to meet crazy smart people though. It’s fascinating to learn about them. I don’t run into them much though, I think I’m more in the normal smart social crowd, lol.
As mentioned, I did appreciate the spatial ability issue from the article, and have seen that at work in real life.
My theory on certain LD people is that, if they are lucky, they learn - very early in life - to persevere and not give up. When you combine natural ability (which isn’t always measured in school tests) with perseverance, fortitude, resilience - you have a recipe for success.
The key is to not let school tell this person that he/she is a failure.
I do not dispute that gifted and profoundly gifted should be identified and nurtured, but this has produced a system that can be, and is widely gamed. 10-15 years ago when my kids were in elementary school, the tests for the county gifted program had low profile; now people track test dates, prep their 2nd graders, construct portfolios, and a number of local psychologists make great $$ testing children who did not make the cut on the school-administered test and whose parents gather the appeal package.
It is not enough for a kid to just be bright anymore - people are after the gifted label.
Something tells me our country/world might be better off if we had more gifted people than gifted students. Gifted students fine, gifted humanistic people? Priceless.
S1 was a gifted student, particularly in math. In elementary school, they tried having him take math with classes1- 2 years ahead of him. By the end of the year, 4th graders weren’t happy being shown up by a 2nd grader (he wasn’t especially humble regarding his math ability then). He then skipped a grade, but by the time he got to middle schoolhe was still ahead of the curriculum. The middle school was unwilling to make accommodations. Fortunately, we had the resources to be able to send him to a private middle school for gifted kids, and a private HS. I’m not sure what we would’ve done otherwise.
He follows the findings of the article regarding kids who skipped grades. He has a PhD in a STEM field.
I asked him recently how he felt about our decision to have him skip a grade. There were some mean kids who teased him about his age. Even some his friends did, although he knew they were just kidding. As he got older, the age gap became less of an issue, until his friends could drive. All in all, he was 100% behind our decision given how bored he was in school.
The article says
Let’s remember that the education establishment benefits, too. Skipping is cheap and easy. Most alternative methods of creating challenging educational opportunities for exceptionally able students are not.
So the people supporting skipping have a vested interest.
[Full disclosure: I was skipped, even though I was an ordinary run-of-the-mill gifted kid, not the type under discussion here. Skipping was not a good experience for me. It challenged me academically for about a year and left me feeling out of sync with my classmates physically, socially, and emotionally for about a decade. But my experience may not be applicable to truly extraordinary children.]
I am no genius but was skipped an never felt out of sync. The private high school I attended challenged me a lot. If I’d stayed in public schools I might have been less happy.
For our older very precocious kid a combination of subject acceleration and getting differentiated work in the classroom worked for the most part. By the time he got to high school he found a small group of kids who were ahead in math and he enjoyed not working very hard so he could spend the bulk of his after school time working on his real interests. He also loved his three summers of doing CTY programs.
I am not surprised at all, one of the things studies of gifted kids have shown is that their gifts can be destroyed by mishandling, and that comes in many forms. It doesn’t help that many people view the concept of gifted education as elitist, classist, bs (ie all kids are gifted), or worse, assumes that means someone thinks only gifted kids are worth something, which is ridiculous, or that giftedness somehow means someone like Bill Gates who creates a billion dollar company, or a STEM education. Gifted kids do usually learn fast (and one thing to keep in mind, there are gifted kids with learning disabilities, who once you figure out how they learn best, can do absolutely brilliant things) but what makes them different from someone academically strong is they often do things differently (which drives teachers nuts a lot of the time), the innovation and brilliance they talk about can be suppressed by schools that often teach to the middle, who love that gifted kids do really well on standardized exams a lot of the time without the school doing much, but often find those kids to be ‘problem children’ because they are bored, may act out, or disrupt their nice tailored little lesson plans and such with their march to the middle. When my son was small and we started seeing signs he might be different, we talked to the person who was supposed to be the gifted child coordinator, and when we asked what they do for kids identified as being gifted or whatnot, he talked about the one day a week pull out enrichment program (which is window dressing), and then at the end said “well, those kids do well by themselves, and we love having them because they blow out the standardized tests without having to do much to get them there” (and yes, those are pretty much the verbatim words), which shows another thing, in a lot of districts the gifted coordinator is often a perk for someone who has been teaching a while…
There is a problem wiith gifted programs, where parents, especially well off ones, game the system, theoretically gifted programs use something like IQ tests to determine entrance, but besides the fact those may be able to be gamed, there are also political issues around them…and yes, there are parents who see that as some sort of elitist flag for their precious little wonderkins, I have met that type of parent, and the irony is often their kids are not gifted but they can game the system to get them into the school.
The other side of that is the granola heads who proclaim all kids to be gifted and say things like gifted kids is a misnomer, all kids can achieve like that…or you get the ‘well, they have to learn in real life they will deal with kids of differing abilities, so it is good training for them to go through things with the ‘ordinary’ kids’ are both wrong.
I cringe when I hear people say “does that mean only gifted kids can do valuable things?”. No!!! A lot of things get done by people who are not gifted, who apply what they have and do amazing things, things like work ethic, perseverence, native intelligence (whatever the hell that is) and yep, creativity. BTW, a lot of the people who others bring up, who never graduated high school or never went to college, if they were tested for intelligence would likely place out as gifted, there are a lot of gifted people who have a miserable experience in school who drop out, never go to college, and end up achieving, so you don’t know if that ‘ordinary person’ isn’t in fact gifted…likewise, there are a lot of people who get into the best schools who are not gifted, getting into Harvard or MIT or Caltech or whatnot doesn’t mean the kid is gifted, it means simply they have done well in school and worked towards getting in there…and likewise the guy who never did well in book learning may be a genius.
One of the long term studies of gifted kids also showed how socioeconomic factors play in, why you can have someone from a working class background who is a genius not achieve, and someone from different background, more white collar, will. What they found was working class parents in general, compared to white collar parents, assume that if the kid is talented someone will identify it and get the kids the appropriate things (often assume the school will), whereas white collar parents in general will assume that role (maybe too much, as noted above). It is why it is important schools identify gifted kids and try to help them, because you can’t assume that the kids will have other resources.
And yes, there are different types of giftedness, one of the problems is this assumption that somehow giftedness=STEM, or that giftedness=achievement in something ‘hard’, whereas there are the artistically gifted, those gifted in human relations, those gifted in being a polymath, putting a lot of pieces together. One of the biggest ironies of the anti gifted programs, the claims it is elitism and snobbery and ‘unfair’, is the one area we reward giftedness is obvious, athletics. By the time kids hit middle school, athletics is already becoming elite, Little League Baseball is pretty inclusive, but once you get past about the age of 12 it more and more weeds out those who don’t ‘make the grade’. Sports teams, inside school and out, only take those they feel are good enough, and as time goes on it becomes more elite. Schools will spend a million dollars on redoing the football field to field turf (which benefits the maybe 20,25 kids in a typical size high school who play football), or 20 million on a football field and field house, and will cut gifted programs with the other hand, arguing they are ‘elitist’. We segregate out good athletes, few people would agree is a parent said “my son may not be good at football, but he should be playing, it isn’t fair the good kids get all the plahying time” (talking HS football here), they would say the goal is the best team, that the best players should play, yet when you want to commit resources to talented and gifted kids in other areas, it is ‘unneeded’, ‘a frill we can’t afford’ and ‘elitism’, and parents when this is discussed will say “it isn’t fair those kids get that kind of thing, and mine don’t”…
When I hear “they are bright, they will do fine”, I would love to answer “okay, let’s cut the football team, if they are good they will find there way through other programs”…more importantly, it also leaves out the many who are gifted who fall by the wayside, who never really achieve their potential, and what could they have done?
I do not understand the “gifted” and how to measure it. Certainly, any hard working kid could achieve the highest standing in HS and college. But I am not talking about “gifted”, I am talking about “hard working”. So, is it measured by IQ? I happened to watch few episodes of that TV show about competition for the high IQ kids with the award of $100k or so. I was so unimpressed with them and how they spend their precious time on all this grind, for what? Because parents wanted those $100k or so. Then, you, parents, better work harder and let the kid be a kid. Few questions were “normal”, not out of this world type of questions. Most “regular” folks like me would know the answer, but not these kids. That is where they failed. They just happen to prepare to be asked certain things and apparently most of them do not know about “normal” stuff. I believe that they were chosen based on their IQ of 140 - 145 and above, I might be wrong there. Are we talking about this kind of kids here?
On the other hand, playing sport is extremely beneficial to the future of any kid. I wish I realized it much earlier in my life. The things they learn playing sport, they cannot learn that early in life, they are building their future on a lot of this type of knowledge.
The article is interesting, but really there probably aren’t enough truly “gifted” kids at any high school to justify a full-blown program. And they’re talking about math, primarily. As noted by others, there are gifts in performing, arts, and other areas. Some people have a gift of boundless, impressive energy, even without being unusually gifted intellectually. That’s a great gift.
I recall decades ago from one of my courses that one quality that “genius” level kids had in common was that they tended to grow up spending more time around adults than around other children. I wonder now if that was more effect than cause.
@dadx:
Depends on the school, but the answer to that may be doing something regionally for kids. There are a lot of ways to handle gifted kids without going to a seperate program, the problem is that relatively few schools consider it a problem, either because they don’t feel they have the resources or as is common, think that of course our school is challenging, how can you say it isn’t kind of thing…(for the record, private schools are not necessarily any better than public schools, they may offer accelerated learning and more difficult classes, but that is not necessarily going to work for a kid who is gifted). The real problem is that in many schools, gifted kids (any kind of gift, other than sports) are treated as a nuisance and a problem more than something to be supported or nurtured. The rate of failure of kids who test out gifted is pretty high, the literature is full of the stories, some kids end up achieving not much at all, some kids end up with serious drug problems and the like, others end up going through life not achieving much compared to what they potentially could do.
Gifted kids do tend to want to hang out with older kids, part of it is that intellectually and otherwise kids their own age developmentally tend to have very different issues, but some of it is comfort level as well, of feeling like they fit in, and it isn’t just intellectual development. One of the challenges of giftedness, too, is that it isn’t universal, a kid can be gifted in math and be ordinarily bright in science, someone truly gifted across the board is relatively rare as compared to those gifted in certain things.