How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children

Parent Cafe
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To complete the reply to jonri #197, no we didn’t do Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My understanding from a German class was that they were originally intended as stories for adults. The original versions are . . . well . . . grim. I think the somewhat gentler Disney versions (still with some violence) are more or less inescapable in an American childhood, though, so the whole family did encounter some of those.

Incidentally, my mother really disliked the number of deaths in the Disney animations (all totaled up) and generally kept us away from them when I was a child.

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@Ynotgo, that is wonderful and really good advice for parents dealing with an issue like this. I wish I had known you back in the days when this was an issue so you could have guided me in the way to make that work effectively. I feel as if I always managed to make things worse. Some teachers were wonderful, some were toe-the-line and really disliked my daughter, and some (lots) saw me as * that * parent. I used to get stern phone calls about this kid too often. :frowning:

My other two fared much better.

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Whatever works for them. They may have opportunities that others don’t, but I don’t believe they have special obligations.

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The article said the top 1% shapes the world. I wanted to know that looks like. I am getting kinda cookie cutter answers. That leads to the next question; who shapes the world? Apple, Facebook, Google and a few other successful tech starters, Political leaders, president and leading senators and congressmen, prominent scholars/academics, leading performers and producers, some writers, some in media. Who else?

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@igloo:
Be happy with their life and be fulfilled with what they are doing. after that all else is gravy. The expectation that super smart people or geniuses have a duty to change the world, the idea of gifted education to me isn’t to produce a product, but rather someone who is happy with who they are and what they are doing. ROI should not be in the discussion IMO, I have heard people ask about the yield of G and T programs, how many people who create 'great things" came out of them, but that made me want to throttle the person who asked it.

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I am talking about the article not my kid’s life. The article claims the 1% shapes the world. I am looking around to see which genius is shaping the world. I don’t see that present movers and shakers are that genius. I wasn’t asking ROI although if we are spending taxpayers money it is legimate to ask.

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Besides if all we are asking is happy kids why should gifted ed take the priority over remedial ed? You’d think remedial ed would be low hanging fruit to pick on “happy” department, many no longer failing kids.

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I definitely wouldn’t define top 1% as genius. I’d put the bar much higher. That said, many movers and shakers aren’t geniuses. There are a lot of skill sets needed for success besides pure brain power and many kinds of intelligences.

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@igloo:
I’ll answer that one from my perspective,. and that is the article itself is problematic, because it is justifying supporting gifted people with the idea that the only good outcome for people in that 1% is to be a world changer, a Supreme Court judge (well,okay, I’ll leave that out, given the history of the court and some of the people who served on it), a captain of industry, whatever. Likewise, if it implies that only people in the top 1% can change the world or do great things, that is bupkus. I resent the tone of the article, to me it is akin to someone telling me only people who go to an elite school will do anything worthwhile, it totally frames the argument on a kind of elitism, rather than on the ultimate goal, which is producing people who are educated and happy with themselves.

Without chewing over the discussion again on who is gifted, what that means, what the article should have said is that people in the top 1% are more likely to be among those who change the world, but also mention that the 1% is not just in measured IQ, changing the world happens in many forms. For example, I don’t know if either Martin Luther King or Ghandi were geniuses, in the top 1%, I don’t know if Guttenberg was. I don’t know if the guy who created Old Ironsides was a 1%er or just a very clever New England Yankee with the tinkers gene, yet in their own ways they changed the world, the same with the native Americans who crafted the Iriquois confederation agreement, that influenced our own founding fathers.

The process of generating ‘great things’ is a complex one, that requires a lot of things to happen.What the article should have said, instead of being like a business plan pitched to a venture capitalist, is that the gifted are often behind great advances (which is true), and that while gifted education doesn’t always produce the next Bill Gates or whatnot, the lack of gifted education means that a lot of gifted kids will not be able to achieve, and who knows what could have happened had more gifted kids had access to a program and resources. Actually, an entrepeneur or venture capitalist would understand, most new business ventures fail so the fact that gifted education doesn’t guarantee everyone who has it will produce something ‘useful’, like with business ventures if you don’t support a business venture, it will always fail, if you support it maybe one out of 6 do end up making it.

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@igloo

My kid is most unhappy when he isn’t challenged. Being in a remedial class would be torture for him. Believe me, I’m the one who has to listen to the complaints about even an AP class where not much new info is being learned or the class discussions are at a low level.

The happiest he’s ever been was last summer at a program where they learned how to calculate asteroid orbits from raw observations they took. They had 5 hours of fast-paced lectures a day–faster than any he’d had before. Also, extensive physics problem sets that they worked on until late at night along with early morning (1-3 am) telescope sessions.

He loved it; he’d never experiences anything like it in school. He knows that it would have been hell on earth for most people at his school. That’s why different kids need different educational strategies.

Students have a right by law to an “appropriate education”, which should be appropriate for them. Parents of academically gifted students haven’t taken that law to court the way special needs parents have, so we don’t have court decisions requiring accommodations for the upper end of the classroom in most states. Parents have to advocate for their own kids.

If you look at the mission statement of most school districts, you will likely see something about each kid learning and growing. For example our is, “…to maximize academic, intellectual, and personal growth in order for each student to prosper in, and positively influence, a diverse and dynamic world.” If a district means it, they will also serve the fastest learners, in addition to the middle and slower learners.

“Genius” is an imprecise term, as is “gifted”.

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@Iglooo, why are you (apparently) unquestioningly accepting the article’s claim that the top 1% shapes the world?

(Or are you trying to set up a proof from the negative to try to debunk it, maybe?)

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I don’t think the top 1% shapes the world.

I do suspect that most of the advances in theoretical physics come from the top 1%. A few of those advances will “shape the world” in the sense that they make subsequent inventions possible.

But if one set the goal of “shaping the world,” it would be much better to be top 5-15% or so, be a “mover and shaker,” and have some charisma . . . or else live on a remote volcanic island with a hairless cat. (Thanks to whoever suggested that!)

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@dfbdfb What do you think?

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@ynotgo:
You are right about the kids that are out there and happiness. People look at remedial ed/special ed and recognize there is a problem, that the kid needs extra help. The really out there kids on the other end? Kid in lower grades breezes through the work, gets great grades (especially on standardized tests, all bow and pray to the dull gray god they made), so what is the problem? The standard response from far too many, including a lot of teachers? “They’ll do fine all on their own, they are smart”…people see things one dimensionally and few of them look at what happens to kids like that, some coast through the early years, then crash and burn because they were never challenged, things came too easy, or the kids who get bored and act out, and are being classified as ADD or ADHD…not to mention that few bother to ask “they do great on this middle of the road curricula, what could they do with something better, more challenging”.

Where I will argue about the out there kids (gifted, genius, whatever) isn’t that they can study calculus at 12, it isn’t that they get a perfect score on an SAT at 11, or they are taking college courses at some young age, that is the measurement game. The thing that makes the out there kids different isn’t the ability to learn fast or do well on an advanced topic early (though those are signs of it, though kids often take advanced topics early because mom and dad were cramming the kid full of the stuff early, whether they wanted to or not), it is that quite honestly every study of gifted and above kids and people is they don’t do things faster, they don’t get better grades than the average kid, it is that they tend to see and think of things differently, the conceive of things in ways others don’t (which drives a lot of teachers batty, given how much of our education is predicated on doing things in a rote, prescribed manner). The kid with the 4.0 and 2400 SAT who ends up at Harvard and ends up a doctor might be a very good doctor, but they very well may not be challenging the world, whereas another kid, maybe with the same path, ends up being someone like the guy who figured out ulcers were bacteriological or the guy who worked out the benzene ring in a dream, or someone like Richard Feynman whose brilliance transcended physics .

The kid who does well in school, who gets the 4.0, the 2400 SAT, gets into the brilliant school, gets good grades there, often is the kid who has mastered the system, getting all the hashmarks designed into what we call ‘success’, yet in the end might be successful, but have done so by following the rules and living within them. One of the biggest ironies of corporate life that Dilbert loves to make fun of is this whole concept of ‘thinking outside the box’, whereas in corporate America success in climbing the ladder is predicated upon thinking inside the box, not taking risk, playing the corporate game, and while they spout “we want people thinking outside the box”, it is those who have spent their lives thinking and living in the box that end up moving up, and they in turn do exactly the same thing.

Put it this way, take a look at the brilliant innovator, the person outside the box, the ‘genius’ and what do you find? Someone thinking outside the box. Bill Gates and Jobs/Wozniak bet a lot on the computer being something anyone could use while IBM, that paragon of corporate inside the box, blue suited straightjackedness, thought only big companies would need their hulking giants. Xerox Parc in the early to mid 70’s created what we now take for granted, the GUI and mouse, hypertext, and the ethenet computer networking, and Xerox Corporate couldn’t figure out what to do with it (they later tried a workstation, called the Star, that was ridiculously overpriced and a clunker), Apple took that technology 10 years later and turned out the original MAC…and the reality is that most new things are created by small companies, often founded by very brilliant, out of the box types, who are likely in the top 1% (the guy who founded my company most definitely was).

Does that mean only those in the top x% can innovate, think outside the box? Nope, there are people of more ordinary intelligence whose gift is in seeing things differently, whose IQ might only be ‘intelligent’. However, new ways of looking at things, different ways of doing things, explode in the population as their intellect or whatnot goes into the gifted (I say whatnot, because the same thing appplies to the arts for example), and among the top X% there will be a lot more people who think like that. The worse crime of schools with their teaching to the middle is that they often quench people doing things differently, they tell kids “do it the exact same way the other students are doing it, your way is wrong” (ever see the commercial with the voice over telling a little girl to ‘color inside the lines only’ in a monotone drone, then you see the kid rebelling, drawing outside the lines, inside the lines, and then ends up if I remember the commerical driving away in some hot car…the first part is what school often is).

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Well, my kid in middle school said he wanted to be Secretary of State. Then he switched to President.
Sure wishing he was old enough so I could vote for him!

He was in MUN in HS (and later college).
At a HS state conference they actually created a brand new award just for him…“The Great Compromise Award”. That’s just him. He’s always been the smart peace keeper. His genius is listening to people.

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From that award and description, I wish I could vote for your son, too, @gouf78!

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“Besides if all we are asking is happy kids why should gifted ed take the priority over remedial ed? You’d think remedial ed would be low hanging fruit to pick on “happy” department, many no longer failing kids.”

The answer to that question is it shouldn’t be a priority, both should be acknowledged as a priority. In most states and school districts remedial ed/special ed is mandated, at the state, federal and local level, and it is also funded. With gifted education, the federal government barely acknowledges it, if at all, at the state level it often is covered by mandates like “the need to cover special learners” (which is implied to mean both ends of the spectrum), or “accelerated learners” (whatever that means), but rarely is there any kind of funding to back it up, when they do have it.

And the answer to the question is in outcomes. We have special ed and remedial ed to help those kids achieve their full potential, which normal classrooms don’t provide, whether that potential is the same as the kids in the middle they are teaching to, below or, or as with kids who are bright but have learning disabilities, to allow them to achieve above the middle (and I realize that that particular segment, kids with learning disabilities, is often not covered well). So @igloo, if you are saying gifted kids don’t need special education to achieve their potential, then why bother with the kids at the other end ? Why should we help the kids at the other end of the spectrum to achieve their potential, why don’t we just work on the kids in the glorious middle, and not waste time and resources on the kids who have issues? After all, wouldn’t the resources be better spent on producing the product at the middle, where most kids reside? If the relative few at either end of the spectrum don’t achieve their potential, what does it matter if the 90% in the middle get a decent education and go on to successful lives?

The answer for the kids at the other end is simple, without that help they will have a very, very hard time finding their way in life, not alll that long ago schools would write such kids off as ‘idiots’, ‘simpletons’ and the like and wouldn’t care, and left them to their families and the like. My argument is that for kids at the other end, though most people don’t bother to look, assuming the kid who got 4.0’s without work will end up just fine, the outcome may not be all that great. Put it this way, groups like Mensa are often full of people who had that potential, but ended up with lives you wouldn’t expect, the very bright kids often have higher rates of drug use, depression, work issues, there have been longitudinal studies done and some of it is frightening. And yes, it is a very special topic to me, my mom was one of those kids, she had a mind on her I have rarely seen, she graduated from high school at 14 (they couldn’t figure out what else to do with her), she went to college, finished something like 90 credits of EE (this was in the early 1940’s, when women didn’t go into engineering) in something like a year and half, then basically had an emotional breakdown and never achieved her potential, I can’t even guess what her IQ was)…and that is not uncommon, when my son was small we attended a lecture by this woman from Mississippi, who talked about her father and what happened to him, she ended up being responsible for a mandated gifted program in Mississippi for grades k-6 being passed, and i have heard a ton of stories like that.

Looking at gifted education as an ROI is like looking at college simply as job training, it misses the point, any more than looking at the ROI for kids at the other end of the spectrum, achieving their potential doesn’t mean getting 5 bucks back for every buck spent , it means at the end the kid can achieve the kind of life they want to, that is the goal. If the kid ends up being a charterboat skipper or the founder of “Latestandgreatesttech”, inc, doesn’t matter, the investment is in them achieving their potential to however they wish to use it, not satisfy beancounters, same with kids at the other end.

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The research is fascinating, but it seems to define success as getting a Phd, preferably in STEM. That seems an excessively narrow definition of success. Most people running the world in government and multinational corporations don’t have Phds, so the “change the world” part may be exaggerated. At the individual level, there’s a lot more to an individual’s happiness than how many pieces of sheepskin they have.

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@roethlistburger:
Yeah, that is part of the problem with things like this, they often focus on narrow definitions of ‘success’, it is the same thing that drives a lot of people applying to the elite colleges IMO, it is about getting that certain “brass ring”, and it leads to things like studying things or caring about things that are ‘useful’. The world gets changed all the time by people, in big and small ways, and ideas don’t just come from STEM Phd’s (in fact, I would bet that only a tiny portion of STEM Phd’s change anything, most of them in their research and teaching can be seen as ‘mundane’, might incrementally show something, but changing the world? One of the biggest inventions of the 20th century, the regenerative feedback amplifier circuit, was invented by a kid then in college…). Creativity and vision isn’t limited to STEM PHd’s, but that is the mindset of many, that “success” equals one goal. Kind of like corporate beancounters who think R and D is a waste of money unless it “produces something” shrug. The real answer to the question of raising ‘geniuses’ is to find the things they have a passion in and encourage it, while challenging them to learn other things, too.

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The other claim I question is skipping grades actually helps children emotionally and socially. How would a study even measure that? Sports is a big part of the k-12 social experience, especially for boys. Being a year or more younger than the rest of your class means being less physically developed and less competitive, unless you have the genetic good fortune to be exceptionally tall and exceptionally smart. If you’re skipping more than 1 grade, as some in the studies did and entering college at 15 or 16, no normal person is going to want to date you for obvious reasons.