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

Parent Cafe
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"I went to Montessori elementary school through sixth grade, with multi-age classrooms and outstanding teachers. Every student can work at his or her own pace. No need to skip grades – you do the reading and math you’re ready for. I wish this were an option for more students. "

This was not our experience. My kids attended Montessori preschool. My STEMy kid was fascinated by the math, loved those works, and worked her way through the kindergarten level materials before she was a “kindergarten” student. There didn’t seem to be any “above grade level” materials for her to work with–I saw them in the 1-3 classroom, but I never saw such in any of the prek-K classrooms I visited (and over the years, I actually saw perhaps 8 of these classrooms at 4 different Montessori schools). The teacher said to me, “I won’t embarass the kindergarten students by asking her to show them anything or work with them”. At some point, she stopped working on her favorite math works. I asked her why she hadn’t been doing them. Her response? “My friend can’t do them, so I won’t do them any more”. That was when I knew we had to get her out of there for regular school. She’d already done most of the “kindergarten” work by then anyhow.

Second kid, different Montessori preschool. At some point, I felt she was ready to read. I asked her whether she was doing any reading at school. She said no because she hated the little books they had for beginning readers. She found them completely uninteresting. I told the teacher about this and asked whether she could get some different books (they had a library in another room). She said, no, she must read those books first before she is allowed to use the library. Completely stalemated. Kid learned to read at home. Teacher didn’t even notice she knew how to read because she never read at school. Eventually, I told the teacher she could read. Teacher didn’t seem to care, said absolutely nothing like “well, then we’ll have to get her some appropriate books”, no, she still hadn’t read those boring little books she hated, which by then were well below her reading level, and for the remaining several months of that year, I never heard of my kid reading anything at school.

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Does it really matter that much? What would have had happened these kids weren’t identified and “developed”? Wouldn’t they be still successful in their life?

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Sorry to hear about those experiences, mathyone. QMP had a reaction that was somewhat similar to your STEMy kid’s, announcing on the way to pre-school one morning, “If my friends know I’m smart, they won’t like me.”

Did your second kid’s teacher ever explain the rationale for the rigidity of the must-read-those-books stance?

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In general, I think the idea that the severely gifted are going to “control our society” is mostly quite off-base. There used to be a saying about the Harvard law students that the A students would become professors, the B students would become judges, and the C students would become wealthy lawyers.

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I know that the Stanford admissions staff are very impressed with Dweck’s work about fixed mindsets vs. growth mindsets, but I don’t find it persuasive. juillet mentioned it in post #52–perhaps as having a connection to the relative success of different people.

One center-piece experiment of hers involved going into an elementary school, giving out a set of difficult problems, and praising one group of students for their excellent scores on the problems. I think they praised the others for their efforts, with no correlation with actual performance. Then they gave a set of challenging problems, and found that those who had been praised for the excellent scores did worse than the other group. Also, students in the first group were more likely to over-state their test scores, when discussing them with other students. Dweck labeled these students “cheaters.” Talk about a fixed mindset, or at least fixed labeling! I don’t think psychologists would approve of this anymore. In a debriefing session, they explained the idea of the fixed vs. growth mindsets, and (I presume) told the students that they had initially misrepresented the situation. This is summarized approximately, based on my recollection; I read it a few years ago and have not returned to it

So, here are a couple of problems with this:

  1. If the fixed mindset/growth mindset differences that have been developed by parents and teachers can be wiped out in one short session with a psychologist coming from outside, how “set” are these, really?
  2. I think that Dweck’s experiment showed elementary school students that adults would lie to them, and it could be quite difficult to tell when the adult was lying and when not. How many students bought the de-briefing explanation? I have not seen any study of this.

On the one hand, I do think that problem-solving skills can be developed, and probably to a much greater extent than students tend to realize. On the other hand, I would be much more persuaded by Dweck’s analysis if she enrolled in a real Calculus 1 course and put it to the test. (The course would not have to be Caltech-level Calc 1, but should be a mainstream calc course that leads to further calculus, not a watered-down version that is just an overview for those whose math skills are relatively weak.

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As I think about it, perhaps the label that Dweck used in her book for the students who over-stated their scores may have been “liars,” rather than “cheaters.” In any event, it was a rather harsh term to be used by a woman whose experimental methodology involved misrepresenting a situation to elementary-school students. Maybe the “liars” were just running a small-scale psychological experiment of their own. :slight_smile:

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There is a lot to like about Montessori, and I think it is a good experience for young kids who enjoy working with the manipulatives and have a decent attention span. Maybe not so good for very energetic young kids who aren’t ready to sit quietly and focus on a project. Certainly the best pre-K option for kids in our area for kids like mine. And yes, kids can progress at their own speed and pursue their interests, but only to a point.

But I also feel these schools can be rather cultish. There was a definite “We know best and our approach is best for every single student” attitude at both the Montessori schools we used. No, I didn’t argue with them about the books. They had the information. They liked to have students work through their curriculum in a progressive way and my kid didn’t want to read their starter books. There were other things my kid could do during her time there, though they also wouldn’t let her do certain things because she wasn’t labeled “kindergartener”.

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“Maybe not so good for very energetic young kids who aren’t ready to sit quietly and focus on a project.”

Maybe those kids need to run around for a few more years. Where are these Montessori schools that are more rigid than the traditional schools? Apparently there are a lot of crappy teachers in all movements.

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The concern would be that if learning is discouraged (not necessarily intentionally, but by not having anything available for the kid who has already learned the typically offered material in school, so that the kid gets bored in school), the kid loses interest in learning and his/her talent is eventually undeveloped and wasted (rather than perhaps delayed slightly).

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@Marian. Yes, but what very early reading can do, just like very early numeracy, is allow intellectually curious and energetic children to educate themselves, in areas that reach well beyond the curriculum at school. Sometimes our son surprised certain adults, such as a time when he was 3 years old and I took him to the doctor because he appeared to have an infection. I told the doctor that it was almost impossible for me to get the kid to take the liquid antibiotic, so the doctor said he had a solution. He showed my son a little pink football-shaped amoxicillin pill. My son looked at it and said “Oh! Two-fifty!” The doctor practically fell off his feet when that came out of the mouth of this 3 year old.

In my son’s case, early reading and numeracy meant that he could read newspapers, especially the sports pages, and he became interested in sports statistics. That was the basis of his early interest in applied math. He taught himself to use spreadsheets so he could manage his fantasy baseball teams. This would be when he was in 3rd grade.

As I mentioned earlier, the school itself didn’t do much to accommodate someone like him. But he found his own way – with our help and resources, including access to a computer. He learned to program in BASIC by first copying and then enhancing programs from the magazine “3-2-1 Contact.” Because we didn’t buy him computer games, he started to write little programs by himself using the BASIC language.

It was his intellectual curiosity and energy, plus our resources, that moved him ahead. Early reading and a fanaticism about numbers drove him forward.

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My family is a prime example of that. I had two children. One taught himself to read when he was four by looking at Peterson’s Field Guides and figured out multiplication at just about the same age. He liked doing basic algebra puzzles when he was five. The other one didn’t really talk until she was four and didn’t learn to read fluently until she was almost eight. By seventh grade, guess which one was the “B” student and which one was in the “gifted” classes. My early reader was precocious and bright, but not a “problem solver”. He got frustrated when things no longer came easily to him. But my late bloomer was apparently taking a lot in while she sat and observed and played with her puzzles without talking to anyone.

BTW, both were in Montessori programs. And the technique worked for both of them in different ways. At some point, however, my son needed a lot more direction and structure than afforded by our Montessori 6-9 elementary program. My daughter would have been fine in Montessori through the upper elementary 9-12 program.

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We had very flexible Montessori classrooms in the early years—works were introduced on an as-needed basis and my son was working with 6-9 works even when he was in the 3-6 classroom. He could also “visit” the elementary classroom when he wanted to do works that they had there that weren’t available in his room.

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D enjoyed the CTY programs she attended. From kids I know who went to TIP, they were similar. But, in the end, I concluded that those programs were more about fun and socialization in an environment that respected the kids’ quirkiness than they were about really stretching them academically. There’s nothing wrong with that when thinking about summer activities, though. Even for gifted kids. Maybe especially for gifted kids.

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That was our son, too. Sports was a motivator for him. I remember when he was three, realizing that he was doing math while watching the Bulls on television with his dad. We figured out if you asked him questions in terms of sports scores (e.g., If Michael Jordan has six layups and four free throws and BJ Armstrong hits two three-pointers, how many points have the Bulls scored?) he was doing math in his head. But he obviously would have no idea how to answer, “what’s 6x2+4+2x3”. When he could do the same thing with football scores that fall, we talked to his teacher about it. She was as surprised as we were.

I do think we throw around the label “gifted” pretty easily these days. Despite his early reading and math accomplishments, I would not say that my son was “gifted.” Precocious, yes… Gifted, I’m not so sure. I’d say the same for my very bright, late-bloomer. She’s intelligent and hardworking. But I wouldn’t say she’s “gifted.”

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In my son’s case, early reading meant only that he could read the manuals that came with Nintendo games.

My husband and I found out, when talking about our childhoods, that we had both been early readers. And we had both done well academically, but neither of us was extraordinary. So when our son showed obvious signs of early reading, we didn’t place any particular importance on it. We kind of expected it, and we realized that it was not much of a predictor of his academic future. And it turned out that he did fine in school but was never outstanding and never showed any signs of being highly gifted.

Where we went wrong was with his sister. She was not an early reader, and given our family history, my husband and I thought that this was an indicator that she was probably not very bright. This turned out to be wrong. In fact, she did better academically than her brother did, and I suspect that she is the smartest person in the family.

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And that pattern of development, which I saw in our own family, is one of the reasons why I’m at sixes and sevens about how gifted education is handled today and has been handled for decades in the U.S.

On the one hand, I realize that early identification is crucial for truly gifted children. I have a good friend with a truly gifted daughter and, while my kids showed intelligence of differing kinds, I can recognize giftedness in her that was not there with my kids. And, a lot of times, it’s not easy being her. She benefited from early identification and a contained (not pull-out) gifted program in our school system.

On the other hand, there are a lot of just plain smart kids out there. Precocious but challenged learners like my son (who was identified as gifted until he “flunked out” in sixth grade). Late bloomers with staying power like my daughter (who was never identified in elementary school as gifted, but who tests well on standardized tests and makes the most of her opportunities). Kids like I was when I was a kid (bright and fidgety enough to annoy teachers into giving me extra work so I was able skip grades during elementary). People with slightly more memory storage and slightly higher processing speed than an “average” student. But not necessarily qualitatively different in how they think or what they need in an academic environment. Students may be two or even three standard deviations above the mean in terms of IQ, but still not need “special services” IF the learning environment for ALL kids is flexible, challenging, and responsive to needs. And by providing that kind of learning environment for all kids, not just those identified as gifted, I think we would be maximizing the benefit.

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Sports seems to be a common thread for our math-centric sons. I distinctly remember my son stopping in his tracks as a preschooler (and he didn’t stop in his tracks often) when he caught a football game on TV. He was fascinated by a field with numbers on it, a game where they count downs and subtract yardage left, where you can score 1, 3 or 6 points (no 2 point conversion in NFL then). He was hooked on the math of football, but we already knew he was a math-centric kid by then (he’d read street addresses as 3,4 or 5 digit numbers as a 2year old)

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Even then, it was possible to score 2 points from a safety, but those were and are relatively uncommon, so many casual football game watchers may not see one for a while. An American football score of [4 points](Iowa 6-4 Penn State (Oct 23, 2004) Game Recap - ESPN) is definitely unusual, though.

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You’re right, ucbalumnus. I forgot about safeties, but I’m sure S1 figured those in too.

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No early (or late) sport stats interest from my math-centric son. Not enough infinities, I guess. I’m suspecting the home environment can have a strong effect on which fields a bright kid focuses on early–and we aren’t a sports family. Turns out he wants to be a physics or CS major anyway, not straight math. His dad has a physics PhD, so that makes sense.

He reads the 538 website religiously (which does a lot with Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo simulations and politics). To my knowledge he never ventures into the sports side of the website, which is where Nate Silver got his start.

Ignore the rant below if you don’t care about Montessori, because it’s a tangent to this thread. After this rant, I’ll try to stay on topic.

I guess the on topic part of the rant below is that after this experience, we found that the local public schools trained their teachers well in differentiation, and he had a series of great teachers who were happy to find ways to challenge him. He didn’t have to skip grades, just had special math groups and some independent study projects. And, lots of dual-enrollment and APs from 9th grade on. So, it’s all good, but I’m still a little salty about our Montessori experience.

— rant on----
Oddly, all the Montessori schools in our area insist that “we are the true Montessori” and the others aren’t. Ours said their teachers had gone to Italy for training.

Our Montessori told us that DS17 at age 4.5 surely had ADHD (uncertified person making the “diagnosis”) because he would only attend to the work they gave him for 7 minutes. (The work they wanted him to do was some color mixing thing to remedy poor fine motor coordination. They decided he needed this because he would write down the answers to multi-digit subtraction problems, but wouldn’t neatly line the beads up to their satisfaction to show how to get the answer. Thus, his thinking was “too abstract” for correct child development. Not sure how Piaget influence got into a Montessori school, but it did.)

The very night after they told us this, he sat attentively through a 45 minute astronomy lecture aimed at adults. When he came home, he demanded to be taught PowerPoint (used in the lecture) and spent several days creating a PowerPoint showing all the characters and villains in Mario Bros games. Also asked questions about the astronomy lecture that indicated he understood.

OK, technically not thrown out. Suggested it wasn’t a good fit and we might want to look elsewhere.
— rant off—