Yeah, Montessori isn’t for everyone. I know a kid who was very good at math, but at age four preferred imaginative play with those Montessori math manipulatives. My older son’s pre-school teacher would occasionally give the kids various sorts of Piaget assessments. She was quite amused that our kid, who she identified as gifted on the very first day of class with him, often failed the Piaget tests out of laziness. (One involved drawing a figure and he didn’t draw a face. When asked about it he told her the figure had his back to you.) Our math kid had no interest in sports statistics. He liked reading books about number theory and liked things like Pascal’s triangle (His project for a French class poster.)
Postscript: This ended up long. Sorry. I won’t feel insulted if you skip it, I promise.
I would like to think that I have some life experience that gives me some ability to weigh in on this topic in a qualitatively different way than the numbers in the article (which, I agree with posters upthread, are suspect due to likely confounds with things like social class and such). So: My wife and I both participated in CTY programs when we were in middle school, and were identified as gifted from early on. I skipped a grade. We both hold PhDs, she in an engineering field and me in a field (linguistics) that some lists classify as STEM while others don’t. I wouldn’t say we’re running the world now, though—I mean, I’m a tenured college professor (which is a high-status job, sure, but not as high-paying as the stats you see thrown around might lead one to think) and she’s in management at a consulting firm, but neither of us have the desire to really take things over.
Similarly, our children have all tested quite high on all the standard measures of giftedness. Each of them, though, have different apparent trajectories at this point.
[ul][]D17 is more interested in the social sciences than stuff that’s definitively STEM, and is currently amidst applying to colleges that mostly rank at USNWR 60±20, because prestige doesn’t matter to her and she’s more interested in whether general and major curricula look well put together. Her dream job would be working behind the scenes at the Department of State; she sees what protocol officers do and nearly starts salivating.
[]D19 does well enough at STEM-type stuff, but is more interested in things like design and human-product interfaces. Her dream job is very specific: To be a product designer for IKEA. (The challenge of having something usable that packs into a flat box fascinates her.) She’s started looking at design programs and figuring out how to put together portfolios for them, which means of course that she’s looking at colleges that lots of folks on CC wouldn’t give a second glance.
[]D23 is the one with the most internal drive to really run stuff, and so will probably be interesting to watch. Her scores on most standardized measures are relatively lower than her sisters’ (that is, top 5% but not top 2%), but I suspect that she’ll outperform any of the rest on easily-definable outcomes measures like salary and such, due to said drive. She’s been laser-focused on ultimately doing something medical since she was five (yes, five) due largely to a fascination with blood and guts and gore, but she’s eleven, so who knows if that’ll stick? If it does, though, her undergrad will need to focus on affordability, not prestige, of course.
[]D25, finally, is the one of the four who has scored the highest—by quite a bit, in statistical terms—on standardized measures (except for processing speed—that one’s an intriguing outlier in her scores) to this point. She’s most likely one of the ones referred to in the article, it would seem. We have no idea what’s going to happen with her, though we do know that she forced us to reevaluate our educational philosophy as parents, and actually have her put in the highly gifted program our school district offers—I mean, this is the child who at age eight was intuiting pieces of limit theory as applied to basic geometry. Beyond that, though, we have no idea what’s going to happen with her—there’s no way to get a read on someone that young.[/ul]
And that last bit leads into what bothers me about this whole thing—we’re trying to put kids in boxes early on. If we’d followed the recommendations we got from some specialists when D19 was in elementary school, she’d be in an intensely engineering-focused program right now, and sure, she’d probably be successful at it, but she’d have lost the opportunity to find her own way, one that’s quite different from anything her mother or I would have ever though to direct her toward.
And to cycle back to the beginning: My wife, the engineer? She started out in something rather different, and only entered that field after getting annoyed at certain intersections in the town we were living in, finding out that that’s civil engineering, and going back to school to get advanced degrees in that field. Me? I actually started out in engineering and promptly flunked out of college, before recovering and going on to my own successes.
This idea that we can identify future geniuses based on a test they take when they’re little kids? First of all, life isn’t that linear; second of all, why would we want to force actual human beings with actual human variability into little narrow channels like that?
Mathyone in post 60 mentioned that her D didn’t like the “boring little books well below her reading level”.
My son ran into that in some respects with a reading program based on the number of books you read rather than what you were reading. Well, Harry Potter at 400 pages was counted the same as a 20 page picture book. And for some reason the teacher thought that was fair.
We worked around it but it made me wonder how many kids are kept back from succeeding because they don’t have the encouragement to achieve more when they are totally capable of doing so. If parents aren’t advocates then teachers really need to be.
I don’t have studies but good guidance is what sends many bright kids to the top of the pack. There are a lot of bright kids out there but many don’t have any guidance on how to achieve their goals. Successful parents are probably one of the best indicators of a kid’s success assuming the kid has the capability.
There have been some interesting posts on this thread, going to respond to some of the ideas that I found particularly thought provoking and address a range of issues.
“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?” This is a common response to the whole gifted education idea, and it is commonly thrown out there as an excuse basically to do nothing. It depends on what you mean about being successful in life, and one of the things I can answer is no, they may not be successful in life. The idea of success as this high paying job that has status is part of the problem, and what I would answer you is that success is that the kid finds their own path and is able to be a happy and fulfilled person with what they do. I know someone who is as brilliant a person as I have ever met, who is an incredible woodworker, who does beautiful work, yet he also is a well rounded person, he is educated, reads about everything, and has an amazing family (not with what they do, but who they are, just a pleasure to be around). He isn’t a CEO or the founder of some start up ap company, but he is an amazing person…and he was encouraged growing up, had an advanced degree but found himself. A lot of kids who are gifted end up crashing and burning, they often get pushed into things they don’t want to (the ie if you are gifted, you must be a scientist or engineer or whatnot, please) or pushed into becoming something they don’t want to. Many of them end up unfulfilled people, the literature is full of those who cracked up, depression, drugs and alcohol, because they never were given that chance. Put it this way, let me ask the question from another angle, supposed a kid is a supurb athlete, a gifted one, has a passion for it, do you tell him “don’t worry about coaching or training, you’ll be fine, you’ll do great no matter what”…I think if you told that to many who feel that gifted kids don’t need anything, they would say “but that is different, to make it as an athlete you need training and coaches to develop the gift”.
I had problems with the original study because they are trying to make a case that somehow this is about creating the next generation of CEO or Judge or politician. First of all, I agree, a lot of successful CEO’s are not necessarily gifted in the sense we are talking about, they may have a unique combination of skills, talents, across a wide plethora of things that allows them to do that. Plenty of kids go to HYP schools and become doctors and lawyers who are bright, who work hard, achieve academically, and are not necessarily gifted…where the study fails isn’t in a CEO per se or a judge, but rather in those who create something different, those are where you find the gifted I think. The guy who went against medical orthodoxy and showed that ulcers were bacterial, a guy like Edwin Howard Armstrong (basically invented radio, the regenerative feedback circuit, the superheterodyne (that allowed for radar and high frequency transmission like we use in wi fi, cordless phones, etc) and FM radio), were the gifted ones. The gifted are generally the ones who come up with new ways of doing things, seeing things. Someone can get a degree in physics, do decent research, and not be a genious, but they likely will be building on the work of others, whereas people like a Feynman, an Einstein, A Bohr, a Planck break out.
And yes, I agree totally that giftedness is just that, a gift, and it is up to the kid who they use it or don’t, usually it is people who see gifted = $$$$ or high profile stuff. The whole point again of gifted education is to allow them to find their own path, to find that space inside themselves that says what they want to do, schools themselves question gifted education, pointing out that many who test out as gifted end up with ordinary lives, as if this is some number on a chart, some ‘yield’ when we are talking human beings. Besides the obvious ones, maybe those gifted kids are often left to fend for themselves, giftedness itself does not create success, and the other problem is looking at it as an ROI, the ROI should be kids who come out who then can find themselves and what they want/need to do. My son is very, very bright, if the tests he took are correct, he is well into the gifted range (he would, by the way, be the first to laugh if you mention that), he had interests typical of a kid like that, early interest in bridge engineering, other things, but music turned out to be his muse, even though on his instrument he is not up there with the 1% who want to be the soloists and such (though in music, he is out there with music theory, something most music kids dread, so he does have the academic talent still there). I could have told him to go to the prep school, study all the STEM path, AP’s, you name it, and he might have done well, but it isn’t him…and he could still blow out another field, but music will help him get there.
@hanna-
The problem with montessori is that like a lot of things, it has become in a sense meaningless. Not in its concepts, but rather that a lot of schools that talk about being Montessori are not following what Montessori originally had in mind. We looked at them for our son, and what we often found was schools using the Montessori teaching material but using it in the same old, rigid manner, where instead of realizing a kid was advancing fast, they would do what many teachers in public school with a fast kid, dump more of the same work on him, others were resistant of younger kids being with older ones. Done right, Montessori can be fitting everyone into the right square or round hole, but many places use it as marketing, claiming to be Montessori but not really individualizing (even some of the supposedly “certified” schools that we looked at were amazingly rigid). It is like so many things (kind of like the term “Agile” in IT, that has come to be something of a joke, Dilbert loves it, because in many cases it has become a label with no meaning), it has become a brand, a selling point, rather than really describing what they do. The ones that do it right are amazing from what I have read, but at least in our area, that wasn’t the case.
My question if it matters to develop genius is prompted by my skepticism of identifying geniuses. I don’t believe we have so many genuine geniuses to fill all the TIP/CTY programs. A few kids I konw attended CTY is no big deal. They are high achieving. Some are in medical school. That’s about it.
@igloo:
I think we also have to be careful about terms here. Gifted generally indicates someone who is well above average, on a standard IQ test it is two norms aboave average (which is 132 on the common iq test scale). Genius level is 4 above or more, and the numbers in that range are very small, I think it is less than 1% (132 and above is 2% I think).
As far as there being too many kids in those programs, the programs don’t necessarily go by IQ test alone, an IQ test for example may not pick up someone artistically gifted, and programs because of the biases in IQ tests also make allowances for kids in the program, for example kids who have demonstrated unique abilities. One of the problems with IQ and giftedness is it is a single measure, so programs might have kids who don’t fit the standard IQ=gifted thing.
The other thing to be careful of is the idea of yield, that if you do X you will create geniuses who will change the world, we are talking potential here. As has been demonstrated time and again, there are so many factors that lead to the kind of thing we are talking about, there is no one factor, so things like when someone is born, where they are born, mentors, access to facilities, parents, work ethic, all play a role…plus with the people you mention in the tip/cty program, the question to ask is not what they have done, but what they might have done had they not gone to it. Given what studies say, some of those kids might have gone on to do well, but a lot of them may not have ended up even high achieving, becoming a doctor, whatever. Where I disagree with the article is in about this idea that a genius has to end up doing something ‘genius’, the idea is that they end up doing what they wish to and succeed on their own terms, this isn’t a magic formula to create the next big thing. And experience tells me that things like TIP/CTY aren’t about what the product does in the end, it is about what they would have done had they not had it.
To use my sports analogy, in many school districts (the one I went to included), they had sports teams through middle and high school, spent decent money on them, we also had of course little league, the town provided the fields and so forth. My town as far as I know to date has never turned out a professional sports player, yet we spend the money on that, year after year. Why? because school sports and little league are seen to help develop the kids, getting them to do things they never would, to learn lessons and yep, have fun, and I think it is a good thing…to paraphrase @Iglooo’s phrase “I knew plenty of kids who played little league, school sports, they ended up at best playing softball on weekends as an adult”…and the answer is obvious, this is about developing the kids, allowing them to develop, and it is much the same with GT stuff, it is about allowing them to have the kind of learning experience where they can be happy and learn, not the final outcome. What I will add will again use the sports analogy, that kid who comes along who is one in a million in sports, who could be the next X (michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Aaron Rogers) but those programs aren’t there, so he doesn’t play, what happens to them then? The reason for the GT program is to allow those who are gifted to find their own level, much as athletics is there for the most party to allow kids to learn from it and fill them out, and when the extraordinary ones come along it is the start of their rise to whatever it is, whether sports or science or art or whatnot.
Re: earlier discussion in this thread of what factors help someone to rise to the very top in business world. Here is a study that says that to become a CEO, you have to be a jack of all trades… and a master of a few of them too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/upshot/how-to-become-a-ceo-the-quickest-path-is-a-winding-one.html
I just got really happy when I saw the part about Gaga
I’m a CTYer too and Rilke’s on my screen name and on her arm
so we’re basically the same
(okay I will depart this thread now)
On the bell (normal) curve, 130+ is 2 standard deviations above the norm (Z score of +2)
I wouldn’t consider 130 genius. Plenty of people are 130+.
130+ represents 2 standard deviations above the norm. It is about 2.2% of the population, and is considered " very superior". http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/iqclassifications.htm
^Thank you for the info. To be genius, shouldn’t they be in the 1% or even fewer? If not, genius is more loosely used than I thought. I would be a genius, too, with 145. Aren’t aany kids on this board are in the 1%? Are we all talking to geniuses?
Some tests are on the normal curve and, IIRC, some aren’t. So check the metrics of the test you are using.
Per a discussion in another thread on the parents’ board. You have to remember, too, that intelligence is not a unidimensional measure summed up in a single number. Variation in subscores may mean that someone with an average summary IQ score may actually be identified as gifted on one dimension and below average on another. (That kind of difference between subtests is one of the indicators of nonverbal learning disorder, for example.)
There is no single definition of “genius”. It isn’t a technical term of any use, but rather a colloquial one.
[quote]
Skipping is cheap and easy. Most alternative methods of creating challenging educational opportunities for exceptionally able students are not.
…
[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.]
[quote]
I was skipped as well - it wasn’t a good experience for many of the reasons you cite and others besides - I “missed” a year of fundamentals that I learned organically – or incorrectly, or not at all. But thing is, leaving me where I was would probably have been worse.
Even skipping, I soon became bored, and never developed proper learning and study habits, which I’d pay for later on in life 
DD was identified by the CTY - honestly, they really didn’t offer much unless you had the money to pay for all the extension experiences. It was mostly a irritating experience - most activities were far too expensive for us, and financial aid wasn’t available but to the very poor. So, those catalogs were mostly a kind of taunting to all of us …
I remember once, based on her early SAT scores, (about the only thing CTY arranged that we used), a top 10 private college I won’t name sent her an invitation to attend a summer enrichment session - cost-free, even the airline ticket was paid for- it sounded fantastic, and we were all so excited.
Until the “Oh, we’re sorry, we thought you were a girl of ‘color’” disinvitation …
.
Yes, our S was given a scholarship to take two college courses with tuition waived from getting a top score on SAT in 7th and 8th grades. He chose to take a statistics course after his 10th grade year in the summer. He was very disappointed that it didn’t cover more of the textbook and that it was so easy. He aced the class and had a very poor opinion of that U (it’s students and faculty) thereafter. He said he learned more in 6th grade than the statistics course, but he did get college credit.
We never got a formal testing of anyone’s IQ in our family.
And wouldn’t that suggest "rare’? 1% isn’t rare. Most kids on this board probably belongs to 1%.
I don’t know if the study mislabelled itself or they were talking about genius level IQ’s only. As someone else pointed out, 2 norms above the average (132) is considered gifted, 148 is considered extremely gifted, and 164 and above is considered genius level. 132 is not common, it is about 2% of the population.
Despite my advocacy for gifted programs, I also have some problems with them. As others have pointed out, giftedness comes in many forms, a kid can have however you want to define genius in math, and by typical in other areas for their age, and while they may be fine socially with their peer group, they can have problems with specific things where they excel, something few school districts handle, if at all , a lot of schools are built around the glorious middle and they will force a kid gifted in math, for example, to plod along with the rest of the class. The real issue is school is a mass produced product that does well in the middle tiers, but stinks at the ends, and even in the middle tier does a pretty good job of paving over individual gifts a lot of the time. Gifted programs also seem to reward academically good students in more than a few districts, rather than targeting the kids who are out there
It is more acute with kids above the gifted line in general, they run into problems because not just accelerated learning, but because they often learn and think differently and a lot of teachers treat that as a threat to them (especially if they ask questions the teacher cannot answer). I think there needs to be better ways to identify these kids and I also think we need to figure out an education system designed to pave kids over into being the same flat surface.
@Musicprint Is that a typo in the the last line? A missing not. Because it seems contradictory to everything else you’ve been saying. (I’m the queen of typos, so no judgement…just looking for clarification.) I, for one, think kids should be encouraged in their “bumpiness”.