<p>He looks like a sweet kid and I wish him the best. This arrangement may be the best one possible for him. He strikes me as an outgoing, friendly kid who has the confidence to do well in many different settings. </p>
<p>What I take from the two articles about this kid along with the posts above:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>He’s not a prodigy. Many posters have commented that their children scored higher on the SAT at the same age. Heck, my own kid scored higher on the SAT at the same age and had the same early “focus” his mother describes and I’d be loath to describe her that way. What that tells me is not that he doesn’t belong at TCU but that maybe more bright–not only once-in-a-generation-brilliant–kids should consider this sort of alternative. For us, ironically, the elementary and middle school years were the best and most challenging school years my youngest experienced. By dumb luck, she landed in a small place with several other kids very similar to her both in temperament and in ability. For others, middle school is a nightmare and early college is a reasonable alternative.</p></li>
<li><p>I sense a tiger mother in the wings. I’m speculating, yes, and I could very well be wrong but I’ve been around enough of them to guess that this may be the case. The mom seems to overstate her kid and depict him as a prodigy. He could read at the age of 1, read chapter books at 2, but scored a 580 on the CR section of the SAT? I suppose it’s possible but it seems odd.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Well, if you mean Tiger mom by somebody who is forcing the kid to do things, I don’t think so. There may be unconscious expectations there by a mom that is very proud of her kid, and a gifted kid may try to please his mom, but this sort of thing is hard to avoid. </p>
<p>As for your definition of a prodigy; technically, you’re right. He would have to be at the level of a professional right now for the strictest definition. But I think most people use the definition as being unusually advanced and maybe <em>operating</em> at an adult professional level in terms of learning speed and ability to do critical thinking.</p>
<p>By the way, I think 580 on critical reading could be congruent with the other facts, such as reading at age 1, based on my own personal experience. </p>
<p>Anyway, this thread is a lesson to those with advanced children to keep them out of the newspapers, because it stimulates these sorts of discussion questioning their abilities.</p>
<p>You know, I tried to be very respectful toward this child. Personally, I wouldn’t care what people thought of me if I believed I was doing the right thing for my child. I think the mom sounds pushy and prone to hyperbole. Big deal. Who am I? I am just reacting to two short articles and that is my honest take. If my comments are the worst things this famil y encounters, they should count themselves lucky.</p>
<p>I don’t think this kid sounds unusually advanced but that isn’t to say he won’t benefit from university schooling. I think there are many bright kids who should consider this as a viable option.</p>
<p>He is now 11. He must have taken the SAT at 10. So his scores are impressive. If he takes the SAT again at 12 then his scores probably would be higher. But the SAT is not a precision tool to measure prodigity. The fact is he already graduated from HS. This is different than the case that some kids have high scores but are still in middle or highschool. We cannot compare one gifted kid to another gifted kid.</p>
<p>While he and his parents are certainly welcome to do as they please, I still think college is about more then studying and going to class. Being 11 and around others who are at least 17-18 makes a HUGE difference in your social circles. So you graduate at 15-16…now what??? Personally, I think he would have been better off at whatever school he attended with being more involved in sports or ECA’s where intelligence alone isn’t all that matters. There are any number of ways he could use his free time if he required little in the way of studying and still be able to interact with kids around his age. Even in grade school, 1-2 yrs makes a big difference in how one thinks/acts among their peers.</p>
<p>Does this kid remind anybody of a young Sheldon Cooper? Hopefully going to college at such a young age will not affect his social interaction with others. The years before college are usually where individuals my age would learn to develop “people skills”. I for one believe that if he had applied a few years later his knowledge would far surpass the state that he is in now. Still, it cannot be denied that he has some true talent. Guess these things are a case-by-case basis, so we’ll just have to wait and see.</p>
<p>Calzone, the actor who portrays Sheldon Cooper has stated that he took his acting cues from a book written by an author who was diagnosed as having Asperger Sydrome, a disorder on the autism spectrum. Some people with autism have high intelligence, some do not. Some people with high intelligence have autism, some do not. </p>
<p>Going to college early does not cause autism.</p>
<p>Social skills (in neurotyoical people) are learned through social interactions. Most profoundly gifted people, and parents of profoundly gifted people, will tell you that they and their children found their most satisfying social interactions resulted when placed with others of the same intellectual level, not a chronological one. Since you are apparently a fan of the television show referenced above, you know that neither Sheldon nor the other non-autistic characters ever talk about positive events of fitting in with their chronological peers when they were children. Why would you assume that the child discussed here would have been socially any better off?</p>
<p>And how would the state of his knowledge have far surpassed what he has now by delaying attending college? In seven years when he is 18 it is likely that he will have a bachelors degree and possibly working toward a graduate degree. How would delaying his education to stay in highschool for 7 more years possibly be better for the “state of his knowledge”?</p>
<p>“Off the top of my head (re prodigy follow-up) -Kathleen Holz was admitted to UCLA School of Law at 15. Sho Yano was admitted to University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine at age 12.”</p>
<p>I still don’t see the point. Who is going to hire an 18 yo law or a 16 yo doctor?</p>
<p>People who believe that even among the pool of licensed doctors and lawyers, IQ matters, and that early completion of this training is a sign of higher IQ. Besides, geniuses who become doctors are often interested in research and get a PhD as well. Following the “normal” path you might be in your early 30s by the time you get your MD/PhD. In general the U.S. educational system is too slow and expensive.</p>
<p>How DO you get information about people’s IQ’s in daily life before you decide to hire them as your (doctor, lawyer, whatever)? Or their SAT’s, for that matter. Even where someone went to college is only an imperfect proxy, since plenty of smart people went to “lesser” colleges for a multitude of reasons – finances, family background, scholarships, etc. Or just not growing up in backgrounds where such things were discussed. </p>
<p>Can’t you meet with someone and evaluate pretty quickly whether they are bright or not? Most normal people are able to, without needing IQ, SAT, GPA or college data to make that determination. Maybe that requires a certain type of smarts that some people don’t have?</p>
<p>Or a sign of being pushed by Tiger parents, or a sign of having few social skills. </p>
<p>When it comes to doctors, they need to have bedside skills in addition to their clinical / diagnostic skills. When it comes to lawyers, they need to be able to establish rapport with judges and / or negotiate with the lawyers from the other side in a friendly yet firm manner. Beliavsky, why do you think that “only IQ” matters? Does emotional IQ / social skills not count for anything in your world?</p>
<p>The kid said he wants to be a physicist, not a doctor or a lawyer. I would guess that it would take him another 10 years to get a BS + PhD, then add another 2-3 years for a postdoc, which everyone does these days. So he would be 23 at the youngest when he would be fully trained. </p>
<p>Is there a “point” to doing that? I think it’s irrelevant in this case, because he is already very advanced and there aren’t a lot of alternatives. I would assume that we all agree that he should keep learning something academic somewhere, especially because he seems to be enthusiastic about it. Apparently he and his parents think TCU is the best option.</p>
<p>I think you answered your own question – I want people starting their careers in their early 20s, not their early 30s. We have applied this thinking to our own children, on a smaller scale. Our bright daughter has a January birthday, so we enrolled her in a private KG at age 4.5. She has done well in KG and 1st grade and is now transitioning to public 2nd grade. By our thinking, we have saved her a year.</p>
<p>^I was just repeating pizzagirl’s question. I agree that it is nice to actually be in the work force rather than training when in one’s 20’s/early 30’s.</p>
<p>Frankly, after getting to the working world and encountering things that I didn’t actually enjoy, I am more impressed with my peers who didn’t like school but spent years and years gutting it out. But for people who are enthusiastic about it, school is not like work, and you should just let them do what they want to do. If they can find a talented peer group through a magnet school, get extra enrichment through parents or outside programs, then that is the ideal thing in my opinion. But these things aren’t always possible. The worst thing is to enjoy doing something work-related, have to wait to do it for half a decade because it wasn’t viewed as age appropriate. Then by that time, you may not even like it anymore. It’s like giving a puppy to your kid 10 years after they asked for it. </p>
<p>And slowing them down because there is no use for an 18-year-old doctor or lawyer doesn’t make any sense either. If they choose to, they could always take a year or two off traveling, or find something else to do. And who says they will end up as a doctor or a lawyer anyway? Let people do what their heart tells them they want to do AT THE TIME they want to do it.</p>
<p>I find these prodigies interesting, but I’m lost about the advantage of it all. Start to read at 1 or at 5, what does it really matter? Hopefully, life is a long time and certainly most of it is spent as an adult. What’s the hurry? Is the kid doing calculus in the 3rd grade really going to out achieve or be better off than the kid who learns it at age 12 or 16 or 18? I’m curious to know the various percentages of these kids that crash and burn, lead normal adult lives or achieve something truly remarkable.</p>
<p>The biggest fallacy used in discussions of whether accelerated learning for prodigies is warranted is to see where they end up vs. everyone else. That is, if the kid in the article is in the top 1/1000 of a percent versus what he can do as an 11-year-old, then he must also be in the top 1/1000 of a percent as an adult. If not, people conclude that the acceleration was a mistake and/or the kid was a fraud.</p>
<p>People develop at different rates. If people are ready and need to be engaged academically, then it is damaging in a lot of ways, psychologically as well as academically, to hold them back. Keep in mind that the expected rate of learning in school starts out veeerrrryyy slow, then speeds up gradually from elementary school until college. The main reasons is that most kids cannot reason abstractly, and they have a small attention span. For “prodigies”, this is not the case, so they learn just as fast at 7 as they do at 17.<br>
Granted, I acknowledge there are social concerns about advancing a kid. That is why it is best to find a magnet school which allows people to go at their own advanced pace. There is a tradeoff, but people at the edges of ability may find it is worth it. </p>
<p>And as for the game people play of whether prodigies really end up “ahead”, a lot of jobs don’t carry with them outward recognition for being the smartest in their field. And as people said, other qualities, such as political savvy, may be important. I mean, are the supreme court justices the smartest judges there are? If the kid decides that he doesn’t like the lab and becomes a successful patent lawyer, does that mean he really wasn’t a prodigy and shouldn’t have been advanced because it didn’t result in a Nobel Prize.</p>
<p>Being a prodigy isn’t a choice, and it’s not manufactured it. By attempting to slow them down, you don’t make them in a “normal” very bright kid, you just make them bitter and frustrated.</p>