How Do You Educate a Prodigy? 659
Nethead writes "When he was 8 years old, Gabriel See got a score on the math part of the SAT that would be the envy of most high-school seniors. When he was 10, he worked on T-cell receptor research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He's built a Genomic Lab Liquid Handling System out of Legos. He's studied chaos theory, string theory, quantum mechanics and nuclear science. He's 13 now. How do you fit him into the American school system?"
Why fit in? (Score:5, Insightful)
He seems to learn enough on his own.
You don't (Score:5, Insightful)
How about something besides science? (Score:5, Insightful)
You could possibly fit the entire American school system into him.
Except that he's highly focused on sciences. How about some history, art, music, or languages for a few years? Heaven forbid the kid learn something besides science.
Speaking as someone who works with a lot of very smart people focused in very narrow fields: the kid's going to be a lot happier if he has at least some general background.
Didn't any of you read Ender's Game? Remember how, among other things, Ender often longs to just be a kid?
Home schooling (Score:3, Insightful)
This kid is a prime candidate for home schooling. In many communities, the public school system, or other social organizations for kids are available to the home schooled to keep them engaged in activities with their peers.
The biggest problem with integrating kids like this into "The School System" is that the system doesn't deal very well [slashdot.org] with those whose performance lies outside the social norms (particularly on the high side). You have to have the option of putting him into activities where he will fit and pulling him out if he's a mismatch for their culture.
Re:Why fit in? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Socialization only, if that (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever he does, make sure there are plenty of girls around. A kid like this needs to have some experience being around them, before hormones hit and he realizes he has no idea how to talk to them.
It'd be the same as anyone else. (Score:1, Insightful)
You don't learn in school. School is about socialization and indoctrination.
There is no American Public School System (Score:5, Insightful)
There are 50 states, each with their own rules, not to mention Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and other territories and possessions.
Within most states there are dozens to hundreds of local school systems with varying degrees of autonomy. Then there are private schools.
In some school systems education quality varies widely from school to school. Even within schools you can get wide teacher-to-teacher variation and even class-to-class variation with the same teacher, same course, and same grade-level.
Re:How about something besides science? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sign him up for sports. Make him play for 2 years. Make him learn to be a teammate. Make him learn to be a human.
Re:Some Anecdotes That Don't Make the News (Score:3, Insightful)
Now here I am a decade later, widely accepted by almost all my friends, coworkers, and supervisors to be one of the most intelligent persons they have ever met, but I have nothing to show for it. I graduated from the local community college at 17, but because I was lazy my grades sucked and I couldn't transfer anywhere. I have over 200 credits from that school now, but few 4-year schools will look at me. Not that I could afford those that do. As a single white male with two AA degrees, I'm not eligible for any financial aid.
tl;dr version. I was a prodigy ruined by forcing me into public schools. I've gotten past it and am quite happy with my life now, but for this kid I say let him run as far and as fast as he can so what happened to me doesn't happen to him.
You Did It to Yourself (Score:2, Insightful)
There was no reason to try when there wasn't anything on the next level.
Obviously you weren't a prodigy at logic.
"Because I was lazy" appears more often than it should in your condemnation of the public school system. That's a pretty big sense of entitlement ya had yourself there, what is stopping you now from discovering everything now? Lemme guess: lethargy?
I'm sure we all could have gone further if Richard Feynman had given us hand guided tours.
Re:It'd be the same as anyone else. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet everything about school is so rigid and factory-like. I still fail to see the need for homeroom other than the daily "Pledge to the Flag" indoctrination and to waste 15-20 minutes.
And there is so little play. (Heck, in 5th grade, at recess, we were told by teachers to not run in the yard as we were "too old for that type of behavior" like playing tag) At least in my experience. Imo, lectures are the absolute worst way to learn, but that's what most schools subject kids to most of the time. And it gets increasingly worse in the higher grades.
Many people just don't learn by someone droning on and on, but that's what we accustomed to. I've seen this in foreign languages (and almost everyone I met, where they load up the student with a bunch of grammar rules up front and throughout, vocabulary is almost supplemental in many cases. Rules and rules taught for special cases when the students can barely utter basic sentences. And there is very little play in the classroom. No one learns their native language this way, but for some reason that's how foreign languages are taught.
I would love to see childrens book and childrens films in foreign language classes just as a beginning.
Also something else you can learn (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that just because you are smarter than everyone else, doesn't mean you are better. That is an important lesson I learned at public school. I was no prodigy, not even a genius, but I was a bright child, smarter than most of my peers (about 98% of them if the standardized tests were to be believed). Well part of the problem with that is it lead me to be, well, a smartass. Much like a bigger kids feels he can push others around because he's bigger, I felt that being smart made me better. I got picked on a lot in no small part because of that attitude.
In time, I learned that just because I was smart, didn't mean I was better, and that just because someone isn't as smart doesn't mean they don't have plenty to offer. I learned, well, to be a functioning member of society.
That was pretty valuable, and is a large part of why I have my job, which I love, today. It requires interaction with people all the time. If I was a self-superior asshole, there's no way I would have got it.
Also as you note, everyone will hit a wall with their abilities. Everyone hits a point where things aren't easy anymore. It is important to develop some skills for how to deal with that, including working with others, or you are in a world of hurt when it happens.
Re:It'd be the same as anyone else. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm writing this anon so as not to cancel moderations.
When you have to teach 20 kids (or 30, 40, 50), and one is really smart... the teacher neglects that smart kid.
One person's neglect is another person freedom. A child with a 146 IQ shouldn't need attention from the teacher in order to learn. In my case, in 7th grade, when the rest of the class was learning basic algebra, I was teaching myself everything through pre-calculus. Or reading books about various sciences. Or reading science fiction. Or writing science fiction. Of course, I still had to pass the exams, but I didn't have to do home work. In computer programming classes, I convinced the teachers to let me turn in a large project at the end of the semester. So I spent much of the time making messages appear on the computers that girls I liked were using, when I wasn't writing games or physics simulations or simulations of how the constellations would look from other stars. I was never bored in school, because I did what I wanted to, which was learn new things. (And, I am glad I didn't take the "early college" route. I knew some 15 year old sophomores, and they were socially damaged by the experience. College isn't just about course work, it's about being on your own with other young adults).
Of course, history, literature and other humanities were not as free form, because I didn't have the interest to teach myself that stuff. So I took the courses, didn't like some, but still got As. But parents of gifted children should realize that "I don't like this" is not the same as "this is too easy for me and I'm bored".
Now, I was in a small enough school district that I was known to the high school teachers before I entered middle school. So most of these "modifications" to the curriculum were things that I negotiated with the teachers by myself. Now in the case of Gabriel, I'd say that his parents need to give him the freedom to do what he wants and needs to talk to each of his teachers and get them to do the same, regardless of whether its a public or private school.
Re:Some Anecdotes That Don't Make the News (Score:5, Insightful)
And he kind of burned out. He lives with his brother (my good friend) now and hasn't ever really had a real job. After he completed college, he decided to independently pursue his own interests and sort of realized that the whole educational path he had taken was really him just quickly absorbing other people's works. Striking out on new ground was far too uncomfortable for him. What was worse was that this totally destroyed his confidence.
As someone in a similar situation (You don't have to consider me a prodigy; I don't. But I got through school and college with minimal studying, by listening and learning), with similar problems (low confidence, burned out, etc), let me offer this for consideration: I have a lot of projects in the back of my mind--many, from tabletop games to video games to other software to computer hardware, fountains, architecture, writing, animation, and probably others I can't immediately think of. However, I don't know how to get anywhere, and critically, nobody is interested in helping me get where I want to go.
Education is a path to becoming an academic. The school system is NOT set up to help you with any particular project you may have in mind; it is set up to give you a solid foundation. For a great, great many people, education replaces inspiration, which is to say that you don't need to say, "You know what I want to learn? Arithmetic. That would help me solve this problem!" You don't have to go out of your way to learn math like a farm boy of the first century, who quite reasonably may never have needed it. You don't have to gain these skills by grit and willpower. However, when these skills are no longer an accomplishment, you DO need grit and willpower to take the next step.
More importantly, what you need to take the next step are people who know what you're capable of, know what you'd like to do, and are willing to help. Imagine if someone took one of my projects and said, "You know what? Let's run with this. I bet if you took classes to learn this, and I went over here to talk to these people, and I know some people over here that can help... maybe within a couple years we might have something to show to investors, and we can make a business out of it." That sort of confidence can't come from me. I'll work, I'll offer inspiration, I'll do all sorts of things, but everything I want to do is a project, and all of those projects are going to NEED other people. Before I can even ask for their help, I have to believe others will want the end result; I can't just look at them and say, "Yup. They'll want this. Come on everyone, trust me, we'll do it." That seems sleazy to me, or corrupt, or... I don't even know what.
How do you educate a prodigy? Find out where their sights are set, and help them along that road. If they have their sights on many things, help with that. Don't ever, ever tell them that when they reach maturity (ie leave college) and are on their own, their job is done. That's a stalling point, and I would imagine that a lot of people get stuck there.
Re:Why fit in? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like he's much further along than I was, doing calculus at 8? That's quite impressive. I didn't start getting serious about calculus until about 12.
College is indeed a good option, and from the linked article sounds like he already doing that. It's what I did when I was a kid, took a mixture of college classes, ( first one was around 5th grade ), did some internships, some R&D contract work, all while going to elementary, middle and high school. There is nothing like being ending up being a TA for a course and having one of your current teachers be a student for it while still also having them be your teacher. My last year of high school was only classes like gym, and at the time I hated going. Looking back though I'm glad I did.
The one scary thing with this, as others mentioned in their comments, is burn out is a big risk. I know I ended up hating anytime anyone would say something like "Wow. Someday you will do ....". I burned out in grad school. Part of it was probably that I never really had to work at being smart before, "why study -- skimming it once is enough", part of it was that I saw everything else as just trivial details and useless facts in the way of the big pictures, and part of it was the misshapen world view combined with an extra large serving of ego that I had developed.
Re:You Did It to Yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
I was no child prodigy, but I was at the top end of average when I was in grade school. I ended up in a public schools system "Talented and Gifted" program (which I really enjoyed). In 5th grade, my teacher -- who was new to teaching -- had a brilliant idea to allow us to go as far and fast as we could: math class would be entirely self-paced. She gave us the materials to learn, and a program to follow. We would take a pre-test before starting a new chapter, then we were to read the chapter, do the work in that chapter, and take a post-test to verify that we had really learned the material. We would grade our own work, except for the post-test, which she would grade. Being (slightly) above average intelligence, but no more emotionally mature than anyone else in 5th grade, I quickly figured out that I could blow off all the course work, take a few days to goof off, and take a post-test, then proceed to the next chapter.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out how well that worked. For the first few chapters, I pulled it off, but once we got to the new material that I hadn't been exposed to before, I started blowing all the tests. Several phone calls home to my parents later ("I don't understand why Mike is suddenly having so much trouble in math..."), I realized that *saying* I had done the course work and actually *doing* the course work lead to vastly different outcomes...but by then, I had a lot of catching up to do.
Child prodigies often have amazing intellectual skills (more or less by definition, right?), but they typically *don't* have the experience and maturity to understand how society works. It's unrealistic to expect a child to understand how decisions now can impact their life ten or twenty years later. That's why children have and NEED parents. Sure, GPP could do some community college work now to get his grades up and go on to a better school for a BS, MS, or PhD, but cut him some slack on his decisions as a kid. I wouldn't have done any better in his place, nor, do I think, would most of us.