Throwing a bit more anecdotal evidence in the mix: I run with the smartest in the computer industry. The smartest new hires fresh out of the best colleges are in their mid 20s, slightly older than what’d you expect (mid 20s as opposed to being about 22 yo ± 1… they’re frequently 24 or over). I have yet to meet someone who graduated at my age, and that’s because I went to a crummy school that was super easy to overload and graduate way early.
My husband attended one of the best engineering schools in the nation and he said something to that effect – that it was more common to graduate later rather than earlier in these “best” schools because the course load was so hard.
Anyway, I’ve yet to run into a teen prodigy in that crowd, but the plural of anecdote isn’t data and all that.
He must have meant something like that, but the way I parse it, that would be skipping two grades in all.
I think schools are too eager to skip students most of the time. I was skipped one half of fourth grade then one half of fifth. Overall it worked out OK but I was limited through the rest of my education by my weakness in math. I would have been better off if they hadn’t skipped me and let me use the extra time for intensive math study.
Erwin Nyiregyházi, at the turn of the century, was compared to Liszt in musical technique and musical capability. In fact the first ever study of music psychology in the modern sense was The Psychology of A Musical Prodigy, by G. Revesz, from 1925.
Mentally troubled, he faded into obscurity and slept on the NY Shuttle for some years, until he was rediscovered by chance by an RCA employee.
He is a phenom. The hand-held cassette recording of that concert a local church was released by RCA. See Ervin Nyiregyházi page]
For good measure, he also refused a direct request to play with Einstein. [Nyiregyhazi and Einstein]
Young Miss Sali, our daughter, graduated high school at 16 and just turned 17 when she started college. She said it was a bit awkward being in the dorm with older students who were into the beer-and-partying . But she wasn’t into that kind of thing, more into watching Bollywood movies with her friends in the lounge. (She used to get out of bed, walk a mile into town, and drive her inebriated roomies back to the dorm, in their car.)
I have known a couple that started university at 15-16. One was an engineering major that graduated and was a pretty hot trader at 20. He retired before 40 worth USD10+ million. Great guy and well adjusted.
another was a science major, a bit out of control in the dorm, but went on to med school and is now a professor/researcher. He got married to a totally whacked out older divorce during med school. they got divorced pretty quickly. I’m sure that marriage was the result of a lack of emotional maturity. He’s grown up since then.
Having a profoundly gifted child can be very difficult. Being a profoundly gifted kid is very difficult. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about hyper-ambitious parents. Often the family is just trying to find the best situation for a kid who won’t fit in anywhere.
A kid that bright often does not identify well with age peers, but obviously is not going to be maturing evenly on every front. She’s doing calculus at 12, but maybe can’t spell, and doesn’t play with the ‘right’ things for her age, and has no grasp whatsoever of Hannah Montana. It’s hard to find friends, and it’s hard to find enough grist for the mind. When a kid has to have a lot of high-level material to learn just to keep from going mad with boredom, and burns through it faster than anyone else can keep up with, parents and teachers struggle with finding enough for her to do.
Meanwhile, American schools frequently don’t care about or even actively dislike kids with very high IQs. If you live in a big city, you might get lucky and get into a special school, but if you live in North Dakota, homeschooling might be your best option, like it or not. Many profoundly gifted kids live for the two weeks in summer that they get to spend at some special program or camp, where they finally get to meet other kids they connect with.
I have often been grateful that my kids are just pretty bright, not over 140. When you get into the high IQ range, life can get pretty tough. The parents I talk with whose kids are profoundly gifted work very hard at just keeping up with their kids, loving them as they are, and helping them get what they need–but putting a 7yo child like that into a regular second-grade classroom and telling him to just get along is like torturing him. Same with high school.
I mostly don’t agree with sending a kid under 17 to college, but I think in many of those cases the families were just doing the best they could with the available resources. The world isn’t set up for those kids, and they’ll never fit into the easy slots.
I’ve known a number of people who were once child prodigies, and none of them were messed up by the experience of being a prodigy. The closest to failing to measure up to expectations is one of them who sailed right through to his Ph.D. in math at a rather early age. (If I recall correctly, he started grad school at 16.) After finishing his Ph.D., he got a job teaching at a pretty good university, one where he was expected to do some research if he wanted to get tenure. At that point, he choked. He couldn’t turn out the papers he was supposed to. When he was denied tenure, he decided to give up on academia and has worked since then at mathematical and computer science jobs in industry and government. He’s doing O.K., but he’s not the high-powered genius that people thought he would be when he was young.
To explain and elaborate on my earlier post; I think that the way the child should be handled is to make an effort to expose them to other people that they can relate to that also have a superior intellect. If at all possible, those people should be at their same age level.
Let’s put it this way; taking a kid with a superior intellect and moving them ahead to interact with kids that are of average intellect but older can be a recipe for disaster. Don’t mistake intellect with maturity. Putting the two sets of kids on par for entirely different reasons makes no sense. 16 year old kids don’t belong in the dorm with 18-20 year olds that are intent on drinking, partying and picking on the weakest kid on the floor.
It’s a delicate situation. Each one is different. The parents have to take into account the long term well-being and emotional development of the child, not their egotistical bragging. I’ve seen it.
I started University at 15, and had to get driven to school by my parents. I was totally out of my depth emotionally, and only went to classes for about the first two weeks… For the rest of the year, my parents dropped me off, and I skipped my classes. Everyone around me was going out drinking, and I wasn’t even old enough to drive yet!
Needless to say, I failed my first year of University.
I ended up going to Community College til I was ready to go back to University. I ended up doing OK when I started again in my early 20’s - I managed to get two B.A.'s and an M.A.
Look at Charlie on Num3ers. He went to college as a young teen. Now he fights crime with the FBI, inhabits an endowed chair at CalSci, and has the hottest girlfriend on television. He turned out pretty darn well.
The problem is not with the prodigies themselves. The problem is how other people treat the prodigies. If advancing them into college to interact with other people who are older than them sometimes leads to problems, keeping them with their age peers who are of average intelligence can lead to worse problems. Telling them that, despite being smart enough to move ahead, they are obligated to stay in the same classes as others of their age is going to mess them up too. They will be bored by having to do work that they are already far beyond. The other students will quite likely treat them badly for being so far ahead of everyone else.
I know a little about this. I wasn’t a prodigy or smart enough to be a prodigy if someone had pushed me, but I was just enough smarter than my classmates that it caused problems. I went to a high school and elementary school system where, if you were the absolute smartest person they could ever imagine, they thought that maybe you could scrape through some second-rate state university and come back and teach high school. If you wanted anything more than that, you were a snob and a traitor as far as they were concerned. When I told them that I wanted to go to some first-rate college, study math, and maybe eventually get a Ph.D., they pretty much decided that I was insane. If I had been a brilliant football player on the other hand, they would have loved me. Football was the local religion. Being 4’11", I didn’t play football. This meant that I was nothing in their eyes. Even being a good but not great 98-pounder on the wrestling team didn’t get me any respect. Every boy was expected to play football if they were to rate at all, regardless of his physical abilities. One year 105 of the 150 boys in my high school were on the team.
The idea that I could have been home-schooled is ridiculous. That takes parents who can supervise such things. I have seven brothers and sisters, and my parents were constantly exhausted (and were only high school graduates). In any case, the ideas that one could be home-schooled, could skip grades, or that anything like A.P. classes existed was completely unheard of in my school. I don’t mean just that no one did it. I mean that if you had told anyone there that in other places some children are home-schooled, that in other places some children skip grades, or that such things as A.P. classes exist in other schools they would have refused to believe you. They would have thought you were insane.
I made it through because I had an iron will. I simply decided that I didn’t care what they thought of me. I eventually got two master’s degrees and ended up working as a mathematician. And I wasn’t a prodigy. If I had been, it would have gone even worse for me. The problem is that we have school systems (and entire communities) where it’s constantly made clear that there is an absolute limit for your ambitions.
The first year of college really isn’t that tough, and starting it early is not, in itself, evidence of extraordinary intellect: many, many more kids are capable of doing college work than actually start college early: AP and IB programs have expanded significantly over the last ten-fifteen years. I teach high school, and two of my students entered college this fall at top public schools with over 60 hours in AP credit, and they’ve done just fine in their classes (that is to say, the credit they received accurately reflects their knowledge). They had peers with as much AP credit who went to top tier private schools, which grant fewer AP credits, but who were equally prepared. Every year we have many (5% of the graduating class or so) who enter college with 30 hours of credit, and at least that many kids again who start with 15. And we are not a top school by any means. I expect the numbers at the nice suburban high schools are significantly higher, and at our top magnet schools it’s absolutely expected that a graduate has passed 4-5 AP exams: it has to be over 10 to even raise an eyebrow. All those kids have effectively started college early, only with peers of the same age, and a more age-appropriate social structure.
I know there are some really crappy schools out there, and starting college early is clearly a better alternative than that. But schools–even public schools–exist that can serve all but the once-in-a-generation type geniuses, and when possible I think it’s best to get students into these sort of situations.
I had one friend who went to college at 14. He went for two years, dropped out, and went back to high school to be with people his age. With two years of college, he graduated college at 20, took two years off, then went on to graduate school. Another friend also went off to college at 14, graduated at 18, couldn’t get into graduate school, and spent the next four years of his life pretty much working at various menial jobs – typical jobs an 18 year old would hold.
By the time they were in their mid-30s, they weren’t any farther ahead in life than anyone else, and they hated their college experience. They were lonely, and simply didn’t have the maturity to do much besides academics. I’ve heard other prodigies had flunked out of college since they weren’t mature enough to handle their new situation.
In the end, it doesn’t make that much difference. If you get into college when you’re 14, you’re only 3 to 4 years ahead of your classmates. By the time you’re in the middle of your career, you’re no longer the child genius, but just a rather socially awkward adult.
Is there any evidence that if you’re a prodigy you’ll grow up to be a socially awkward adult? I suspect that social awkwardness is no more common in one-time prodigies than in the average adult. Does anyone have any statistics about this? Statistics, not more anecdotes.
There’s a middle ground in between advancing them and letting them be bored in the normal classes. I wasn’t at all a child prodigy, just fairly smart, and my teachers discussed with my parents about me possibly skipping a grade. My parents decided against it for the usual social reasons, and I’m glad about that. But, since I was advanced beyond my peers, I did get to do advanced work in several of my math classes. In 5th grade math I would often have a chair in the corner working on stuff from a book different than what my classmates had, since I already knew that stuff. In 7th grade I was in the 8th grade math class, and in 8th grade math, I was in the back with a high school math book I was working from. It worked for me since I was disciplined/well-behaved enough that the teacher could just give me the book and I would work quietly and ask questions if I had them.
