Every few months, durring dinner, my wife likes to tell a story…
The story is about some *uber-*child out there, somewhere. A kid whose parents are both ultra-smart PhDs, a kid who listened to classical music while in the uterus, a kid who could recognize the alphabet by the age of 1, a kid who found kindergarden boring and high school a minor hiccup, a kid who skipped seven grades and got into college at fourteen, a kid who makes Doogie Howser look like a slacker.
The details may change, but the story is always the same. The kid is usually (though not always) Asian, and the unspoken subtext is always, “Why isn’t our kid like that?” :rolleyes:
Anyway, she was at it again last night, telling a story of some precocious super-smart gal who was “just recently” admitted to UCLA at the age of 15. To which I commented, “You know, it’s always weird how you keep bringing these stories about these super-smart kids, yet I never hear anything about them in the regular news media. Surely a teenager getting into college four years ahead of everyone else would make for a feel-good story that the local newspapers and TV stations would love to cover, right?” She had no response, of course, other than to insist that the story was 100% true and verifiable.
So I turn it over to the Dopers. Are there legions of super-brilliant kids out there, performing feats of academic athleticism that makes Stephen Hawking look like a dork in a wheelchair, who somehow manage to slip under the radar of newspapers and reporters everywhere? Or is this all a bunch of hoo-hah, spread by an underground network of office gossip and tabloid papers, meant to make parents feel even more insecure than they already are?
If anyone remembers my little coupon fiasco, the woman I went with got into college at age 16. She wasn’t a genius though she just started grade school a year early and was skipped a grade (I think). She finished her BS in psychology at 19. Now she is pre-med. SHe is smart, but not an uber genious.
That one seems pretty interesting. Most child prodegies just go to college, this one does something for charity and has several peace prize nominations.
There’s a timely article in Time Magazine on the subject of whether to let intellectually gifted kids skip grades in school. They can get bored if they stay with their age group, but if they skip grades, they might have problems because of the age difference.
Yes, they exist and not all of them have parents who allow their kids to be in the media. Greg Smith’s rare in that Janet does do a lot of media with him.
Not all these kids burn out. Ruth Lawrence had a very difficult family life and is bitter about how she was hothoused. Not every kid who is at college early is hothoused although there’s a few families where it looks like it is happening.
And a hell of a lot of these kids do not have parents with PhDs, the parents don’t play them Mozart in utero or do anything remotely resembling that kind of behaviour and still have one hell of a shock when the child begins to do stuff which is totally out there academically at a young age.
And there’s not legions of them and given that the advice generally is to try and avoid publicity for the sake of the children, you don’t read about them everywhere.
I’m currently two-and-change years ahead of where I’m “supposed” to be academically. Does this count?
I’m at the very least a 4th generation American. My mother is a teacher; my father is a manager. I first really found out that I could hack it at a high academic level when I took a chemistry course at the local state college while a sixth-grader and demolished the grading curve to the point where the prof. had to redo the grading curve by Gaussing it without my grade factoring into the calculations. Aside from that, I don’t think there was anything especially unusual in my earlier years. I was recognized as a very bright student, and well ahead of my grade in mathematical ability, but there was nothing ridiculous here.
The Massachusetts Academy of Mathematics and Science (free, semi-public) www.massacademy.org put me ahead a year by combining my junior and senior years of high-school into one and sending me to WPI for a year free of charge. We usually have a graduating class of around 50.
I was already several months ahead of most of my classmates by virtue of a September birthdate.
I’ve also picked up a semester at the university I’m at now.
From this information, you can reveal my exact identity - good luck. I’m but a guest on this board, and as a flat-broke student, I cannot afford to subscribe, so I’ll be leaving in a couple days.
Anyway, I think the reason you don’t hear too much about these kids later on is that they (we?) generally end up either blending into the higher-income levels of normal society (most of my class isn’t as geeky as you’d think) or working in some laboratory or engineering department later on. A couple years difference matters a lot at 15, but it matters a lot less at 45.
If things work out well for these students, what you’ll hear about them will be their achievements later in life. If, for example, one of them earns a Nobel Prize in Physics, I doubt the news stories will mention that they skipped a few years in school.
You don’t hear about them because they move on and have lives. Often part of the deal with getting an early college place is doing some media stuff but after that the kid just gets on with college life and then with establishing a career.
The children that Miraca Gross wrote about in Exceptionally Gifted Children for example. Off the top of my head (and I haven’t got the book close by) the boy she called Chris finished uni and went to Cambridge as a Rhodes scholar but it’s not all that newsworthy that he was a success. You do occasionally see articles on profoundly gifted kids who crashed and burned but the ones who do well are a non-story.
Michael Kearney was on Oprah and all over the media a few years back but if you google him, it’s really hard to find any info which isn’t connected to his parents’s book Accidental Genius. Last I heard he was doing his MA at 14 but that was some years ago now.
As an example of what I was saying, Stephen Wolfram published his first paper at the age of fifteen and received a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of twenty. So he definitely qualifies as a “super-student”.
He got a MacArthur Genius Grant, did work in high-energy physics and developed the computer program Mathematica. He recently published a book called “A New Kind of Science” which I haven’t read and am not qualified to evaluate. So you’re more likely to hear about these achievements and less that he skipped a few years in school.
When I was in my last year of college, myself and the rest of my Advanced Calc class was struggling to get a passing grade. We spen hours upon hours studying for this class, probably close to 30 hours a week in groups of 2-10 on top of what we did ourselves at home. The entire class failed (which I still think says more about the teacher then the students, but that’s another story). Anyways, like I said, the entire class failed, except for the one kid that was still in high school (IIRC he wasn’t Asain). Rather obnoxious when we were all trying to arrange when to meet after class to study and he (never part of our groups as he didn’t seem to need it), was trying to arrange wheather or not he would driver himself to class tomarrow or have mom pick him up from high school and drop him back off.