posted
Suddenly, the idea of genius battle school students does not seem too far fetched anymore.
quote: Sho Yano (born c. 1990, Portland, Oregon) is a Japanese American and Korean American boy who at the age of 12 held the title of world's highest recorded IQ with a figure so high that it was unmeasurable. He reportedly played Chopin on the piano at age 3. After scoring 1500 out of 1600 on the SAT at age 8, he entered Loyola University at age 9, graduating summa cum laude at age 12, and now attends the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago in the MSTP (Medical Scientist Training Program) program designed to earn a combined MD and PhD.
posted
Yeah, often times those kids don't turn out particularly well. Hopefully everything will turn out well for him.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
There was a kid that started at my school (Colorado School of Mines) when he was 12. I think he's graduating either this year or next year. I would personally love to have been able to do something like that... Imagine having a doctorate when you're 18...
posted
so you have a PHD by the time you are 18??? then what? now maybe in a world of battle schoolers where all of the kid geniouses of the world are brought together something like this wouldn't be too terrible, but when you take a child who is already very different from others his own age, and then further alienate him, what type of life is he going to live?
Posts: 104 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
No kidding. College for college aged people is bad enough, even after you've had some kind of childhood. Why, just because he's a super-genius, does he have to be a doctor at 15? Why can't he have a childhood?
Posts: 326 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Wow... that is really amazing. I do share the concern others have voiced - I hope everything works out for him!
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No. I know too many kids who've gone through this. In general, they wind up profoundly unhappy, and rarely achieve much once they're into their twenties. I hope this kid's an exception.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I have to disagree with most of the people on here. My mom fought hard for me to skip grades when I was younger (and unfortunately failed). I could have easily graduated high school when I was 14/15, if not earlier. As it was, I nearly dropped out my freshman year and got my GED.
I was an outcast throughout most of my school years because I was more intellectually mature than most of my classmates and didn't know how to fit in unless I dumbed myself down - which I did out of desperation because I wanted to fit in. The school system did me a HUGE disservice because it wouldn't let me skip grades. They claimed it would hurt me socially (as if being an outcast helped...)
posted
I dunno, Eisen, maybe I'm not as brilliant as you, but I was a pretty smart kid, and I think my parents were right not to skip me ahead. They considered the idea, but rejected it, because it was a guarantee that I would never fit in anywhere until I was an adult.
I mean, if it's hard for "the smart kid" to fit in, think how hard it must be for "the smart kid" to also be "the kid four years younger than everyone else" and still fit in?
Personally, I didn't find being intelligent to be a barrier that prevented me from relating to other people. The fact that I grew up isolated from other children in a neighborhood with no playmates besides my younger sister and my parents probably caused me some problems. To this day, I relate better to people at least ten years my senior than I do to people my own age, but not because other people make me feel like I need to "dumb myself down". It's much more of a comfort issue.
(And it may also be a cultural issue at this stage in my life. The fact that I'm a Mormon may mean that my priorities line up with those of older family men with children at a much younger age than is common. Hmm ... have to think about that.)
But even if I was smarter than the average kid, there were plenty of other "smart kids" around for me to talk to. I don't know how brilliant you must be for everyone around you to seem like pathetic ants by comparison, but I think I may have a Ming the Merciless costume I could dig up for you ...
[ April 25, 2005, 11:18 AM: Message edited by: A Rat Named Dog ]
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
Hopefully that kid still has time to play with kids his own age.
edit or do kids hang out at that age?
And now for some reason, I'm picturing a young kid at the operating table, asking where the red light up nose on the patient is, so he knows when he touchec a side he isn't suppose to.
Yeah, they do. My brother does nothing but "hang out."
I was one of the smartest kids in my class, but my mom refused to let me skip a grade (even though every time I went to a different school, they offered to let me) because she wanted me to be with kids my own age. I'm eternally grateful for it, since I made some wonderful friends who I wouldn't have known if I had skipped a grade. I can't imagine skipping all the way up to college at age 9. When I think of all the things I do in college (and I'm only 19, so I don't drink... the medicine I'm on kinda reacts funny with alcohol anyway, and I don't want to end up back in the hospital), and how few of them a 9-year-old would be able to do or would enjoy, I pity the kid.
Hopefully, everything will turn out well for him. I've heard way too many stories of ultra-genius kids who got so sick of life that they committed suicide. It would be sad if he becomes one of them.
Posts: 25 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Heck, I was HELD BACK, between Kindergarten and first grade (a program my town called "Readiness", it was half-day, like kindergarten in my town, but they did much more reading and math than a kindergarten class), because while I had no problem learning anything academic, my kindergarten teacher felt I was emotionally/socially behind the other kids (being a September baby, I wasn't quite 5 yet when I went to kindergarten).
She was probably right. As a kid I was fairly emotionally fragile, even with the almost year up on everyone else.
As a result, I was put in with people who would have been a year behind me (my school system rarely, if ever, offered to skip grades) that had 4-5 brilliant people in it, most smarter than me by a fair bit, but I was challenged constantly. Twenty years later, they are still all good friends.
For some people, skipping grades can be fine; others need time not only to learn to communicate with their peers, but also learn emotional intelligence, along with all the book larnin'.
posted
My bro was a September baby, my mom held him back before he even started kindergarten- started when he was 5. I, myself am a July-er so I was 6 when I started kindergarten.
Posts: 30 | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
First, I must say, a big misconception of AS is that it automatically signifies that you will be above average.
I have a cousin with it, to whom I am almost an exact copy of in many feilds, some of which may be shocking. (For example, I naturally walk on my tip-toes rather than heel toe. He does too. For some reason, that can be a sign of AS. We both are very extreme introverts, we both go almost obsessive over our interests. For him it was trains, for me it's working with things in a logical sense. Why things work and how they do so.) We are roughly intellectual equals, but I do not have AS.
Now, many of the greatest minds ever do/did have AS, but I would definatly not account their having AS to why they are intellectually superior to others.
Now then, onto the matter of kids being pushed forward/back. I had every potential of being advanced a few grades. I may even still have that. But I choose myself not to go up. Many of my peers consider me a genius, not sure entirely why, but they do. But there are others like me who seem to grasp a better understanding of the concepts being taught in school. While I may not be learning things faster, I am still with people who probably are about or a bit above my level.
I would highly discourage moving children ahead. It may very well cause unhealthy relations with children their own age. As mentioned briefly, there's the 'Young kid who's so smart s/he's in our grade.' or there's the 'Hey, you're too good to be with us.'
I was recommended every year of my life in school to go into ALPS, Advanced Learning Program for Students, (Well, not now being as they don't offer it at my grade level.) But I refuse. I have spoken with people from there and people who've taught there, and the environment, while it is higher learning, seems unhealthy in people. A neighbor of mine once subbed for a class, she truly said something around the lines of "they are the snottiest most stuck up kids I have ever met."
Personally, I'd much rather be with people who do not gain such a reputation. Even though the people in my grade have gotten a reputation for being the most destructive, terrible kids ever to go through the school, I far prefer that than to go up or go into advance programs.
And as for this kid. It may be me, but wasn't there some child prodigy someone made a thread on that committed suicide? I hope this kid does all right.
Edit: Now, I might be wrong about what you were implying with you having AS. Whether that could put you as an outcast, or it put you at a higher intellegence.
posted
I don't know, maybe it's just an artifact of my specific experiences, but I've always thought that the idea that there is an intrinsic dislike for the "smart kids" ranks up there with saying that girls don't like nice guys. Certainly, this wasn't true in my case, nor in the cases of quite a few other people I know. Of course, I don't know that I'd think of describing my classmates of the past as "less intellectually mature" than I. Not that it wasn't the case, but I just didn't think of it that way. We were friends. We hung out. I didn't make my intellectual superiority the primary aspect of our relationship and neither did they.
In my experience, the people who are going to hate you for being smarter than they are the "smart kids". They tend to be the ones who make how smart everyone is the central aspect of their relationships.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I think the big problem with children who are exceptionally intelligent being allowed to move forward at an advanced pace like this is very much like what A Rat Named Dog said. I was an intelligent kid as well, and I ran into the problem where when I wasn't spending my one day a week in GATE (the California educational system was designed by a group of monkeys with a sizeable amount of typewriters) they couldn't keep me busy so I became a problem in the classroom. I was a little hellion, yes, but as a solution to the problem of my boredom, they forced me to do more work than the rest of the class which didn't figure into my grade. This was for grades 2 and 3 anyway, I still remember the book-report-a-day syndrome.
When we moved the school board in the new town (it was small, I don't think I was really that brilliant) had me as an agenda topic in their next meeting. They were trying to decide whether they should skip me, and if so, how many grades (I believe there was discussion about advancing me from 3rd to 6th, but it was thrown out for physical maturity reasons). My mother took the middle ground and said she would allow me to skip one if I so desired, which at the time I really did. I was in the fourth grade class anyway, I'd made friends, and I was having a great time.
In retrospect that was really dumb. Not only was I skipped but I also had a summer birthday. I didn't get my DL until my senior year of high school. I was a freshman at 13 years old. I still couldn't relate to people in my own grade, let alone those my own age, so I was constantly struggling for some kind of social network. Saying it was difficult socially was a huge understatement, because despite my intelligence, I was essentially emotionally and socially retarded. I would get angry easily, I would have my feelings hurt easily, I couldn't understand why people were so damned illogical all the time.
High school did actually cure me of most of that; I was forced to learn how to be social to do what I wanted to do.
So the parent, I believe, if the case is anything similar to mine, is faced with a huge dilemma. Either leave them in a group where they should be interacting, allow them to develop emotionally and socially, and provide intellectual stimuli outside of the normal school cirriculum; or allow the schools to provide them a more advanced cirriculum and make their social development just that much harder. A kid in my high school had his parents take the other route. He was three years younger than me and working on his Masters via a mail-order special course with a large University (I believe it was Duke). His parents made a deal with him that they would pay for his higher education, provided he was willing to finish public school.
So he tested out of about 80% of classes in Jr High and High School and ended up graduating with a masters in mathematics, and a high school diploma.
I should also mention he was probably the most well-adjusted human being I've ever known, and was very much a kid his own age.
In summary, I'd say letting your kid go all Doogie Howser is a horrible horrible horrible idea. As soon as he hits his early 20s he's going to be hearing stories about all the fun crap he missed out on, and he's going to be bummed. He's going to wonder what he has left to do, and he's going to be bummed. He's going to have trouble at work because he's so much younger than his co-workers, and he's going to be bummed.
Don't turn your kid into a bum.
Posts: 68 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Vadon - I made my comment about having AS as a caveat, letting others know to take whatever I'm saying about with a grain of salt as I'm not the norm.
Jesse
P.S. I agree wholeheartedly that having AS does not automatically make you smart or anything. My brother also has it and he is of normal intelligence.
Posts: 175 | Registered: Jan 2005
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posted
I didn't mean to be condescending by the above post.
Meeting your 'Petra' is something I would wish on anyone, and the term seems particularly appropriate for Sho.
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