Oh, I LOVE that Tara!!!!! Beautifully expressed!

Tara,

That's a very interesting point. I'm curious if you (or anyone else) can elaborate further.

Incidentally my value priorities for my kids are:
1. Ethical and decent human beings
2. Health
3. Able to function adequately in society
4. Academic development
5. Extra-curricular stuff

I really think point 3 largely takes care of itself in the course of normal life (there is stuff like driver’s ed, of course), and all normal parents attend to point 2, so I do tend to focus more on points 1 and 4. It is funny that most people would actually describe me as someone singularly focused on academics, when that is actually not my top priority.

I haven’t listed “happiness” as a goal, because I doubt you can really successfully pursue happiness as such. I suspect that you can try to lead a decent and worthwhile life, and, with a little bit of luck, a nice bonus will be happiness.

I mentioned on one of these threads how one of my kids really annoyed her cousin by telling the cousin that the cousin could not play piano because the cousin was not homeschooled. This of course was not only rude but false -- it was just a matter of which child happened to be taking piano lessons. (Incidentally, I know the cousin very well, and she is in fact extremely bright, quite possibly brighter than my kids. My kid’s not entitled to look down her nose in any way at all towards her cousin.)

However, the kids of most of the people on this board really will end up being greater achievers academically, in an objective sense, than most of their acquaintances, and all of us as parents, as shown by our participation here, put a pretty high value on academic achievement. The kids are inevitably going to pick up on this.

So, since we really do think it is good to be high achievers intellectually, how do we get our kids to understand the distinction between better academically and being better as a human being? Indeed, how do we get them to understand that you can and should rank human beings on particular skills (ice-skating, trumpet-playing, etc.), but, except in terms of basic moral behavior, it is generally wrong to rank human beings as human beings?

I hope my kids learned all of this a bit from the piano-insult incident: we had some long and detailed discussions after that, and my child did choose, without any suggestion from us, to later apologize to her cousin.

I also agree with you about being labeled as “smart and nothing else.” I really did feel that way as a child. I’ve mentioned somewhere that a classmate towards the end of my senior year casually said to me, “You know, Dave, you’re actually okay.” Clearly, she had heard I was a nerd (well, I was!); fortunately, we had gotten to know each other well enough that she came to see me not just as a nerd but as an ordinary guy.

By high school, I was mature enough to grin at this sort of thing, but as a younger child it did bother me.

Can you elaborate on how this works in your local homeschooling group? I know of some kids in ours who are clearly gifted, but the general ethos in the group tends to push them to hide the fact. Again, I’m not sure how to create a situation where everyone can say “Hey, I’m great at basketball, you’re great at calculus, and Emily can really make that trumpet sing!” and everyone can feel that this is wonderful.

Maybe it is an impossible dream.

All the best,

Dave

Tara,

A tangential point – you wrote:
>The most important thing to me is not that he is ready for calculus by age 10 (although that will probably happen)…

I feel like I am inviting an angry response if I ever mention that I think bright kids can learn calculus around ages ten to twelve.

Can I impose on you to fill us in on how you are handling math and how you plan to deal with calculus when your son gets there (if you’ve already posted this, a link please)? Are you acquainted with W. W. Sawyer’s “What Is Calculus About?”? I myself found that very useful to get the basic ideas (I think I read it when I was fourteen), but you cannot really learn calculus from it.

Even though I’m very good at math and, as a physicist, know a lot of advanced math, I find math one of the most challenging things to teach in terms of engaging the kids.

All the best,

Dave

I'm fortunate enough to have been close friends with a group of homeschooling families for about 5-6 years. In essence, our children have grown up together. I realize that this is unique, but nonetheless, it does help take away some of the "wow" factor when one of the kids is an obvious standout in one particular area.

One of the kids in our group is exceptionally gifted physically. He rode without training wheels and swam independently (very well) at age 3. Another child in our group plays a very difficult orchestral instrument, is almost on a par with students at Julliard who are 3 times her age. I'm not saying we are a group of prodigies across the board, but these experiences have encouraged a healthy respect for different gifts...and recognition that just because someone is a superstar in one area, that isn't the sum of who that person is.

We do have newer families coming into our group, and folks don't tend to overemphasize the standout gifts. I have had chats with newer moms or dads who might say something like, "I hear that your son started reading at 2 and is now doing algebra, is that true?!" with a shocked look. When I respond without fluttering excitement, it sets the tone of "all of our children have their strengths, and this isn't ALL that my son is about."

I don't know if that answers your question.

Best,
Tara

I'm not what you'd call a math person, but my husband is highly gifted in math and all things analytical. Even though I am the primary homeschooling parent, he tends to do ad hoc math work with our son in the evenings and on the weekends.

At the moment, DS is using Teaching Textbooks, Life of Fred, Aleks, and a smattering of Zaccaro books to learn algebra. He really loves math and LOF and Zaccaro are what he'd call pleasure reading. He probably spends 1-2 hours working on math each day, by choice.

I'm not yet sure what we'll use for calc when it's time. It might be a traditional class (AP Calc at the local high school, or maybe at the community college--or maybe one-on-one with a mentor). One of the reasons I was excited to get the DYS acceptance letter is that I hope they can be of help when that time comes.

Tara

edited to add: Our son is doing high school work pretty much across the board right now (at 8) so it's not just math that I am dealing with in terms of advanced subject matter. In fact, I find that math is one of the easier subjects to handle when dealing with such extreme asynchrony.

Tara wrote:
>I don't know if that answers your question.

Well, it’s one of those questions like “What is the meaning of life” that can never really be answered, but your comments are interesting.

And, of course, now if anyone claims that my kids are going too fast on math, I’m going to say, “Hey, I talked to this mom on the Web whose kid is way ahead of my kids…” It’s nice talking with people who are happy rather than distressed that their kids are fast learners.

All the best,

Dave

Dave, I think it's less about "there are kids who are way ahead of mine" and more about "the parent isn't distressed about this." I have run across kids whose abilities surpass those of my kid - there will always be someone who is doing more/better/faster.

One of my primary responsibilities as a parent is to find an even keel, a way to integrate this brilliance into our otherwise ordinary lives without giving it too much (or too little) power over us as a family, and our son as an individual.

Tara

Tara,

Yeah. One thing that does concern me involves a college friend of mine. This was a guy who started grad school in mathematics at age 15 (at Caltech, a serious school). He was the office mate of a good friend of mine, so I knew him pretty well.

I was the top undergrad physics major in my class, but this guy, three years younger than me, knew things about physics I did not understand. There were write-ups in the newspapers about him as a once-in-a-decade prodigy: he was the Terry Tao of my generation. Incidentally, he was a very nice guy -- never arrogant about his brilliance at all, although he was a bit socially inept, even by the standards of the rest of us geeks.

Last time I checked, he was working as a tax preparer.

Now, of course, tax preparer is a perfectly honorable profession, and I bet he does a fantastic job at it. But it was certainly not the career he had been hoping for as a student.

I don’t know the “backstory”: maybe he is quietly working away on the most significant advance in human history and soon we’ll know of it (like Einstein in the patent office).

Anyway, do you worry about your son having a similar experience – a child prodigy who sort of “burns himself out”?

I honestly know nothing about this, except for my college friend, and, as I say, I don’t really know the full story with him either. I’m not trying to insinuate anything one way or the other, and I hope you won’t take this as anything except an honest question.

I suppose that one could just take the tack of “Let the kid learn as fast as he can, and if he peaks at age 15, that’s life.”

All the best,

Dave

Well, that was sort of the point I was making: I don't want his extreme intelligence to be the sum total of who he is, or how he sees himself, because I find that to be (at best) very limiting and (at worst) very dangerous.

When I make the effort to create an environment for him in which he is perceived in a myriad of ways, not just "the 8yo high school student," then I give him opportunities to be more than that. He is more than that. For us, for now, that means homeschooling.

I don't really care what he ends up doing with his life, as long as he is reasonably happy and productive. If he wants to be a professional studio drummer, that would be fine (he may very well go in that direction), if that is what blisses him out. I'm all about feeding the bliss. Which would take me off on another tangent about homeschooling and child-directed learning, so I'll stop for the moment.

Short answer: no, I'm not worried about burnout. We lead a very down-to-earth, balanced life. Sometimes I need to tell him to "put away the books, we're going to the playground." But then again, I don't consider him in the same league as Bobby Fischer and other similar prodigies. [I don't know much about actual prodigies, though, to be honest.]

Tara

Tara,

Thanks. This again is the sort of question to which there is no final answer, of course.

Incidentally, it occurred to me after I posted that it might seem as if I were criticizing you or other parents who make advanced materials available to their gifted kids. Thanks for interpreting my remarks charitably and not taking them in the wrong way.

I’m actually quite “gung-ho” about getting kids access to any resources that interest them academically, even if those resources are beyond their current level – it shouldn’t hurt anyone to puzzle over a book about calculus or black holes, even if, in the end, he or she puts it on the shelf to look at it again in a year or so.

Puzzling over things is a very good thing.

So, I’m certainly not trying to intimate that anyone here is allowing his or her child to accelerate too rapidly. In the case of my college friend, both of his parents were mathematics professors, so it is not surprising that he had very strong talent in this area. I did always wonder, though, if they intentionally created a “hothouse” atmosphere that pushed him to develop at a rate even faster than the rapid rate he would have developed on his own.

This is an issue for me in my own mind because my kids do not seem quite as self-motivated as many of the kids being discussed here in terms of asking for material at the level they are able to handle. Perhaps (I’d like to think!) they are just so used to getting material appropriate to their level of development that they see no need to ask for it. But, I am concerned that I might “push” material on them that they might be able, barely, to handle, but that they do not really enjoy and that does not really foster their long-term development.

Incidentally, I am not mentioning my old friend’s name because I am really just using some vague impressions and speculations about his life as a springboard for raising issues that concern me. All I really know for certain about him is that he was profoundly brilliant and an awfully nice guy (he would of course be labeled “Asperger’s” nowadays, which is paasingly strange, since I knew him to be more sensitive and compassionate about others’ feelings than most “normal” people are). For all I know, he may consider his entire life to be the absolute ultimate of “bliss,” as you put it – I certainly hope so.

Anyway, thanks for your comments. I know no magic key to definitively answer the questions I’ve raised with you, but it does help to hear your thoughts and experiences.

All the best,

Dave