Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
I was homeschooled, along with my two sisters, my entire educational career until college. We all started taking college classes early, my older sister correspondence at 14, my twin and I correspondence at 15. All of us took classes at local colleges before starting 'real college'. All of us scored high on our ACTs, all of us got scholarships to college.
My parents didn't really push us, we were just smart. We had childhoods, I was a starter on the basketball team, and played college soccer for a year. I also read 10+ books a week, played way, way too much Civilization and Total Annihilation, and did plenty of volunteer work, especially at our local public access station.
For my sisters, going to and living at 'real college' worked out well, they both succeeded in their own ways (my older sister graduated with two masters a few days after she turned 21, my twin sister received a lot of recognition from professionals in her field before graduating, was salutatorian, etc), whereas I didn't do so well being away from home and the support structure. I'm lazy, and I thought could just not do assignments I didn't want to and do well enough on other assignments to make up for it. Long story short, my GPA dropped enough to lose my scholarship, and I decided that the private college experience wasn't worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for.
So I moved home, finished my bachelors from the state university in town. Snagged an internship and then got a job offer from that company, essentially during my junior year for a full time job, contingent on finishing school.
My point in typing up this story is not to say that I am or was awesome. My point is that I am pretty sure that Ahaan Rungta is a pretty smart kid, his parents probably pushed him less than you think, and that as long as he and his family figure out how to navigate the maturity journey, he'll be fine.
Are you sure? Being a smart fellow, you must know that your experience is not evidence that this young man was not "pushed" too much and that he will "be fine."
That said, my suspicion is that Rungta's early achievement is not cause for concern about his social development. Conducting research, for instance, is an intensely collaborative experience that he will probably have, and would provide ample opportunity for interacting with people of many ages. He probably will be fine.
Well, of course, all of us deal with pride and so part of my motivation to type up the story is that I'm proud of what I've accomplished, yeah.
> Being a smart fellow, you must know that your experience is not evidence that this young man was not "pushed" too much and that he will "be fine."
Of course my experience is not evidence of someone else's experience. However, I have experience being homeschooled, and entering college early, so I think I have a degree of ability to relate to Ahaan Rungta's situation that others in this thread do not. I think my contribution to the thread is to provide a counter-point to those who were decrying his parents for pushing him too hard, or depriving him of a childhood, which can only be provided by personal experience.
Additionally, I think my story demonstrates the variability of how children, within the same family, respond to environmental and parental stimuli. My sisters were fine starting school early, I wasn't so much, and if I would have lived at home during my first year of college, instead of in a dorm four hours away, it would have been different.
I'm not claiming that the subject of this article should be expected to have such problems (see my other comments), only that your story doesn't serve its stated purpose.
My point in writing was entirely to say that I've been through a similar journey, as have others in my family, and (while I didn't mention this originally), I have friends who have done the same thing. Thus, I have observed this situation from several different perspectives.
Based on what little evidence I have from this article, Ahaan Rungta's family is taking the course of action that has the best probability of a positive outcome. However, as my own story and that of my family illustrates, some kids will do fine and others won't, coming out of essentially the same circumstances.
Will Ahaan Rungta be fine? Depends on what you mean by fine. I mean that he's likely to graduate from school no more messed up than any other college student, and that his family seems to have positioned themselves to do that the best.
What's there to be proud of? Seems like your "accomplishments" are pretty mediocre, and not anywhere the level of your siblings. More like a story of wasted/neglected born-with talents (smarts).
That said, going to college early usually isn't a good idea. People are quite "age sensitive" in that age so you're missing out on a lot of the social stuff. Regardless how good MIT is the rest is still "only" knowledge. I can of course imagine worse things though.
I agree that going to college early isn't a good idea for the peer socialization aspects. The intellectual ones, I think it's fine. But every kid is different.
But when I was a kid,
- I usually read a book or two a week as part of school,
- We typically were done with 'school' by lunchtime, and so I had a lot more free time than other kids.
- I stayed up late reading quite a bit
- We lived 15 minutes outside of town so I read in the car a lot (driving or in parking lots during my siblings' activities)
- I read a lot of not-intellectually-demanding stuff like Star Wars, Star Trek, or similar novels mixed in with more serious history.
- I used to read at about 600-1200 wpm (depending on the test), which is on the higher side. It's a skill on top of natural speed, I'm now out of practice, and I top out around 500.
I skim a lot on fiction, I admit. I also read chunks of words instead of individual words when I am really going, which diminishes comprehension, and so I don't do that when I am reading theology or philosophy or something I want to deeply learn.
Some people were pushed by their parents, but mostly it was people who were bored with the normal experience and found an out. Out of that set, maybe about half regret it, and wished they had slowed down and enjoyed high school/childhood more.
People tend to assume that folks who go to college early would be socially awkward, but that was not my experience. The social/emotional intelligence distribution was pretty normal.
Out of everything, the common denominator was supportive parents.
Anyway, supportive (or desperate) parents are a key aspect.
I wasn't a completely functioning adult at that age, in a lot of ways. I did not know college was an option, I just complained to my folks that I was bored (like any bored kid). They really helped find things to keep me occupied, and eventually found the college option for me.
In addition, the typical stuff you might expect was also important. For example, paying for college would have been very difficult for me (getting a job at 14 would have been too much on top of everything else). Getting to/from campus was also difficult, and I was too young to live on campus or drive. I also had to deal with all of the normal teenager BS (hormones, depression, etc), in addition to going to college, and they helped (as I expect most good parents do).
Sorry if that doesn't answer your question, the circumstances varied a lot depending on the individual.
Entering kindergarden, in music class the teacher had a keyboard, asked the children who could play. A little girl banged out chopsticks. Another little boy picked out twinkle,twinkle,little star. My son Andrew raised his hand, and played some Beethoven sonata. The teacher asked him if he knew what that was. He told her.
He's not a prodigy. Has terrible handwriting! The 1st-grade evaluation suggested he had fine-motor issues. Yet he could play 64th-note runs on the piano endlessly. Its all because of regular teaching and fun practicing.
Kids can learn what they put their minds to. But it takes 10,000 hours not only from the pupil but from the tutor. My wife put in the time; Andrew plays wonderfully.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3045994/albert-einsteins-handwri...
I mean, sure, you get the occasional Ted Kaczynski, but the vast majority of kids I've heard of entering college early seem well-adjusted.
Occasional? Ted was one of a kind. And apparently, you don't "get" someone like him. Allegedly, rather, you "make" that kind of person through government sponsored psychological torture experiments. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...
That's, unfortunately, who a lot of people automatically jump to when they think of "maladjusted precocious children/young adults" I think there was a RadioLab episode about him as well?
My younger sister was regularly mistaken for a teacher when she was in 7th grade.
I was pretty obviously an immature punk all through high school, but some people are both academically and socially advanced.
Right now, my five year old son with autism is simultaneously learning the toilet and calculus. Who knows where he'll be socially when he's academically ready for college?
Good for Ahaan he escaped it and I wish him the very best of luck @ MIT!
I did start college a little early my senior year, using a program that let me take half the day off to attend college. But I could have easily been going to college since 9th grade.
As for the social stuff, I actually lost most of my friends in HS -- they all moved to other states, and I had no desire to gain new friends (I had good friends on the internet, that I still have to this day, ~20 years later).
I dunno about this... we're not intimate with his family so it seems a little unfair to characterize his parents as "pushing him". For all we know, the opposite may have happened and his parents were "holding him back" and trying to prevent a precocious teen from rushing into MIT at age 14 instead of 15.
As far as the article's text reveals, it says his parents were responsive and not pushy: "Rungta is grateful to his parents and to MIT for being responsive to his needs every step of the way."
And that is a first hand experience watching 42 gifted smart young children pushed in our education system and over their interessents on behalf of their parents. I attended this school for 6 years.
It was a pain, and as if school wasn't boring enough ( school is mandatory where I live ) you had to consider every word you wanted to say as a 16/17/18 year old when there where 9/10/11 year old depressed and ADHDish, but extremely smart kids around you the whole time.
In the end I am a hundred percent sure every kid can study MIT classes at every age. Most of the stuff is rational trivia. Also beeing gifted has nothing to do with your grades or your ability to follow classes or lectures. Because that's something your parents could've pushed on you, but for sure you are allowed to be happy that they didn't.
I'm in the U.S., and I can tell you that having gone to a good, but regular state university for undergrad, and then to much more prestigious university for grad school, the difference between the two was striking. I went from being one of the smarter students in the class, to one of the least smart (or at best, the middle). I expected this university to be better, but it was quite a shock just how much better it was.
Is it possible that what they teach at MIT might go beyond the "trivia" or rote memorization that you describe being taught at your country's schools?
Do you mind if I ask where you live? In most of the US school is "mandatory", but pretty much anyone can homeschool if they want.
Sure, he will never say bad things about his parents, especially not in the media. He's from India! As I see it parents (in general) can bend things so that children do not want anything else than what their parents want. This is not to blame the parents - they probably don't know better.
From this story I can't tell what is the case. His parents are maybe the best ever, that not only want best for their kid, but actually let him find out what that is.
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$50K!
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$40K! ** * Any Questions?
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no high some Bachelor's Master's Doctor
high school college Degree Degree of
school diploma Philosophy
diploma
This all might be true but the article makes it very clear how precocious this kid is. I don't think his parents were trying to push him. If anything they seemed to struggle to get him the things that he needed to succeed.
Some people are just so laser focused on their desires that you just have to let them do their thing. I'm sure if he wants to play sports or learn history, he'll excel at it too.
You could find other reasons to nitpick (Did he do sports? Did he develop social competences by interacting with other kids?), but even if these things are true, which we do not know, there are children, who got a regular education, that are still lacking in these regards and they are not enrolled at MIT at 15.
Completely agree with you. He has the rest of his life to get better at those areas
Many of us old folk change direction over the years. The key to a happy life in the long run is not to know everything when you are young, or to have picked the right direction from the start, but to recognize when your direction is no longer fulfilling, and to know when and how to change when you are old.
We have turned in circles in the past and will do it again if we do not get that we turned in circles.
Questioning the sacred cow of universal suffrage might be a better allocation of mental resources than picking on a single kid's parents.
a) The first one is the fact that we want (mostly) to help each other and make each other happy. This looks benign, but combined with b) can be really irritating
b) Humans are bad at empathy. You might enjoy humanistic education or sports and so you automatically think that everyone else does too.
This probably worked fine for our ancestors (getting torn apart by a cave lion is something no-one would like) but kind of breaks in modern society.
Different people like different things, keep that in mind.
c) Most humans just won't "do it". As a child, student, teacher, and parent I've realized that most tasks really aren't that hard, and by far the greatest hindrance to expedient success is an irrational unwillingness to "just do it".
What does all technical excellence mean as long as the Middle East is a clusterfuck? Most really big problems have little to do with technology.
What really needs to be done particularly in the US is increased voter motivation because low turn-outs are not helping anything at all here. People don't want to talk politics out of "politeness" or something other passive policy and the country continues to have trouble talking about hard issues without leading to emotionally charged methods of "argument" that have led us to the current state of things with low voter engagement and politics devolving into a minstrel show of democracy.
We already have enough problems with an elite class within our economic power. Lets not extend that elitism into governmental processes as well.
What choice did the kid have? None. Dude didn't go out and was full MIT mode from the age of 5.
The real aim here should be to be engaged and to be learning; which are things this kid seems to be have done plenty of. It is so cool that we now have all these learning resources accessible easily.
It's interesting how this kind of thing makes one think about their own life. I went to a talk by a computer scientist yesterday. He is studying cryptography. You could tell that he was so engaged, getting so much joy from his subject. People were interested in what he was explaining. You could tell that he is just loving every minute of his job. This is the kind of engagement level I am looking for. And by the way, I don't think one needs to be top-level at what they do to get there.
My friends in Fort Lauderdale are gonna LOVE this!
Right now I am very much for adjusting education to students, rather than the other way around (without expecting that everyone gets magically enlightened at the age of 18-19). Especially as the cohort-based learning is a direct heritage of the Prussian education (for teaching soldiers, not - scientists or engineers).
We're so obsessed with money, and forget all about the one currency that really matters. Time. Time to live.
I'd rather he were average academically, and experience life exceptionally.
Paint letters onto toy cars, paint a car park with letters in the spaces.
Or paint letters onto rocks, and use a toy dump truck to load them up and move them around.
Use synthetic phonics and sound out the letters when the cars are parked or the rocks are collected.
(but in general I agree with you)
Talk to your child, see what he actually likes. Make sure he knows that he always has a choice - years later my parents told me they thought about homeschooling but didn't think they knew enough to, and couldn't afford a tutor, but they never even mentioned these thoughts to me at the time.
I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of this young man's intelligence. Yes, the latter is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. I have little doubt that there are many 18 year olds entering MIT's class of 2019 who could have entered at 15 had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing.
These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games, perhaps we would have progressed through life with a singularity of purpose and self-confidence that would have situated us in a better position today. We might have been spared years in our teens and twenties trying to find a sense of meaning in our work, unlike this fellow, who seems to have it figured out.
I won't speculate about his social skills. I've met college students his age running the gamut from borderline autistic to social butterfly. Yes, the sense of "peerlessness" must be a bit alienating, but many of us have had this experience without leapfrogging high school.
Given an MIT course at that age I probably would have ignored it in favor of playing outside.
Five year old me would've loved a higher level of education though. School was incredibly boring.
Granted our stuff was just introductory stuff but I doubt I'd care the slightest between AND and OR and associate them with intersection and union if it wasn't for the teachers.
Now my professor in college who teaches operating systems? She could not be more of a downer. You go ask her a question and she says "I can't answer any questions off the top of my head. I am not a genius." Never has she ever said "let's see" or "let's try to figure this out". Her level of enthusiasm makes me wonder why she even teaches at all. She appears exhausted and sad.
To go a little off topic, I want a universal basic income (and universal free healthcare) so that people who don't like the jobs they do or would like to take a break can do so without worrying about money.
Well, I guess my point is school can be boring or interesting depending on the teachers around you. This seems rather obvious. My hypothesis is that teachers who want to teach are likely to be better teachers than those who are just there because they need money.
I never thought of telling anyone that I was working through the rest of the textbook just to keep myself occupied in class. I just kept my head down and did my best to un-bore myself.
Which bit me in the rear end when I got to University and started taking classes that required studying.
Instead of stretching mundane material that could have been taught in a week or two (calculus, etc.) over a period of years, I would have much preferred taking all of my engineering courses then. That would have left plenty of time in undergrad to learn topics as diverse as representation theory, semidefinite programming, quantum information theory, lambda calculus, etc. Instead, I have to learn these things on my own as a grad student in an ad-hoc fashion. Occasionally, courses on these topics become available, but they pop up at random semesters and you can't take all of them.
We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the time. Astronomy club. Chess club. In high school I went to night school with my friends' mom at the university in the big city when I wasn't working to help pay the rent. You just couldn't get the breadth and ease of access to information you can today. It was slow and laborious back then.
But a world like this? Today? Amazing. You don't even have to leave your house. He is lucky. I'm 33 now and I'd kill to be able to study mathematics full time and be a professor some day. It just wasn't in the cards. Parents, circumstances, life and all of that.
Yes... we'll envy stories like this. More of us could have been this hungry. We just couldn't get there.
There's nothing to prevent you from studying those things today, within the constraints of your spare time. If you find the study intrinsically gratifying, I see no reason you should enjoy it any less because it probably won't result in a professorship.
When I do have spare time you bet you'll find me working on a problem, reading a paper, or studying. It's almost like regret knowing that I won't be able to dedicate my life to something I love for the mere circumstance I come from.
When I read about stories like this one I can't help but feel happy for them. They're lucky! They got exactly what they wanted and needed! Not all of us can say the same.
We are all lucky and unlucky relative to someone else. I think time used on regret or "longing for what could have been" is simply time misspent, much like you might regard your childhood. Best of luck overcoming this natural tendency.
Life is nothing but an inevitable race to the end. I try to take it slow and steady. Having some regrets is unavoidable! But it makes stories like this all the more sweet. Not all of us had the same chances but someone made it through and that brings a smile to my face.
Providing an amazing environment for my children has erased all regret for my own childhood. I can see a new hope filled future with new eyes.
Update: Also... kind of terrified of the public education system. No time for home schooling though. Damn circumstance!
So far, it seems to work - the children have a certain detachment to the school environment and a mindfulness about them when they talk about their situation.
Learn from your past, take things from where they are today, and change the things that you can, now, going into the future.
There are other people like you today; some of them will do that, others will only continue to live in regret.
10 years from now you can be the person that they will look at and say "if I had only..."
From the more practical side- the time you spent 'wandering' can pay big dividends over those who are more tightly-focused, when you get to a more strategic role. Having tons of varied experience makes you a better communicator, teacher, & leader...
We came to the conclusion that no matter the path of life you end up taking, you'll regret missed opportunities. I could have studied hard since 9 years old, skipped high school and be a PhD now or something, but then I'd probably talk with some people and start regretting that I haven't the time to read the books and watch the movies that could have shaped my imagination.
So the real advice is - instead of obsessing over the road not taken, focus on what comparative advantage you got from your experiences. Even if you "wasted" half your life drinking with random people, there's still a lot to learn and use from those experiences. The reason we have brains is to figure out how to make the best of what we have.
I decided to become a musician when I was 15 and wasted 6 years pursuing the unrealistic dream. I somehow managed to gave up the dream and became interested in computing in college. I sometimes wish I had become interested in programming instead of drums in junior high, but those 6 years of hustles taught me a lot about team management, entrepreneurship, and how to learn new things. So I don't think I wasted 6 years. As Paul Graham says, you should explore when you are young.
You say that like they're necessarily causal/correlated.
When I was in high school I was clinically depressed, smoked weed every day, shoplifted whenever I could just for the thrill of it, failed most of my classes, and in my afternoons, late nights, and sometimes up to 6am, I was contributing to opensource, writing phpBB mods that thousands of people were using in their bulletin boards. My most popular mod had over 10,000 downloads. They even accepted me into the official mod approval team for a while.
And despite my obsession with coding and working on my career, I was also an adolescent delinquent.
Life is funny that way.
I have full confidence most people are capable, but they would need some exceptionally staunch parents and finacial stability. Plus a lot of drive to accomplish these goals (it is not for everyone).
> Thats why most of us attend public school.
I started my PhD in math at 36. Admittedly, I made some life choices (savings, no kids or mortgage) that kept options like this open.
For now I content myself with following my fancies and working on digestible problems in my spare time (devoured ONAG a couple of years ago, graphs, sets, concrete mathematics... found Martin Gardner and enjoying devouring his recreational maths books). When I get the chance in my work I tend to enjoy the maths more than the programming... distributed systems, computer graphics, compilers. But most commercial programming is book keeping.
C'est la vie.
It's not a question of being a kid, it's a question of living your life as a neurosurgeon because you decided that sounded cool when you were 8, and never really rethinking it until you had a lot of debt.
Sure, if this is what they really want then great. But, thinking this is a good path and they would be wasting there potential being a raft guide is terribly hollow. Getting out of high school at 15 is cool, starting collage is not a goal just a path to something else.
To pick up on the racing comments from above, one should keep in mind Tal Ben-Shahar's warnings about the rat race happiness archetype, where one sacrifices in the present for perceived benefits in the future.
I certainly wish some of my teachers had spent more time teaching the people that cared and less time helping the D students that didn't. It definitely resulted in a few wasted years of education for me.
That said, most of the "critical periods" for learning are over by the time you hit puberty and the ability to learn advanced knowledge, like the kind taught in college, doesn't decline that much with age so I wouldn't worry about it.
I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm guessing you're pretty young. The older you get the less a year or two matters matters.
By the time you're 30, no one (not even yourself) will notice that you are 2 years behind your peers (based on whatever metric you're using). In fact, the older you get, the harder it is to measure what being 2 years behind even means.
And, just think about the huge variations in life span. Say, for example, George finished college 2 years later than Bob. However, George lived to 90 and was able to do productive work right up to the end, and Bob died at 78. George had an entire extra decade, even though he had a slightly later start.
Losing these regrets have made me much much happier and I enjoy a lot more of life now.
EDIT: and no, I didn't mix up b and d when i was 5 years old. I was able to read fluently and to write pretty well. Who cares if I wasted my youth on videogames, I'd do it again.
However, I think it's important to be able to look back at everything and find the positives as well. I think you should take pride in where you are and where you come from. This kid has his story, and so too you have your own, just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad, it's just who you are, and that in itself holds a lot of value.
Today I can say that I would love to have had such an upbringing. At the same time, I can also say that my 5 year old self would have hated it.
“(...) Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games (...)”
I'm a more complete (and interesting!) person because of all that.
There is a lot of benefit to the singularity of purpose at the same time there are a lot of side effects. To give you one example, homeschooled kid lacks good social skills, which are more important to success in life than mere intelligence or knowledge.
Definitely not the case, and I wish this tired cliche would go away already.
My homeschooled sister is far more social than I am (I did the normal school thing), although we're both fine at it. Homeschoolers probably have a lot more realistic socialization opportunities, as it's all based around common interests and skill levels, just like the real world, rather than being packed together with a bunch of people whose only trait in common with you is their age.
Stereotypes like this are broad generalizations and generally not representative of the facts... sort of like saying that all Blacks are criminals, all Muslims are terrorists, or that Gays are child abusers - none of which are generally true.
Most of the homeschoolers I have known have excellent social skills, and further, even the few "creepy" homeschool kids that are really awkward socially tend to grow out of it completely within a couple of years of college.
Also, you get to interact with only about 20 other random people of the same age with the same skill set (by definition). For 10 or so years. Very realistic, totally happens in real life.
I mean, schools are terribly inefficient at teaching skills/knowledge, but they are clearly even more terrible at teaching social skills.
They all seem like pretty good social skills to me.
He's a minority immigrant that fled poverty and homeschooled himself. Please clarify in what ways this was an advantageous upbringing over say an american native raised in the suburbs by a wealthy family who attends the best public schools, few if any of whom enter MIT at 15.
Whereas many working class families toil long hours and weekends at minimum wage jobs just to be able to pay the rent on their small house or apartment and so that they don't lose what little they have, those who have fallen upon hard times (particularly through misfortune, rather than their own laziness or fecklessness) have the opportunity of taking greater risks and investing more in themselves and in their future.
It leads to this weird kind of envy where poor natives look at wealthy second-generation immigrants whose parents fled poverty (often becoming the landlords of the poor natives) and wonder where the hell they went wrong.
Consider a similar situation where a five year old wants to take college courses through an online program in an american native family that is wealthy, except instead his parents dismissed that idea on the sheer ridiculousness of a 5 year old taking online college courses. Or his mother not taking time from her already limited schedule to continue trying to find material for him to consume. This hypothetical child will be advantaged in other aspects of their life to be sure, but they probably won't be accepted to MIT at 15.
“When I was five years old my mom told me ‘there’s this thing called OCW,’” says Rungta, who was homeschooled. “I just couldn’t believe how much material was available. From that moment on I spent the next few years taking OCW courses.”
For Rungta’s mother, the biggest challenge to homeschooling her son was staying ahead of him, finding courses and materials to feed his insatiable mind.
When Rungta turned 12, his family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, as his parents realized he needed to be in a more intellectually stimulating environment. He also wanted to live closer to MIT.
Later that day, Rungta saw an Indian restaurant in the Student Center that had been closed down. He suggested to his dad — a chef who owned a restaurant in Lowell — that he look into reopening the café. His father soon became the manager of Café Spice, and the family moved from Lowell to Cambridge. Rungta studied in the Student Center every day while his father ran the café.
Reflecting on his journey from Calcutta to Cambridge and the many intersecting moments with MIT, Rungta is grateful to his parents and to MIT for being responsive to his needs every step of the way. “MIT has been my middle school, my high school, my entire education. That’s pretty amazing. Some people think I’m gifted, but I don’t think so. OCW was a gift to me. I was lucky to be born at the time MIT was opening up education to the world and extra lucky that OCW brought MIT and me together.”
If the commitment these parents showed to their son's upbringing and education doesn't strike you as absolutely extraordinary, I'm happy for you. But my own opinion is that they went far above and beyond what any ordinary parents would do, including the vast majority of wealthy parents who live in the suburbs. And it's worth pointing out that we can acknowledge this fact while also recognizing this young man has accomplished something exceptional.
I think our view of this gets skewed by sports because it really is an edge case where you have to achieve a certain level of performance in a very specific time period because your body isn't in peak condition forever. Talent may mean you pick up those skills faster and hit that narrow target window. That constraint doesn't seem to be nearly as present in other areas to the same degree: if it takes somebody 5 extra years to become a superb programmer, that won't absolutely kill their chances of having a successful career at it even if they needed the extra time to get there.
Perfectly summarized by one of the inspirational banners at my gym (a local independent that caters heavily to student athletes) reads, "Hard work beats talent when talent isn't willing to work hard".
I was raised in an environment (and at a time) when there were no games like this and I filled the time doing other interesting things that were not only fun but lead to me being able to earn a good living after college.
I was taught by the "look and say" method, now not used in British schools at least. They teach phonics now. Interestingly my daughter is dyslexic and struggled horribly in school to learn by the phonics method. It was when I started teaching her the old fashioned way that she picked it up.
Uh, what? Trouble?
Since Bush the public education system is more geared towards to the D/F students nonetheless, i.e., the no child left behind policy, a road to hell. This might have something to do with Bush, who is about a D student himself.
A solution I would like to see, is tax-relief for home-schooling families, they don't use the public education system so why pay for the school district property tax? This looks like a win-win for the family and the nation in the long run.
Human races compete and evolve, focusing on the left-behinders are so against nature, yes they should be taken care of, but the focus really should be on the other side.
Actually, no. The idea is associated with Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightment and stuff like this. This was years before workers had to be educated. It was actually about humanism and liberty from the catholic church.
That idea is definitely one of the things holding Boston back in terms of startups -- you definitely see research labs at MIT that don't hire postdocs from Stanford or Cornell because they only want to hire MIT people. There are plenty of MIT grads who are mediocre at best but many local startups (particularly those started by MIT grads) don't realize this and often make up all sorts of excuses about why things went wrong.
Taking physics and chemistry classes at 5 years old? Call me crazy, but I think that can certainly be considered gifted by most standards.
-How does one go about replicating this kind of success? Or even moderate success. In typical schools, you have some measure of whether your child is "succeeding". How does one go about doing the same for home-schooled children.
-How do you go about providing the structure that schools provides towards increasingly complex material which will keep the child engaged and learning at the same time.
Not having children myself but watching my brother's children, I can see that the structure provided for children is extremely important, even for simple things like when to have food, go to bed, practice music etc.
Are there any good resources for raising home schooled children and providing structure?
I personally feel like I suffered from my parent's laissez faire attitude.
I don't think anyone is really happy with public schools these days. I object because of a Christian background. Yet my non-church going (atheist?) in-laws asked me once about "non-religious" based home school programs for their kids since they knew I would be home schooling. I really had no idea what to tell them.
Terrence Tao supposedly knew numbers from Sesame Street at age 2, but I do not know of any avid kid readers at age 2.
I know plenty of kids ages 3-4 who know the alphabet but none are actual readers.
In fact I know plenty of kids who "read" a book at age 3, but they are not reading the way we adults are they are imitating the reading process.
Anecdotally I was a relatively early reader at age 5 (reading whole scary Grimm's tales) but my mom keeps insisting it was age 3 when I know it was not.
So if he really was reading at age 2 and half that is showing advanced potential.
Of course not everyone cares, or wants to learn all they can, but for those who do it is important to give them that opportunity. And it is in that context that I think the availability of course ware will help us guide smart, motivated, kids before their boredom leads them into an ill advised adventure.
I don't want to reproduce Ahaan's story. My father was a biology teacher and always had tons of text books we could just kind of grind through growing up. I'm not doing the same for my kids at this time- mostly for lack of resources.
Just skimming through the OCM content- I don't see material in physics or science that can be used to introduce kids to the scientific method. It mostly looks like baptism by fire.
Any tips?
And now imagine that you actually do not need MIT. In comparison to what you have done, it is another rigid institution with a more or less rigid structure.
I hope the educational landscape will keep changing, giving more alternative bodies to aquire high end knowledge, e.g. through hacker spaces, virtual/internet based platforms, etc.
For some the ideal childhood is playing outside, playng games or playing sports. For others it's technology and science.
How do you do that?
"Children are able to learn more, therefore any obsessively accelerated curriculum is justified even if it detracts from other aspects of child hood"
Um, I think that's just an excuse for not learning as an adult and pushing your own failed dreams on your offspring.
How does he know enough math to follow along any scientific course? How can he be well enough versed in literature to follow along a liberal arts course, or history to comprehend a sociology course?
...as soon as you don't understand the math, google it, then keep doing that until you start understanding things (though this is probably more what a 7yo would do, not a 5yo)
That took a lot of courage. Props.
Green card has 6 - 12 years of wait.
watches video of American students at Yale yelling about safe spaces
o_o
I can imagine it being hard to grow up in a place where you have a pretty reasonable expectation of never being able to return to and live in on your own terms, unless you manage to stay the top 1% of the 1%.