Nine-year-old child to graduate university
cnn.com
cnn.com
I don't know so much about electrical engineering, which is the subject in this article. But for mathematics, I don't think it's a great idea to advance to college super early.
One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. The people who went, for example, to Ohio State University while they were young, and took their undergrad math classes, generally didn't describe them as very intellectually interesting.
You also just miss the social interactions of having a peer group near your own age. But I think those are more apparent to people. The problem is that you think you're exchanging some social interaction for a great intellectual experience, and then you don't even really get a great intellectual experience.
My recommendation to kids who are great at math and thinking about taking college classes is, don't. If the math classes at your high school are too easy, ask your teachers if you can skip straight to the AP exam. In my experience, teachers who are hesitant to break the rules of the system are more willing to believe the "proof" of an AP exam, and a smart kid can ace an AP exam in a subject they know nothing about with a little bit of cramming.
It's better to wait and go to a top-tier school rather than to start college super early at a medium-tier school.
For math specifically, you can usually just start taking graduate math courses during your freshman year at university. That way, you get the intellectual stimulation of grad school, but the social stimulation of an undergrad program. And if you change your mind and decide you want a career in something other than mathematics, you have plenty of time.
That wasn't my experience. (I went to a top liberal arts college - it didn't give minors, but I took enough math courses that it would've been a minor at other schools.)
In my experience, post-calculus college-level math is qualitatively different from high-school math in focusing on proofs and abstractions over problem-solving, techniques & algorithms. I had an intuitive sense for high-school math. College math kicked my ass, because I was asked to prove everything rigorously, and the proofs just kept coming, dozens of them per homework assignment. That required a very different way of thinking than high-school math did: you needed to remember this large body of theorems and combine them in creative ways to derive new proofs, you couldn't just memorize recipes and techniques that will get you the answer.
I found that physics was more like the continuation of high-school math, except that then your courses had all this lab work and experiment design and fundamental physical principles. One of my friends (a math/physics double major) described it like this: "In physics vectors are objects that live in a vector space, while in math a vector space is a set of axioms from which the concept of a vector and rules for manipulating them naturally fall out."
Edit: hmm, just looked at the username. I know you, and I also know you're better at math than I am. I'm curious just what kind of math you did in high school and what you did in college where the college math was no harder than high school. Either your high school had some really great math courses or your college had some pretty shitty ones. Maybe it's just where we went to school.
I think Terry Tao describes the stages of mathematical maturity really well: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...
The courses which are typically boring for advanced kids are calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, probability, statistics, combinatorics. Most of an undergrad math degree usually falls into this bucket but it really varies by university.
Also, there’s a big difference between colleges. Not because of the curriculum as much as the other students who will set the pace of the class. Often the same kid who could attend Ohio State at 14 could also attend Princeton at 18, and that makes a difference even if the course titles are the same.
That's just not true. That's the freshman/sophomore curriculum. And there are big differences between the diff eq, stats & linear algebra course which are which are 'proof' vs. those which are 'practical'.
That’s one small part of the intro algebra course at my university, which all math and CS students take in the fall of first year. The first year calculus courses are considerably proof-based as well, and lots of first years end up failing despite being a high 90s student at their high school.
A more typical high school student who got 80s in their sleeves and calculus courses would fail everything and be asked to withdraw.
People are going to have different opinions on whether or not it's worth a 13 year sentence of boredom in order to socialize with age peers, but I really question whether the default high school experience is, for most people, a good thing. Activities like sports and music seem like a vastly better return on effort for advanced kids, with more positive values in the milieu than the typical high school popularity contest.
Ultimately, the world is defined by a vast diversity in ages, backgrounds, and capabilities. If you want to do something in that world, and you're really young, you'll first have to get used to being the youngest person in the room.
Throw all of this argument out the window if the student actually enjoys school, of course.
Student: Man I don't want to take this boring mandatory calculus class.
Teacher: You have to.
Student: But I already know all this stuff!
Teacher: Mmmmm, well that's just like your opinion, man.
Student: What if I ace the AP exam?
Teacher: OK, then I would believe you.
In my experience it's pretty rare for all of high school to be boring. You probably haven't read the particular works they're discussing in English class, you probably haven't read about the particular time period they're discussing in history. And even if you have, there's plenty more you can learn about those things. The most common area to be bored by is math, because you can pick that all up yourself relatively easily.
University was so much better! For highly motivated and gifted students, early university can be a great option. It is important to place it on a larger arc of one's own journey of learning, development, and self discovery, however, that must continue for as long as one keeps growing.
As an important aside, girls and boys have approximately equal interests in science math and technology earlier on; for girls this changes pretty severely in middle school and high school. I'm sure there a very large social component to this, parents would do well to inoculate against it by finding alternative environments, and university is certainly one.
I think this is very US-specific. Here in Europe there's definitely a huge difference. You enroll in a pure math-only 5 year degree, and are talking about topology in your third semester already. That might be a specific thing only my analysis prof does, but quite a lot of time is devoted to neatly delineating different levels of structure you're equipping a space with, proving things with as less structure as possible or at least discussing it. You are expected to juggle tricks on a totally different level, which takes a lot more qualitatively different practice than in HS.
When I talk to people who take math classes in the US it's usually not on that level of engagement until the graduate courses. Maybe it depends on their university, in smaller European countries you often have just like one main math program that is then high-intensity.
But you can go to schools like the University of Toronto, which is a strong math school and has very challenging programs like ASSPE1165 (https://fas.calendar.utoronto.ca/mathematics-specialist-scie...)
I can actually agree with you from experience. I was homeschooled from age 13, but my parents didn’t know enough math to home school me in it, so my mother got me into a dual-enrollment program with a community college for math and CS. Overall I did ok, but calculus really threw me for a loop, and I ended up scraping through calc I & II with C’s. I often wonder if I had taken those classes when I was 20 rather than 15 if I would have done any better. My own son took the test (at his math teachers urging) to get into high school algebra while he was still in middle school. He didn’t pass the test, so he had to take plain-old middle-school algebra, and he was actually a little bummed out about it. I told him that when you’re 30, the only thing that really matters (if anything) is where you went to school, which depends a LOT on your test scores… not how old you were when you took the tests. He knew some of the kids who “made the cut”, and they struggled with high school algebra, got B’s and C’s, and one actually dropped out of high school last year while my son is still a straight A student.
Sorry if I am not convinced. In my country most schools are considered somewhat equal. Maybe in the US it is very different.
I keep hearing this when the school wants to put kids on the advanced track. All it does is give them more work and risk lowering their GPA, which is far more important for admissions. One district allegedly give a 0.5 bump just for taking the bait to make up for that. It's all a game.
Goodhart’s law and all that - if unadjusted GPA were the sole number to target, it would make way more sense to take the easiest classes possible and never challenge yourself.
I know online classes don't have a great record, but this is probably one of the instances where it makes the most sense. The student is presumably motivated, and if they're not, then it's not a big deal. They're already ahead and can do something else at their regular school.
As you say, students who have that aptitude for math tend to have a sufficient motivation to do the self-study, especially if the material can be presented as some sort of challenge (how fast can you get through this textbook?).
I wonder if this sets the teacher up for reprimand though via 'no child left behind' type stuff. I wonder what the repercussions would be if a student complained that someone else was getting more attention (advanced work in this case) which received attention from the administration.
My fiance is a high school math teacher and just a few weeks ago she had a student claim she was bullying him, which got administration involved with a parent-teacher-administrator-student conference. When the student was asked how he bullies her "she makes me stay awake and do my work in class" which got her off and got her an apology from administration but she was legitimately nervous about it prior to the meeting because that's the state of public education now.
Anecdotally, she's doing her best just to get her students capable of doing the assigned math as they will just pop out their phones when she's not looking (or when they think she isn't) and use some app on their phones to tell them the answers (PhotoMath I think) so they aren't even getting the foundations they need to continue to advanced maths. At her current school someone wanting advance placement would be a pretty rare exception. She has multiple students that will write profanities as answers, will draw cartoons as answers, will write things along the lines of "I don't know I want to die" "this doesn't matter" etc the past few years. Seeing the 9 year old in the OP article seems miraculous to us both given the state of things at some schools.
Can we all agree to never use that word? Actual prodigies are measure zero in the general population. Terry Tao is a prodigy. The rest of us are just normal schmucks.
Prodigy suggests that talent comes naturally to and is dismissive of the massive amount of work that goes into preparing for something like the IMO.
My general feeling now is that talent as perceived by others is mostly a function of hard work. Looking back, the level of persistence I was able to apply to mathematical problems at such an early age without any real supervision was incredible. I was almost entirely self-taught from age 7-10 and without being on a strict curriculum, this included some college level math. I think this was a function of a lot of things that don't have much to do with natural ability.
There's a huge difference between learning something because some external pressure dictates that you learn it and truly immersing yourself in something and just letting go. Math isn't that exciting for most people, so the vast majority of people never cross over to the latter. So the extremely small percentage of people that are able to cross the chasm and deal with math natively can stand out.
I mean, my basis for that estimate is that I know a bunch of people without such immersion who got that far when I was a kid, who were on the regular school education track, didn't self-educate outside that, and didn't have much external pressure either.
Edit: But I don't mean to imply these people absolutely never thought about math or numbers outside of the classroom, because it's interesting, and they most certainly did, just no traversal through a curriculum, or deep immersion.
And imagine trying to make the same argument for basketball. Kids with low field goal percentages just don't want it enough?
Or are you saying top tier schools for math are so much better, that aspiring mathematicians should wait if at all possible to go to a top tier school? What if he's admitted at a top tier school at 9?
I did community college in high school so I’d say it’s better to eliminate the “boring” general ed classes first but that’s just my experience.
I don't know specifically about the Eindhoven University of Technology but it seems like roughly the 100th best school in Europe, which in the US would be like going to Saint Louis University. A fine school I'm sure, but if you can graduate there when you're 9 then maybe you should just instead go to Harvard when you're 18.
There are caveats, I know someone who finished the CS curriculum in high school, when he got to Berkeley the only credits he had left for his CS degree were non-CS, which bored him, so he just dropped out and started a startup. Seems fine now, as far as that goes, aside from the exodus from the bay area that the housing situation has forced on many of us...
Socializing is huge. I really cannot emphasize enough how important it is, especially for younger kids. If you're really smart or gifted in a subject, there are multiple other avenues to take that still let you hang out with peers around your age.
I transitioned from homeschool to public school at one point during my childhood and I think I was actually much more socialized in homeschool where I was in sports, Scouts, intentional play dates, etc. that my parents were doing to avoid the socialization problem. Whereas once you’re put in public school it’s simply assumed you will be somehow “socialized” (in reality socialization in school often takes the form of bullying, especially if you’re clearly different from peers in some way like intelligence, or you can end up just not having friends)
Parents should definitely take socialization into account for such a student, but I don’t think putting them into a standard school academic track is the only way to achieve such socialization.
Obviously there are a lot of benefits from socializing at school but there's really a lot you can do without. It would be much more beneficial to get kids to socialize in an environment where beating someone up actually ends up in the court.
Not saying it’s not possible, but a school setting is definitely one very easy organic path to socializing children.
But won't my child become a unsocial hermit?! Interestingly, I've heard people dislike unschooling not because they are afraid that their children will not learn anything, but because they are afraid they will not develop "healthy social relationships with their peers". Nothing could be farther from the truth.
First, school is not a place to develop social relationships. In fact, it seems designed to stifle them. There is hardly little time for socialization provided, and it is discouraged for the majority of the school day. Any student who does develop a true relationship with someone does it outside of school: at a local meeting place (like a park or mall); when going over to a friend's house; or after school. An unschooler can still do all of these things.
Second, who decided that meaningful relationships could only be had with other people who happen to be in roughly the same physical area at roughly the same age? If anything, this is a severely restrained peer group. I have developed my most meaningful relationships online. None of them live within driving distance. None of them are about my own age. Even among those who I would not count as "friends", I have met many people online who have simply commented on my work or are interested by what I do. Through the Internet, I've developed a strong social network -- something I could never do if I had to keep my choice of peers within school grounds.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101219193753/http://www.aarons...
I think public schools do a pretty good job teaching kids to not speak openly with adults.
Totally helped me socialize - first year uni students cared less about who I hung out with, and more about who I was. I was able to reset and engage with people in the way I wanted to. I was also able to accelerate my pathway to meeting attractive and mature young women, since I went to an all boys high school.
Still trying to shake of the horrible socialization that is the result of accepting that the people who are left behind by the education system act out in violent ways.
Socializing in your formative years is MASSIVE.
There are posts about home school students, some of the teams meet at the local library (not just books!) and that also helps
This makes it less likely for them to enjoy moving to a place where this topic is nonexistent.
Or, to say it in ML terms, it would be very surprising for this child to be trained so fast without overfitting.
The intense focus on academic learning does very little to prepare you for being a productive human out in the real world, which is tacitly a part of the environment normal kids grow up in. That many of these kids are dropped into the real world even earlier than their age peers due to accelerated schooling just compounds this.
One the upside, one elementary school that had no idea how to teach me sat me in front of a computer and left me to my own devices. So I taught myself to program.
Can you potentially figure it out over a long period of time if you happen to hook up with some folks that are very understanding and tolerant of "odd" behavior? Sure... but you're talking years and years and years of interaction to recoup those lost social skills.
Not so easy for the one under selection!
Humans are animals, and social animals at that. If we don't give our brains social release, we're going to struggle.
And by that I mean quite literally I had the epiphany that I was ahead of my peers/some teachers when I entered high school (i remember it was the first time I realised they were ranking us and that we were supposed to be competing for grades... hadn't received any/paid attention to them until then), and so made a vow (child's/ adolescent minds are funny like that) that i would do whatever it takes to learn the truth about things irrespective of this social system/mandate to keep going to school.
Its worked out for me in the long run, but that's partly because I'm deeply interested in the social sciences and so was spending so much time thinking about how these strange humans act and what I can do to learn from their behaviour (still do and always will feel like an alien/man trapped in an asylum though).
At the time though, it resulted in all kinds of social problems. I just stopped doing some assignments + homework. I failed math, then simultaneously topped the grade on the national standardised test they made us take, resulting in a meeting with the school/my parents. I called the math teacher stupid, thinking the adults would listen/care to listen to my words. I was accused of plagiarism in one of my English classes and received a failing grade for that until another meeting: the evidence? Just a general feeling that it was 'too good for someone like me, so someone else must have written it'. I got on fine enough with my peers, it was largely the irrational adult world I couldn't understand at the time.
They tried putting me in gifted programs occasionally, but I viewed (accurately imo) that the children in them were social climbers rather than gifted/smart, so I didn't get along with the other kids in them at all (not as in hostile, as in I just found them incredibly boring people and the entire experience incredibly boring).
In summary, I continued to have social problems and continued this pattern of non attendance, non completion, failure, and randomly top out some metric.
I made it to university where I was promised it would be more intellectual: it wasn't, and my perception there was that it was even more authoritarian/social and about parroting back what the lecturers wanted to hear and doing the admin dance rather than actual intellectual inquiry. I had some good lecturers, but some of the were on another planet of dumb (mainly due to the specialisation heirachy of the university system: even today the idea that you could have knowledge/expertise from more than one field hurts brains). I eventually graduated with a similar pattern of grades, but stopped attending any lectures by the end of it and regularly handed in my assignments late (due, fundamentally, to the mental drudgery of doing them and the absolute inanity of the questions/formats).
My actual goal was a success though: I spent huge amounts of my spare time reading/ studying/discussing things of my own volition, and all I can say is thank GOD I was born just in time for the internet to arrive as I hit adolescence or I think that would have been the end of me. I consider myself learned, mature and happy now. I have a family, and, currently, a job where people listen to me (and outside of silicon valley, a wage considered high, plus I live exactly where I want with access to learning materials still).
It left me deeply distrustful of formal education systems and social institutions (I think justifiably/accurately).
Someone without my ability to learn/observe/pick up on social cues would have been chewed up and spat out though once they reached the real world assuming dad isn't giving them a job, and I would say it's been far from smooth sailing even for me (80% of my life is still pretending I'm 'dumber' than I really am, even though I'm now partly looked up to as an authority in my line of work, and smiling/trying to get along with everyone and the social system).
Protip for those following after: 80% of human social interaction is comprised of recognising who has authority/status, smiling, and avoiding open conflict :p everything also makes a lot more sense when you realise truth doesn't rate as an ongoing concern in most human's lives (but being viewed as 'socially correct' is extremely important).
I didn't try to do it because I didn't understand the relative difficulty of high school and (your average non-elite) college, at the time, though. High school eats so much time that college ended up feeling much easier, and the course work for subject areas outside the harder end of STEM wasn't a bit tougher than that of high school (the dividing line is essentially "is any of the math required more difficult than Calc 1?"). I wasn't expecting the first couple years of a 4-year degree to often fail to go past material we'd covered in 8th grade (looking at you, Psych. 101 requirement). I just expected it to be much harder than it actually was, since I gathered that's how it's supposed to be.
However, I think it all worked out, as long as parents make provisions for social adjustment things can work out okay. I don't know about 9 though, seems tough, i literally could not imagine it because college was a lot more than just studying. Especially since I was in a cognitive science not like a hard STEM, lots of social interaction and open ended questions.
I cannot imagine going at 14. That must have been pretty weird. At 16 I was fine and the biggest issue was the dating and (underage) drinking mismatch.
For me going at 16 was an incredible relief. I was incredibly, incredibly bored and unchallenged in school until that point. I wish there wasn't such a stigma about it because I imagine there are lots of other people who had the same level of terrible frustration.
This sounds expensive
There's a HN posting in why there is such a dearth of technical support hires in the modern era and it starts with killing the pipeline and ends with eviscerating the entire career in the outsourcing binge of the early 2000s...
I can't imagine isolating a child like that at a university.
It's not the same socialization as with your peers that kids need.
Short term - very very hungry. Long term - a far more effective and well-integrated member of society.
Sorry for asking, but what problems exactly do you have in non-academic sense?
<Company A> Hiring manager: checks resume This guy graduated back in 2019 and hasn't had a job since? Nope, no way. I'm not interested. Probably some lazy kid again.
<Company B> Interviewer: So I saw you graduated in 2019? What jobs have you had since then? Any personal projects?
Kid: (incredulous)
A few questions, and feel free to ignore, tangent, etc. any as you see fit:
1.) It seems you had a good educational upbringing from your parents. What did they do to encourage and promote your ability to learn and understand?
2.) What things do you think children in your situation need to be made aware of–whether it's to understand life, childhood, society, or themself–that may be overlooked?
I'll leave it at that for now. I ask because as I plan for parenthood, I want to make sure I can help my child understand the world better, but also be socially well adapted for their peers, as well as feel good about their life as they understand who they are in the world.
Thanks
I think (2) is a good question, but a huge one, I'm not sure what to say within a HN comment. I know it's a cliche, but certainly that being smart isn't everything, there's a lot more to life. The game-like recognition of academic credentials and so on is not as meaningful in the real world as it seems "in the bubble."
That said, what I think is a common thread of prodigies is a hunger and thirst for knowledge, to learn things. I carry that with me today, and think it's something to be nourished.
But I'll say this. I was very socially awkward as a kid and teenager. I dated some as an older teenager, but didn't feel quite comfortable until I got to grad school (at 22). Then I fell in with a peer group, got a really good friend group (who I still keep in touch with), dated and got married, had two kids, now divorced. So it's definitely part of my story, but my experience now is probably not all that different than most of my friends.
I know that this kid was raised really isolated from kids around the same age, did you also have this and how do look back at this?
And yes, I was pretty isolated from other kids. Part of that story is that I grew up in a very rural, mountainous area. Looking back, I wish I had had more of a peer group. I wanted to go to the Johns Hopkins gifted program, but I think my parents were reluctant to let their little boy go into the big bad world. I regret they didn't.
Also how did this affect your expectations of your own children?
Regarding my own children, this is complicated and I don't really want to talk about it here, but I'll say that their mom and I made sure to make opportunities available, but put a lot less pressure on them than I had when I was growing up.
Everyone was suggesting us to skip two or three classes and keep skipping them.
I refused and kept him in his normal track because he was emotionally a 8 yo kid,who spittle play with other children, who silly things and learn to be social.
I let him read a lot, he was interested in science so we were discussing these subjects a lot etc.
He is now 16, happy, doing silly things with his peers and otherwise attending the 3rd high school in the country (being average+ there). I am everyday so happy with our choice.
It's a 3 year program that I believe the average student could do in at least half the time if they where give the same freedoms this boy has been given.
A 14 year old girl started the same program around 2006, she did do the full, regular coursework.
I saw an article where one genius kid years ago was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said a gameshow host.
They get by with their raw intellect for most of school, and everyone compliments them on how smart they are. But they never learn skills like how to study, how to learn, how to persevere etc.
So once they hit their plateau, which everyone does, they don't know how to get past it and then they give up. A kindergartener that can read like a grade 8 will work off her raw intellect until she gets to grade 8, but then once her abilities max out, she won't have learned how to get past that, and that's where she flames out.
It happens all the time, even to friends of mine in high school. One of my gifted friends did well in high school but unfortunately flamed out in spectacular fashion in freshman year and I haven't heard from her in 30 years, even though we were extremely close and I reached out to her several times over the years.
A smart girl who grows up in a school where everyone's getting pregnant at 14 might end up pregnant at 14. A smart kid who grows up in Flint might have to deal with the same lead poisoning as everyone else, with potentially varying symptoms. A smart kid whose parents are depressed in its adolescence might be depressed.
There are many potential causes of burnout and it's extremely unhelpful to assume that we know what's happening to these kids based on "I know a guy who knows a guy". What you're essentially doing is framing a kid's failures as a moral issue of perseverance and study skills when it might be, but it also might not be.
Imagine being naturally competent but having a mental illness that invites the public to inject their own personal biases.
And of course, conscientiousness isn't fixed. You can improve it through various means. Although if you're extremely low in it in my view you're likely not going to be able to improve such that you can become the most conscientious person out of 100, for instance.
When we talked about it in the past, his reasoning is: "life is short, I'm going to have all the fun I can before I die."
I'm pretty sure he knows this deep down inside, but that "have fun, don't give a fuck"-attitude is just a too convenient rationalization for being a lazy coward.
Why is "playing videogames" considered not meaningful? I have a group of friends that I have played video games with for over 10 years. We have shared a number of life ups and downs together and have met up in person numerous times. I would argue that we all bonded over videogames and it was the door that opened a broader friendship among each of us. Oh yeah, to be a bit a dick, we all make over 200 on average, with one way north of that. Every one of us is well-adjusted and now married.
That's really what you wanted to measure, right? How "successful" one is. Stereotyping isn't helpful. It blinds you to things that exist as they are.
Grow up.
> Grow up.
Part of growing up is recognizing that you don't get to set your own values. You're not biologically capable of ignoring how other specimens judge you and how you measure up against them. Even if you don't believe in these "natural values", your own nature will be telling you that you're too maladapted to be part of the future. It'll make you wither and die, to make room for everyone else. That's not a happy ending.
You'll be a loser that has wasted a life, and everyone recognizes that, even though they'll never dare tell you. You will most likely recognize it yourself at some point, or maybe your cognitive dissonance will protect you, but I wouldn't count on it.
Happiness comes from within, and I respect this more than chasing fame or fortune because of the expectations of others.
I was born reasonably smart-ish. Did okay in school, have a good job writing code because I have an aptitude for it. But if I had a big dream, it would be in entertainment.
source: https://www.npr.org/2014/03/08/287255411/what-the-u-s-can-le...
Can you even enroll in university without a high school diploma? I certainly might have if I had heard more stories like this.
It should get less common, if more parents understand the developmental and psychological damage to the child.
I skipped a couple of grades, and started university at 16. By far the worst time that I had, in my psychological development, was in middle school, when I was among same-age peers. Children can be incredibly cruel to eachother.
Since everybody gets that, that's the same as the "developmental and psychological damage inflicted" by society, or life in general.
In other words, a necessary evil. And perhaps not even evil, just something to make people stronger for the real world, which is not all roses and love.
Children might be incredibly cruel to each other, but the stakes are much lower. In adult life adults can be cruel to each other in much higher stakes (cheating on you, taking advantage of you, stealing from you, abusing you, beating you, looking down on you, and tons of other ways). And that doesn't stop in a few years, like school does. Those cruelties can go on till one dies...
My social experience in middle school was horrific, and school in general tried its best to beat any interest in learning out of me.
If those are the stated goals of school, most of them do a piss-poor job at meeting them.
So that's part of the "social experience".
Someone home schooled, especially if kept from friends too, would have a much bigger problem understanding adult life.
There really needs to be some method for giving them the chance to excel to their maximum (without unfairly pushing them because we can) while also having a chance to experience more general social settings.
I wish more parents were involved with their children's education, some just expect the government to educate their kids while they just work or stay at home. Some aren't even really aware of charter schools, which some are way better compared to the local public school. Got to be accepted, but at least it doesn't cost like private school since the funds are moved from the local city school to the charter school.
There's a family who sold their house to full time RV, and their dad is a web developer, but him and his wife have already started teaching the kids to read and write even though not even at age for school yet, which they are homeschooling anyways - but kinda forced to if traveling full time. Looks like there's some company that sells you a package with the curriculum. I guess that doesn't work for every family, but I really love to see when parents are more involved, and get a bit jealous. I feel like that gives them a head start.
Then some kids don't even go to preschool. I feel like the education system is one size fits all too. Kinda wish we had more school choices, and then not everyone has the same learning style. I remember seeing on the news once some school started as a experiment to teach via games. Forget what it's called. Some kids who are told they are ADD or ADHD, when really it's the style of educating that's the fault, so the lazy teachers tell their parents to put them on drugs so they are labeled as disabled just to get more funding for the school to pocket.
What a lot of us did (including myself and apparently a lot of other commenters in this thread) was took advantage of community college dual enrollment programs: if your middle- or high-school teacher approves it, and you can pass an entrance exam, they’ll let you take community college courses for credit part time even without a high school diploma. Well, if you’re home schooled, your “teachers”/parents are probably going to approve it, so as long as you can pass the entrance exam, you can start accumulating college credit as early as you care to.
> I'm fairly certain I could have kept up with at least the average college student
If you're on here, almost definitely ;)
He finished highschool a year earlier (he only did a single year for his bachelor's). And by law you must have a highschool diploma to start uni over here.
Even if the rest had very interesting research, you wouldn't hear about them outside of their chosen field unless they reached superstar status.
"After graduating from Ayer High School in 1906 at 11 years of age, Wiener entered Tufts College. He was awarded a BA in mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14, whereupon he began graduate studies of zoology at Harvard. In 1910 he transferred to Cornell to study philosophy. He graduated in 1911 at 17 years of age."
There are also, of course, many, many more musical and chess prodigies, for example... Mozart probably being the most famous of them all.
Curiously, there don't seem to be any significant prodigy novelists or poets.
"Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark (Hebrew: רות אלקה לורנס-נאימרק, born 2 August 1971) is a British–Israeli mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology."
"In 1981 Lawrence passed the Oxford University entrance examination in mathematics, joining St Hugh's College in 1983 at the age of twelve."
Discovered group theory and died in a duel at 20. His work is very important to modern cryptography.
From time to time, we see articles like this of a gifted children.
And then we never hear from them ever again.
It seems to me that having a gift is not synonymous with being (moderately) successful.
Am I totally biased, wrong on this notion?
I know one guy that finished his Bsc in math by age 17, and got accepted to Cambridge - he's a rich fund manager today. Didn't really contribute to science, but interests change with time.
As a counter example, Zuck, Sergey Brin and Lady Gaga were identified as talented youth. They may not have been covered by the Economist when they were kids. But all of them are certainly successful in my book.
2. being famous at an early age is probably correlated with wanting to be as far away from the public eye as possible as an adult, if any other options are there.
But also, I was in one of those articles (a long time ago and am now an Old in internet time), so AMA, I guess.
"Child prodigy turns into well adjusted and highly regarded member of society" just isn't news. The opposite of that is news.
Ask me anything about later life of child prodigies etc.
I don't regret doing this. I was a super-fast learner, and I don't think I would be able to bear a full-length school+university circuit.
Many people consider child prodigies to be incredibly talented and thus expect great breakthroughs in research from them, e.g. Terrance Tao, but do you feel that talent alone is enough?
Can you still learn new subjects / fields ?
What is it like talking to a 9 year old who has completed a 4-year EE degree?
Can you walk up to the kid and say, "Hey, solve this bridge/op-amp circuit's transfer function?" or ask a humanities question, "What are the ethical dilemmas inherent in an open discussion forum?"
I guess this is what it feels like to be a young-earth creationist: I simply cannot wrap my head around a 9-year old being able to answer these question, so like a creationist I choose to believe it is a fake.
You think you're picking on an easy target there, but if you talked to some, you might actually find a few that will talk about young-earth creationism in the context of something interesting like Einsteins theories of gravitational time dilation. Had an engineering professor like this.
Call it cognitive dissonance or not, but it seems pretty normal to be able to hold two concepts in one's head, even ones that seem to conflict... with the hopes of one day reconciling them.
There's just no way a 9 year old can handle serious research papers or form complex arguments about social and global issues. Two things common in most university general education programs.
Can a 9 year old be good at something specific? Sure... but I'd put my money on this kid was pushed through for the narrative and not for the actual coursework.
But Lydia (the mother) has her own theory. "I ate a lot of fish during the pregnancy"
When I look at earlier generation (I am 77 born), I notice that they are happier than others in tough times. And the generation younger than me feels irritated when the elders ask them to take it easy or ask them to ignore some comments etc.
The academic competition is taking lives out of people.
I wish this kid the best.
It always worries me to see news like this. I really don't see the benefit of this type of lifestyle for a kid. Even assuming the best case scenario for him it just seems like he's being forced into adulthood too early.
(This is partially from my own experience, although it's nothing like in the story.)
I'm still a teenager, but I'm in the workforce, but I try to maintain some level of "kid-ness". I still do stupid stuff with my friends, and make out in parking lots. Both are possible, and if this guy is determined, he can skip a lot of the boring parts of life and get to the good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ
In this video she is 11. When she was 5 she told her parents she wanted to become a professional drummer. They got her an instructor and she started performing publicly at age 6, and has since gone on to a very successful career.
It's really interesting to see what growing up in the political capitol of europe among children to diplomats can do to a kid.
For instance everyone in my extended family speaks 3 languages at least, some 4, due to historical circumstances. It's simply a question of exposure.
If you go to Fribourg in Switzerland there's a whole area where people speak both French, Swiss German, and High German. And these days English as well. The rest of the Swiss at least learn several languages in school, though perhaps not using them constantly.
Is her's adjusted to 20 years?