[prodigies] are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids
... nor should they be. I was learning calculus in elementary school and writing the Putnam in high school. No matter how hard they tried, there's no way the schools I was enrolled in could have given me those opportunities. What prodigies need it not opportunities in school, but rather schools which are flexible enough to let them access opportunities outside of school -- in my case, starting my days at Simon Fraser University and packing my high school courses into the afternoon.
Those of us who managed sky-high SAT scores at 13 were 20 times as likely as the average American to get a doctorate; let's say, being charitable, that we're 100 times as likely to make a significant scientific advance. Since we're only 1 in 10,000 of the U.S. population, that still leaves 99% of scientific advances to be made by all those other kids who didn't get an early ticket to the genius club. We geniuses aren't going to solve all the riddles. Most child prodigies are highly successful — but most highly successful people weren't child prodigies.
This is probably the most important paragraph in the article. The numbers are unsupported, but I don't think they're so far off as to invalidate the point.
It isn't exactly wrong to say that Terry Tao and other former prodigies like him are geniuses. But it is more accurate to say that what they accomplished was genius. Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.
Genius is both a noun and an adjective describing some people. It's a shame that Dr. Ellenberg felt it necessary to end an otherwise good article with such a piece of pithy nonsense.
Genius is poorly defined. Take all the different ways someone can qualify and you end up with something far more common than people assume.
EX: Apparently, Einstein was an ok chess player and Oppenheimer sucked. Yet, chess prodigy's are often called geniuses even if that's the only thing there particularity good at.
Businesses, Language, Math, Music, Go, Chess, IQ tests, Poetry, Physics, Early development, and Sculpture don't really have all that much in common. In the end it's much more meaningful to say someone is a _ genius than simply calling them a genius because g is closer to a myth than reality.
Businesses, Math, Music, Go, Chess, IQ tests, Poetry, Physics, Early development, and sculpture don't really have all that much in common.
... except for the people who excel at them. The author of this article is a mathematics professor and an author. I'm a computer scientist and a violinist. And in my time reviewing entrance scholarship applications for my alma mater, I don't think I've ever seen a student who excels in a single academic field and has no other unusual talents or accomplishments.
It takes more to be outstanding as you get older, so a 10 year old can be outstanding in several of them. And a collage student may keep up with 3 or 4.
However, none of the worlds best people in any of those, as in top 5, is also the worlds best any in any of the others. Not to step on anyone toes here. Michael Jordan was an incredible baseball player as in better than 99.99% of everyone that has ever played the game and by the 1:10,000 concept he may have been a dual genius, but that was not enough to be outstanding at the top level. And that is for two vary closely related sports.
So sure you can be outstanding in 2 or 3 of them but good luck finding people that can play at even just the professional level in Go, Physics, Sculpture, AND Poetry.
PS: My point is that collectively they don't share much in common. The Music / Math link while strong is not the same as the Music / Sculpture link.
I agree with your post, however, there are exceptions. While Jordan didn't have the best baseball career, Bo Jackson did excellent in both football and baseball.
Bo Jackson won't make the Hall of Fame in either of those sports, let alone both.
IMO, making the Hall of Fame is one obvious/indisputable mark of someone who is truly distinguished by excellence in the sport. (He did make the All Star & Pro Bowl, but those are far less distinguished honors, with something like 5-10% of players making those teams each year. So, rather than being a "top 5" type of mark, it's a "top 68" (baseball) and "top 110-ish" (football).)
Don't forget "mile-wide inch-deep" generalist geniuses. They aren't particularly gifted in one area, but are able to achieve simultaneous competency in a very large number of discrete disciplines. We used to call these folks "Renaissance Men", but the recognition of excessive achievement in specialties has virtually eliminated recognition for that kind of intellect.
Success in life is more correlated with ambition than with knowledge: an average educated but very ambitious person have more probabilities of being successful than a super smart individual that is ambitious but about knowledge and ideals, not money.
If you link this lack of focus in taking profit from your actions in life with a master in a struggling field, you are on your way to an underachiever life. That's me.
That probably depends if your definition of "success" is centred around "money" or around "happiness". (Or some other factor that I haven't considered).
Not so. Renaissance people (there are a few, even today) tend to end up underemployed. If you want to be a "business multimillionaire", you go the opposite way. You focus, you narrow yourself, but you have to focus on something that can actually make you money (i.e. not medieval history).
Why are most of the true Renaissance people underemployed, obscure, and financially mediocre? It's because the only thing that can tell a polymath from a dabbler is time.
... nor should they be. I was learning calculus in elementary school and writing the Putnam in high school. No matter how hard they tried, there's no way the schools I was enrolled in could have given me those opportunities. What prodigies need it not opportunities in school, but rather schools which are flexible enough to let them access opportunities outside of school -- in my case, starting my days at Simon Fraser University and packing my high school courses into the afternoon.
Not to derail from the article's point too much, but there are schools / programs specifically for talented youth - although they are not everywhere (sounds like there were none wherever you grew up). I know of one high school where a large number of students write the Putnam. I think it is important to have these schools / programs because pursuing opportunities outside of school is not always possible / easy for disadvantaged youth.
there are schools / programs specifically for talented youth
Yes and no. There are schools and programs specifically for kids in the 99th percentile, sure. In a large city, there will be enough kids for that to be feasible (as long as the kids have parents who will drive them across town).
But I'm pretty sure there are no schools dedicated to students in the 99.99th percentile. Even in New York City there are only 10 students per year at that level.
True, the top 0.01% is not going to work, but Los Angeles has a public school program that explicitly focuses on the top 0.1% (although recently they have rounded out their admissions with those in the top 0.5%):
I attended this program in elementary school and it seems to have spoiled me socially, since the students in the program were so much more interesting to me than other kids.
I suspect the reason the school district chose to create the program is because of the notoriety of the Mirman School, a lauded K-8 private school which also has top-0.1% admissions requirements.
So at least in some areas, education tailored to the 99.9th percentile has a long track record. But sadly, I have no idea if the practices and knowledge of that experience are available to inform highly-gifted education in other parts of the world.
Yes, I think aiming for the 99.9th percentile is a good target -- for reasonable-sized cities, that gives you a large enough segment to ensure that students have age peers, while being selective enough that the kids in the 99.99th percentile are likely to have at least some intellectual challenge.
I don't consider that to be part of the school system, though -- rather, that's a scheme to allow students to escape from the school system, just like the one I used.
Well, you're right that it's not part of any school that is designed to handle the general population. But I was making the point that prodigies don't need to look outside of their schools if they attend schools designed for them.
But apart from a short transition program, they're not attending an institution designed for them -- they're being mixed in with the general UW population.
If you think about the needs of gifted youth, there's basically two broad categories - academic and social. From an academic perspective, they're fine and probably better off in college, where they can take undergraduate and graduate level courses, do research with professors, etc. From a social perspective, the program actually does fulfill that need too, by providing resources and social opportunities to Transition School alumni (it's on campus, so it's sort of just a place for them all to hang out with each other). By and large, I don't think the students feel like they are just abandoned after they graduate from the Transition School. Also, Transition School is a year long, so it's a decent chunk of time.
Could you elaborate on the level for programs like these? I am familiar with a kid who was writing proofs regarding tensors (this is how it was described to me, my own math skills are extremely minimal in comparison) in the 5th grade. His father is worried about his social life going forward while wanting to nurture his talent. The kid was sent to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth for a summer which he apparently found really boring. I think he is actually being tutored by a professor at a local university now, but I wonder if he'd find peers of his own age group and ability level at these programs?
It sounds like his math skills might be slightly more advanced than the kids in these programs, but I would say that these programs are probably still worth a look for two reasons: (1) the kid may not similarly advanced in other subjects (it's not uncommon for kids to come in advanced in math but at the same level or lower for, say, English), and (2) even though the other kids are not as good at math, the kid you're familiar with may nevertheless get along with them better than they would with kids at a normal school.
What about democratic free schools like Sudbury Valley School? Where all the children, ages 4-19, are free to do what they want, whether playing video games or studying abstract algebra.
9 min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI
>Genius is both a noun and an adjective describing some people. It's a shame that Dr. Ellenberg felt it necessary to end an otherwise good article with such a piece of pithy nonsense.
It's a shame that you felt it necessary to end an otherwise good comment on Dr. Ellenberg's essay with such a literal reading of his last sentence. It reeks of unearned arrogance.
What prodigies need it not opportunities in school, but rather schools which are flexible enough to let them access opportunities outside of school
Interesting point, it reminds me of the 60 Minutes story of this kid [1] who showed signs of autism and was starting to become very inward-focused and withdrawn until his parents decided to trash the therapy and encourage his own exploration... Seems to have really changed his disposition to be far more communicative and most certainly affected the direction of his life. (Whole video is decent, but ~7:00 on is his parents)
Regarding that last bit, I think you discard it too quickly. What I read him as saying is that putting people in the category "genius" is a shallow understanding, and that he's arguing for a deeper one.
I do think that paragraph should have been substantially longer, and I suspect it got trimmed for print. But what he's trying to do with it is to summarize the rest of the article.
The article built the point that worshiping individual genius was counterproductive for the majority (non-genius) practitioners of math and science. The last sentence was would not pass as a dictionary entry on "genius" for sure, but that was not the point either. It was a rethorical device. Too bad i chose to start this post with such a piece of pithy nonsense.
These kids also need schools with staff who are capable of interceding, and are able to provide the means to do so when parents aren't educated well enough to recognize an especially gifted child or financially capable of nurturing the talent, so that the opportunities you note are less likely to be passed by.
[prodigies] are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids
... nor should they be. I was learning calculus in elementary school and writing the Putnam in high school. No matter how hard they tried, there's no way the schools I was enrolled in could have given me those opportunities. What prodigies need it not opportunities in school, but rather schools which are flexible enough to let them access opportunities outside of school -- in my case, starting my days at Simon Fraser University and packing my high school courses into the afternoon.
Those of us who managed sky-high SAT scores at 13 were 20 times as likely as the average American to get a doctorate; let's say, being charitable, that we're 100 times as likely to make a significant scientific advance. Since we're only 1 in 10,000 of the U.S. population, that still leaves 99% of scientific advances to be made by all those other kids who didn't get an early ticket to the genius club. We geniuses aren't going to solve all the riddles. Most child prodigies are highly successful — but most highly successful people weren't child prodigies.
This is probably the most important paragraph in the article. The numbers are unsupported, but I don't think they're so far off as to invalidate the point.
It isn't exactly wrong to say that Terry Tao and other former prodigies like him are geniuses. But it is more accurate to say that what they accomplished was genius. Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.
Genius is both a noun and an adjective describing some people. It's a shame that Dr. Ellenberg felt it necessary to end an otherwise good article with such a piece of pithy nonsense.