House of Eratosthenes

…today, I don’t think we’re paying too little attention to our young geniuses. I think we’re paying too much.
:
Talent isn’t a number. We would never presume to identify the great novelists of the future by counting the number of vocabulary words they knew at age 10. To think we can do the same for math and science—as if proving the Riemann hypothesis were something like getting 100,000 on the math SAT—is to adopt a depressingly impoverished view of science and its demands on its practitioners. The cult of genius tends to undervalue hard work and the productive persistence that psychologists nowadays like to call “grit”—not to mention creativity, perspective and taste, without which all those other virtues may be wasted on pointless projects.

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.

Hat tip to Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

Not sure if I fit into what he’s discussing; probably not. I was one of the “bored” prodigies. Didn’t hand things in, didn’t hand things in, didn’t hand things in, and then came the threats of holding me back a year. It’s not an isolated case by any means, and seems to be happening more and more often now: Kid doesn’t do his work, so the adults start fighting with other adults. Then, as an experiment, I was put in the advanced group, stopped being bored, and started doing work.

It didn’t last into high school. Maybe I went back to being stupid. Or, more likely, the being-bored-with-class thing was just a symptom of something much larger. Public school has always been friendly to those who think inside the box, which is a kind way of saying it’s always been hostile to those who think outside. It’s a bureaucrat-friendly zone, and I have the impression from being a parent & former student that it is crystallizing, becoming a more strident and uncompromising version of its past self.

I didn’t mix well with the (other?) prodigies. I recall a certain need for a grasp of conceptual command of something, when I asked a teacher I was directed to ask one of the prodigies. I did, and what I got back was a sequence of steps I could execute so that I would be solving the problem as expected. I repeated the question about the concept, and got back the same sequence of steps. It emerged that the prodigy didn’t have the answer to the question I was asking, hadn’t developed it, didn’t need it. There is no one particular episode to which I’m pointing here, this is a generalization that applied to several events from that year or two.

I suppose by high school I maybe “matured” to the point of understanding and accepting that school is a crushing bore, and you have to just do the best you can and limp through to graduation day. I was too slow to grasp what we’re forced to learn in adulthood: Most of life is boring. Plodding through is not the answer, what you need to do is shrug off the boredom, think about the outcome, link it to your identity and take pride in what you do.

My gripe with K-12 is that it seems to be grading kids on their ability to fully come to terms with that. Which isn’t something that is too likely to happen, and if it does, it’s certainly not likely to happen early. If the kid’s going to be a success, it’s much more likely to happen because the crushing boredom somehow never becomes a factor.

Which makes the argument for more-attention-to-prodigies, up top, 2nd paragraph, a little distressing:

Some educators rebrand child prodigies as “exceptional human capital” and hold us to be the drivers of global economic competitiveness. “These are the people who are going to figure out all the riddles,” the Vanderbilt University psychologist David Lubinski said in a recent interview. “Schizophrenia, cancer — they’re going to fight terrorism, they’re going to create patents and the scientific innovations that drive our economy. But they are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids.”

It’s fascinating to me that with all this zeal we have for separating people and putting them in organized boxes, we’re so sluggish to form the separation that truly matters: Those who plan according to process and those who plan according to outcome. The surface-thinkers vs. the vertical-thinkers.

The latter of whom, time after time, we see are getting in trouble at school for thinking too pragmatically. They can’t see the point to handing in the assignments, so they don’t hand them in, and this is pegged as a “who cares” sort of an issue — kid lacks discipline, kid’s pig-iron stupid, poorly organized, who cares what it is? We’ll just treat him like he’s stupid and threaten to flunk him. Nowadays it’s “treat him like he has a DSM-V learning disability, and medicate him.” Back when it was happening to me, I couldn’t see why there was so little analytical thought being put into it, even as the grown-ups were getting in these arguments with each other over the work I wasn’t doing. As a grown-up, I can see the passion was really not so much about what it took for me to succeed, but more like about their differing approaches to life. They were having arguments about definitions, with the outcome-thinkers requiring strong and crisp definitions in order to even begin to assess what was going on, and the bureaucrat process-thinkers who fight so hard to keep things from being defined. And it was all my fault, really, for getting them into these fights with each other, by not doing my work. These two sides shouldn’t be coming into contact with each other, ever. Or, very rarely anyway, only under very tightly controlled conditions.

Back to the school thing, though. We talk so much of kids learning to think creatively, solve problems, think outside the box. Had that energy managed to find its way into the public school apparatus, the apparatus, I think, would have been taking a very different evolutionary path from what it has been taking, and would look very different from the way we find it today.

I have 4 university degrees but neither a valid GED or HS diploma.

Success is about finding your path and working towards it
- Fai.Mao | 06/03/2014 @ 15:16
The current US educational system is designed to miseducate students and leave them stupider than when they started.

It is a very successful system.
- pdwalker | 06/08/2014 @ 17:14

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ProdigiesTuesday, June 3rd, 2014

Prodigies
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014