A guide for parents, teachers and schools
“I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept…I was lonely and had no friends,” Albert Einstein, one of the most famous examples of genius, wrote in 1952. His problems did not end up there. Einstein’s relationships were full of difficulties. He cheated on his first wife, Mileva, and finally married his cousin Elsa.
Beethoven, Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson, Isaac Newton, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many more suffered from depression. Mozart and Virginia Woolf were prone to mood swings.
Still, intelligence is highly valued in society. Awe is shown to geniuses, and it is thought that they would be prosperous and successful. However, intellect has a negative side. Many bright youngsters’ childhood is sometimes miserable. Genius children often struggle to relate to other children and have few friends. They were sent out on their own into halls and offices at school.
Only recently have psychologists begun to investigate whether and how exceptionally high intelligence affects other aspects of these people’s lives. Gifted children frequently endure what psychologists refer to as “asynchronous development”: remarkable ability in one area may be connected with, or come at the expense of, other parts of adulthood.
A gifted youngster may have a superior ability to learn something like algebra, but a more limited capacity to deal with their social environment, which is a vital element of growing up and fitting in throughout their lives. A gifted child might be prone to complete social meltdowns.
Some countries place a higher priority on exceptionally high intelligence than others and provide special educational opportunities for such children. Even if talent is valued, the social and psychological challenges that frequently accompany tremendous skill may make it an unwanted gift.
Genius can feel more like a curse than a blessing. Precocious youngsters are sometimes rejected as the result of obnoxious middle-class parents. Nurture and environment definitely play a vital influence in the intellectual development of any child:
- If you talk to your youngster about politics at the dinner table, he is likely to get firm beliefs about how the world should be run.
- Suggest to your toddler that she conceive about cake slices in terms of angles, and she may show an early affinity for mathematics.
Perfect practice can be obtained. A talented tennis player that practices 4 hours a day is more likely to compete at Wimbledon than a gifted one who plays occasionally.
Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon created the first intelligence tests in the early 20th century. They assessed their students’:
- Short-term memory,
- Analytical thinking, and
- Arithmetic aptitude.
Most IQ tests focus solely on specific aspects of intellect, such as mathematical and verbal reasoning. This illustrates how limited society’s perceptions of giftedness are. Many other types of skills and attributes, such as ravenous curiosity and the capacity to make intellectual connections, are overlooked. The tests are unlikely to detect future novelists or poets, as well as children who excel in sports or music.
There is currently no mechanism to assess creative, artistic, or emotional intelligence (EQ). The children we label as “geniuses” are typically those who fit within the traditional categories.
“A high IQ is like height in a basketball player,” says David Perkins, who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It is very important, all other things being equal. But all other things aren’t equal. There’s a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and there’s a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ.”
Intelligence tests are labeled “on a curve,” which means the findings are turned into a bell curve: what matters is how you perform in comparison to other people who take them.
Most results, by definition, cluster in the center: the average result in a cohort becomes an intelligence quotient (IQ) of 100; the middle 2/3 of scores become IQs ranging from 85 to 115. There are few outliers. 2 people in every hundred have IQs below 70, and another 2 have IQs above 130.
You’re down to around 1 person in 1.000 when you’re 45 points from the average of 100 in either direction. However, because only a small percentage of any population takes IQ tests, identifying exceptionally gifted youngsters is difficult. Most schools do not have any.
Though the examinations have evolved since then, the fundamental talents they seek to assess have not. IQ is fixed throughout your life within a few points either way: the only way to lose it is due to a brain injury. There are numerous online “intelligence” tests. Many students take aptitude exams at school. Most of these can be gamed or, at the very least, coached youngsters to succeed in.
Mensa, an international organization created in 1946 in the United Kingdom to cultivate the country’s “gifted” citizens, has 20.000 members who apply to join. Mensa makes every effort to make its examinations “culture fair,” or to uncover intelligence that is inherent rather than taught.
The word “gifted” is generally reserved for children who exhibit 3 traits:
- First, gifted children begin to grasp a certain discipline, such as a language, arithmetic, or chess, far earlier than most. They do it so easily that they advance far faster than their classmates.
- Second, they attain this skill mostly on their own, rather than through parental prompting. A child’s environment and socioeconomic background undoubtedly influence their rate of development: there is a strong association between the number of words a child’s parents have said to them by the age of 3 and the child’s scholastic success at the age of 9. According to studies, children born into professional homes may have heard 4.000.000 more words by that time than children born to less educated parents. Such families frequently have larger incomes, allowing them to provide more educational possibilities. However, Lyn Kendall, a Mensa consultant on talented children who grew up in a working-class family, maintains that reading Nietzsche to your 5-year-old or forcing them to complete 3 hours of extra schoolwork would not “make” a genius. Many children with extraordinarily high IQs show indicators of extraordinary ability even as infants, long before aggressive parenting may make a significant impact. “
- A third feature of gifted youngsters is that their hobbies are frequently obsessive. They have what is frequently referred to as “a rage to master.”
Some people are skeptical of the concept of giftedness. According to Deborah Eyre, creator of High Performance Learning, an organization that works with schools and teachers in the United Kingdom to help large numbers of children become “high performers,” the concept of a talented child has splintered over time. She does not believe that talent is innate.
According to Eyre, children of wealthy parents are over-represented in cohorts of bright children all around the world. Minority groups are under-represented: “Latinos do not get selected [for programs] in the United States, and Maoris do not in New Zealand.”
She also claims that determination is often what distinguishes intelligent and high-achieving youngsters – and adults. The ambition to succeed distinguishes 2 equally competent scientists, one of whom goes on to earn a Nobel prize and the other who does not. She claims that seeming genius is a combination of potential, the correct support, and personal determination.
According to Eyre, a specific type of parent, usually a well-educated one, takes delight in having a “gifted child” to brag about. However, the majority of parents find their children’s gifts to be a source of anxiety, if not sorrow.
Many of these parents encounter 2 major challenges:
- One is how to accommodate to their child’s enhanced intellectual growth.
- The 2nd component is less frequently mentioned, but it can generate just as many problems: extraordinarily bright youngsters are frequently socially alienated, if not disruptive. Gifts that are valued in the abstract are frequently perceived as less welcome in person.
Leta Hollingworth, an American psychologist, spoke about “socially optimal intelligence” in the early 20th century, which she connected with an IQ of 125 to 155. Increase the score over that, and Norman Geschwind, an American behavioral neurologist, describes a “pathology of superiority”: the dominance of one region of the brain can impair the development of other sections.
We don’t know why this is the case, or if it’s due to nature, nurture, or both. According to 1 study, the rate of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) among Mensa members in America is about 2x that of the general population.
Others believe that because some gifted children are so different from their peers at school and may engage with them little in the classroom, they may interact with them less in the playground as well. Though their abilities are highly adult in certain aspects, many find themselves unable to play activities that we frequently refer to as “childish”: their social development is more limited.
Such children’s sleeping patterns are frequently abnormal: turning off their brains can be challenging. One gifted child’s mother informed me that he didn’t sleep for more than 90 minutes at a time until he was nearly 5.
The correlations between genius and emotional and physical wellness do not end there. Mensa’s American section, which has over 50.000 members, refers to its members as “hyper brains.” According to a recent survey of its members, people with exceptionally high intelligence frequently have “over-excitabilities” or “super-sensibilities,” such as heightened awareness of one of the 5 senses, experiencing extremely intense emotions, or having extremely high levels of energy. Depression, anxiety, and ADHD are more common among these people than in the general population.
Giftedness may even be linked to physiological disorders including food allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases, which can sometimes coexist with “sensory processing disorder.”
Everyday stimuli like as a radio playing in the background, the color or texture of food, a colorful display on a classroom wall, or a scratchy label on a piece of clothing can become virtually painful for many extraordinarily brilliant people.
“Neurologically, high IQ goes with increased efficiency in neural functioning,” says Sonja Falck, a psychotherapist in the United Kingdom who works almost exclusively with “extreme intelligence” clients. “That’s measurable,” Falck adds. “If a person is getting a lot of stimulation and processing it very quickly, they are susceptible to being over-stimulated.”
The term “gifted” “connotes privilege,” implying that the gifted individual has an advantage over everyone else. However, it is not always advantageous. Someone who is gifted but grows up in an unsupportive environment can suffer greatly. This pain is vastly underappreciated.
For many other youngsters, the most difficult problem is that ordinary, day-to-day existence is so difficult to live with. Really smart students consider education excruciatingly uninteresting. Some teachers do not agree thinking that boredom could be a way to relax from tension.
Boredom, on the other hand, can be torturous. According to Falck, a gifted student requires a fraction of the hours to master an AGCSE subject that the school curriculum generally allocates to that subject. She compares it to a seasoned runner having to slog in step with individuals who walk really slowly every day. How should a gifted youngster be educated?
The difficulties are complex and frequently competitive. On the one hand, they can master stuff faster and more efficiently than their counterparts. On the other hand, because many of these children’s social skills are underdeveloped, it can be extremely difficult for them to be a child in the traditional sense, to fit in, and to learn many of the nonverbal, non-testable abilities that social interaction teaches in preparation for adulthood.
And, unintentionally, such children may come across as smart-arses who, despite their best efforts, other children and adults may simply not want to be around. Adults, particularly teachers, may find very bright youngsters threatening: a tiny child speaking to you as an equal can put you on the defensive. They literally know more than the adults around them and can’t stop themselves from telling them.
Parents are informed they have 2 options:
- Homeschooling
- Private schools
Private schools offer more personalized attention. Both concepts terrified parents and many are against homeschooling on principle, believing that it would compound the children’s sense of isolation.
The appropriateness of advancing youngsters out of their age group is being debated. They may suffer socially if they are promoted. They may switch off intellectually if they remain down. According to Leonie Kronborg of the University of Monash in Australia, students require social and psychological assistance.
She cites programs for gifted adolescents such as the Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington in America, where young teenagers can begin university studies as part of a group of similarly advanced people their own age, allowing them to be intellectually stimulated while still socializing with their peers.
When faced with bored and unhappy children at school, many parents of bright children choose to take matters into their own hands.
Ηome-schooling is surprisingly frequent among brilliant children of highly educated parents. In the mid-1980s, a father and daughter, Harry and Ruth Lawrence, performed an eye-catching tandem cycling ride across Oxford. Harry had given up his work in computing and had home-schooled Ruth since she was 5 years old; at the age of 12, she obtained a place to study mathematics at Oxford University.
Ruth was accompanied to all of her lectures by Harry, who made certain that she never “wasted” time by socializing with other young people. She is now a well-respected if not great mathematician. When she had her first child, she resolved not to push him intellectually any faster than he wanted to.
Some countries have created a welcoming educational atmosphere for brilliant youngsters. Every year, Singapore operates a highly selective program to find the most remarkably intelligent students. All students are tested in math, English, and reasoning when they are 8 or 9 years old. The top 1% of students are transferred from “normal” classes to the Gifted Education Programme, which operates in 9 primary schools for children aged 6 to 12.
They can then choose whether or not to attend secondary schools that provide such lessons. Selected children receive “personalised education plans” that include more in-depth and broad training on specific themes, access to supplementary self-taught online courses, placement in higher classes for selected subjects, and early entry to primary school for very young children. However, emphasizing educational attainment has proven divisive. Since 2007, attempts have been made to enhance socialization among youngsters of varying abilities.
A technique like this represents a fairly conventional concept of intelligence: employing specific types of exams to identify youngsters with seemingly natural intellectual abilities.
Greece has the so called “protypa” schools. Elsewhere, educators are employing a broader range of techniques to identify highly brilliant youngsters, as well as a greater emphasis on attitudes and personality qualities common in the most successful people, such as the drive mentioned by Deborah Eyre.
In Project Bright Idea, a program at Duke University in North Carolina, 10.000 ordinary nursery and primary-school children were taught using methods typically reserved for the brightest students – raising expectations, encouraging complex problem-solving, and developing meta-cognition (“thinking about thinking”). Almost all of them went on to perform far better on tests than their colleagues.
According to Raj Chetty, an American economist at Harvard University, people who score in the top 5% of standard examinations in primary school are many times more likely than the other 95% to submit patents as adults – and that chance is significantly higher among brilliant youngsters from wealthy families. Children who have their innate abilities encouraged and given opportunity have a lot better chance in life.
Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, evaluated 1.500 children with exceptional intelligence in the 1920s. Others followed in the footsteps of that group 70 years later. They discovered that they had achieved little more than what their socioeconomic standing would have anticipated. William Shockley, one of Terman’s rejected children, co-invented the transistor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
However, gifted youngsters do not always shine later in life. Some are “lost Einsteins”: children who did not have an outlet for their genius or were not encouraged to push their intellect, or who required assistance to cope with the isolation of their situation.
There are certain people whose abilities are overlooked due to the limits of IQ tests. And then there are the many exceptional youngsters who experience challenges later in life because they never learned the interpersonal skills required to succeed in the business or in the larger sphere of social activities.
Technology can help carry some of the slack. With AI homework can become a unique personalized experience customized on each student’s learning profile. AI powered ed-tech platforms constantly assesses how students learn best and accordingly determines whether to deliver:
- A video clip.
- A game
- An interactive exercise
- A text explanation
The latter is longer or shorter one depending on how students learn best. The genius student will receive tougher questions. These platforms adjust the amount and difficulty of practice questions. By doing this, these platforms:
- Keep students engaged.
- Recommend study partners, who have a similar learning style and know concepts the other students have mastered and vice versa.
- Provides detailed analytical tools to assess the students concept mastery compared to the class, region, and all of the rest.
They also help teachers by providing detailed analytical tools to assess their students’ concept mastery and create personalized plans for groups of students. These platforms can identify the concepts the students have not mastered so their teachers know which concept needs reinforcement. Teachers don’t have to design a one size fits all curriculum, but they can tailor the material to challenge each student, genius or not, at the appropriate level. This is done by:
- Showing the list of missing foundational concepts so teachers know how to best help their students.
- Clustering students with similar learning profiles so they can develop unique instructions for those groups to keep them challenged.
- Turns textbooks into rich media ecosystems that encourage teachers to create content around each textbook.
- Statistically determines which material is most effective so teachers can incorporate this material into their lesson plans.
Technology could be a very useful supplementary tool that can ease the lives of both teachers and their genius’ students!
