The needs and requirements of gifted children in private school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
No, I have never claimed to be a mind reader. However, if anyone says that their regular private or public school is full of kids with 150+ IQs, I know that person is either misinformed or just lying. Once again: Statistically, 0.1% of the world's population has an IQ of 145 or above, the level required to be deemed profoundly gifted. That means that one child in about 2,000 has an IQ above 150 on the Stanford-Binet. So if there are roughly 100,000 kids (I’m just using this number to illustrate a point) in private schools in the DC Metro area, statistically only 200 of those children will have an IQ that qualifies as profoundly gifted (200 out of 100,000!!!). This means that Sidwell, St. Albans/NCS, etc. cannot possibly fill their seats with kids at this level. Many of you are mistaking very bright, hardworking students for children who are profoundly gifted—they are NOT the same. Calm down, I am not saying that profoundly gifted kids are better than the merely gifted/bright kids out there; they are just different.

Enough already!!

First PP, it looks like you blinded the "Enough already" PP with science and actual statistics. It's too bad statistics can be so dang hard to follow! I know I'm advantaged in having done enough statistics to understand what you're saying. And to agree with it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If your kids are really at 150-160, they would already know they are different from the other kids. You wouldn't need to tell them. You would facing a whole different set of academic and social issues that you're apparently unaware of. In your search for answers, you'd already be aware of Davidson's, because several teachers would have made you aware.

New poster. Really? I didn't know I was different until I got my PG score in 7th grade. How about you other people upthread? Did you know you had the golden halo of gifted and were somehow more special than all the other kids before someone told you that you were profoundly gifted? I knew I was good at school but that was it. I think the gifted label causes problems (as another poster alluded to) because of the potential for work ethic problems, so my kids will not be told their scores and I will not be doing gymnastics to get them into a "special school". Regular private works for us.

NP. I didn't know I was PG. I just thought everybody else was slow...

[Anonymous]

My PG kid is quite happy at GDS. Typically the public approach is to enable gifted kids to go fast and the private approach is to enable them to go broad and/or deep. Whether a private school can pull that off depends on faculty, class sizes, and cohort. (Inclination probably also matters).

Observe classes, look at what they read, pay attention to the projects on the walls/in the halls. For me, the ideal is challenging and engaging assignments that are open-ended but have a clear focus/structure. That approach works well with a wide range of abilities. But you also need teachers that can engage at the level your kid is at (i.e. provide critical feedback, help him/her take the analysis to the next level vs. simply praise or evaluate).

The cohort of intellectual peers will be smaller at a private than in a public gifted program. That said, for a PG kid, the peer group (if defined in terms of IQ) is always small. But we all learn from people who think differently than we do, so really what you want is a place where the students are curious, intellectually playful, passionate about their interests, etc. And you can probably sense that from classroom visits. Although, alas, it does vary from year to year sometimes. My kid got lucky. A year younger or older and it would have been a different story.

[Anonymous]

If your child is PG and qualifies, why not send them to college and skip high school or part of high school? My brother went to Hopkins at 14 and they had other students who either skipped high school altogether or went to college after their sophomore or junior year. I have a gf who skipped her senior yr of high school and went to the Wharton school at U. Penn and an ex boyfriend who skipped senior yr and went to MIT. Save tuition, etc... DB also graduated from Hopkins in 3 yrs. All the people I know who went to college early LOVED it. Great to be with your intellectual peers.

[Anonymous]

But they aren't your intellectual peers -- they're just older. So you risk creating a social problem without solving the academic one. And you send a really bright kid to college at an age where s/he doesn't have the experience or judgment to get as much out of it as s/he would at a later age.

Skipping senior year to go to MIT makes sense to me -- it's just one year and in some cases, kids will have maxed out their HS's curriculum at that stage. But doing your undergrad degree from 14-17 strikes me as a really bad idea in most cases. Glad it worked out for your brother. Was he in a STEM field?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But they aren't your intellectual peers -- they're just older. So you risk creating a social problem without solving the academic one. And you send a really bright kid to college at an age where s/he doesn't have the experience or judgment to get as much out of it as s/he would at a later age.

Skipping senior year to go to MIT makes sense to me -- it's just one year and in some cases, kids will have maxed out their HS's curriculum at that stage. But doing your undergrad degree from 14-17 strikes me as a really bad idea in most cases. Glad it worked out for your brother. Was he in a STEM field?

He got an MD/PhD and is a prof at a medical school. Does research but also maintains a private practice.

Hopkins has a long history of taking PG kids early and integrating them as undergrads. My brothers keeps up with some who were there when he was there and they have all done very well, mostly STEM fields or mathcentric like finance. I wouldn't hesitate to send my kid there if he qualifies.

FYI, DB turned down Exeter and Andover to go to Hopkins and for him, it worked out perfectly.

[Anonymous]

I wonder if that's still their policy. (I was on the faculty in the 1990s and didn't encounter especially young undergrads. But I was in liberal arts -- which is why I asked if your DB was in STEM).

Abstractly, for me it's a question of whether school is something you want to be done with as quickly/soon as possible vs. whether it's something you'd rather get as much of/from as you can. If you end up an academic, that's less an issue (you're still there -- just a question of what role).

[Anonymous]

He went during the mid 80ties. I know at that time there were other 14 yr olds besides my bro. Not that many maybe one or two per class but there were more who started at 15, 16, 17. This was prior to Hopkins opening their gifted center so they could have changed it. I don't know. The kids like my bro were all math prodigies and were recruited on the basis of their SATs which they took when they were in 7th grade. We grew up around NASA and were one of the neighborhoods in the country that Hopkins targeted for kids who were good at math.

It depends on the individual what you get out of school or anything. DB had few friends prior to Hopkins and they're the ones who discovered his talent for math and where he found his passion (his work) and made many of his lifelong friends. He got a lot out of it even if he did it early and quickly.

[Anonymous]

Oh geez - I was at JHU in the mid-80s and can remember some of those 14 yr olds. They were invariably overweight, dressed by mom, often pre-pubescent, driven to school by mom each day. They may have had other 14 yr old peers at Hopkins, but they certainly did NOT mix well with the rest of us regular 130 IQ 18 year olds. In general, I'm afraid, we felt a fair amount of disdain for them. Send your kid to Andover or Exeter to learn how to socialize, which is AT LEAST as important as scholarly pursuits. There's no medal given for finishing college when you're 18 - you just have to start work sooner.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Oh geez - I was at JHU in the mid-80s and can remember some of those 14 yr olds. They were invariably overweight, dressed by mom, often pre-pubescent, driven to school by mom each day. They may have had other 14 yr old peers at Hopkins, but they certainly did NOT mix well with the rest of us regular 130 IQ 18 year olds. In general, I'm afraid, we felt a fair amount of disdain for them. Send your kid to Andover or Exeter to learn how to socialize, which is AT LEAST as important as scholarly pursuits. There's no medal given for finishing college when you're 18 - you just have to start work sooner.

LOL! DB lived on campus and was and still is skinny. We're from the Midwest so not driven by Mom. Most of his friends were 18+ but geeky like him. Hopkins students aren't exactly urbane or known for great social skills so he fit in nicely. He had a great time at Hopkins, med school too.