Gifted Bulletin Board

Welcome to the Gifted Issues Discussion Forum.

We invite you to share your experiences and to post information about advocacy, research and other gifted education issues on this free public discussion forum.
CLICK HERE to Log In. Click here for the Board Rules.

Links


Learn about Davidson Academy Online - for profoundly gifted students living anywhere in the U.S. & Canada.

The Davidson Institute is a national nonprofit dedicated to supporting profoundly gifted students through the following programs:

  • Fellows Scholarship
  • Young Scholars
  • Davidson Academy
  • THINK Summer Institute

  • Subscribe to the Davidson Institute's eNews-Update Newsletter >

    Free Gifted Resources & Guides >

    Who's Online Now
    0 members (), 591 guests, and 14 robots.
    Key: Admin, Global Mod, Mod
    Newest Members
    streble, DeliciousPizza, prominentdigitiz, parentologyco, Smartlady60
    11,413 Registered Users
    March
    S M T W T F S
    1 2
    3 4 5 6 7 8 9
    10 11 12 13 14 15 16
    17 18 19 20 21 22 23
    24 25 26 27 28 29 30
    31
    Previous Thread
    Next Thread
    Print Thread
    Page 11 of 13 1 2 9 10 11 12 13
    Joined: Jan 2008
    Posts: 1,689
    W
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    W
    Joined: Jan 2008
    Posts: 1,689
    I asked DH today if he had known any MD that had graduated really young, Dougie Howzer kind of thing. He said in his whole practice of 80 hospitals in Boston and the surrounding area, he never encountered one. He said there was a thorasic surgeon who finished resdency (6 year residency he said) around 27.

    He said that just the patient interaction, medical schools wouldn't likely admit anyone really young just because the scores are good.

    Those kinds of things are also a consideration. What law firm is going to hire an 18 year old? Any one know of one?

    Ren

    Joined: Jun 2007
    Posts: 906
    CFK Offline
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    Joined: Jun 2007
    Posts: 906
    Here's one that gained admittance to medical school at a very young age. Granted, it's just one, but then I wouldn't expect to find many people capable of this. But it can be done.

    http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-08-24-prodigy-school_x.htm

    Joined: Jan 2008
    Posts: 1,689
    W
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    W
    Joined: Jan 2008
    Posts: 1,689
    Yes, but that was 1 and then said a 17 year old graduated in 1995. That was 16 years ago. And he is just starting. If you have 1 in 20 years, that is really rare.

    And he was admitted to the combo PhD program, generally geared towards research, not patient care mostly.

    Not saying it never happens, but the difficulty of getting into medical schools or law schools young may be difficult.

    ren

    Joined: Jun 2007
    Posts: 906
    CFK Offline
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    Joined: Jun 2007
    Posts: 906
    I don't disagree with you - there are very few and it is rare. But then so are truly profoundly intelligent people.

    Joined: Apr 2009
    Posts: 687
    P
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    P
    Joined: Apr 2009
    Posts: 687
    I agree that med school is a field where much younger grads may face more difficulty with admissions than they might in a subject like physics. Everyone's options are different. It may be that for some kids who are finished with college by 16 and 17 they have more options than they did at 11 or 12. Older teens may be more able to travel, work, enter a master's program before med school, etc. Options that will be engaging but weren't a good fit for a preteen or younger teen.

    Joined: Jan 2008
    Posts: 1,689
    W
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    W
    Joined: Jan 2008
    Posts: 1,689
    I don't think they only choose some brilliant people. DH tells me stories about medical school. He remembers some office where the women heard yogurt was good to put in the vagina. They used strawberry and all these women came into emergency with rashes. One, it took some level of maturity not to laugh but also you had to examine all these women. Can you imagine being one of those women and a 14 year old boy tells you he is going to examine you? You get some indigent people who really smell and have pussed up huge blisters and ulcers. It would have been really hard for me at 14. These are as medical students, not interns or residents.

    And if you did get a job at a big law firm or investment bank, how the hell are you going to entertain clients?

    Does it mean that options are seriously limited if you want to radically accelerate? And truly, I do not mean this to inflame. I am genuinely thinking and playing devil's advocate to provoke healthy discussion.

    Does radical acceleration limit a chid's options in the long run?

    Ren

    Joined: Jun 2007
    Posts: 906
    CFK Offline
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    Joined: Jun 2007
    Posts: 906
    Originally Posted by Wren
    Does radical acceleration limit a chid's options in the long run?

    I don't look at it that way. Here's the way I look at it: whether or not radical acceleration limits my child's options, he has no choice. He could not have survived a traditional elementary and middle school education. He could not survive four years of highschool in order to enter university at a socially appropriate age. He cannot cease his pursuit of knowledge. That is not an option for him. Whether his course in life is harder or easier than most doesn't matter. He is who he is. If I was the parent of a developmentally delayed child I would not expect him to subscribe to society's schedule. I don't expect my child to either. He has to follow his own path.

    Do I believe radically acclerating him will limit him? No. Holding him back in school or not allowing him to learn would have limited him.

    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 5,181
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 5,181
    Originally Posted by CFK
    Originally Posted by passthepotatoes
    Originally Posted by Giftodd
    One of the things I was horrified by when I became a parent was that people were so judgemental of each other and with so little appareciation that we're all, really, making it up as we go along.

    At least there is much less of this in real life. Part of why this thread has been interesting to me is that this sort of negative stuff isn't something that seems to happen in real life a lot. So, I'd hate for anyone considering the early college option to fear that you will be confronted with negative comments all the time. If it is truly the right path for your child it will be obvious to the people who know them in real life. And, then you will be more likely to hear something like "It must have been rough to be confronted with the need to make these decisions, but you handled it well."


    I agree. Ironically the only naysayers I have encountered about decisions I have made for my son have been on this board. For people that know my child, there is usually no problem understanding why we do what we do.

    This has generally been our experience, as well. People who actually KNOW our child (and us) think that we are very much rational and pretty conscientious without being terribly push-oriented. At least not more than is warranted by her particular blend of personality characteristics.

    And she will be in all college coursework, probably before she is fourteen, since I am not seeing what else to do with her last two years as a high school student at this point in time.

    What Grinity said (back several pages even from the quote above) really resonated with me, both as a parent, of course, but also as an insider from academia. Colleges which are "no place for especially young students" are very often not exactly healthy environments for students at traditional ages either. I've seen that play out so often that it literally makes me weary to think about it. tired

    I would be extremely reluctant (at this point) to have an 18 year old child of mine live and attend school in such a place without access to parental guidance or any safety net. Yes, there is some sort of cultural rite of passage there, certainly-- but far too many children now have no one to catch them when they begin to fall. Times have changed from when we went to college in the 70's and 80's. (Er-- and 90's, I'm also guessing. blush)

    It's a 24-7 world of social media and pressures, which leaves little time for the scholarly, deliberate pace of things that we tend to recall as normative. I'd not be averse to having a traditional college student live at home while attending college their first two or three years. Not at all. That goes at least quadruple for an extra-young student.

    It's hard to imagine all the minutiae that are involved in a child that young actually doing things intended for older people until you've tried a few of those things. It's complicated. For a child even as young as 13 to attend college courses, often a great number of hoops have to be jumped through, and the child may have to have an affidavit of empancipation in order to live in dorm housing (since colleges are prohibited from acting in loco parentis, but obviously a child who is under 16 is VERY clearly a minor and not legally responsible for him/herself). Complicated.

    As for internships-- YES, this is a HUGE problem. We've run into this already with DD at the middle school/high school level. There are competitive paid internships available through our land-grant institution's Land-Sea grant programs, but many require the applicant to be a minimum of 15 years old. Some require a drivers' license. All require the student to still be enrolled in high school. Ergo, most are not things that my DD will ever be eligible to apply for. Others, there will undoubtedly be issues regarding the insurance policies related to laboratory or field work.

    <back to catch up further>


    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
    Joined: Oct 2008
    Posts: 466
    M
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    M
    Joined: Oct 2008
    Posts: 466
    Originally Posted by Val
    Just wondering. For those of you with kids who will probably graduate from high school 2+ years ahead of schedule, do you or your kids have ideas in mind for what they'd do next?

    Would you let your child go off to college very early? If so, would you let him/her go if the college was close to home or would a distant college or university be okay?

    I know that there's no single right answer to this question and that everything depends completely on each child, but I thought I'd ask as a way to solicit exchange of ideas. Here are a few of ours for our child:

    * Do a high-school abroad year or two with a program like AFS.

    * Get a p/t job and take random classes at a community college (astronomy, ceramics, etc. etc. etc.).

    * Do an exotic internship (e.g. Marine Biology in the Bahamas). There are many experiences like this aimed at high school-aged kids.

    * Other.


    I hope nobody minds if I bring back the first post for a minute--Frenchie and I have been mulling over ideas similar to Val's for a while, and I wondered if I might just pop a couple of thoughts out there. We're a few years away yet from facing these kinds of decisions, but it never hurts to do a little advance research!

    (Frenchie and I both headed to university a couple of years early ourselves--he lived at home, while I was seven hours from my folks--we both had good experiences, but we find it helpful to think over a wide range of possibilities, given that we have three kids who are very different from one another, and, like most people here, I'm sure, we may well need more than one solution.)

    We've wondered about some online university classes as a way to get feet wet, or taking a course or two at the university where I taught until Harpo was born. Although we're in Canada, we're also wondering about maybe doing some A-levels--Harpo likes the looks of some of the subject areas, and thinks he might really enjoy digging into some of those topics in depth. (Since we homeschool, a regular "high-school diploma" is not really happening here anyway, unless we change our minds and decide to enroll them, so we are possibly looking for some other kinds of potential credentials, as well as learning experiences.)

    Some other possibilities are a year or two away, with programs like United World Colleges (http://www.uwc.org/) or Katimavik (http://www.katimavik.org/ ; this program is just for Canadians, I think, because of the way it is funded) or some kind of language immersion experience (http://www.learningfrenchinquebec.com/academic_year.aspx); we think Groucho in particular would love this kind of thing.

    We have also wondered about helping the boys find some mentors; we know a lot of people with pretty interesting work, and we wonder if somehow we might set up some kind of apprenticeship, as it were. Harpo, for instance, is very interested in endangered languages and in archaeology, and I could see some kind of extended "field school" possibilities there, maybe? Groucho is theatre-mad (at least at the moment); if that interest continues, we know people with whom he could engage in an extended job-shadowing/apprenticing type of situation. (David Albert's books are quite interesting in this regard, I think--I loved the way he and his wife found mentors for their daughters over the years.) Chico at the moment, however, wants to be the first man on Mars, so I don't think I can help too much there!

    Groucho also likes the idea of taking a year or two first and getting really good at a trade, so that he can always pay his bills, even if the acting work dries up--that kid thinks ahead!

    Anyway, just thought I'd toss a couple of ideas into the mix...

    peace
    minnie

    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 5,181
    Member
    Offline
    Member
    Joined: Feb 2011
    Posts: 5,181
    Originally Posted by CFK
    Originally Posted by Wren
    Does radical acceleration limit a chid's options in the long run?

    I don't look at it that way. Here's the way I look at it: whether or not radical acceleration limits my child's options, he has no choice. He could not have survived a traditional elementary and middle school education. He could not survive four years of highschool in order to enter university at a socially appropriate age. He cannot cease his pursuit of knowledge. That is not an option for him. Whether his course in life is harder or easier than most doesn't matter. He is who he is. If I was the parent of a developmentally delayed child I would not expect him to subscribe to society's schedule. I don't expect my child to either. He has to follow his own path.

    Do I believe radically acclerating him will limit him? No. Holding him back in school or not allowing him to learn would have limited him.

    Yes. It isn't perfect, and I don't think any of us that are "pro-radical acceleration" are saying that it necessarily even "good" in a general sense-- just that for our own kids, it's least-worst.


    For kids that "don't fit" anywhere anyway, that is, sometimes there isn't a better answer.

    This is probably not even true for most PG kids, but for some sub-set of them with a particular blend of personality quirks and learning needs.



    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
    Page 11 of 13 1 2 9 10 11 12 13

    Moderated by  M-Moderator 

    Link Copied to Clipboard
    Recent Posts
    Testing with accommodations
    by aeh - 03/27/24 01:58 PM
    Quotations that resonate with gifted people
    by indigo - 03/27/24 12:38 PM
    For those interested in astronomy, eclipses...
    by indigo - 03/23/24 06:11 PM
    California Tries to Close the Gap in Math
    by thx1138 - 03/22/24 03:43 AM
    Gifted kids in Illinois. Recommendations?
    by indigo - 03/20/24 05:41 AM
    Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.5