So I'm curious what this forum thinks about gifted in light of books like Outliers (10,000 hours of practice makes prodigy), Tiger Motherhood (which in a sense desires to validate Outliers), vs the general concept of nature - born this way.

No thesis yet, but some random sleep deprived mumblings:

I'm convinced the Tiger book has had a big affect on our recent school placement advocacy. The timing and media saturation are really frustrating. You just can't argue with Terry Gross...

I saw the Race to Nowhere recently. I was struck how both the Race to Nowhere and Outliers used Bill Gates as an example to prove their POV - but Outliers stressed how hard Bill Gates worked as a student and Race to Nowhere talked about him not graduating from college. It seemed like cross purposes. I felt kind of sorry for the poor guy.

If I have a point, it might be that people take out of that stuff what they want to think. Most of the people I know who (not on this board) talk about Outliers as if its all about why red shirting your kids is a really good idea. What I got out of Outliers was that our famly's commitment to Suzuki music education was a really good thing for my child because it is hard for her and she is supposed to practice a little every day.

I have been thinking of this today, not in philosophical way, but in regards to Chinese (Mandarin) learning for my son. He has great �ear� for languages and great memory, I attribute those to the nature. He can trick his teachers making them believe that he knows the material due to his short term memory and visual memory (being able quickly located what he needs to answer questions). However, I know for fact that he does not work on memorizing words for his lessons. His vocabulary should be much better than it is, currently he has effortlessly memorized about 50 - 60%, what about the rest? So I have come to conclusion, that he is not outside the 10,000 hours rule and I may have to become a Tiger mother to work with him on the vocabulary and writing.

I don't think your a Tiger mom, unless you shame your kids into working harder and throw their toys away when they don't.

I think kids can be born talented or smart but real achievement takes work and effort. It's easy to see a kid who self-teaches reading and writing and math through 3rd grade at 3 or 4 and believe that things will always be so easy, but even very smart kids don't usually self-teach fluent Japanese or high-level music or ballet performance, or differential equations without some effort and time and coaching or teaching. To succeed at high levels of anything, there's a lot of luck involved (I think Gladwell covers that well) and a lot of work, or at least a lot of practice.

I'd like to teach my kids to reach towards their goals with lots of effort. If they are talented and naturally gifted, that work might get them farther towards their goals, but they also need to put in some effort. At very high levels of anything, talent seems less important to me since everyone involved will be talented. If you go to Julliard for music performance, you will have lots of talented company. In elite PhD programs, very smart folks really are quite common. Work and effort can distinguish someone in that situation or reveal relative mediocrity when everyone else is working hard and passing by someone who is coasting.

In the best of all possible worlds, the "work" doesn't seem like work to the child/adult. It may be that the violinist with 10000 hours has been brow beaten by Amy Chua, but it may also be that the child can't wait to play and desperately waits through school and meals trying to get back to the piano or violin or science experiment or sport. Practice isn't necessarily torture.

Books like outliers are getting quite a bit of press in our local Suzuki program. I really think that success is variety of factors. I have a kid that has been taking Suzuki piano going on 5 years at this point (starting at age 5 to 10). I know he is working less hard than some other kids at the same level. On the other hand, he is working at this skill every day and his first 6 months of just developing enough small motor skills to play simple pieces was excruciating. After that he FLEW through early repertoire however.

So I think when someone says it takes 10,000 of work or practice to develop a skill I think they're on the right track. But someone's 6000 hours of skill development might be more like some else 12,000 hours. I do think understanding that practice = progress is an important life skill and one that my own kids were definitely not born with. Music lessons have become VERY important to us, even though it is coming easier to them than some. My daughter's been taking violin for 2 years. Just the past 6 months have we had a sort of break through on progress and she's looking more "GT" in the music world. Before that it was mostly about mind games with a 4 and 5 year old. Who claimed she needed to start lessons by the way. I recently had an experience with another parent cornering me and asking why my kid was progressing so fast. We certainly aren't doing anything magical other than practicing 6 days a week for an age appropriate length of time.

The red shirting thought is interesting! I truly don't blame people for making the choice to red shirt. We only have all day kindergarten locally that looks and feels much more like first grade. Not exactly the most friendly environment for an active 5 year old.

I think that US society suffers from extremes of ideology that, in this case, give birth to what I call the Myth of Hard Work. The myth posits that lots and lots of practice makes a prodigy. The idea that people have put a number (10K) on how many hours you need makes it more extreme to me.

The other extreme is that prodigies are born that way and will always be prodigies because they were born that way. You could call this the Myth of Not Working.

Most people know that the second myth is a myth, but our society labors very hard at pushing the first one as Truth. I believe that this idea actually drives false egalitarianism in schools: everyone just needs a chance, and you can't skip a grade because it would be saying you were "better." Sorry, but differences in abilities are real. Not everyone can get at least a B in geometry, just like not everyone can run 100M in under 13 seconds.

The truth is somewhere in between: in order to really excel, you need to put in a lot of hard work. BUT lots of practice won't guarantee that you'll go to the nationals. Even if you do, it also doesn't guarantee that someone who was born with, say, an incredible set of ice skating genes won't beat you in spite of having practiced less. Or that some outsider who has a genetic talent for theoretical physics won't figure out the answer ahead of all the great minds at the universities.

Just my rambling thoughts.

Val

This is what I worry about my children. How do I teach them this? Up to now, they have been able to progress with very little practice (forced by me) or no practice at all.

This is exactly why I've been trying to have dd grade skipped this year. Unfortunately, between the Tiger Mom hype and red shirting skewing what is normal, I don't think its going to happen.

Grade skip did not solve this issue for us.

If stuff is still too easy, maybe another skip is needed.

At the same time, I'd also bear in mind that it also takes time and maturity to learn how to focus on a problem when the answer isn't immediately obvious. It's probably a learned skill (at least in some or many people) and may not come magically because of acceleration. So, don't be surprised if a skip creates problems at first because the answers aren't immediately obvious anymore. The problems could actually be a sign that the student is finally at an appropriate level.

Sorry if this is getting OT?

My mom keeps buying me Malcolm Gladwell books, and after reading the first couple, I developed a strange, instinctive distaste for his work... although I could never really understand why his books irritated me. And then a couple weeks back I came across this little jewel on the intertoobs:
http://www.malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/

Perhaps it's his over-simplification that I find grating, but at least the gentle(?) mockery at that site makes me giggle.

Regarding Outliers in particular, I like Val's observations... and especially the two "myths" demonstrating extremes. Our DS9 definitely holds the "Myth of Not Working" as gospel truth, trying everything in his power to avoid any meaningful effort in life. He's forever hoping to rely on his highly-capable melon, while I work tirelessly to push him to the other end, almost wishing at times for stark -- if not moderately painful -- object lessons that will teach him the importance of hard work.

I must admit that my inner-Amy-Chua definitely regrets not pushing him harder along the way, especially when I see him give up (or not even undertake) tasks that pose even the slightest degree of difficulty. Even after two grade skips, the greatest regular challenge he encounters is... well... getting to Purple Wizard Level 19 ( or whatever) in his favorite online game.

Our kid's definitely an Outlier, and he has no where near 10,000 hours of anything (other than whining) under his belt. When I look at what he's been able to do so far, I can only imagine the possibilities were he to put even a fraction of those 10K hours toward something productive.

One thing I really liked about Outliers is how it demystified the process of getting to a state where one person is vastly better at something than another. It's not *just* that it takes 10,000 hours (say!); that's a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. What's interesting is the way that even a small initial advantage prompts spending more time, which prompts a bigger advantage, which prompts spending more time. Given enough bits of luck to allow that process to continue - it was Outliers, wasn't it, that laid out a long list of points at which Bill Gates was through sheer luck able to keep working with computers - by the point at which the time spent reaches 10,000 hours, the advantage may be huge. It's not just the 10,000 hours, but the whole process that led to the doing of the 10,000 hours. My feeling is that the "talent" element shows itself not so much in the initial advantage but in the repeated choice to keep going with the process of spending the extra time and going to the next level.

E.g. maybe you take two rather musical 5yos and they both start piano, and for a few years they are both keen and they practise more (with or without parental insistence) as they get better, and they take up the musical opportunities that come their way as the result of their early promise. They get to 8 and you can't tell the difference yet. But from here on Child A gets more and more keen on piano and maintains the process of working harder, getting more opportunities, etc., while Child B gets interested in Egyptology and gradually puts less energy into piano. We could also through in a Child C who is just as keen a Child A but gets stymied through living somewhere remote where there isn't a good enough teacher to take her to the next level. We rejoin them at age 16, by which time Child A is thinking about being a professional pianist and B and C have more or less given up. It's easy to say that Child A is "more talented" at piano than Child B - but remember it didn't show for the first three years. And we might twitch a bit at saying that Child A is more talented than Child C, but claiming to know that it isn't so would be silly - we don't *know* that Child C would have continued on a path like Child A rather than like Child B.

Moral: talent is what you have now and can demonstrate. It isn't a fixed innate quantity. It makes sense to ask of a small child "I wonder how much talent at X he will eventually have?" but it doesn't really make sense to ask "I wonder how much talent at X he has?" - he doesn't have it yet.

Indeed this makes sense to me close to home. In DS's first term at school, he was mildly ahead in maths; doing simple sums rather than cementing his ability to count. What got him to being seriously ahead was a self-reinforcing combination of his choice to spend vast quantities of time doing maths, and his parents' willingness and ability to talk about maths, provide resources, etc. etc. At his age I had the impulse to spend the time but I hadn't had the support. He's more talented at maths than I was. Whether he's more talented than I would have been under different circumstances is fortunately unanswerable! (Why yes, I am envious, regardless of how little sense that makes!)

I'm tempted also to make a distinction between "talented" where someone may need to push you up the first few steps - e.g., we remind DS to do his piano practice - and "seriously talented" where you don't need that - nobody has ever needed to remind him to do maths! I don't know how much that holds water; there are certainly musicians who recall being made to practise when young. It may be more about the difference between music and maths. (That said, for my DS, it does seem clear that his maths talent is of a different order from his music talent, and it
was interesting to talk to another mother who has an older DS also into music and maths but the other way round. One thing I noticed was that, if her recollection can be trusted, her DS's early progress in piano was much faster than my DS's, although it doesn't sound as though he practised much more. IOW in that, my guess is he already had a noticeable advantage within weeks of starting. That happens too.)

Perhaps, but I believe that a point comes when more hard work won't result in more skill unless you have the talent in large quantities.

Some (most) people just wouldn't be able to do a triple axel, no matter how hard they try. Others wouldn't be able to recall 14 digits backwards, regardless of effort. This doesn't stop some from trying very hard to do these things, but if someone doesn't have the muscle and the balance and the timing and the guts, landing that triple won't happen. Ditto for the reverse digit span. Some people won't manage a single axel and some won't manage 8 digits backwards.

I'm not advocating against trying: often, you can't know unless you attempt something, and trying is great. I'm saying that our society doesn't do itself any favors by pretending that a positive attitude and hard work are all it takes. I actually think that the hard work myth can be very damaging. It discourages honest self-critique and/or can create feelings of inadequacy ("The teachers keep telling me that I can learn long division as fast as everyone else. I'm such a loser because I can't.").

Here are Charles Murray's comments on Amy Chua. He mentions that her kids have good genes:

http://blog.american.com/?p=24765
"To get a little bit serious: large numbers of talented children everywhere would profit from Chua�s approach, and instead are frittering away their gifts�they�re nice kids, not brats, but they are also self-indulgent and inclined to make excuses for themselves. There are also large numbers of children who are not especially talented, but would do a lot better in school if their parents applied the same intense home supplements to their classroom work.

But genes play a big role in whether you can demand that your child get an A in advanced calculus or make first seat in the violin section of the orchestra. With that in mind, let�s contemplate the genes being fed into those Chua children who are doing so well.

Maternal grandfather: EE and computer sciences professor at Berkeley, known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks.

Mother: able to get into Harvard (a much better indicator of her IQ than the magna cum laude in economics that she got there); Executive Editor of the Law Review at Harvard Law School.

Father: Summa cum laude from Princeton and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, now a chaired professor at Yale Law School.

Guess what. Amy Chua has really smart kids. They would be really smart if she had put them up for adoption at birth with the squishiest postmodern parents. They would not have turned out exactly the same under their softer tutelage, but they would probably be getting into Harvard and Princeton as well. Similarly, if Amy Chua had adopted two children at birth who turned out to have measured childhood IQs at the 20th percentile, she would have struggled to get them through high school, no matter how fiercely she battled for them.

Accepting both truths�parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities�seems peculiarly hard for some parents and almost every policy maker to accept."

These problems Val describes are exactly what dd encountered in her trial skip period. They are exactly why she and her dad and I want dd to continue in the higher grade. DD says, "I finally have to pay attention." But since its not perfect after the first month, the school isn't comfortable.

My goal is just one "normal" year where dd can be a more mainstreamed kid who is accelerated in math, rather than pulled out and accelerated in everything. We are finding that she is just not held accountable for her work and growth when everything is done in enrichment, pull out groups. Everyone coddles her and she is never going to learn the organizational skills required in life until she is faced with organizational challenges. I don't think that wanting those challenges for her makes me a "Chinese Mom," but I have now certainly been branded one.

It's good rhetoric - but don't you see, it isn't an argument, just a set of assertions.

Who says Amy Chua's children would have got into Harvard/Princeton regardless of upbringing? Murray does, but he doesn't advance any argument for it. Who says a child with an IQ at the 20th percentile would have had a hard time finishing high school regardless of upbringing? Again, only Murray. These "facts" are obvious only if you are already committed to a talent-is-innate world view.

In fact, I'm sure every one of us knows of a child of very high achieving parents and grandparents who didn't go on to be similarly high-achieving, for whatever reason. And fwiw, if this Wikipedia page is correct (I don't think it's worthwhile to check, but feel free if you disagree) 85% of American adults have completed high school, so logically [quibbles deleted] at the very least, a quarter of those whose IQ is in the bottom 20 percent do complete high school!

Even if you decide that he didn't really mean to claim that these things *would have* happened but only that they probably would have, it's still not obvious, as he suggests, that genes give a hard limit to achievement whereas parenting doesn't matter at all provided the genes are good enough. The standard figure is that IQ accounts for about 25% of the variability in school success. Now, you might argue that Chua's children have good genes in ways not accounted for by IQ, but then, IQ isn't solely determined by genes either.

Strictly speaking, I dare say Murray's assertion "parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities" is true, but I don't think I'd back it to be more true than "genes do matter, but parenting constrains possibilities" after we turned both into precise statements.

Memory appears to be something extremely susceptible to improvement-by-training. I found the article here to be very interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html

It didn't for us either. While there is a bit more challenge, it's not enough to require DS7 to practice more than just going through the motions of homework, classwork, etc... even with the sports he has played, though helpful, it has not proved to him that he would have to practice outside of scheduled team practices.

I am hoping the introduction to something completely foreign - a new language (pun intended) - at the new school next year will help teach him. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Grade skip did not solve this issue for us, either. The challenges of grade-skip have been "I have no friends" and "I write more slowly than the rest of the kids," but very little "this work requires more effort of me."

Grade skip solved the "I'm bored and miserable in class" problem, but not the "I can get high As without significant effort" problem.

Absolutely. But... Backwards recall is sometimes said [citation needed] to be very different from forwards recall in the cognitive skills it exercises; to reverse a sequence you (supposedly) have to hold it in memory and process it at the same time. In a naive, un-memory-trained person (me!) that feels true. Forward recall I do essentially by audio memory, perhaps with a little mathematically-based pattern spotting. Backwards recall does seem much harder (and one has less occasion to practise it!)

Still, my guess would be that these trained memorisers would not have that much more difficulty with the backwards than with the forwards task, even though the article doesn't speak to it. I would guess that the walking through a house trick would be easily adapted to "placing" numbers on a forwards walk through the house and "retrieving" them on a backwards walk. What that trick does is to turn the memorisation task into a simple matter of repeated association, with the sequencing, forwards or backwards, parasitic on a sequence one already knows well.

Of course, the effectiveness of the recall task as part of a cognitive test - the correlation between how good someone is at it and how good they'll be at other tasks - is not in contradiction with the idea that it can be trained. That's why IQ tests are secret. This is one part that can't be secret, and should training memory ever become a popular pastime, doubtless this part of the test will have to be removed because it will no longer be predictive.

A little late on this, but their is more then one way to so called success. If I practiced 10,000 hours on a viloen I would be good, but never great. If I was born with talent and did not prcatice I may be good, but not great. If I had talent and practiced, but had no great formal instruction I may be good, but not great. If I had all three I would be great. And the same goes for my spelling and grammer.

Also if you practice 10,000 hours but wrong you still won't know it. Also just b/c you can do something doesn't mean understanding and ability to move beyond.

I think you missed my point. I was definitely not trying to claim that practice doesn't improve performance. I was saying that there's a point beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent.

Let me put this another way: people here talk about the very high intelligence of their children. Do these kids really have an extreme set of talents, or are they just working hard/being made to work hard? If the latter, do the schools have a point when they make accusations about hothousing the kids?

Practice is a necessary ingredient in success. But referring back to the hard work myth, and as Edwin pointed out, it's only one ingredient.

And my point was, that for memory in particular, there appears to be no point beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent. If you read the article, there's scientific evidence that top memorizers aren't people with inherently good memories - they're average people with training.

Same here.

Same here too. Grade skip plus mid-year switch to HG school working faster and a year ahead seems to have addressed this issue. For now...

Same here, as well; radical acceleration (even 4+ grades) hasn't really helped EITHER problem for my DD. The underlying problem of pacing and repetition is just too much for EG/PG kids in most regular academic environments, I think. Of course, we don't have a magnet option, so that may color our perspective.

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I actually think that Outliers is a terrific book. BUT. What I find disappointing about that book is that so many people who read it seem to lose sight of the subtext that these anecdotes and loose collections of (admittedly cherry-picked) data can obscure-- that these radical success stories are, as others have noted, about BOTH time and underlying ability/talent. It truly does take about 10,000-16,000 hours of study to earn both a bachelor's degree and a PhD in a subject. We've done the math there, and this tallies with our personal experiences and with those of numerous colleagues. So there really is something to it, though I am not sure that the number is 10,000 for everything, and I will also say (from personal experience again) that no matter HOW much you want something or work hard at it-- there really ARE things which are simply beyond one's scope of natural talent.

I can't CREATE a Tiger Woods or Midori-- not starting with just any child, that is. There is genetic potential involved. I knew very hard-working graduate students that simply were not going to succeed at earning doctoral degrees in chemistry or physics, no matter how much more time they put in than the rest of their peers.

My daughter is a pretty reasonable example of this in action. Sure, she's a rock-star in terms of being almost so uniformly/evenly "gifted" academically that she truly SEEMS like a very bright college student trapped in the body of a pre-teen.

Have we 'coached' her to be that smart? While some people may think that Tiger Parenting can produce kids like that (hot-housing, I suppose one might say); I categorically do NOT believe that it is possible. That's genetics-- my daughter's legacy is not unlike that of Amy Chua's daughters. She has a family littered with scientists, mathematicians and musical prodigies and parents with PhD's in the physical sciences. Her smarts are just natural and mostly genetic. That is potential.

Then there is the environmental factors that go into whether or not that potential will be met, and to what degree...

I push my child pretty hard to apply herself and give some things her "all." Piano has been one of those things (though I've never resorted to the lengths that Dr. Chua reports, I'm happy to note)... as has a 4H project that my daughter chose to do, and at one time, swimming lessons. The message is "don't be a quitter just because this is HARD. It's supposed to be HARD. It's hard for most people-- mastery in the face of difficulty makes the victory that much sweeter."

My reasons have to do with several things and my desire to be a good parent to the child that I have. (As opposed to my ideal of what it means to be "a good mother.") My daughter, like another poster's child, would willingly apply herself to not much if left entirely to her own devices. Goldilocks would automatically avoid ALL tasks that are not "ideal" from her perspective, in terms of difficulty and stimulation... and when the going gets tough, I have given my child a very NO-NONSENSE 'follow through' lecture and insisted in no uncertain terms that she WILL follow through on a committment she made.

We as loving parents want her to learn that effort is, in many ways, directly proportional to results-- no matter HOW incredible your brain is; that's like understanding that a formula one racecar needs as much care in the driver's seat as a used Yugo. She, as I noted at first, is NOT learning this particular lesson from school. And also as another poster noted, PhD programs are filled with people who are smart-smart-smart just like her... and the successful people in them are the ones that have learned that secret-- coasting isn't how to make your dreams become reality.


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Also worth noting-- my ten year old read Outliers. I encouraged her to. LOL.

She has also read Nickel and Dimed. Just saying... we felt that was an educational choice, too.

Hmm. I don't think the answer is quite so cut-and-dried.

When I did a search for the Nature article mentioned in the Times, I found other papers on the subject. The first one I looked at was Wilding & Valentine (1994) Memory Champions British Journal of Psychology May 1:231. The authors studied winners of the same memory competition and found evidence that their memories were superior outside of the use of mnemonic techniques. They also had very good long-term retention and relatives with good memories (last trait self-reported). I didn't look at any of their other papers.

The Nature Neuroscience paper (Maguire et al; (2003) 6:90-95) had some intriguing results about self-teaching. It implied that the subjects all had average IQs, yet they didn't do full IQ tests. They just did an assortment of subtests. I'm not in the field and can't judge the validity of these results as broad measures, though using a test of reading ability, for example, seems a bit odd to me.

The reigning world champion of memory is a guy named Ben Pridmore. He has said that his IQ is 159. The literature has many references to IQ being correlated with short-term memory.

Maybe people with average memories can learn to memorize a deck of cards in 30 seconds by using mnemonics, but I'm not sure. to answer the question, you'd have to run tests on two groups: those with high IQs and those with average IQs. If both use mnemonic techniques, can the people with average IQs beat the high IQ group? Dunno.

What I do know is that it's super-frustrating when the media oversimplifies a complex problem and writes a report implying that some broad idea has been definitely proven by a single study, when reality is way more nuanced.

All this stuff about whether having a good memory is correlated with high IQ is beside your original point, though. You don't need to do an experiment as complicated as this to confirm or refute your claim, which was: "there's a point [and earlier you put this point at 14 digits of backwards recall] beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent."

I've put in the 14 digits you mentioned earlier, because without some specified point, there is a danger that your claim becomes uninterestingly true: for example, if you take someone who is so severely learning disabled that they cannot communicate a sequence of digits, practice won't help that person to demonstrate backwards recall of 14 digits; but that's not a very interesting example of "insufficient talent". You clearly intended something more like "most people of around average IQ will not be able to learn to recall 14 digits in reverse, regardless of how much they practise". That's an easily testable claim. I expect it's false, for the reasons I already described drawing on the article, but I don't know for sure.

In this nature vs nurture field, it seems particularly easy to allow loaded language to get in the way; that's why it's important to make claims precise. Nobody doubts that humans have different capabilities, and nobody doubts that many of those capabilities can be improved by practice. Cf my earlier comment about "parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities" being probably true, but maybe no more true than "genes do matter, but parenting constrains possibilities".

No argument there.

The 14 digits thing was a bad example, so I definitely stand corrected there. The triple axel was a better example.

My original point was that in US society, there is a myth positing that you can do anything and be a success if you just practice enough. I don't think that success is that simple, and feel that this philosophy is an extreme one that sets people up for failure while not giving them the tools they need to understand why they failed. Pushing too many people to go to college is an example of that.

"You can..." is not the same as "You might; see what happens."

Val

Oh boy. When I get back in I cannot wait to read all these posts! Two thumbs up for taking what I saw as interesting bait for a conversation! Keep it coming, I'll be back today!

I think that what is being overlooked here (unless I missed it) is passion. No one is going to spend 10,000 hours on something that they aren't passionate about. There has to be 3 ingredients. Talent, commitment and passion, for it is the passion that keeps you going when things get tough.

I'm not in US society and don't, perhaps, have a very good understanding of how it differs from UK society. In the UK, what I think I see is some people - most of them teachers! - promulgating the falsehood you're criticising, but in reaction against a much more prominent general assumption that what matters is "potential" or "raw talent" and that nurture, practice, parenting, education and the environment in general have only minor roles to play. Maybe knowing that will make it clearer why I kick against that falsehood (too) - I agree that both are false and unhelpful.

For example, a big political issue here at the moment is the funding of universities, and the government proposes to tie a particular freedom for each university (letting the university charge more than 6Kpa fees) to that university's achieving particular targets - implied, much higher than they achieve at the moment - for the percentage of students it admits who come from disadvantaged homes and/or schools. (One article, another article.) The govt wants universities to lower entry standards to do that, arguing that there "must" be plenty of students with the "potential" to achieve at university, even if their results so far do not demonstrate it, and that universities should admit on this "potential". At my university, and I'm sure at others, we are seriously keen to admit students who will benefit from what we can offer, and we do lower entry requirements where we feel that they aren't a good reflection of how a particular student will do on our course. However, we aren't in a position to re-teach school material to students who haven't got it at school, and it's clear that our courses require some very fundamental skills which are difficult for students to pick up quickly at university if they haven't learned them in the first 17/18 years of their lives. Even if (to avoid issues irrelevant to this argument) we assumed that, say, the most disadvantaged 5% of children are, at birth, just as likely as the most advantaged 5% of children to have the potential, if they were given equal circumstances, to benefit from our courses, it doesn't follow that we're failing if it turns out that we admit more students from the latter group than from the former. What happens to the students between birth and university admission actually makes a difference to who they are and what they can do, and hence whether - at that point - they are suitable students for our courses. We are unable to do anything by fiddling our admission criteria or by running great pre-university summer courses that can come close to compensating for 18 years of disadvantage, and it is unreasonable of the government to expect us to. Yet that's where the "it's all about talent" argument which is what I mostly see in the UK leads to.

[For the benefit of anyone who knows which university I'm talking about, of course I speak here in an entirely personal capacity!]

<nodding> Yes-- I know precisely what you mean.

I was floored the first time it was none-to-subtly suggested to me that I just needed to "take the students as they come to" me... (this from my dean)

uh.... wait... a... minute... remind me again what "prerequisite" means, exactly, to YOU??" I can't teach advanced chemistry to students who have no grasp at all on basic algebra, and it is GROSSLY unfair to the well-prepared students in those courses to expect that I should.

But apparently saying such things out loud is, well... verboten. <shakes head sadly>

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I agree that passion is the third essential ingredient in whatever one chooses to call it-- success, mastery, etc.

But I don't think that it's necessarily independent of the other two, either, and I think that mastery is possible for very gifted people even in the absense of that passion.

Kids are definitely just born "musical" or "mathy." Particular passions may be discovered along the way, but there is no question that I was destined to be a scientist. My basic mode of cognition is the scientific method and so for me, it wasn't "being taught" those concepts so much as learning the formal terminology for the way I approach the world.

My parents were downright perplexed by the way I thought about things, even as a child; neither of them thought that way. My DD has yet to discover her life's great passion-- but we see glimmers of it now and then. She loves reading, but not "literature" per se. She loves math, but not theory, no matter how elegant. She seems to love argumentation, social justice, talking, statistics, and physics (including the mathematics).

She's good at a number of things that do not particularly feed her soul. I think this is a challenge for many gifted people-- that you sometimes feel pressured to follow your natural strengths, whether or not they bring you existential joy.

Oh, yes. I was the project lead for designing three courses several years back. I wanted to include prerequisites. I was told that they had to be just for guidance and not mandatory. The department was afraid that "someone might sue" because of making entry requirements unrealistically high (remember, everyone deserves a chance!!).

For the record, the courses were second-year-level and I wanted a course in introductory college-level biology for course 1, that plus course 1 for course 2... you get the idea. I argued that everyone had the same chance to take intro bio, but forget it. It wasn't "fair."

OK, I know I'm veering off path here, but this made me think of how difficult it must be for some of our elementary school teachers when we ask them to "take our kids as they come to them" (advanced, in the case of our GT kiddos)... Of course, the problem is reversed, but....

An excellent point.

That's probably no more off topic than my observation that just because you are GOOD at something doesn't mean that it is personally worthwhile to pursue mastery of it, either.

Both are problems/observations that are somewhat tangential to the mainstream conversations surrounding these issues (nurture v. nature, I mean, and what sort of "nurture" is desirable/appropriate in the first place); but both are unusual and critical aspects of these issues for gifted persons in a general sense, and those of us parenting gifted children in particular.

I've really been enjoying others' observations.

Terrific thread. I posted the same thing on another site, and not one bite. And if you read this this start to finish, I think it is fair to say our kids didn't fall far from some bright trees.

@chrys I love the corner you show Bill Gates being painted into... wonder which party he feels has better claim, if any.

And the parenting matters but genes constrain conversation is great.

As for grade skips, it is like taking fever reducer but not antibiotics. You minimize the discomfort but you do not rid the underlying problem. And that is these kids are not products of hothoused achievement but fundamentally gifted. So moving up provides challenge until they are caught up - but their learning speed may still outpace traditional classrooms. Hmmm... untouched traditional education and the gifted? Is that like 10,000 hours of wasted time and practice. What if that 10,000 hours went into challenging work.

On red shirting, I would simply like similar questions asked to ensure like grade advancement that it is in the long-term best interest of the child. I think sometimes folks can be parent centered not student centered. Maybe it feels good to be a parent of the kid who walks into k knowing everything, and just hands down covered. But how does that child feel after 2-3 months of answering the questions, not learning something new. Choir preaching here I bet.

So research makes its statistical claims - but without citing - how would you rate the pull of nurture vs nature as it relates to your child's gifts?

My favorite request -- "your thoughts without citations." It's hard for me to separate nature versus nurture very much, because I have always provided DS with many opportunities. But in the early years, I can guess that nature predominantly led to a 2 year old teaching himself to read, despite the hours of me reading to him. I know other parents who read to their kids just as much, and they did not magically learn how to read. Nature created the HG+ child, and the opportunities we gave to him nourished his HGness. Would he know so much about the things he is interested in if we had not provided resources? Probabaly not to the extent he does now, but his nature would still be HG+ (the potential, say). But then again, we haven't pushed or created very many additional opportunities for the kid, compared with families with more resources/time. Hmmmm. Good question. To be the kid he is today, I'd say nature was 70%, nuture 30%.

I feel like my nurture is giving him the tools he can use do whatever his nature starves for. � �All parents juggle meeting their kids need now with storing stuff for them later. �(think money for carnivals vs college savings). �So now we got to juggle when we want to ration out this educational information, why? �Right now, if there was no future to think of, I would know that offering a pre-school education is fine. �But there is a future and it's heading this way, and it makes me doubt encouraging,., what am I doing? �I'm teaching arithmetic to a three year old? "What's he going to learn in kindergarten if he knows his abc's?" �A neighbor asks. �Keep teaching him as long as he wants to keep learning, the hubby says. �Meanwhile he memorized nursery rhymes he's found online and traces cursive worksheets because he thinks it looks nice. �He asked me for the one at walmart but I bought a better one online.

I've got a strong confidence in his nature. �*It allows me to allow others to teach him things I don't believe are right.* �Mainly my own oversensitivity makes me cringe when well meaning friends, family, or neighbors teach him things the way they were taught and that I don't believe are sensible. �I really think about it, bite my tongue, and only state my thoughts when it's my turn to be relevant. �I believe in him too much to convince him that I don't like what somebody else thinks or says. �To me this is because I believe in his pg nature to find his own conclusions over time. �I save my parenting for the mundane, (use a normal voice, if its not yours dont touch it, don't break stuff) not for ruling his internal world. �Or at least I fight to.
that's my thoughts on nature vs nurture. �I don't really quiestion weither (sp. Ugh) nature vs nurture defines academic giftedness as much as I question if the gifted should be nurtured differently. �I made a post or two a while back saying how I would raise a gifted kid differently depending on LOG. �One of my items was I would teach them morality less, trusting them more to innately find it. �I just realized why I would feel that way. �If someone told something to a child that I felt was one-sided, misleading, or useless and that child had a lower LOG I would be compelled to speak up immediately with other pov(s) for them to weigh and judge. �A child with a higher LOG will store the idea on a back burner for years and file it away and encounter and weigh the other pov's eventually anyway. �The lower log kid may never put the pov's together in the same light for evaluation.

Well what do you know? �I had that inclination to treat the kids differently for years, and while writing this post I thought of the reason why. �I wasn't even looking for a justification, someone just asked "what do you think?"

ETA: My boy doesn't say please every time he asks for something. �I like the way ds does use please. �He uses it sparingly to indicate that he realizes he's asking a huge favor. �He wasn't taught that it's a magic word. He uses it �to mean the depth of his request, to express his meaning, not as a word with any kind of power. �A family member is now teaching him, "I won't listen to you if you don't say please. �And change your voice like this... (immitating a cuter baby voice)". �I over-react internally to these hughe life-changing issues. �I'm comforted by the fact that everybody can teach him everything they believe and in the end he'll come out with his very own unique beliefs. �I certainly ended up putting my own twist on everything I was ever taught.

This has been a really fun discussion. I am in the US and rarely see much evidence that there is a societal tendency to believe anything can be achieved with effort. I see much more myth of the kind Dweck argues against (as does Chua in her references to Western parents) that you either have it or you don't and there isn't much place for practice or memorization or hard work because your IQ test at 3 labeled you gifted and that *cannot* be taken away. A kid is either talented in baseball and math, or not. Most threads, even on this board, illustrate the belief that one is or is not gifted and that gifted folks think differently and need different education. There is not that much discussion about whether that can meaningfully be measured, whether a measurement at 3 or 5 or 9 or 15 still applies at 30 or 40.

One thing I like about Gladwell is that he brings into the discussion many things that impact opportunities that are usually left out -- like whether one's parents are paying enough attention to know a teenager is slipping out at night to program computers, whether one's talents would be appreciated in a particular time period, how whether one was born in January or July impacts hockey skills later. Each of these fortuitous or non-fortuitous events has repercussions for future development. If you know more math than most entering K and adults praise your math ability and you get moved to GT math for more enrichment and end up doing more math, that becomes a huge advantage eventually. The initial advantage might have been talent, might have been hothousing, might have been being in a school with a teacher who isn't afraid of math. Each advantage can lead to others but in a seamless way so the steps aren't seen. Without reading Gladwell, I doubt many hockey parents would attribute their children's hockey success to month of birth. Similarly, I think many successful musicians believe in their talent when many, many people would have similar levels of success with similar levels of work.

I agree with St Pauli on this one! I can see teachers shaking their heads in amazement at the audacity of suggesting that a whole year of math be skipped! In elementary school, the prerequisite for 6th grade math is 5th grade math. When I argue that my child should skip 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade math, they look at me like I'm crazy. I agree that you can't teach advanced chemistry to folks without algebra, but taking an algebra class and passing it guarantees no great achievement in algebra. There are kids who teach themselves high level algebra (and trig and biology and chemistry and Latin and . . . . . ) and they truly *don't* need a prerequisite for a class. So how do you handle them? Can placement tests offset the prerequisite? What about a kid who hasn't had algebra at all but is smart enough to figure it as it comes up?

Back to the skipping issue, I love some of these thoughts (masks the fever but doesn't kill the germ!) and am glad that it has worked for many people. For my kids, skipping grades and subject acceleration cannot address the primary issues which are pace and repetition and depth. Even a higher grade starts with review and more review and then teaches every topic many times and spirals back to make sure they have it and reviews for tests to make sure they have it. Then there's a vacation and more review because the kids presumably forgot everything during the holiday. After a two-year math skip, instruction was great for about two months and then all the same problems came back. I suppose you could argue to skip and skip some more (and one child has done that), but there are many social considerations for radical skips and early college. If it's only one subject, there are major logistical issues in transportation and being in multiple school levels. If a kid is 9 and ready for algebra or calculus, who is available to teach? Not teachers in an elementary school. If a kid is 9 and ready for 10th grade work in all subjects, there is the issue of how to find a school willing to do radical acceleration and how to protect a child in an environment with high school kids. Some people manage to do that well, but it's not easy. And, even with radical skips in place, the work may not be difficult or appropriate, just higher level.

I've really enjoyed reading this thread, and have been pondering the nature v nurture thing since we realized dd was gifted. I come from a 'line' of EG+ people on my father's side, though I have only recently discovered this. I was brought up by my bright (but maybe MG at most), mentally ill mother, who had no input in to my schooling. As I've mentioned elsewhere here some time ago, school for me was 'away from home', rather than somewhere to learn. I never felt smart, only different. I often found things very easy, but spent so much of my time trying to cope with life (I don't mean that in a 'woe is me' sense, I have a wonderful life now), put in so little effort and had so little support academically or otherwise that I was only ever an average student. I got in to a mid level university, dropped out because I was bored and went to work (where I always excelled, much to my own surprise and frankly, disbelief) and people would always comment on how bright I was, which honestly shocked me.

When I had my dd and found out about giftedness, it was like a whole part of who I was was brought out from under wraps. Discovering giftedness and the social and emotional aspects of it was wonderful - it was me! But it was also disappointing. When I speak to other parents of gifted kids - who were high achievers themselves at school, who are formally educated and work in professional fields - I realize how much knowledge passed me by, that I suspect I will never be able to pick up. When I read other posts by people using the appropriate term for particular maths functions, for example, I realize there is a whole vocabulary that goes with education that I don't have. I suspect I don't present as particularly bright to those who are well educated. This is where I suspect nurture comes in to it.

I eventually went back to study with great success and will do more. But I do feel that that lack of general education and the vocabulary that goes with it (and I don't mean the vocabulary of someone well read, I mean the jargon of education), along with the lack of early networks tertiary study provides can have a profound effect on someone's capacity to identify and access their potential if they are unknowingly gifted and/or unsupported. Though I am proof that it needn't be the end of opportunity.

What I do have is an intense understanding of life and people (which I suspect is why my lack of success at school didn't translate to a lack of success at work) - perhaps I got a different kind of 'education' caring for my mum and myself. A different result from a different kind of 'nurture'. I think this goes back to the post above where someone referred to their child's gifted nature. I guess from my point of view nurture gives you access (or not) to meeting a particular potential depending on the focus of that nurture, but it doesn't change that intrinsic giftedness and how that makes an individual tick.

In the case of my eg/pg daughter, I clearly see the benefits to her of being supported in her learning. When I see her challenged by something and what she can achieve when she's supported to work through that - and the other side; bored and in need of stimulation - it makes me very conscious of how much difference that support would have made to me. But I'm very much a middle of the road, moderation is everything kind of person, so no tiger mother for me

I found all the tiger mom uprising fascinating, especially since I was raised by tiger parents, with dad being the more pressure laying of the two. My intent before DS was to try to find a middle ground between my upbringing and the laid back approach of my DH's upbringing. He is as bright and successful as I am and I would describe us both as MG maybe EG but not PG but where my sib is like us, his are not. So I was always railing against the nuture vs nature. My parents were of the philosophy that you just can trust nature. We had such battles in high school because I felt we weren't trusted to be responsible for our own education. And to me that is the core of the Amy Chua phenomenon, there is a line, of offering opportunities and requiring practice, of fulfilling responsibilities - it's over that line - where the problems, especially the rebellion starts. I was infuriated that I was treated with so little respect that I couldn't do sports be ause it might affect my grades and my chances to get into a good college. The result was even after getting into my excellent college, and grad school, I'm not a joiner. But on some level I want to be, so nurture created the desired behaviors but they have unit ended consequences.

Fast forward to having DS5 and I am faced with how to create the upbringing I wanted rather than what I had or what DH had, I fully planned to take what in liked about my childhood and ditch the rest but then I got DS and his nature had no respect for what ever nuture approach I wanted to take!!! I'm not talking about approaches to discipline but rather his learning needs. My first few posts here are filled with guilt over missing his exponential growth all the while expecting him to be quite bright. His insatiable need for information sets him apart. There is nothing I can do to change that and I don't want to, but when those needs were not being met he was frustrated, he didn't know at 3 that he was desperate for information and neither did I, all I knew is that he was crazed for tv which I didn't want him to watch, started bringing hom books by the bucketful and he forgets we have a tv.

My DF a teacher hates the focus on gifted even though her DC is quite bright and now in a special program, she is completely focused on working hard. I get that but I believe as someone said earlier - no amount of hard work is going to get you over the hump of innate understanding at certain levels. I believe we have innate skills and predispositions, that we aren't blank slates. But I also believe that many are short changed by not having their needs or circumstances met because due to context and environment signals are missed. If figured out what my DS needed, what if I had missed the opportunity, gladwell's moment, would he be just regularly gifted, with behavior problems, or maybe just the behavior problems, or would he have found another way to get what he needs. Not sure. But what I do know, is that he is who he is, regardless of hothousing, tiger-ness or anything else. But my job as a parent I believe obligates me to help him fill those needs even if no one else thinks so!!

DeHe

Now can I cite something though? �Cause there's this book I just read about nurturing your kids nature that I really like how they define your Childs strengths as being not the same things as skills. �Strengths can be turned into skills. �Strengths are the things that when you do them you feel energized. �and with the practice,practice mold we're always focusing on kids weaknesses, trying to fix them. �Any passion is going to be from an area that makes you feel strong, alive, energized from doing it, not from an area of weakness. �Not that this helps the argument because the Chaunese clan says you feel strong on your 10,001st hour. (whatever the physical # translates to). �Conversely the unschool of thought says you can only find that passion from finding your own path. �I like this book I just read because it solved one of my parenting paradox I made for myself three years ago. �How can I unschool ds, even if I send him to public school. �Jenifer Fox m.Ed, gym teacher/author has replied, "by teaching your child how to reflect on their own feelings and refine their understanding of what activities they engage in that makes them feel strong and more energized after they do them, and keep pinpointing what exact aspects of that activity energizes you, so you can approach every task through the lens of your strength (...paraphrased poorly:) and probably what the unschoolers are saving their children from, which is a NCLB weakness based school system with a mission statement goal of fixing kids, of spending eight hours a day for thirteen years only being told what's wrong about you. �Never really celebrating what's right about you. �Because we have to fix what's wrong with you first. �Who cares if you can X, you can't Y. �So Y you'll do all day until your X regressed enough to match. �

But with this new positive psychology movement, "the nurtured heart approach", the strengths movement, the "your child's strengths". �I'm beginning to manifest a solid physical line, a definite shape of what it looks like to show my kids how to , crap. �I lost it..

By the way, in googling something else I happened on this volume of a journal of High Ability Studies that appears to have a focus on just this question:
High Ability Studies, vol 18 issue 1, 2007
This is behind a subscription wall, but at least some of the papers are findable individually by googling their titles. In particular, the Ericsson et al. paper at the beginning looks interesting (and it starts by discussing the trainability of memory, as it happens). I haven't read it yet. The presence of another paper in the same issue by the same authors responding to criticism of their paper suggests that there is considerable controversy!

I'd put the balance with my own five-year-old kid close to 50% nature, 50% nurture. That's a complete guess, of course. I believe strongly that nurture plays a much larger role than many here assign to it.

Of course, it's obvious to me that some high levels of certain skills can't be attained by a person with any amount of training; I often label these "savant-type talents". For memory, this would include such things as memorizing the entire London skyline at a glance (Stephen Wiltshire), memorizing whole pages of the phone book at a glance (John von Neumann), etc.

I think, though, that there are many kinds of skills where savant-type skills would not be possible, or would not be highly relevant, only giving one a sort of boost. I don't think that being a numeric savant who can calculate pi to any arbitrary place in one's head, for example, really gives one much of a boost in higher math reasoning ability, nor would memorizing math textbooks at a glance. Memory of course is a special area that can increase one's ability on a myriad of tasks, but I suspect that for a great many tasks one could be well enough off with the type of memory enhancements that come with practice that a savant's memory would again not be the prime determining factor in maximum achievement potential. For other tasks (winning Jeopardy, drawing things precisely from memory, etc.) a savant-type memory might help quite a bit.

I remain convinced that for most types of skills that really matter to the human race (research etc.), a person with fairly average biological attributes could be trained to the level of being a "genius" as that term is generally used by the public-- primarily a person who is observed to make great discoveries, or otherwise change the world in a significant way. I believe you can train someone into having an indomitable spirit, incredible focus, amazing problem-solving abilities, the whole nine yards. Of course, a John von Neumann type, trained "perfectly", would quite likely be ahead of the average-starting-point person in a number of ways due to her or his gifts.

Haven't seen the board this fired up in a while!

For the nature vs. nurture question....My DS was born with his brain, nature. I have fed the monster, nurture. So my first inclination would be 50/50. But I remember a conversation with a Psychologist regarding DS at 18-20 months(somewhere around there)We took DS to see him because even at that age perfectionism was causing issues, big issues. The Psychologist told us that the fact was that my son was born with an "insatiable need" to learn. Not a want, a need. He further stated that if my son were asked to live in a 5 x 5 cardboard box for a week, he would learn something. No way to stop it, or slow it down. That is purely nature. His words, 6 years later still ring true. My son will learn, whether I want him to or not. I can't slow him down, neither can his teachers. The only thing that we can do is nurture his "needs" by making available whatever he identifies.
So, in our case I would say that my DS is a product of probably 70/30 with nature firmly holding the top spot.

As far as the prerequisites issue goes... I firmly agree in learning A before B. That being said I believe that all prerequisites should be open to challenge. My son is in the school he is because of his ability to pass assessment tests for classes he's never taken. His school is committed to putting him where he needs to be. Because of this, he is given tests prior to schedules rather than automatically being moved up one grade level.

Strengths vs passion..... My son has amazing math skills, show him something once and he's got it. He can also carry it forward and make the connections without any help ie: understanding that division is multiplication backwards. Because of this, he is currently working 5 years ahead in math. That being said, it is a strength, not a passion. Science on the other hand is his passion. It doesn't come quite as easily, although a terrific memory helps. At 8, he is committed to having a career in science. Last month, he asked me to print a list of all of the world's sciences for him. He hung it on the wall in his room because he doesn't want to miss anything. He is excited with the chance to study geology, physiology, chemistry and the rest. He won't stop until he's had a taste of each and every one because only then can he make an informed decision regarding his life's path. Eventually I suppose, he'll make 10,000 hours on something!

That's my 2 1/2 cents for now.........

I really like how you put that, Shari.

Had to highlight this from another poster, though-- it made me chuckle:


Exactly. These were students that theoretically had the proficiency by virtue of having completed the prereq... but the reality was quite another matter. A matter that I was, as a professor, somehow supposed to 'work around.' So if I had to teach beginning algebra instead of, say... quantitative analysis the way the ACS envisioned it... that was apparently what I should do. In other words, I was not to require mastery of the prerequisite. (This still boggles my mind.)

In the college environment, "testing out" of prerequisites has a long history. The prerequisites are much less about "do A and then B because that is how it's done" than they are pragmatic needs for particular skills. "You need to be able to use integral calculus to understand this physics course." Credit for a course is sometimes even given via exam.

At least it used to be so; there has definitely been pressure on higher ed to propogate the philosophy that has taken hold in K through 12. Even worse is the attitude that students are "customers" and that the institution should be run as a business to please them. I don't think that's sound at all, FWIW.

Not everyone can be a particle physicist, a great jazz pianist, a charismatic talk show host, or a poet laureate. I think that it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. That's not to say that most people couldn't develop some skill in physics, piano, public speaking, or creative writing with sufficient practice, or that luminaries in those endeavors don't work hard.

They do; they MUST or they wouldn't have that level of accomplishment. But enough of the one ingredient doesn't substitute for the other. The Mozarts of the world are not "made" but neither are they "born." They're BOTH. The reason that they are so seemingly rare has to do with right-place-right-time-right-child-right-parents-right-passion.

I think that is the essential meaning behind Gladwell's premise, and perhaps also the subtext of Chua's. Both err in overestimating the contribution of time/practice/sweat equity to true genius, however. Einstein, Picasso, Oprah, Robert Frost and Jellyroll Morton are special above and beyond hard work and opportunity. History is filled with examples of children who were given VERY special opportunities by virtue of birth-- but most become 'proficient' and not more, and we never know their names the way we do their more talented relatives. Most of JS Bach's many children, all but one of the Barrymores' many great-grandchildren-- there are a few who stand out as "talented" but most weren't able to make use of those opportunities to the fullest. If environment were everything, then family dynasties should be much more common in areas of performance-based prestige, and most fail after a couple of generations.

It bemuses me that while most fully concede that not everyone can become, say, a professional athlete, there is still the durable belief that environment is 100% of intellectual performance, and that with the right environment, neural plasticity is infinite. It's just not so. There's "neurotypical" and then there is "other." Functional MRI and PET scanning studies have shown for nearly two decades that there are real differences.


There are fields where neurotypical people are the minority; is that solely due to lack of interest? Can everyone who WANTS to be a brain surgeon or test pilot do so? Most high school quarterbacks will never become Peyton Manning. Is it lack of nurturing?
Is 'everyone' college material? If so, then is 'everyone' (everyone with the desire) Medical School material, too? Is it really just a matter of effort?


____________________________________

I think I've already answered the nature v. nurture question. Probably several times over.

In my DD's case in particular, I'd guess 80/20. Like Shari's child, mine would need to be in a sensory deprivation chamber to prevent learning. Actually, that's not even true. At this point, she'd probably do thought experiments even there. LOL. But she has been given the opportunity to exist "unmasked" for much of her school day since she is educated at home.

In my own case, I think that the answer is more like 90-10. I did not have a nurturing upbringing, nor a well-to-do one. On the other hand, that does make for greater tenacity and resilience when the mixture is just right, so who knows.

This has got to be something like ten cents at this point. I guess I just find this topic to be compelling.

Oh, and one other thing that I find just intriguing as all get-out is the notion of "savant" abilities or cognitive singularity/exceptionality.

I think that most people have some sort of savant ability (and a mirror image weakness, too, often as not), even if it isn't extreme. I think that we only really recognize them when they are extreme or in particular areas such as music, visual arts, or mathematics. Perfect pitch, for example, or the ability to memorize pages of numbers at a glance; those are the things that we notice and label as "savant" abilities.

Just as remarkable (to me) are the people that 'just know' what a baby is thinking when it cries, can identify a particular blend of seasonings on food at a restaurant, or reproduce a conversation verbatim from memory.

If you talk to people, a lot of them even know what their particular savant ability is. It's fascinating.

I can't recall a phone number long enough to dial it without looking at it again. (Completely true) My savant ability is color memory/discrimination. It's not a very useful savant ability, as these things go, and I'd probably trade it for being able to remember a phone number long enough to find a pen and paper when I need to take a message, but hey...



I think that most people just assume that everyone shares their savant ability, so they don't think of it as remarkable unless it comes up in conversation. I only realized in my thirties that most people can't pick a paint sample/color out from memory.

(I think the waters have been muddied somewhat by the term "nurture" and the subsequent use of the term by laypeople in these sorts of discussions. It would be simpler to call it the "environment vs. genetics" debate, to rule out the need to discuss whether a child is a self-teacher, as that's not very relevant in my opinion).


I'm amazed that you would lump a charismatic talk show host in with a particle physicist and poet laureate. (I also don't think that the word "disingenuous" means what you think it means. :P )


Sure; though they can compensate somewhat, one certainly can't completely substitute for not enough of the other. "Perfect" instruction couldn't turn a person with a defective brain into a great thinker, just as a John von Neumann-type brain can't teach itself particle physics from scratch, nor can it invent a language to think about abstract concepts from scratch. The brain of a John von Neumann, as with anyone, would actually physically atrophy, as I understand it, if he/she were raised by wild dogs.


Come on, seriously?


Well, I think it's pretty well-accepted (by most in this thread at least) that an extremist viewpoint is bound to be wrong. I do think it's a fallacy, however, to liken abstract intellectual pursuits to athletics. I can see why it would be tempting, of course-- physical limitations are easy to understand on a gut level, and easy to prove-- but running a marathon is not just like doing advanced math. I don't know of any proof of the maximum level of ability of the human brain, and believe that we are still in the beginnings of our journey of understanding about the brain.


Hyperbole, of course. No one seriously thinks that.


Are you saying that these fields are packed with autistic people? I am amazed at that, especially at the test pilots. In any event, does the existence of that minority tend to prove or to disprove that an improved environment can make a biologically normal person perform at what we today consider to be a very high level? (That's rhetorical-- I already know the answer.)

Anyway, I don't think that merely becoming a brain surgeon or test pilot, or scientist for that matter, means that one is particularly brilliant. But if achieving membership in such a role is how you define very high mental ability, I am guessing that any born-normal person could fairly easily be educated to perform at that level, with the right know-how. I even think one could be trained to be a charismatic talk show host! I may just be a disingenuous sort of person to feel this way, but we can agree to disagree.

I wasn't actually drawing any sort of comparison between those disparate fields, for whatever that is worth. Hopefully the inclusion of Oprah provided some amusement, at least.

Setting aside judgements about the relative worth of endeavors, my point there was that each requires a set of specialized skills beyond that possessed by most (average) laypersons. Worth noting that not everything that LOOKS easy actually is. That's as close as I'll come to defense of television personalities, I promise. LOL.

Are there not people for whom one or more of those occupations would be entirely unsuitable? Is the reason for that due to "defect" or is it "difference" in cognition? I'd argue yes, just as some children are born introverts, others are born 'mathy,' musical, or with exceptional language acquisition skills.

I'm perfectly willing to grant that a greater number of people may be suited to some endeavors than to others. The pool of people who would be marvelous electricians may well be significantly larger than the pool of those that are innately well-suited to be astronauts, for example. I'm also perfectly willing to cede that there is no person that is destined for a single outcome from birth (even though in the case of singularities, it's difficult to envision)-- someone who eventually becomes a stellar neurosurgeon might well have been outstanding as something else, instead.

I was pointing out that pretty much ANY broad endeavor/occupation has its "singular" success stories. They are by definition anecdote, and therefore, broadening one's definition of "success" to include more cases may be useful in terms of determining underlying contributing factors.

When examined, as Malcom Gladwell has done, one finds what one looks for, it seems to me; that might be passion/drive, it might be innate ability (genetic potential, if you will), it might be effort (hard work, 10,000 hours, Chinese parenting, or whatever else one chooses to call it) or it might be environment/opportunity. The real question in my mind is whether or not any of those correlations would exist if one could examine the phenomenon with objective tools.

It seems most probable to me that the truth owes something to all of them. Perhaps being merely average in any of those areas is enough to doom a person to relative mediocrity/obscurity, regardless of compensation in the others. As long as it is a happy and meaningful obscurity, I don't know too many people that wouldn't be perfectly fine with that outcome.

I was using examples to show that successes are definitely not just individuals for whom that level of success was entirely due to situational advantage or hard work, or even the two in combination-- both are necessary, in other words, but not sufficient. There may be endeavors for which superlative performance has no relationship to innate ability, but I am hard-pressed to think of any examples.

As for some fields drawing disproportionately from particular types of non-neurotypical folks, I didn't mention Aspies in particular precisely because the phenomenon is broader than that. Elementary and SpEd teaching tends to draw people with what I would term empathetic gifts, as does veterinary medicine. Engineering, of course, draws Aspies so reliably that Aspie traits have almost come to represent the engineering archetype, but it is NOT necessarily the case that "most Aspies are engineers." I seriously doubt that.

In my opinion, it is disingenuous to appeal to egalitarianism using untapped cognitive potential/environment as a means of sidestepping the possibility of being labeled elitist, or at the very least, fatalistic ("my genes made me who I am"). This strikes me as very close in sentiment to "all children are gifted," without SAYING it.

I mean, sure, it sounds nice to think that the bell curve doesn't exist as anything but an artifact created by circumstance alone, but problematically, it seems to persist no matter how one looks at population data, and most of the people that I hear using that kind of rhetoric certainly should know this full well. It only holds up if one is willing to redefine the terms. Ergo, disingenuous.

I have no idea if any of that was what Iucounu intended. I would be astonished if it were. I wasn't trying to be provocative or inflammatory with that statement, in any case, and it wasn't directed at anyone in particular. My apologies if that wasn't clear. I ramble, in case nobody has noticed.



I'm not suggesting that possessing a sufficiently high IQ score makes one "special" in any sense of the word. What I am suggesting is that a particular set of cognitive quirks is fairly fixed for most people from birth, and that this probably has pragmatic consequences related to occupational "fit" later. Even so, traditional IQ is probably not the best description of that phenomena. The language here is imperfect, I am afraid. (And yes, I'm well aware of studies done on "training" children's brains to be more neurotypical as interventions for ADHD and specific visual processing disorders-- but the jury is still out on whether or not this is simply a learned skill like reading phonetically or doing long division, or if it's truly a functional cognitive change.)

It's probably better to note that some fields seem to be best suited for a particular cognitive arrangement/toolbox. That's undoubtedly somewhat independent of IQ, but it dovetails with the evidence that some occupations/fields seem to draw particular types of people who are cognitively quite similar to one another.

Being verbally quick on one's feet and having terrific people skills probably makes one a good salesperson-- or talk show host. I know that I don't have the ability to be Oprah-- or David Letterman, if you prefer. Now, that may not matter much to me since I am also not disappointed by that particular shortcoming. One could argue that I could be better at the required skills if I were passionately interested, which is, I gather, what Iucounu is suggesting; that with sufficient training and motivation (hot-housing), an average person (such as myself) could match David Letterman or Oprah. I'm skeptical of that conclusion, and it's largely because I simply don't think that hot-housing is capable of that sort of shift in potential.

Then again, maybe I'm just looking at my part of the elephant.


(I really try to be brief. I do. It's just that... well... it's a cognitive limitation. If brevity is the soul of wit, however, I think I know where this leaves me. LOL.)

There's an old saw about "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree". And that's true...to a point. All the bending in the world won't turn that tree into a pepperoni pizza. OTOH, if I don't prune and bend the darn thing, it grows over my roof and turns into a raggedy old termite highway.

So, having beaten that metaphor to death, I will take credit for contributing to some of my children's success, but also have to acknowledge that I had amazing material to work with.

And as for percentage amounts...depends on what we're talking about, and what day.

Quote:
that with the right environment, neural plasticity is infinite


Well, I kind of believe that literally. I read it on a cereal box once that we only use 10% of our brain. I'm assuming they mean on average because even my light bill fluctuates.

I personally think that I think either:
1)we are born with a variety of individual "ceilings" and we each fluctuate around 10% of our max rpm. The iq test should be multiplied by 100. (shows lack of understanding of the iq test). And since we hang out around 10% of our brainpower that's why the test is only a picture in time. Or
2)we all have the same "ceiling" and some of us are comfortably firing six cylinders while others of us are eight cylinder beasts. I think they make twelve and sixteen cylinder cars now. Enough of that analogy. I've been hanging out with the hubby too much and I don't know the first thing about cars. That saying some of us like to use 20% of our brain 24/7, others, whatever. This is why sometimes you can bring others to your depth or height (nd, +/-) but they keep their own depth when you're not around. Of course you can always walk down a path with a friend for a while, regardless of the depth, yours, theirs, or wherever's fine. ((unless, like me you have installed a stubbornness firewall))

I haven't found out which I believe yet, and it might end up being something else. I also think whichever one it is we swim in different lakes with different groups of people.

Howler Karma,, no!, don't throw me into your rambles mr. Brer Rabbit.

Don't remember who posted "how the twig is bent is how the tree grows", because I read it at the krispy kreme. But I had to tell the hubby when we got back in the car because he always says it's all in the upbringing. I don't think he means ultimate potential, or maybe he does. I think he means wether they go to college or be a hoodlum, or wether the are respectful, popular, hardworking, likable..hey, even my dad said something like that, "if you want people to care about you all you have to do is be someone people would care about.".

And regarding brain surgeons and Opera Winfrey, supposedly successful people, people who contribute, produce, and are happy with it are the navel-gazers who have found "something to do as much as I like this. Find something you love to do and find someone to pay you to do it..."... But people end up growing out of what they thought they wanted sometimes. That's why we should learn to recognize when work, friends, debatably even trouble (according to the nurtured heart thread) rewards us by leaving us feel energized for doing it. That's probably why sometimes you hear about people that don't want to retire. We should learn to recognize opportunities for energizing activities so we can see them in every situation. I think. Right now I think that.

Ok, so the definition of nurture, vs environment, vs opportunity. Figure that out we can balance the school budget and chose between books, teachers, or more classes.
So what was the original question? Was it nature vs. Nurture or was it 100007 hours vs. Guidence and direction. Granted you could be on a path of your own then guidence would be a sideshow. But, if you're on a path of your own that's a pretty big thing. I don't think following,... well this post is getting too long and I'm turning rambelyer than the howler monkey now.

P.s. ss21 said, "but what if you break the branch when you're bending the twig?".

Now there's another question. The iPhone just put a (.) after that sentence even though I already put a (?). Was it because the (?) was inside the (")'s, so it was for the quoted sentence and the iPhone added the (.) after the (") because it was for the quoting sentence?

I just read this whole thread through and my question is: nature vs nurture what?

If you are talking about innate talents, which many are, then nature wins. But if you are talking about long term success, my vote is on nurture.

And to be nice, what do Einstein, Picasso and Oprah have in common? Hard work. All applied themselves to what they were doing to be a success.

All the really contented adults, and I am going with contented since I have no broad swath of psychological insight, have good work habits, stayed in their jobs, whether they were NG, MG, or PG. They are disciplined. And one of the things we commonly complain or are concerned about is the lack of challenge gifted children find in regular schoolwork and the long term problems of bad habits that lead to unsuccessful long term outcomes.

So my kid is a whiz at math. I could do my engineering math without homework, it came easily to me, but I didn't learn anything. I did not have good habits. When in a job, I got into it, skimming, treading water, and when I could achieve easily, got bored. I got lucky after many bad decisions and a career that peaked early by a husband that had really good habits, which got him into Harvard and medical school. He has taught me good habits, which now I teach DD.

So nature made me a whiz at math, nurture made me long term unsuccessful. I don't care if DD can play the piano better than 90% of the kids her age. I want her to learn to practice, to do it the way her teacher wants -- which requires practice. Right now she has to do one piece with a pizzicato staccato. She has to train her fingers to be able to play this technique on the piano. It isn't about talent, it is about practice, training, building the muscles. Just like she has to build muscle strength to do her chin ups and pullovers in gymnastics.

And I make her to do it for good habits, not to be a concert pianist. And that is what I tell her. She can't quit piano, not until she learns to apply herself and work to do her very best. That is the lesson from taking piano lessons.

Because, in my opinion, nature gives her options, not long term success.

Ren

That does not make sense, because in some alternate universe where you had given up DS for adoption, his adoptive parents still would have fed him. Do you think your cooking has some special qualities leading to high IQ? What you (and your husband) have given your son that is likely more distinctive are your genes. My reading of the IQ literature is that unless parents are outright negligent or abusive, their childrearing cannot boost IQ appreciably in a way that lasts until adulthood.

That's why I was saying the nurture has more with direction, with how to find your place in this world, and feeling like you belong. The genes are there, it's going to be an apple tree, orange, or oak already. The nurture still matters.

That's a good thing to remember. We are dealing with degrees; there's not much point in making comparisons along the full spectrum. I think Shari was writing about nourishing his intellectual growth, but the point stands: we can assume someone else would've, too. And especially for a self-directed learner, as long as they have sufficient information to draw from, results may be pretty similar in different environments. (Note that Shari doesn't think it's a 50/50 split either.)


(I know you meant "affect" instead of "boost".) I read things a lot differently. I think that some studies that have been done are flawed, but even those show can show that environment can play a large role; they are in my opinion often summarized incorrectly. So, for example, a study that shows a .74 correlation in IQ between identical twins raised separately doesn't show that the environment cannot influence IQ, although it might not usually do so in a large way (which in my opinion could be explainable in a number of ways-- perhaps as we grow to adulthood we tend to get exposed to similar normative educational forces that can tend to flatten out an earlier spike). I don't think all the identical twins with dissimilar IQs can be explained away by brain injuries, malnourishment and the like.

With the cookie-cutter approach to education in the U.S. and seemingly the rest of the world, I wouldn't expect nurture to provide such a differentiating force on IQ tests as much as it could. I also don't think most parents, at least in the U.S.,do much education of their children after they come home from school. There's just not a lot of time in the day for a working family.

I think there are two important points:

* The first is that limits to individual talents exist. The corollary here is that everyone has different limits.

If humans really did have limitless (or nearly so) potential, we should all be able to train ourselves to run as fast as cheetahs or master complex mathematics. But everyone knows this isn't the case. Non-bionic humans can't run as fast as cheetahs* and most people can't become highly proficient at, say, tensor calculus.

It's when you get away from the extremes that people get wound up. Examples include: "all children should be able to work at age-grade level," "we need to encourage most of our young people to go to college," and "all students should take algebra in 8th grade."

All of these ideas are based on arbitrary standards, yet this fact seems to escape their proponents. I would argue, for example, "students should take algebra when they understand the prerequisites for algebra."

* The second point is that you can't know your limits until you push toward them in a way that is appropriate for you. Here is where the "nurture" part of things comes in. Pushing to your limits requires internal drive, help from family, teachers, coaches, circumstances, and so on.

I wonder about the extent to which people conflate these two ideas. It seems to me that our society doesn't like to talk about specifics as regards to limits, which may underlie the "all children are gifted" argument.

Letting different kids go through a math book at different rates is simply acknowledging different individual limits. It isn't saying that the kids in the slower group aren't being given a right to "try," as is argued by proponents of equity-based educational outcomes. In fact, letting them go more slowly will likely increase the probability that they'll learn more than they would have, had they been forced to go through material too quickly. A rate of learning is subject to limits, just as anything else.

Val


* In fact, I think Steve Austin only got to 60 mph, which is not as fast as a cheetah.

Excellent observations, Val.

I personally have observed this 'upper limit' for peers that simply could not cope with graduate level training in mathematics or the physical sciences. For some of them it was the pace/rate that was limiting-- but for others, it was a cognitive limit of some sort that caused shut-down. They had the foundational skills, and they had the speed, but they didn't have the surge capacity. It was heartbreaking to see this up close, incidentally. They were completely competent with bachelor's level understanding of the subject, but they simply didn't have the raw material to earn advanced degrees in those subjects.

Many of them were better teachers of the lower-level material than the rest of us, however, which I've always found interesting. They certainly had greater persistance than many of the more successful of us. They had a lot of different tools in their mental toolboxes, and seemed to be much more capable at switching from one mode of teaching to another situationally. Those of us that didn't struggle quite so hard with the material seemed to have fewer strategic methods of working/learning, and we'd often give up when we hit a wall that we couldn't work around.


Cheetahs. We're good at what we do, but really AWFUL at being 'generalists' in some ways. The generalists aren't cut out to be good cheetahs, but they sure can outlast us in sheer determination and endurance.

I also love how Wren put her daughter's piano experience. That is precisely how we approach tasks/obligations with our DD. She doesn't have to be a 'master' at something to make it worthwhile. She probably does need to get out of at least some activities what she puts into them, and music is an excellent tool for learning what that feels like.

Mostly, results don't seem (to her) to be related to sweat equity, which is not a good thing to learn. I think this relates to what Val is saying about arbitrary boundary conditions. I also think that this is the underlying principles guiding Dr. Chua with her parenting.

Just because broader culture says that {example} is the "normal" and "natural" progression and expectations, why is it mandatory to follow that path? Is it right for everyone? If it isn't, then how does one determine which cases are exceptions? What does "normal" and "natural" look like for those exceptions?



Take, for example, the notion that "everyone should go to college."

Well, everyone?? Really? Maybe not. Okay, so who should be excluded from that statement? Maybe "additional learning experiences beyond compulsory schooling are beneficial to everyone" is a better way of saying that, but that is certainly going to be harder to QUANTIFY and MEASURE.

Frankly, I think we've gone round the bend in our culture (meaning N. America and the US in particular) in our obsession with quantitative data-- to the point that it sometimes seems as though numbers are preferable to anecdote or plurality, even if when those statistical data are known to be meaningless in the context in which they are being used. Does anyone truly think that NCLB statistics mean anything much? In my mind, that is nearly as ludicrous as evaluating how many third graders know how to tie their shoes and take a city bus somewhere and calling that a measure of effective parenting. It's crazy, and everyone knows that it's crazy, but we can't seem to stop.

Savant abilities - sounds much better than 'party tricks' which is what I was calling them until now. My DH is one of those who can pick paint chips from memory.

For me, NCLB statistics are a good way of showing the extremes that people go to when a statistic about, say, mathematics knowledge among nine-year-olds, becomes far more important than the mathematics knowledge itself!

Have you ever read The Trouble with Physics? The first ~3/4 of the book is about problems in theoretical physics. The second part is about what you said: "It's crazy, and everyone knows that it's crazy, but we can't seem to stop."

Val

First, I have never had any trouble with physics, so I will look for the book Val.

Secondly, I still don't get what this is all about?

It is almost like parents of gifted kids want assurances that their talents will keep them safe or something. So what if your kids is the smartest kid in class, in the city, in the state? What then, what does it matter?

In these times of budget crunching, you are not going to get sympathy for gifted programs. We will be lucky if they don't get cut. I am paying for CTY accelerated math but I also know that accelerated math is not the be all and end all for my gifted kid to OK in this world.

It doesn't matter that her IQ is derived from her parent genes, or that she got a boost from the breast feeding or DHA tablets she gets or that we read to her.

It is well known that what she is born with is not the total story. The brain does a huge development from 5-9 and you can get big changes in IQ, though many on this board don't subscribe to the concept. And in teen years, there is another huge brain development. So how much is nature vs nurture when you combine these two periods?

I just know, as a parent, it is my responsibility to make sure she has all the options. She may choose to count birds in the Rocky mountains, be a vet, be a jazz pianist, be an astronaut. But I will make sure that whatever she wants she has the options and having an IQ in the HG+ range doesn't guarantee that.

My opinion is that the kid with 20 points lower IQ who has an amazing work ethic will have far more options than the kid with a 140 IQ that is directionless.

Ren

There, I conflated them. Yeah. I like the way that looks now.

Wait. Wait. Wait. I REALLY like this one too.


Val I want to pencil in your husband's name on the next presidential election so you can be the next first lady!