Now, as for his performance in school/academics - that's not always going to correlate directly to IQ. Achievement is a combination of exposure and effort. His lack of desire to do anything "hard" is something very common (at least on these boards, it seems) among kids who are under challenged in school - they develop a sense of perfectionism. "This is easy, I should get a 100/A." At this point in life, he's probably hardly learned anything from an actual teacher. He's capable of absorbing things like a sponge and understanding them immediately. I think home-schooling him and getting him to do challenging work is an excellent idea. He doesn't have to be working at any specific grade level - he just needs to be learning and understanding what it means to put in actual effort in his schooling.
YES.
My DD didn't seem
that extraordinary to us until we started to apply an increasing 'load' to her cognitively... which we only did because we were curious what "all out" looked like for her.
There was only one moment before she was about 7 that really would have given her away as profoundly-gifted. She didn't
overtly do anything so early that it wasn't possible to explain it as still being more or less normal. So what gave it away? HOW she learned to read, that's what. She's not an autodidact, and that
is unusual among PG people. We taught her to read in a few hours (no, really) with some phonetically controlled readers (Bob books, basically-- but harder/more rich and slightly snarky storylines), and within five months or so her reading levels were middle-school
and still rising rapidly.With
zero additional instruction, I mean.
THAT is what it means to not learn from 'teaching' the way most kids do. She, too, resists "hard" things, and at 14, she is a beast of a perfectionistic turkey. She won't enter competitions (which she'd be competitive at) because of a fear of "failure" and because she doesn't regard success as the result of hard work to be "authentically 'successful'" in the way that most human beings understand it.
The greatest challenge with a child like this is figuring out ways to teach them that effort is proportional to results. Because in the vast majority of age-appropriate measures, that is
directly contradictory to their life experience.
