What Mumof3 said.
My daughter (a 14yo high school senior) can read peer-reviewed literature faster than most people with PhD's can.
But mostly, she'd choose to text or skype, or maybe to lay on the floor in her bedroom and listen to her MP3 player.
I truly do not
know what she is actually capable of. We see glimmers occasionally that are (frankly) superhuman. But mostly, she doesn't really exert herself much.
Two things about that:
a) she's learned that being a side show freak isn't that much fun
b) extending yourself really doesn't come with much of a reward, and it can make others uncomfortable.
She's a stellar student, but just a "good" kid otherwise, not extraordinary-seeming in most ways. Until you realize that she does all of this without breaking a sweat-- and she's 4 years younger than most of the peers who are doing it through hard work.
DH and I are both HG+-- but our DD is something alien even to us.
Another thing that I'd offer as an observation is that most people who think about kids who are "super-gifted" are actually thinking about extraordinary instances of profound talent-- not actually about 'typical' 99th percentile kids.
Most 99th+ kids aren't going to be teaching calculus before they are kindergarten age.
The ones who
really seem to hide are those that do NOT have a singular area of extraordinary ability that outpaces everything else.
I found the description of "omnibus gifted" enlightening in Ellen Winner's description of gifted children. I realized that this was why we didn't think of our DD (then about 3yo) as
all that odd.Well, most of her development was more-or-less in synch. She just acted more like a 6yo than a 3yo. Except when she didn't, and it always threw us that she was suddenly behaving like-- well, like a 3yo.
She still deals with that. She's 14. Not 19 or 20. And yet... most of the time, she
acts as though she's a bright 19yo. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that she is continuously doing things that no 'average' 14yo
could do.
She's merely "good" (not "great") at photography, at her dog training, at her community service activities, at sewing, at drawing, etc. She's REALLY good (but not 'amazingly' so) at public speaking, piano, writing, communications, and science. For a 17yo, I mean.
Her problem is that she sells herself short, too, as a result of this multipotentiality. College is
really scary at this point, because she COULD do about a dozen different things, even as a 15yo. How on earth is she supposed to know at this point what she should choose??
