Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy PG girl graduates at 16, headed to PhD program

Tesca is several years ahead of my DD, but we've met her (she was in high school when my DD was in 6th grade).

She's a great kid! I'm so glad to see an article that focuses on her accomplishments and normalizes her rather than trying to paint her as a sideshow freak. Way to go, Betsy Hammond @ The Oregonian. We could all use more press like this for a change!!



Tigard OR's Tesca Fitzgerald off to PhD program at 16

Heartwarming, thanks for sharing that!

she sounds like a great kid!

What a lovely article!

Could someone please explain why Ami said this?

Quote: "'I guarantee, if you home school your kids for eight hours a day every day, they’ll be in college at age 12, too,' Ami told The Oregonian.

Source

I interpret this as saying that any home schooled child can be a college student at age 12. Doesn't this contradict what it means to be gifted?

Yes, but if you have three HG+ children, and are yourselves HG/HG+, then it really can escape your grasp to realize that no, not everyone could do that.


Most of the homeschoolers that we've known over the years-- even those with bright-to-really-REALLY-bright kids don't send them to community college until they are about 16.

The difference is that only a small percentage of kids can learn at whatever rate you can keep up with feeding them academics. That's part of what makes PG kids PG.

Now, what I guarantee is different. I guarantee that if you home school your kids 4 to 8 hours a day every day, they'll be stronger academically than their regular school peers, and they may well gain as much as 2-4 years on them by the end of secondary curriculum. But they'll still be limited by innate ability. It's just that they'll be limited by THEIR OWN innate ability, not that of the least able 1/3 of their classmates.

Pro-homeschooling families often demonize other schooling options, and even those that don't do that tend to overemphasize the advantages by a considerable margin. Relatively few parents are actually well-equipped to homeschool, IMO, and relatively few children are gifted enough that they respond to it like this. I say that as a person who deliberately stepped off of a trajectory that had my own kidlet off to college at 11 or 12 because it made us so uncomfortable from a maturity standpoint; my DD did so much more with so much less input than most of our homeschooling acquaintances... I was really reluctant to divulge the details-- but I did keep records of it all, so when I say that she did 4 years of public school in about 14 months of 'homeschooling' a couple of hours a day, I mean it.

At the same time, though, we were observing other homeschoolers and the the ones who send their kids to college at 16 drove those kids pretty hard. I'd call them MG, those kids (knowing them reasonably well, I mean). They were always buried in a workbook or textbook at the pool, at the library, at the park.

Innate ability is the difference.

I suppose I assumed that Ami would have read something along the way on what it means to be gifted and that just didn't "jive" with what she said.

Made me cringe to see it in a paper. How many are thinking this is a matter of hot housing now?

Well, to be fair, it's possible that some percentage of her success is what I'd call hothousing.

My DD is particularly strong in STEM due to life in an immersion environment, too. I don't think that's active hothousing, though-- it's just that kids are interested in what their parents do, and how they think, and if those parents spend professional time with them and answer questions, the brightest of them will soak it up like sponges. My DD's literature and social science acumen is entirely her own, though.

It's probably no accident that her expertise is in the same general area as her parents' computer-science professions.


The mistake is in assuming that it can be reduced to some formulaic method which produces seeming prodigy. It can't. Obviously. With the same inputs available, the vast majority of homeschooled students do NOT have this kind of success this young. I have fallen into this trap myself, though-- I find myself thinking "wow-- it's just not that hard!" when a homeschooling parent talks about all that s/he is doing to teach a child very basic literacy. My DD didn't need all of that, and she certainly didn't need continued support for months on end. I have to stop and realize that no... a single set of controlled readers and a couple of weeks really isn't enough for most kids. Not even for most bright ones.

Thank you, HK. I'm gratified to hear a gifted child's natural environment plays a role but not so much as to create their intellectual ability. It's what I've come to believe from reading about kids like DS.

Your example of the set of controlled readers is exactly true.

Like my 7 year old she may be mathematically correct but functionally naive. Kids going to school 180 days a year with about 6 hours class time each day graduate in 12 years with around 13,000 hours of schooling. Now if they are homeschooled "ever day" which I'll give them weekends off, that would be about 260 days times 8 hours is almost double the hours per year (2080 vs. 1080) and would have the same amount of schooling in just over 6 years at the age of 12.