Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Regarding "losing our minds" Ruf

I believe she has rose in the ranks of MN and the case studies are from MN, but this is without opening the book so take it with a grain of salt.

I remember researching her son from an article and she talks about MN for his schooling. He is a child actor and from my understanding not the smartest of her two boys. I believe he was a level 4 and the other a level 5. The actor son lives in NY and is a lawyer now.

So true! For all the myths about how pushy and competitive we are (Bah!), I think most of us take great solace in the notion that someone is smarter.

I think Losing Our Minds is a great intro to the gt world. To be honest I liked the stories about children more than the final list of milestones. That's where I could see our older son (3 at that time) and that was the first time I officially freaked out about schools. The book took care about my gt denial but only testing and acceptance to Davidson took care about the HG+ denial.

The book has lots of weak points. It doesn't address 2e, some of the children don't seem to fit the categories she puts them in. She seems to ignore some of the rather high IQ scores. I think the book is a very useful reading when you are new to the gt world but not too much beyond it. I haven't even tried to find a level for DS4 there. I know that he is HG, but I don't think the book will give me any more insight. What I need is a good tester and a good testing day and a kid who is a little bit older

Wren, 20% of the kids can test in 98% but it's not the same like 20% of randomly selected kids test in the 98%. I think you have your child tested only if you are reasonably sure that your he/she is gifted. I doubt people have their average or bellow average children tested for a prestigious gifted program. I would go as far as saying that it's not at all surprising that 20% of the kids applying to Hunter test in the 98%. They should, shouldn't they? That said I have no doubt that Manhattan has more gt children than an average city.


I'm so there. What a relief. Till last year I used to think "At least he wasn't in Davidson. Those parents have it really difficult." Fortunately there are still many kids who are smarter than DS6.

Selective vision helps there, too, I think. The child who is 10 or 12 and studying college calculus makes me feel a lot better about my 7yo who is "only" in pre-algebra. Now, where will my son be at 10 or 12?

But in the meantime, I can keep my not-so-GT-colored glasses on and pretend not to know that we might be going down a similar path.

One day at a time!

Ditto! I read a case study in Developing Math Talent about a boy named Christopher. There was an example of his work at age 3 which included square roots, division and algebra. Hearing that the family was able to devise an appropriately challenging math program for him gave me great hope.

I was just giving an example that was similar to Ruf's. My further comment was about the large number of children score in the high percentiles.

Ren

I also included the point about the OLSAT and the differences between the Upper Westside and Bronx. Which shows the same bias as Ruf's estimates.

Ren

I bought the book when DS4 had just turned 2. It was recommended on a forum like this that I had gone on. I was so excited to see that my son seemed to fit in somewhere, and I could relate so well to the stories and funny/cute little things that other kids were doing. It was hard to put him at a level at that point, but everything he was doing by age was a solid level 4, a 5 in some areas. While I was excited to see some validation and some answers as to why he was the way he was...I was suddenly aware that there were problems that could come from a child like him and that there were LOG's that I was not aware of before. And that with higher levels came some more challenges. So with the excitement of more understanding came the reality of the challenges ahead. It's also pretty funny because I remember thinking to myself when he was two...wow he is doing all this now so early...but a few things I thought there was no way he would be doing at 3 or 4. And then he did. It's been very interesting to see and fun to look back at the book while he gets older. While I don't take everything in there as complete absolutes, it's a great guideline and has helped me to realize that my child is most likely HG+ and I need to stop denying that.

[/quote]I'm not sure *anyone* is as smart as TT! [/quote]

I think that is part of problem of the different levels of Ruf's book is that you can go insane trying to figure out where dc fits.

Not that you spend days agonizing but yes, she does this early, this did that not so early, this did this super early. How smart is she?

I try and remind myself that IQ can be high, it can skew in different directions. Like my friend, who got a PhD with Feynman and worked on the shuttle solution after Challenger blew up. He sits on international super computing committees etc. Yet, he says that I am the smartest person he knows. Because I have a different kind of brain than his. Because my brain works differently, he thinks I am smarter.

And, although DD has strengths in many areas, different from mine, she also shows the same strengths, some of which may not be as measurable as her ability to do math.

It is like what did Jackson Pollack have inside of him to create what he did in the middle of his career? Could you have measured it,no, but it is a perfection of brilliance. Or when you read Proust (actually get past those first 30 pages) and how he wove such tales together over 7000 pages and decades of his life.

My point, somewhere, is that how smart is smart? With someone like TT, you can do calculus in your head at 10, and I am not taking anything away from this amazing child, and I hope he finds us a green energy source that employs millions, but how many of the brilliant things accomplished were done by prodigies or just the super smart? I actually do not know.

Ren

Ren, go get that new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers. You'd like it, he speaks to this and explains in this super-uncommon common sense kind of way.