<p>OK, now to address recent criticisms, then I think it’s time to wrap this up unless there are legitimate questions as opposed to gripes.</p>
<p>Nwgolfer321, my son rarely studies for a test. Never in AP Physics, AP Stats or any previous math course. He will do the occasional quick review for a history or literature test. He’s not killing himself working hard, he very likely has more free time than most of you, even while taking more and harder classes.</p>
<p>A few here have called my older son “socially weak” for starting high school at age 9. Why would you make that assumption? That’s the FIRST thing the educators look at before admitting a very young kid to school 4 years early – no one had any doubt that he would be at the top of his high school classes academically! This kid grew up mainly talking to the adults around him because the kids his age were, from his perspective, almost ■■■■■■■■ – how well would you folks relate to a person your age with an IQ 30-50 points lower than yours?</p>
<p>Most of the adults he chatted with enjoyed his unique perspective, borne of deep insights combined with limited life experience (the exception: parents of other children his age). Indeed, my son would come up with the occasionally profound comment, like his explanation of race at age 3: “Some people are brown on the outside and pink on the inside and others are pink on the outside and brown on the inside.”</p>
<p>Given that he usually chatted with adults, who never talked down to him, how difficult do you think it was to merely chat with kids 4-6 years older? Seriously, guys, you make too much of this supposed age gap – when you get to college are you only going to talk to college freshman and not seniors or, god forbid, grad students?</p>
<p>Folks, I’m not going to tell you that attending high school at age 9 is an optimal solution – it’s not, but sometimes in life there ARE no ideal solutions. Gifted programs were way too slow. He was eager to learn more, more, more. The best solution we found was to have one older group for academics and discussions and a separate younger group for video games and fantasy role-playing.</p>
<p>Peytoncline, my first son took his first COLLEGE class when he was still 12. Not a problem, the professor loved him and his classmates were amused. My second son took his first at 15 and had a 25-year-old lab partner, who used to call him up to discuss the lab write-up. Again, no problem. The first son graduated high school at age 14 (got a 35 on his ACT at age 13) and went on to college. Never a problem with his classmates anywhere: when the age gap is large, the kids in both high school and college treat the youngster as a sort of younger brother; he’s a novelty, like a foreign exchange student.</p>
<p>Nwgolfer321, OK you got me, I exaggerated about my son learning Physics C Mechanics in a 3-day weekend. He actually only spent about half that weekend, maybe 12 hours tops, working on the Physics C because he had a history paper he was also working on. In all fairness, he had just taught himself Calculus BC and was taking Physics B in school, so he “only” had to learn the additional material. He of course did not spend time doing lots of sample problems or even memorizing the formulas: he’d look at a formula, consider its relationship to all the other physics formulas and place it directly into long-term memory as a “pattern.” If this sounds like magic, trust me it looked like that to me, too, but I had him take an old Physics C AP test 2 weeks later BEFORE doing any review and the result was a solid 5 plus 15-20%. He had not gained true mastery of all the material in that timeframe, but the threshold for a 5 on the AP is pretty low, about 55% right.</p>
<p>Fisawalab, over 80% of siblings have IQs within one standard deviation of one another (15 or 16 points), regardless of how high the first may score. We’re not talking about randomly plucking people from the general population.</p>
<p>Questionmark, the reason you don’t usually hear about these kids when they become adults is that have learned not to advertise it. Also, they tend to expand outward into multiple areas of expertise. I once worked with such a fellow – I had no trouble holding up my end of a conversation in a field I knew well. Then one day I heard him in a conversation with a physician on a cutting-edge topic. Another day I heard him discussing quantum mechanics with a professor of physics. Each person was challenged and had a good conversation; none was aware that this was merely one “corner” of his acquired knowledge base. </p>
<p>Your last point, questionmark, is a valid and important one: living a good life isn’t necessarily about being the next Einstein. But let’s consider what “living the good life” IS while you’re in school – isn’t part of it to have interesting classes that challenge you without frustrating you? If you were suddenly thrown back into a 5-grade classroom and were expected to pay attention to every minor detail and do pointless homework, would you be happy? Could you even succeed? How long until you became a troublemaker, the class clown, the kid waiting to drop out the first day it was allowed? Living a good life is very much about avoiding boredom.</p>