“Didn’t HLS abandon LSAT?”
No. It also accepts the GRE, but the vast majority of applicants still submit LSAT scores, and the GRE isn’t an easier test.
CCtoAlaska, you raise a good point and my first reaction was like yours, that this article reflects the difficulties for gifted students. But I also think it may be a little easier to raise a gifted kid in this day and age when so many classes are available online. Check out the Virtual High School https://courses.vhslearning.org/d2l/login or countless online university courses. Or even EdX.
I hope this young man goes on to a happy time in whatever schooling or career lies ahead.
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Right, HES is not the only solution for gifted. Many kids are in special gifted programs outside their middle and high schools, now.
I do think his performance matters. I don’t usually. But he’s being held up as reaching a pinnacle.
Idk why this is being sold as an amazing achievement as every year hundreds of students take heavy AP, IB, DE load and actually graduate with top grades and high scores as well as doing awesome extracurriculars, paid jobs and community work.
Not everyone has extra money or dedicated parents to take them for paid summer courses at expensive colleges.
Geez now this is in the NY Times with the same headlind about “:Harvard” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/good-news/kansas-boy-16-is-set-to-graduate-in-the-spring-from-high-school-—-and-harvard/ar-BBRASbZ?ocid=spartandhp
Plenty of high schoolers take classes at Harvard Extension. I am surprised he was able to because the first three are full pay and some classes have to be taken on campus.
Who is promoting this kid and why?
Maybe part of what makes it an interesting story is that he attends a small, rural, poorly-performing, largely Hispanic, public high school in remote western Kansas? Even if it is Harvard Extension, obviously the kid is gifted and had few options anywhere near his home–except online programs. That he is able to finish both programs is quite an accomplishment. And he’s doing that a year early, too. Many kids take college courses in high school. Quite a few earn a year or even two of college credits. But I imagine very few manage to finish a four-year college degree at that age–while also attending high school. Congrats to him.
Much of the time that is due to a highly gifted or profoundly gifted child not being remotely challenged.
While gifted children vary greatly in terms of what skills develop early, two common early skills are early reading, such as naturally picking it up without being taught by age 4 or earlier, and early math expertise, such as algebra by first grade. For such a kid, the typical school is water torture. And many of them rebel.
If you are near a city, you have choices. If you are wealthy enough to live in a high quality school system, or can afford private school, you have lots of choices. People in Ulysses, KS have far fewer choices.
@compmom Someone from that area mentioned this family was in local news few years ago for some financial fraud relatedcases, father owned a local newspaper or something. If it’s true then probably they have connections to journalists.
Even if it’s not as special as portrayed, it still takes lots of money, discipline and hard work to stay with the academic plan for four years so student and family do deserve praise. It sure is an unconventional route to Harvard Law School. I hope in next attempt he earns a good enough LSAT score to get accepted.
The University of Kansas would be a good choice. Online classes are available there. And better majors than HES.
When I read the thread title, I thought another Terrence Tao was “discovered”… Certainly he accomplished a lot and deserves praise, but he wasn’t a child prodigy upon a closer look. Quantity doesn’t equal quality, even though quantity could be a quality of its own.
Online education is perhaps the future, but the current format hasn’t been refined enough to replace a traditional college education. College education is more than just knowledge transmission. It’s also about interactions with professors and fellows students. Ideas and solutions need to be critically examined and challenged, even if they’re the right ones because they can always be polished and improved.
Saw the clip on the morning news. They did say Harvard extension.
@twoinanddone this is actually the first place I’ve seen an Ancient Greek class offered outside the matriculated college student system. It says in the HES course catalogue that it’s a campus-only class :(.
@compmom the story showed up in our local paper today, too. Hmm, makes you wonder what it’s about and who is pushing this kid?
I do agree it’s easier to raise a gifted kid these days but it can get expensive. I don’t know that my kids are gifted, per se, so much as decent at taking standardized tests (two so far have been CTY Talent Search-qualified one at the highest levels in both M and LA and the other in LA). I’ve been able to cobble together resources for them, including a gifted track in a cybercharter school (which was amazing). HS is where I found it got really hard outside of taking early college classes which is what they’ve both ended up doing. And I don’t even really think they are truly gifted just a little advanced academically. I have no idea what I would do with a truly gifted child especially if they were profoundly gifted. I’ve had some preschool students (I teach a sport) where I’ve felt compelled to flag potential giftedness to the parent. One mom told me her son who is 4 had been reading since 2 and was working in 2nd grade math. There are literally no resources for that kind of profound giftedness in our area.
@CCtoAlaska The Lukeion Project offers a number of online Ancient Greek classes.https://www.lukeion.org
The public schools were not a good academic fit for my kids, so we homeschooled. (They did, however, participate in the public school extracurricular activities) We used a lot of great online resources in addition to our home-brewed classes at the high school level: the Art of Problem Solving, MIT OCW, the Well Trained Mind, JHU CTY, and PA Homeschoolers to name a few.
I also don’t understand why this student’s story is newsworthy.
Why does it have to be a course for credit? I thought one of the benefits of home schooling is they you, the parent, create the opportunities and curriculum. You can give her credit for learning it on her transcript.
@twoinanddone she’s not homeschooled anymore and I don’t know Ancient Greek. I mean, I haven’t found Ancient Greek anywhere - credit, not for credit, whatever. Does not have to be for credit at all.
@shuttlebus thanks! I had not seen those before! She’s not homeschooled, though, so the times would not work but I’m glad to se such a great resource.
The Virtual High School has Latin. It might have Greek.
My gifted son read late and when it happened it was instant. I have read that late reading is actually common with gifted kids. He also took longer to do math problems because he thought deeply about them and his mind wandered around. It’s not always what you expect. He found stimulation outside of school, mostly. In Lego and pretend play during the younger years- and various techy activities like theater lighting, in later years. Our schools were terrible with giftedness. I took him out for 6 months once but otherwise he stayed. I wish we had had online programs then! And Khan academy would have been great too.
@compmom when my daughter had G&T science in 4th grade, the kids had to design and carry out 14 of their own lab experiments. We got really lucky with their cyberschool’s program.
It’s weird that hardly anyone teaches Greek. I looked at VHS and no dice. Interestingly, they have that whole Judaic studies track but no Hebrew or Aramaic.
University of Texas Austin may be a resource https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/grkol/00
A lot of universities and colleges offer ancient Greek but not online, too bad. I was just looking at Boston College for one.
University of Kansas offers very few online degrees–primarily degree completion programs. Only a couple undergrad majors. The biggest variety of online programs in KS is at Ft. Hays State U. (I read he had taken some classes there.) They offer a BA in Political Science/pre-law concentration, which would match his interests. Tuition is very reasonable.
But I suppose he/his parents were more ambitious than that. “Ft. Hays State” doesn’t ring the same bells as “Harvard”–and the average person doesn’t know the difference between Harvard and Harvard Extension. (Fwiw, FHSU isn’t a college that many gifted kids in KS consider. It has some good programs, but it is probably the lowest ranked of the KS public universities.)