Gifted children

Just been reading about a four year old girl who has been accepted into Mensa with a certified IQ of 159.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-17702463

I think it's fantastic in one way that this child has parents who recognised her potential but four years old is awfully young to have the weight of pressure and expectation on one's shoulders. She could also be bullied by her peers for being special or the centre of attention. Very intelligent children know they are different from their peers. I'm not blowing my own trumpet in any way, but I was probably what would have been considered gifted when I was a little lad. In class one at primary school, there were times when the teacher asked me to check and mark spellings and sums. There would be two queues to get your work checked.

Gifted children have special educational needs and as a teacher it is difficult to differentiate lessons and tasks for their benefit.

I don't have any children, but if I did, I'd want them to be playing and reading in their spare time rather than quizzing me on world events. I didn't get my IQ measured or join Mensa until I was 17, and I only did it then because I thought it would look good on my personal statement on my UCAS form.

But we live in a results focused world and at a time of cultural and technological crisis.

largehat wrote:I'm not blowing my own trumpet in any way, but I was probably what would have been considered gifted when I was a little lad.

Do you have any friends?

Why do you ask?

how clever are you though?

It all depends how much stock you put in IQ tests really. When I was 17 I scored 151. By that measure I'm in the top 0.8% of the population, but when I was a kid at school (would rather the discussion was about kids) I was perpetually bored. They measured my reading age at 7 and my score was off the chart. When I got to about the mid way through secondary school then I got to be like everyone else in a way, with good and bad subjects. I was never any good at any aspect of maths which does not involve number crunching. My mental arithmetic is really good but I can't get my head around trigonometry or quadratics.

I understand the basic principles of chemistry to a point but I could never have studied it at a level beyond secondary school. I was a right pain in the arse at secondary school, I was in detention regularly for answering back and being immature, flicking rubber bands, or going to the pie shop at lunch and getting caught out of bounds.

Honestly, I'm glad i wasn't a gifted child, unless you're in the financial position to be put into a private school, extra intelligence doesn't really give you too much of an advantage at that age, and as you say, you probably end up bored, or rebellious.

My school put us into "sets" i assume most do and i was always in the middle for everything... never been clever and never been "thick."

What's the difference between a woman who writes in a daily newspaper that she's beautiful and a bellend on a football forum who claims to be gifted?

Seriously, Natasha, do you have to poison every thread on this forum with your antagonistic nonsense? Your trolling is pretty tiresome today. Bugger off.

I think four years is much too young to be putting kids through IQ tests. In some respects we are taking away their innocence and making their lives a tiresome chore.

Childhood should be about enjoyment and seeing the world as a wonderful place. Many of these child prodigies who were pushed by their parents end up being really fcuked up in later life.

I have never completed a Mensa IQ test because I have managed to get by in life without having one on my CV. How do you define intelligence ?

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. Intelligence is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad. Having never considered putting tomatoes in a fruit salad I consider myself intelligent.

I have met people with degrees who were as numb as a piss stone with no inter personal skills whatsoever and I have also met some well read labourers. It takes all sorts as is demonstrated by some of the Apprentice candidates.

Intelligence is the ability to survive, whatever the environment, whether it be in physical, financial, social, or academic. Higher intelligence is being able to ensure you and yours survive, and thrive, in those same areas. Cunning is the need to outwit those able to outthink you and take what is possibly yours. None of this matters if you win the Euromillions lottery.

Surely life itself is a lottery ? Some people get taken far too early, through no fault of their own. The only real certainty in life is death. My mantra has always been to be the best that you can be. Whether you are a brain surgeon or a bin man you still perform a necessary function.

My mantra too

A senior moment on my behalf. I got confused with an old car I used to drive! An Opel Manta no less.

As I suggested earlier, I am far from convinced by IQ tests. If they measure anything, it is a type of intelligence, rather than intelligence per se.

For example when I did the Mensa exams all those years ago, there were two exams, a verbal based one and a logic based one involving shapes and patterns, and whichever was the highest score you got was taken as your IQ for the purposes of whether they'd let you join.

As time goes on, experts are subdividing intelligence into categories such as linguistic intelligence, emotional intelligence and so on.

To complicate things still further, children having different learning styles and types. There are lots of different models which describe these.

In the 80s a guy called Kolb divided everyone into four learning types -

Convergers - people who learn through experimentation, 'hands on' learners who start from an abstract base.

Divergers - people who reflect on their own experiences and are able to appreciate the ideas of others.

Assimilators - abstract learners who mostly prefer to observe and reflect and benefit from modelling.

Accommodators - engage with the world and learn by doing.

There's also the popular theory that people favour one of the primary senses - sight (visual learners), hearing (auditory learners), touch (kinisthetic learners). I find this is true of some people. In conversation, some people I know frame descriptions of their experiences as "I saw X and Y", "I heard X or Y" or "I felt X or Y" more often than not.

I guess I would class myself as a Converger. Understanding something is not the same as experiencing it. I am of the firm opinion that you can only truly understand something by actually experiencing it.