Educating my child need help!!!!!!

[Donald Barney]

When I was younger I was an extremely bright student in public schools I was very easily bored, I thought because I could answer all the questions at ease that I required nothing my teachers had to offer. this did not serve me well later in life.

Now I am the father of an extremely intelligent son. I have three children and as any parent we believe in our children I love all three of them with all my heart. My plight is, however that Max is without a doubt Genius material..... at 8 years old he can perform complex multiplication in his head and with 99% accuracy. His problem sloving is quick and well modeled, his memory as sharp as I have ever seen. He can solve many problems at once with interlacing variables..... All this is done within his mind and with very little outside stimuli. Since before he could walk I have answered my childrens questions and querys with the most accurate and technical answers as possible. Ridiculed by those around me for this, "they don't understand that!" I believed that the memory of those answers would remain and teach them that there is always much more to any one thing than a simple answer. This I now see manifesting its rewards in Max. today withe only two minutes explination of square routes and exponents, My son was able to shout off the top of his head the products of numbers "squared" and "cubed". this may not seem like much but his class is learning addition and subtraction..... and until the last few months I have not pushed the mathmatics on him the fact of the matter is my style of teaching has just been answering questions they ask me... I found out his abilities by helping my 12 year old niece with her math, he was in the room listening to me explain to her how to multiply and divide small numbers, he astounded me when I would tell her to write down a problem and he would shout out the answer before she completed writing the problem......


HOW CAN I FIND A SCHOOL THAT WILL CULTIVATE HIS MIND??????????

PLEASE HELP ME.......

[Dawn]

are you located in the sarasota area ? ? Check out Pine View School for the "Gifted" where you child could excel much more than in the usual basic, on -grade-level classes....Also, most of the middle schools in Sarasota offer Gifted programs, and the highschools AP, Baccl & Duel-Enrollment college courses :)

[Mary Phillips]

Also, get him started in music. I believe that the mathematically gifted often translate that into quickly and easily learning music (they easily grasp the fractions involved). It's a way to enhance the often lonely life of a gifted child. My son, who was scoring 5-6 grades beyond while in early education found when he went into high school, he became a hero on his trumpet in jazz band. He started playing when he was five years old and still plays at age 33 even though he lives in a small western Colorado town. By the way, my son now says he wishes we'd started him on piano / keyboard before moving on to trumpet so you might start with a small electonic keyboard set up with a program for learning.

[Roberta Morgan]

Donald,

I can't help with finding a school, but I have some thoughts. My sister and I attended an excellent Catholic high school for girls in Baltimore. (Nancy Pelosi went to this school too.) In thise days many schools gave incoming students a placement exam to figure out whether to put you in the top tier class with the smart students, or one of the other classes with slower students. I got confused by the directions for the test and scored lower than I should have, and as adults we found out that we both had the same experience. So I can identify with your son's boredom.

However, what I really want to share with you is a more recent experience. When I was in college, One of the faculty members was this poet that got his Masters at Johns Hopkins when he was 19, and was by all accounts considered a genius, and often by people whose opinions on such things had merit. It was also agreed by everyone that his unscrupulous behavior was impressive. Eventually the school fired him.

About 20 years later I found out that he was the new boyfriend of one of my close friends. Becky and I talked about David throughout the course of this relationship. It turned out that though he mellowed somewhat, he was also a lying alcoholic creep. My discussions with Becky about David and his genius friends gave me what I see as an enlightening look at the world of intellectual prodigies.

While Felix Mendelssohn seems to be an exception, geniuses are frequently deeply flawed in the skills needed to be a happy, social, fulfilled human being in the world of other human beings. Davis hadn't learned to drive until he was well into his 40's, and he lived in Baltimore, not a place like Manhattan where you really don't need to drive to live life comfortably. She told me that this was also true of some of his friends. It seems that these guys were used to people doing things for them, so they expected others to do simple tasks like drive them around. Growing up in schools where other students are much older meant that social skills stayed at a really primitive level. I could go on, but Im sure you get the drift.

What I am saying is yes, your son needs serious intellectual challenges. He also needs, more than other children, all the help he can to develop as a person as well. This may be a great challenge for you, but I would encourage you as a loving dad to make sure he gets help to grow as a social, moral, gifted person. He has a lot of needs, and what he has is you.