Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting our Brightest Young Minds by Jan & Bob Davidson with Laura Vanderkam Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster ISBN: 0743254600

 

Excerpt from Genius Denied, Chapter 5: “Patrons, Teachers, and Mentors” pp. 111-113

Wenyi, a highly accomplished young woman we know, went to a traditional high school in Illinois. The school offered numerous AP classes and humanities electives, but Wenyi still felt she had outgrown the place by her junior year. The curriculum didn’t challenge her. The school didn’t value intellectual talents like it could have. Once, an assembly intended to honor many student accomplishments became a rally for the football team, which had narrowly missed winning the state championship. Wenyi had just won a national science award. The principal forgot to bring her plaque. In her sophomore year Wenyi met her journalism teacher, who was to become a major influence in her life. They didn’t like each other at first, and they fought a number of skirmishes over assignments, but soon came to recognize each other’s talents. Her teacher, Wenyi says, was never content to just run a high school newspaper. She wanted to win awards—national awards. “There’s a lot of things in life that if you don’t think about, they’ll never come to you,” Wenyi says. “She taught me to dream big.” She helped Wenyi hone her writing. She encouraged her to attempt big stories on subjects like teens losing parents, plagiarism and dating violence. She pushed Wenyi to enter contests, and sure enough, she won them. As Wenyi pushed herself to try more and more new contests, activities, and research projects through high school, her journalism teacher kept her level-headed and sane. Wenyi always preferred friends several years older, and as these students graduated, she became disconnected from her high school’s social scene. However, she and her teacher would talk for hours after school about life, the universe, everything. Wenyi also found a mentor to teach her science and math skills that went far beyond her high school’s offerings. She wanted to try an original scientific research project, so she and her parents asked around. Dr. Jin Wang, a friend of a friend, was enlisted to see if Wenyi could work with him at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois. She couldn’t be a full-time intern, because she wasn’t in college. So Dr. Wang had to work hard to give her a chance in his lab. He, too, was skeptical of what she’d be able to do. He’d never worked with a high schooler before. So the first week she was at Argonne, he assigned her a mathematical modeling problem that he thought would take her all summer. She figured it out in a week. So he assigned another problem. She did this one in a week, too. This step-by-step introduction helped her grasp the scientific process of figuring out problems without checkable solutions in the back of the textbook. “There was no guarantee I was going to be able to get it,” she says. But she did, and soon she was ready to work on a full-fledged project. She used those same mathematical skills to model gasoline sprays for fuel injection technology using computer programming to transform thousands of lines of code into 3-D images. She would program for hours on her computer at home, starting at 10 a.m. and working late into the night. She would simply lose herself in the lines of letters and numbers. Sometimes their secrets eluded her, and hours turned into failure and frustration—and determination, as she refused to go to sleep before she found what she wanted. But other times, the lines would suddenly make sense, taking form, answering her questions. She worked hard, but she loved it. Dr. Wang was the busiest person in the lab, and never let an opportunity pass him by, Wenyi says. She wanted to do the same. By the end of the summer, they figured out that the gasoline spray was not uniform but contained many intense concentrations. She kept working on the research after she went to school that fall, sometimes sleeping only three hours a night. But it made her happy. And others began to notice, too. Her research has now found Department of Energy funding and interest from automobile companies in Detroit. With Dr. Wang’s encouragement, she started collecting scientific awards to complement her journalism ones. “He first gave me an opportunity and that had a snowballing effect—it profoundly affected my life,” Wenyi says. “Obviously I had to seize it and make something of it.” But without a research mentor who checked his skepticism about a high school student, she would not have had the experience she did. . . . Wenyi’s story is concluded on p. 113 in Genius Denied.

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Excerpt from Genius Denied, Chapter 1: “Genius Denied,” pp. 23-25

We think of the story of a young woman we know named Brennan, who grew up on a hog farm in Delhi, Iowa. Slopping pigs and chasing after piglets, she learned early how to work hard with her brothers and parents to keep the farm running. Brennan always asked questions. She loved learning about the world by playing in a cabin she and her brothers built in the woods, acting out adventure stories and pretending she was an explorer. Then she started elementary school, and soon realized how different she was. First, as a bi-racial child, hers was the only dark face in an all-white class. Then she discovered that the other children didn’t learn to read so fast and didn’t find their curiosity pricked the way she did by everything she read. Brennan’s parents had her tested. Her scores showed she’d mastered material several grade levels above her age. The school wasn’t sure what to do. All the lower elementary school children worked from reading kits coded by different colors for different levels. So Brennan received a different color kit from all the other children and was told to work through it by herself. For two years she did this, teaching herself what she could. No one checked up on her. After two years, the school tested her again. She didn’t do as well as she thought she would, but that result made her happy. Now she was no longer so different, she thought. Now she no longer had to be the strange child working alone. Then when she was eight, her parents divorced. Her mom found a job in a truck-parts factory, so Brennan and two of her brothers moved to Manchester with her. They struggled financially on her mother’s wages. When her mother quit her job to go back to school, the family went on welfare. Brennan’s mother would rise at 6 a.m. on Sundays to redeem her food stamps at the local supermarket—so no one she knew would see her. The family lived in a housing complex where drunks regularly caused commotions, children turned up neglected and a neighbor was arrested for molesting his daughter. Brennan’s father didn’t fare much better. He worked third shift at a plastics factory. His house had little heat. When Brennan spent the night she had to sleep under piles of blankets to stay warm. Manchester was a small town. Brennan soon learned that everyone knew the low-rent district she lived in and knew how her family got by. When her mom sent her to buy small necessities with food stamps, her best friend refused to go anywhere near her. Poverty didn’t stunt Brennan’s intellect, though. As it is for many gifted children, seventh grade was the turning point. She played clarinet in the school band and, with little practice, won first chair. She earned straight A’s with little effort. Brennan grew frustrated with the lack of challenge. Though she loved hands-on work, she endured science classes without labs. Her literature classes spent weeks reading books aloud, every student reading a paragraph by turn. She could finish and comprehend these books in a night. Even though she excelled in athletics, generally a ticket to popularity, she felt perpetually on the outside, not sure whether her outsider status was the result of her skin color, poverty, intelligence or all three.  “I had one seventh grade teacher who told me that I was going to be a real success, but no one else had much faith in me,” Brennan says. . . . Brennan’s story is continued on p. 25 in Genius Denied.

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Excerpt from Genius Denied, Chapter 4: “Parenting Pushy Kids,” pp. 77-80

Jane knew her son Eric was bright, but she didn’t know how bright. He was an only child, and since the family lived in an isolated part of Maine, she knew few other children to compare him with. Eric always loved language. He looked at books and learned to speak at a very young age. He needed constant entertainment, and he couldn’t sit still in his high chair. When he was two, he started noticing small words. When Jane would drive past a gas station, he would call from his car seat, "Momma, what does G-A-S spell?" He saw the bright red octagons at the corner and asked the meaning of S-T-O-P. Then, three months before his third birthday, as they drove past a shopping center, he called out "Momma, that sign says ’Paperback!’” Jane backed up the car and asked where. He pointed to a store’s marquee, and sure enough, that’s what it said. Eric had taught himself how to read. After that, he devoured words wherever he could find them. Jane attended a conference on gifted education and mentioned that her son, at age four, was reading the newspaper. One educator insisted he be tested. Jane agreed; Eric scored off the charts. When it came time for him to enroll in school, she met with the local elementary school principal and showed him her information on Eric. The principal said Eric seemed like a very bright little boy, and the school would look forward to having him in class. Then Jane’s husband lost his job, and the family had to move. They landed in Bangor, Maine. The school there told Jane they had no legal obligation to help her gifted son. He would have to attend class with other kids his age. So Eric wound up in a regular classroom. He chafed at the environment. He argued with the teacher. He grew frustrated with the other children who couldn’t learn as fast as he could. When the situation never got better, Jane decided to homeschool him. An artist, she started a business making souvenir knickknacks so she had the flexibility to work from home. She painted Maine lighthouses on Christmas tree ornaments—and scrounged around for ways to meet her son’s needs. So began Jane’s odyssey of guerrilla education. She didn’t have a college degree. She and her husband gained and lost a series of jobs and never had much money. They prided themselves on being free spirits and often lived like pioneers in isolated rural areas, including for a while in a cabin without running water. They moved often to find employment. Despite these obstacles, Jane created a challenging education for her highly gifted son through some luck and a lot of perseverance. She joined a homeschooling group that she found by asking friends and neighbors. One day the homeschooling group was supposed to tour a local college campus. Somehow plans got mixed up and Jane and Eric wound up at the college by themselves. They roamed the halls. A professor invited them into a classroom. When it became clear that Eric understood what was going on, another professor invited him to attend labs. So Eric started going to classes at the college, and Jane learned a lesson: Professors are often delighted to teach students who love to learn. "College professors are very intelligent people," she says. "They could understand. They’d say, ’Let’s give him access to this information.’ Administrative types would just say it’s against the rules. I’d get no where with an official phone call." Eventually, Eric realized he seemed out of place in college classes, and decided the idea was "weird." So through networking with friends, neighbors, teachers and people from the college, Jane found a science tutor who charged an affordable fee for working with her son. This young man was studying to be a science teacher, and he told Jane he was getting as much out of the experience as Eric. One day he came over to the cabin with the complete apparatus for distilling water. He and Eric assembled the contraption on the floor, merrily learning about the properties of water and scientific processes in a home with no plumbing of its own. In Maine, the schools made old film strips available to homeschoolers, so Jane found some on the Apollo missions. They were hopelessly out of date. But Eric watched them, fascinated. One morning when Jane woke up, he told her he’d diagrammed the system for filtering carbon dioxide from the Apollo capsule. He made detailed drawings. She helped him find materials to set up a demonstration on the properties of carbon dioxide. He entered his project in a science fair and, at age seven, won first prize. . . . Eric’s story is continued on p. 80 in Genius Denied.

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Excerpt from Genius Denied, Chapter 6: “Schooling Solutions” pp. 146-148

Early college: “I didn’t miss a thing” Acceleration can mean attending college early. Several colleges and universities sponsor programs for students who want to sail over high school. Noshua Watson, now a reporter with Fortune magazine, took the SAT through the University of Denver’s talent search in sixth and eighth grades, and went to summer programs at the University of Northern Colorado for three years. She loved her classes, and her parents loved the way she flourished. She discovered social skills and an enthusiasm for learning that her Boulder, Colorado middle school was doing its best to snuff out. She had few friends from school; she preferred the company of children from church or dance with whom she had more in common. She was always bookish, interested in academic endeavors and frightfully bored. As one of very few African-American students in her school, she already had trouble relating to many of her classmates. When she was in eighth grade, the Denver talent search program sent her a booklet of high school options. She had nudged her parents to send her to a boarding school, though with college for Noshua and her two younger sisters looming on the horizon, her parents shied away from the expense. But then her mother found a program at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia -- an early college entrance program for girls Noshua’s age. Since the family planned to move to Maryland the next year anyway, Noshua visited Mary Baldwin with her parents. She toured the dorms, met others from the Program for the Exceptionally Gifted (PEG), and liked what she saw. She sent in her SAT scores (required to be as high as Mary Baldwin freshmen) and essays, and PEG admitted her for what would be her freshman year in high school, and instead became her freshman year of college. PEG provided a peer group and support to help these young students succeed. Noshua took an extra semester of English to learn academic composition, analytical reading and other skills middle schools gloss over. She "telescoped" her remaining three years of high school math into one year so she could major in economics and take calculus her sophomore year. After a year or so, PEG students take regular classes for their majors at Mary Baldwin. "Going to college was the academic challenge I needed," Noshua says. And as for leaving home so young, "I was a pretty independent kid. I went because I was dying to get out of the house and public school was just killing me." If her mind was grown up, she thought, why should she be somewhere where she had to ask permission to go to the bathroom? Some PEG girls—particularly those not as self-sufficient as Noshua—had less happy outcomes. Some had family difficulties, or could not handle the responsibility of living on their own. Some had trouble academically. And others, as at the Indiana Academy, had the “misfit” problem. Going to PEG is not the expected thing to do; so many of the girls are the maverick type. One of Noshua’s classmates dropped out to manage a pizza joint rather than pursue more education. PEG certainly can’t guarantee that these young women will immediately make socially useful contributions in an important field. But it does take these students’ mental energy and put it to positive use. That by itself is an improvement over what many girls had at their previous schools. Judith Shuey, head of PEG, notices this about her students. "A lot of research shows that if gifted people aren’t challenged, after a while they lose interest in challenging themselves," she says. They stop growing. They stop caring. At PEG, many of these young women learn to care again. For this, most PEG students don’t mind sacrificing high school as glorified in movies and TV shows. After all, they can still go to events and mixers with high school kids in the area as long as they come back to their dorms by curfew. Noshua went to a high school’s prom. She asked friends questions about their school experiences. All in all, she says, "I didn’t miss a thing." Perhaps the toughest part is the moment of reckoning all PEG students have when, as Noshua says, she realized she was seventeen, financially independent and completely on her own. Now what? Most go to graduate school. Many transfer out of Mary Baldwin and repeat parts of college at the more selective schools they would have otherwise attended . Noshua pursued her masters’ degree at Stanford. "I don’t regret not going to high school," she says. "I regret not spending more time in college as an undergrad." Still, Mary Baldwin provided a good liberal arts education and Noshua liked the experience so much that her two younger sisters decided to attend Mary Baldwin through PEG as well. Rudy Watson, Noshua’s father, knows parents worry about sending their kids to college early. The Watson family chose PEG because it challenged their daughters and gave them a peer group with caring adults close by. "The concern was primarily due to their ages," he says. "I was not sure if each one was mature enough to make the proper choices, but the environment that they entered was nurturing enough to allow them to learn and to allow me to feel comfortable."  . . .  Nosha’s story is continued on p. 148 in Genius Denied.

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“This School Will Save Some of These Kids’ Lives” Excerpt from Genius Denied, Chapter 6: “Schooling Solutions” pp. 136-140

In Muncie, Indiana, the Hoosier state has learned how not to fail its gifted children, at least for their last two years of high school. Every August, seniors at the public, residential Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities watch a certain giddiness come over the 150 new juniors when they arrive on the campus near Ball State University. Students discover the joy of throwing themselves into the mastery of difficult academic work while eating, studying, socializing and living with other bright students. Unlike talent search summer programs, they don’t have to leave after a few weeks to endure a dreary school year. This is the school year. What most gifted kids consider near-paradise is suddenly home. Laura visited the Indiana Academy as a prospective student after she missed two weeks of classes at her old high school because of illness. When she recovered, she returned to discovered her honors English class had just read out loud 100 pages farther into a novel she’d finished the first night it was assigned. The Utopian Literature class she visited at the Academy featured a discussion on the use of dream sequences and letter devices in fiction—and the students didn’t snicker when she defined "epistolary." At her lunch table at the old school, students spoke about who was not currently speaking to whom. Academy students gossiped, but they also debated political issues. The calculus teacher at her local high school puzzled through what to do once she exhausted the school’s math resources that year. At the Academy, a counselor suggested a sequence of math electives that could build on her calculus foundation. "Here," she told her mom during the car ride home, "teachers actually care what students think.” So she enrolled the next August and soon showed that same giddiness as her new classmates as she wandered all over the Rust Belt town—to the river with a guitar-playing crew, to the local coffee shop to chat—with new friends who liked being smart. She had to figure out how to budget her time. Her first semester’s B’s and C’s showed her lack of study skills, but she soon learned how to ponder problems late at night and feel connections forge in her brain. "The Indiana Academy gave me my mind back," she says. Like Chintan at the Charter School of Wilmington, she couldn’t imagine how she would have survived if she’d stayed at her local high school. Like Charter, the Academy offers students a curriculum that is both broad and deep. Students learn chemistry, botany, literature, and playwriting. Their social studies classes read the political theorists who influenced America’s founders. Students study statistics, differential equations, and other math electives beyond calculus. They study Chinese or French or take classes offered at nearby Ball State. They join the university’s choirs and dance troupes, and they play on sports teams at the Burris Laboratory School, where the Academy holds classes. They learn to work for their grades. Friendly competition with their peers pushes them even further. The Academy welcomes young scholars from all different backgrounds and supports them as they live and learn together. "This school is one of the most forward-looking things the state has ever done," says Tracy Cross, the Academy’s executive director. Since former North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., proposed the first state-sponsored residential school for the gifted in 1978, thirteen states from Indiana to Texas have created similar institutions where bright kids can learn in an environment with their intellectual peers. Because these schools draw students from all over some large states, they live in dorms, often near a university campus. Most such schools enroll only juniors and seniors. It’s a matter of cost, says Cross. You either cut the student body or limit the years, and some people in states without long histories of boarding school education don’t want kids to leave home before age sixteen. Most of these schools focus on math and science. The Indiana Academy incorporates the humanities as well, and so brings in a more diverse group of kids. Students can specialize in a way traditional public schools make difficult. Their teachers keep office hours, and students regularly inhabit their favorite teachers’ offices for these informal salons. The Academy’s students have standard teenage angst-related problems. They chafe against strict rules put in place for liability reasons. Some sport bizarre clothes and hairstyles. "The ones who come to our school have chosen to give up things and to live in a less comfortable environment," Cross says. Many would never be “normal” anyway. However, "As a psychologist, I know this school will save some of these kids’ lives," he says. There is pain in not using one’s mind. At the Academy, students will discover what it is like to receive an appropriate education, often for the first time. . . .  “ This School Will Save Some of These Kids’ Lives” continued on p. 113 in Genius Denied.

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