Smarticles

I’ve heard this theory before and I completely agree, the way you can tell if your child is going to be smart is if they enjoy the company of adults. Allow me to explain. I read a study sometime ago (probably in grad school) and it has come up in conversations that children who get classified as gifted enjoy the company of adults rather than peers their own age.

This stems from something very simple: thinking kids your age are too childish and immature. From my own experience I can say I fully agree. I grew up with a sister five years my elder and we got along great. I really enjoyed her company, and I would hang on to every word teachers would say in hopes that I could be as eloquent as they were one day (most of the time) and I just thought adults were overall better people. I couldn’t wait to grow up, but yet again, who can’t? But it made me want to read more, know more about the world, and explore life outside of school so that I could hold conversations of substance with them in hopes that they would see me as their equal. Let’s fast forward now to high school. I still felt adults were better, and I still couldn’t relate to the average fifteen year old. Granted, I went to a magnet school in which I had the majority of my classes with students who had proven to be smart and all the friends I made were college-bound. I could definitely relate to them, so it’s not like I ever isolated myself from my age group seeing how we were “mini-adults.” In my high school program, our core classes were taken within the magnet school and we had to take electives from the regular high school. So in observing how the other students interacted, my friends and I always had our side commentaries as to how they conducted themselves and how at times there was a level of immaturity we couldn’t relate to. However, that’s not a blanket statement because that can’t be said about everyone; I definitely met a good amount of exceptions. But I digress, I think a big part of why I did pretty well for myself was because I had that mentality even at a young age.

Now there’s my brother. My brother is eight years younger than I am, which means my sister and him have a wide thirteen year gap in between them. My brother, being the youngest amongst my siblings, had no one but older people surrounding him. He had cousins his own age, but he only really interacted with adults on a daily basis. He also could not relate with kids his own age because he would view the world, even as a young age, that he could do better things with his time than play childish games like learn languages, learn about the world, and reach his potential. He did so exceptionally well for himself leaving middle school with a flawless 4.0 GPA and graduating high school with honors. Now as an adult, I think he’s content at a level I was when I reached that facet of my life.

Now we fast forward to my niece. She is a kindergarten student, and you may think it’s too early to tell how she’ll turn out. It’s not. Now being in a mostly “only child” situation, she’s had no choice but to interact with people who are nothing but grown-ups in her eyes. Kids will still be kids and she does enjoy playing with peers, but she also enjoys being challenged. I remember when that little girl was three and could work a DVD player like it was second nature. And then she would get entranced in my brother’s Nintendo DS, which made her require her own at some point. Her curiosity had also led her in learning much about reading before going into school, similar to how I was taught before stepping foot into a kindergarten classroom. Because of this, and because there’s nothing but adults who are looking to her to strive, she became the “student of the month” the first month of her school year. This was based on the fact that she learned all her sight words for the semester in about three weeks. She’ll now be enrolled in a gifted program in her elementary school, so the pattern continues.

The idea to blog about this came about a dinner I was having with fellow teachers here in Korea and thinking, “being an adult and talking about anything and everything rocks!”