Solomon quotes piano teacher Veda Kaplinsky of Julliard: “Genius is an abnormality, and can signal other abnormalities…Many gifted kids have A.D.D. They may have dyslexia and have difficulty learning to read, they may have serious problems with math, or they may have perceptual-motor problems leading to number reversals or difficulties in handwriting… Sometimes these children also have an inability to focus and attend, and they are classified as having an attention disorder.”ĭrew Peterson, another prodigy in Andrew Solomon’s story, didn’t speak until he was three and a half, just a few short years before he was playing at Carnegie Hall. Typically these children excel at abstract verbal reasoning and seem very bright and motivated outside of school, but they encounter serious problems with school tasks. The Nueva School has plenty of these children, and they receive a great deal of individual attention. “Academically gifted children are sometimes so uneven in their scholastic profiles that they are learning disabled in some domain. In her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, developmental psychologist Ellen Winner explores two such sets of unevenly gifted children: Students enrolled in Johns Hopkins University’s Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, who at ages 12 and 13 are able to score in the 700s in SAT math skills but show large discrepancies in verbal abilities, and children enrolled in The Nueva School for academically gifted children outside of San Francisco: Armstrong learned to count at 15 months, began composing music at age 5, attended college at age 9, and dabbles in things like physics, chemistry and mathematics for fun.įor every child in Armstrong’s mold, however, there are just as many whose abilities skyrocket in one specific field even while lagging behind the norm in others. Kit Armstrong, one of several children profiled in Andrew Solomon’s 2012 New York Times piece “How do you Raise a Prodigy?”, may be a classic example of a child who is “globally gifted”.
It appears prodigiousness is not genetic, nor is it necessarily even a reflection of intelligence.
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