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Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

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Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#71

Post by jazzyk »

Spearchucker wrote: post #16
littletimmy wrote: post #9

I don't know man, I think there's something to be said about having a childhood. Being from India myself, I know the tremendous pressure parents put on kids to succeed. I hope that this kid wasn't subject to the same.

Agree with you. My wife and I are already arguing over the future of our 3-year-old. She wants him to learn to read and write. I want him to play, have time to be a boy, get in trouble, kiss a girl, and have a care-free childhood. We're so obsessed with money, and forget all about the one currency that really matters. Time. Time to live . I'd rather he were average academically, and experience life exceptionally.

Up-voted for courageously (and beautifully) expressing a potentially unpopular opinion. Stay strong - it is hard not to feel guilty when other kids in kindergarten can seemingly write essays and do calculus, but in the end, it does not matter as much as it may appear to. And sometimes putting so much pressure may have unintended consequences. I know a few kids from affluent families in my town where their "early prodigies" are now college drop-outs.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#72

Post by NameNickHN »

nibnib wrote: post #48
NameNickHN wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who have a hard time learning to read and some who never manage it despite making every effort. Why is it so hard to believe that there are people at the other end of the spectrum who are able to learn to read as an infant?

This isn't normally distributed. Would you find someone learning to feed at 18 as surprising as someone learning at a week old? Reading at this age is certainly unusual.

Normal? No, but neither surprising.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#73

Post by rtl49 »

agentultra wrote: post #55
rtl49 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't cause for despair. In the grand scheme of things, none of us is so important and the desire to "achieve" more than we have is, in some sense, a wish to bless ourselves. There's nothing to prevent you from studying those things today, within the constraints of your spare time. If you find the study intrinsically gratifying, I see no reason you should enjoy it any less because it probably won't result in a pro…

It's not so much despair but longing for something that never could have been. My parents knew what was wrong with me but couldn't understand it themselves. They thought it would be best to hold me back so that I learned how to socialize. It was a rough education. When I do have spare time you bet you'll find me working on a problem, reading a paper, or studying. It's almost like regret knowing that I won't be able t…

I don't know your personal circumstances, but I do know that there are roles for mathematicians to play in many areas outside of academia, and that your age wouldn't preclude these possibilities. If you haven't already, there would be no shame in beginning a PhD at your age (even some successful academics have done so).

We are all lucky and unlucky relative to someone else. I think time used on regret or "longing for what could have been" is simply time misspent, much like you might regard your childhood. Best of luck overcoming this natural tendency.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#74

Post by Retric »

jjaredsimpson wrote: post #61
Retric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the idea that the absolute best thing for a highly intelligent person to do is get to collage as soon as possible is a little sad. Life is not a race.

Some people enjoy the race. Seems like you are implying his time could've been better spent "doing kid stuff."

Write a book, start a company or a band, volunteer, learn to meditate or Kung foo, do whatever.

It's not a question of being a kid, it's a question of living your life as a neurosurgeon because you decided that sounded cool when you were 8, and never really rethinking it until you had a lot of debt.

Sure, if this is what they really want then great. But, thinking this is a good path and they would be wasting there potential being a raft guide is terribly hollow. Getting out of high school at 15 is cool, starting collage is not a goal just a path to something else.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#75

Post by allendoerfer »

sannee wrote: post #38
allendoerfer wrote: post #6

As long as he did not exclusively learn technical stuff but also got a humanistic education, which we do not know, and enjoyed his childhood, which I think he did, because you cannot perform like that without enjoying it, I think this is pretty amazing parenting. You could find other reasons to nitpick (Did he do sports? Did he develop social competences by interacting with other kids?), but even if these things are…

You have to realize the fact that humans have some really annoying bugs. a) The first one is the fact that we want (mostly) to help each other and make each other happy. This looks benign, but combined with b) can be really irritating b) Humans are bad at empathy. You might enjoy humanistic education or sports and so you automatically think that everyone else does too. This probably worked fine for our ancestors (get…

I think a bit different about humanism. I think a basic humanistic education is more like a drivers license for society. Know nothing about WW2? Well, you should not be allowed to vote, because it could turn out really bad for all of us. Democracy can be really dangerous without proper education.

What does all technical excellence mean as long as the Middle East is a clusterfuck? Most really big problems have little to do with technology.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#76

Post by mkj »

NameNickHN wrote: post #40
mkj wrote: post #34

"two-year-old son — already an avid reader" sounds somewhat unusual?

There are people who have a hard time learning to read and some who never manage it despite making every effort. Why is it so hard to believe that there are people at the other end of the spectrum who are able to learn to read as an infant?

No, I'm not saying it's unbelievable. More that some of the comments here seem to be assuming that the kid was just pushed quite hard, but there seems to be more to it.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#77

Post by uhtred »

agentultra wrote: post #41
rtl49 wrote: post #22

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.” I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of thi…

> These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the…

I wish I had the drive / focus / interest that you sound like you had when you were at school. I hung around with the wrong people, didn't put enough thought into what I might like to do for a career, valued the wrong things, and as a consequence spent my twenties in lots of meaningless, unsatisfying jobs. I'm in my early thirties now and am lucky in that I've managed to change my circumstances and begin a career as a software developer. But I feel I will never be able to achieve the success I could have if I had only gotten my arse into gear and taken my education seriously when I was 16. Now I find myself spending most of my free time trying to learn things that I should have learnt when I was 18.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#78

Post by IshKebab »

Retric wrote: post #51
rtl49 wrote: post #22

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.” I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of thi…

I find the idea that the absolute best thing for a highly intelligent person to do is get to collage as soon as possible is a little sad. Life is not a race.

I disagree. It's a race to learn as much as you can before your brain loses plasticity.

I certainly wish some of my teachers had spent more time teaching the people that cared and less time helping the D students that didn't. It definitely resulted in a few wasted years of education for me.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#79

Post by PaulHoule »

This seems to have been drawn from the same statistical distribution of many stories that center around this idea that "MIT students are smarter than students anywhere." The ideology of MIT is that you should go to MIT daycare, then MIT kindergarten and all the way through to the PhD and beyond, and if they had enough people in that pipeline they wouldn't bother taking applications from anywhere else.

That idea is definitely one of the things holding Boston back in terms of startups -- you definitely see research labs at MIT that don't hire postdocs from Stanford or Cornell because they only want to hire MIT people. There are plenty of MIT grads who are mediocre at best but many local startups (particularly those started by MIT grads) don't realize this and often make up all sorts of excuses about why things went wrong.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#80

Post by allendoerfer »

Cyph0n wrote: post #14
allendoerfer wrote: post #6

As long as he did not exclusively learn technical stuff but also got a humanistic education, which we do not know, and enjoyed his childhood, which I think he did, because you cannot perform like that without enjoying it, I think this is pretty amazing parenting. You could find other reasons to nitpick (Did he do sports? Did he develop social competences by interacting with other kids?), but even if these things are…

Why is exclusively technical education bad? Who cares if he doesn't know much about politics, art, or geography? All that matters is that he loves what he's doing.

Because we live in a democracy and I want to be sure that people how have actual power over me know some basic facts about politics, art, geography and history.
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