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How Do You Raise a Prodigy? (nytimes.com)
92 points by llambda on Nov 3, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments


amusingly not a mention of benjamin bloom and his seminal work "Developing Talent in Young People". he and his team studied over 120 individuals under 40 in 6 fields and found consistent themes. this few page PDF breaks it down nicely:

http://www.kragen.net/uploads/4/5/4/3/4543087/developing_tal...

in short, parents, educators, and kids have to own specific roles in this. sadly little of this is outlined in the piece. more on this in an interview with bloom:

http://leading-learning.blogspot.com/2009/01/developing-tale...

while not everyone can raise a prodigy, a prodigy can come from anywhere.


Nice to see a comment on Bloom. The Kaplan folks mentioned in their initial lecture that they found most MCAT questions fit within that schema. So, like we do in the military, I read what the enemy wrote for each each other: I pulled his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Most of it is very dry government-reporty sort of stuff, but the Appendix is a nice concise outline. Email me if you want a copy, or see if you can get it through interlibrary loan.


yes but you don't interlude with random personal quotes so I feel attachment to the subject enough to follow it to b5 than from b6-b9


Freeman Dyson on Norbert Weiner (intentionally raised as a prodigy):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/jul/14/the-tra...


This appears paywalled -- Is the full article available anywhere?




Not just that, it stopped it at the most awkward place in the story:

>He made his reputation as a pure mathematician by inventing concepts such as the “Wiener measure” that …


I assumed this was where he lost his status as prodigy.


advice on education, by Terrence Tao who is himself a prodigy mathematician: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted...

I think the article doesn't really answer to the question of the title, but is rather a bunch of example of very gifted children (in the field of music).



I'm curious about how the HN duplicate detector distinguishes cases like this. I had seen the earlier submission and was surprised that there wasn't more discussion about it.

Elsewhere in cyberspace, I have had parents of high-IQ children (as ascertained by national membership organizations) tell me that they think the submitted article is thoughtful and reasonably factually accurate. I would like to read the book on which the submitted article is based.

If you like reading about this subject and closely related subjects, it happens that I was just at my town's local Wikipedia Loves Libraries event, and in a conversation with a librarian there a bibliography about human intelligence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

was viewed by the librarian and me. That's a good source for more current reading about bringing up gifted children and closely related topics.


Another case in point: the Polgar sisters[1][2][3], raised by their father[4] to prove the point that "geniuses are made, not born".

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Polgar

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r


It would have been even more profound for each daughter to have been made a prodigy in a different specialization. I suppose the availability of instructors in three separate areas would have been a barrier though.


Great variety (and quality) of the sensory input and stimuli from the very first breath?


Win (or lose, depending on your perspective) the genetic lottery.


The first few pages of TFA seem to be more about raising a prodigy than about giving birth to one. I.e., given that your child is a prodigy, what parenting techniques are useful?




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