Alejandro Iglesias Essays (1088 words) - Education,

Alejandro Iglesias Sociology The Marriage and Family Experience January 7th How to NOT treat Child Geniuses In today's speech we are going to talk about a very interesting topic. Imagine being surrounded by a classroom of peers. And now imagine that these "peers" are all about ten years older than you as you sit in a University classroom at 12 years of age. This may seem like some movie scene that I'm describing, however this is the eventual situation that unfolds for many of the most precocious "child geniuses". This very general term is used to describe a child prodigy. That is a child typically under the age of ten who is capable of doing one or more fields at the technical level of an adult. Mozart would be a good example. Intellectually gifted children seem to not only experience different things in their lives compared to average children, they progress faster in respect to their chronological age mentally but not emotionally. The development of child genius's brain allowing them to perform at an adult level at one or more general tasks may show that higher intelligence is also linked to higher maturation in cognitive abilities. There is more evidence to support this than there is evidence to support that high intelligence means an equivalent level of maturation emotionally, largely because this has to do with life experiences that have to be lived over time for people to be mature. This which has implicit things to consider on behalf of educational institutions. Specifically it is not recommendable to move children of high intellectual ability out of the classroom with similar aged peers and then putting them into environments with people that are older. This does not afford these children with the opportunity to develop alongside same aged peers and could negative affect the socio-emotional state of the children over time I once knew a child who could be considered a "child genius". This child has a very poor childhood in my and many others opinions of those who knew him. I knew him all through growing up in elementary school. He was capable of doing high school level mathematics by the fifth grade. Although he was not separated from the rest of the classroom until around the sixth grade when we transitioned into middle school, those couple years were quite bad for him now that I think about it in retrospect. From first grade up until the fifth he was always treated very differently by the teachers, he often worked alone in separate rooms, had different assignments and textbooks than the rest of the students and was barely involved in many of the extracurricular activities. He always seemed to be ion a completely different schedule than the rest of his peers. It was almost immediately noticed by the rest of the other kids and I remember him being often picked on from the other kids. Even though he wasn't really bullied he was completely alienated from the others through the way that the school treated him and in retrospect looking at the situation through a more mature point of view I think that the child (I forgot his name) could have had a better experience if the school had handled his ability in a more productive matter. I believe that while he was certainly challenged educationally which is important, part of the role of school that's at least equally important is to literally socialize children. So, in these instances where schools tend to separate and alienate the gifted, they may be serving their higher ability for educational material, but what about them just being kids. Just because a ten year old can do theoretical physics like a fully grown man does not mean that he has the emotional maturity or life experience to best be surrounded by adults with whom the gifted child becomes "peers" with if this is implemented. Healthy development must include appropriate benchmarks not only in a mental sense for these children but rather in an emotional sense simultaneously. Because this is the healthy way for a child to develop in general, that is, with simultaneous emotional and mental benchmarks growing up, schools are fundamental in appropriating gifted students without divergence from