Terramagne colleges

[kengr]

Been re-reading some of the older Polychrome Heroics stuff, and the problems that various Finn children were having with various colleges and universities got me thinking.

At some point, someone is going to have to come up with a solution for the "genius kids" in higher education. My though is a dorm with special support for not only the young geniuses but also "regular" adults who either have problems that are similar (gaps is "social learning" or being non-neurotypical in ways that could use the same sort of support.

On the other paw, having them all clustered together like that could cause problems with them getting classed together as "problems".

On the gripping hand, scattering them around the campus would make support harder.

Not sure if there's a good answer, but even just trying variations to help will likely be better than the current mess.

Thoughts?

Comments

[mama_kestrel]

The thing I've noticed about trying to integrate genius children with their peers is that they essentially have no peers but each other. Their age mates aren't peers, either socially or intellectually. Neither are adults, because these are still children in emotional development. The little girl who looks up from playing with her dolls to explain desert thermodynamics to adults planning to drive across the Southwest in summer before cars were air conditioned had no peers. (Ues, I did that. I was 7. Fortunately my family was used to me and didn't shut me down.) My son's few peers were all online. The mother of one child emailed to thank me for encouraging the friendship, because her son had no peers either. His passion and genius is music; he won a Grammy award at I believe age 16, playing with his dad. But when they were 13, they had each other to talk to, laugh with, and play with. The problem? We live in northern Indiana; the other kid lives in Tennessee.

I think putting such children together would help the isolation of being a genius child a lot, but it would require adults that understand how to deal with such children. And they might be even thinner on the ground than the kids themselves.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Exactly. Most adults found me exasperating or downright frightening ... starting when I could talk. I had acquaintances, but no friends, until I went to a magnet school, at 16. I have friends now. They are scattered all over the world, because people who're into things like quantum mechanics, xenolinguistics, and S-risks are few and far between. I like the fact that the Internet allows me to have a goodly handful of friends, though; that's really nice. I certainly couldn't do that locally.

Putting children together with others like themselves is a great idea, regardless of what difference sets them off from the average. It is also essential that smart kids have smart adults to learn from, especially if they're sports instead of nerdspawn. They need adults who had similar experiences growing up and can say, "Don't worry about the asynchronous development, that's common, your slow thing will probably grow in eventually. Most people's do. You just can't grow in everything at once." They need adults who can help them compensate for whatever hasn't grown in yet, without punishing them for not being good at everything already.

Almost no gifted children enjoy these advantages, and that underlies a lot of the problems.