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.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> At some point, someone is going to have to come up with a solution for the "genius kids" in higher education. <<

At least two groups already have:

* The Marionettes have their own educational setup, which spans private schools that they actually run and public ones where they have a special interest. So many of the Moblings are soups that they really need accommodation for that.

* Kraken has the Ocean Pearls Academy which is basically an umbrella institution for homeschooling. It provides social connections and tailored lessons for superkids, many of whom can't safely attend ordinary schools (or at least not yet) and some who have survived educational abuse such that trying to push them into another school would likely result in a 50-foot robot situation.

These two approaches are working quite well, for the people who can access them.

A third is still in development. That's the Maldives. They've been purposely attracting soups for several years now. While they don't have a school for superkids yet, they're going to need one, and the President is a scholar magnet so I'm sure it'll turn out fine. That's also the first place to put up a supernary school for adults who want to construct superpowers by hand (the "Intensive Training" option in some roleplaying games).

Bear in mind that Super-Intellects are rare. Even if you count gifted as well as extremely gifted, they're not common. That limits what ordinary schools can do in the way of separate support, unless they are huge, which has its own problems.

Terramagne does have a lot more alternative schools than here, though. Many of those are much better equipped to meet the needs of exceptional students. Frex, Montessori schools allow children to work at their own skill level in each subject. They don't care about asynchronous development; they care that each child masters the material, which means not holding back in the adept areas or pushing too fast in the sluggish ones. Waldenkinder uses nature as a focus, which is great because one kid can be memorizing lepidoptera species while the others are just swishing butterfly nets. And I think that flexibility in educational offerings is because Terramagne has so much diversity, they've been forced to admit that cookie-cutter education doesn't work for everyone.

Yes, there are still colossal fuckups. Shiv was in his late teens before anyone realized how smart he actually is. His "Can't we just do this the easy way?" leads to insightful applications of superpowers and sometimes whole new inventions. And the idiots who raised him thought he was stupid because he reads badly and has a low bullshit tolerance.

No place is perfect.

If you want to explore more about education in Terramagne, by all means prompt for it. There's plenty that I know about but haven't written yet.

[acelightning73]

I had no peers as a child. Some kids close to my age, but none of them could hold an intelligent, interesting conversation - only adults did that, and patronizingly, because I was just a kid. I got put into the Bright Kids Class, which didn't help. They were all kids who KNEW they were bright, and their families had high expectations for them. I had nothing in common with them to have a conversation about. I didn't really have peers until I was in college, and some of them were my teachers.

Alas!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That sucks.

Yeah, I got along better with adults than children, the ones who found me interesting rather than alarming or intolerable.

Re: Alas!

[acelightning73]

I got tired of adults treating me like some sort of performing seal - "Say something smart, kid. Explain Einstein's theory of relativity." I had almost nothing in common with other kids my age. Instead of watching Saturday Morning cartoons, I was happier reading a book Arthur C. Clarke wrote a non-fiction book called The Exploration of Space, which I owned a copy of. ("SHe's such a weirdo! She reads BOOKS that aren't required for school, for FUN!") I didn't play games like dodgeball with other kids, I wasn't interested in "playing house" or "cowboys and indians" or stuff like that. Or maybe I'd be helping my dad work on the car, or the TV, or building a cookbook shelf in the kitchen for my mom. Or asking one of them to drive me to the library.

[acelightning73]

I was 16 when I graduated from high school, and when I started college. I was in all the "advanced" classes in public school, but even there, there were damn few other kids I could communicate with.