Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school

We make it up as we go along :)

Basically my wife and I ask ourselves "What is the next thing to learn, or what do the kids need to review?" Our very broad curriculum for math is operations in order, from addition to exponents and logarithms, with learning and graphing functions that use that operation at the same time. So, when they learn addition they learn linear functions and line graphing, curves when they learn exponents, etc. Then fractions and decimals, because you need to understand fractions to understand the unit circle, which is the basis for angles and therefore geometry and trig. Reading is easiest: make them read and discuss harder books than they read last week. Writing is similarly straightforward, though there we reach rhetorical techniques when we do persuasive writing, meter when we write poetry, etc. History we are doing linearly, and trying emphasize the history of technological progression and cultural progression over dates and names. For example, kids should know what the difference between neolithic and paleolithic societies is, or what the limitations of bronze tooling are. We also do a lot of timelines, so the kids know about the different states of various societies at the same time in history.

Finally, the best thing about this approach is that you can get your teachers to suggest things that would work well in your curriculum, or related areas that should be taught together. If you ever get anxious about missing something you can look up your local curriculum standards, though most often these will just show you how ridiculously ahead of public school the kids are.

But people have a lot of control over many aspects of our physical appearance.
We also have a lot of control over many aspects of how "smart" we are.
Don't we?

It's possible to make a mistake in both ways. I wish someone told me in my childhood: "Viliam, some things you are interested in are simply too complex for an average person to understand and care about. To discuss them with someone, you must first find sufficiently intelligent people."

My parents never gave me information of this kind, probably believing that it would be morally bad for me to have it. So I spent many years believing that I am too weird and no one can understand me; that my only way to interact with people is to meet them at their turf, never going to mine. (And that social skills consist mostly of pretending to be like other people, and denying what is unique about me.) I did not have a good explanation for this asymetry.

And then (a dramatic exaggeration) I found LessWrong, and I realized there are other people like me on this planet. Then I went to a CFAR seminar and met them in person, so now I also feel on the emotional level they are real.

Sometimes working hard is not an answer, for example when you are a hard-working member in a team of idiots, and it's a job you can't manage all alone. The only solution is to find another team; but to do that you have to believe that different teams are possible, that not all people are the same.

So to simplify - explaining the state of the world is fine, but there's a difference between that and praising someone for it.

At the moment I find that the cards I made in my first year of using Anki haven't been what I know consider to be simple facts.

I frequently delete old cards where when I think they don't make sense anymore.

For example I used to belief that the card: ?(port is red)? with the possible answer Yes and No is simple. ?()? was a shorthand for not having to write the sentence.

Now I find that "port is ?(green/red)?" is much more simple. The ?(X)? gets colored blue to make it stand out to the eye when I see the card. Sister cards:
Starboard is ?(green/red)?
?(starboard/port )? is green
?(starboard/port )? is red

It seems to be very near to the ideal of redundant minimum information chuncks. Formatting might be improved but the information of every card seems close to optimum.

It took me years to learn the Zen of making simple Anki cards. Old cards that get badly formatted or represent knowledge that isn't useful get either reformated or deleted.

In the last week I had to relearn the meaning of dative and accusative. I think I probably learned those concepts in school. But I didn't make any Anki cards for it. I forgot that knowledge.

I also lost a lot of French vocubulary. Take animals.
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means dog
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means cat
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means cow
[fr->en] ?(chien/chat/vache/cheval)? means horse

Four very simple cards. I would also make the reverse English to French cards. I could have written them easily to learn French in school. I think a 8 year old might have enough cognitive capacity to write those four cards and learn them. He might have a challenge to learn them and might not be as fast as I'm now when I'm learning them, but they wouldn't provide him trouble.

When it comes to teaching the 8-year-old Anki I would encourage them to write cards in that style that have 2 to 6 choices and that require the user to write down his choice every time when a computer is available. When he uses Anki via a phone of course writing down the words isn't necessary.

If you follow that principle learning languages, learning biology or learning whatever gets a nice game. Seperate the knowledge into groups and put them into Anki.

Aren't you worried about your brainspace?

Research indicates that brainspace isn't limited. On the contary, saving a lot of information in your brain makes it less likely that you will get Alzheimer's. Badly formatted cards that cost time because they get forgotten are a issue brainspace isn't.

I have the same skill and have found it's a bit of a mixed blessing -- because when reading tough technical stuff my brain still wants to process it at the same very high speed, which needs I constantly need to pay attention and keep my reading rate down because otherwise my eyes fly across the page and I take nothing in. Since a large fraction of what adult-me wants to read is tough technical stuff, superfast novel-reading isn't necessarily a great trade for this.

Is it that unproductive to read a lot of fiction? I read extremely quickly and still retain a lot of what I read, and this seems to be quite a useful skill, and I've always assumed that one of the reasons I have this skill is because I read so much as a child.

I have the same experience. It could be that I wouldn't have read nonfiction as voraciously, and less practice would result in less reading skill now. But I suspect that I read far past the point of diminishing returns.

I also do seem to have been interested in learning things, and so if they were presented at a faster speed I think I would have learned more. If I had been spending an hour a day on various required subjects like civics and history and English, which would have been enough, and four hours on self-paced math, I suspect I would be in a much better academic position than I am now. (This is what I'm thinking of when I said strongly suboptimal- if I were educating a child, I don't think I would put 8 of their hours into fiction reading, though I might put 4.)

Good fiction is also an excellent way to build vocabulary, which is at least valuable for a child who wants to signal to colleges: "Look at my Verbal SAT score!"

I on the other hand, got a very good experience out of the CTY distance writing program. It forced me to clarify my thoughts and be conscientious about how I wrote for the first time. Also, as an 11-year-old who had gone through life with few to no challenges, it was an excellent opportunity to really have to work hard at something.

Public school is child abuse for a bright kid. He will learn all the wrong lessons, things that will hamstring him for the rest of his life. He'll learn that he doesn't have to work. He'll learn that he can beat his peers while being a lazy jerk off. He'll learn that "being smart" is the standard of status, not achievement.

And he'll fail to learn how to drive himself. Fail to learn how to overcome setbacks. Fail to learn how to discipline himself.

Amen to all of the above, from personal experience.

Definitely a time commitment. I suggest it on the theory that smarter students tend to educate themselves, and what the public school is doing is nearly a complete waste with a kid like this. So the homeschooler who achieves a better result than the public school in only a few hours of effort a week is way ahead of the game. The homeschooler may be aware that he could do so much more if he spent more time, but that way lies useless guilt. Put a small amount of work in as the schooler, and if that doesn't translate into enough effort on the part of the schooled so that the net outcome is ahead of what was going to happen in the gigantically mismatched public school, you can switch the kid back in.

If the kid has been reading, as reported in OP, since he was 1, then it is not a bad guess that he is a good candidate to teach himself other things a child is expected to learn. I am assuming he was not reading at 1 because of an intensive teaching effort, that he more or less picked it up on his own with minimal exposure from "teachers."

My first grade teacher refused to believe I was gifted until the principal showed her my standardized test results at the end of the year.

(I eventually ended up in special education because of behavior problems. Ugh.)

I made a little trouble, but mostly I found ways of killing time. (Drawing a tesseract in 4 point perspective is educational the first few times, doing it again and again is not. And most of my doodles weren't quite that cool.) Killing time is a bad habit I've still got.

I'd add another call for caution with this approach. This got longer than I meant; the short version is: beware of getting in to an arms race with smart people, particularly ones you love, because one or other of you will lose.

A bright child will be able to out-manoeuvre you in areas where they are motivated and you are not. If not now, soon. Think about it: there will already be things they are better at than you. (Some of those games, for instance.) Better not to rely long-term on a strategy that only works if you are able to continue to out-think them.

To spell it out, the risk is motivating him to avoid you learning about his behaviour, rather than motivating him to avoid the behaviour.

That was my experience as a child. Between about 11 and 16, I hung out with a bunch of troublemakers, but was regularly able to evade almost all the negative authority-imposed consequences their actions led to, largely by being much better at subterfuge than the others in the group. (The others in the group were among the least bright in the cohort.) My parents were both smart - but I knew more about what I was up to than they did, and was much more motivated in practice to avoid punishment than they were to enforce discipline. And it did my relationship with them no favours to regularly succeed in hoodwinking them.

(Add-colour aside anecdotes: I recall being punished by a bright teacher for some infraction. I protested the size of the punishment - I admitted a minor wrong, but (truthfully) claimed that I hadn't been involved in the main naughtiness. They didn't buy it. A while later, evidence emerged backing up my case that I didn't do it. The teacher said "Well, count the unjustified bit of the punishment as being for all those times you did do it and weren't caught.". Which I don't think was meant to strongly emphasise to me the vital importance of not being caught, but it did. I am also perversely proud of a new school rule being instituted because I had semi-successfully argued that I shouldn't be punished for breaking a rule that didn't exist. Luckily that arms race was abandoned by mutual consent before it got out of hand.)

This is also my experience a parent. Obviously, I don't know of any instances where my kids have evaded my 'surveillance' entirely successfully. But I have caught some cases close to my ability to detect, and it seems very unlikely that they do things behind my back only right up to the edge of my ability to detect and not over it.

I'd advocate trying for more genuinely negotiated engagement with them. It's really hard, and not something that you can just do like that. But I certainly try for "we urgently need a discussion about whether that action is a good idea because we seem to disagree strongly" as a frontline response ahead of "do that again and I will stop you having X that you like". (Another bonus to the discussion approach is that it leaves the door open to the kid convincing me to change my mind and thus coming out of the situation a winner.)

Back on the original topic, I very much expect that taking an active interest in what the kid's up to, and how bored they are or not, and trying to keep them positively engaged (as in this post!) is an excellent step to avoiding the negative outcome here.

My counter strategy for him trying to do this: no video games!

This strategy seems optimal for achieving the goal of maintaining your personal social dominance and in signalling your affiliation with the authority figures that the child chooses to defect against. Depending on just how gifted and resourceful the child is it may or may not result in the child optimising around you in the same way that they would optimise around any other part of the problem.

Yyyyyeahhh...

Okay, so. I really can't say very much, between Generalizing From One Example and not knowing anything about specific circumstances.

I am going to say that there exists a certain kind of intelligent child who will see what you are doing, resent you for it, and initiate a downward spiral that leads to a rather unpleasant relationship going into adulthood.

Not saying that this is an example, but ... be a little careful.

3rd grade is multiplication tables territory. That's deadly boring even when you haven't mastered it yet.

Not for me. I got into a competition with the other smarty pantses in the class to see who could get passed to 12x12 first. We all stayed after school one day in a round robin competition being quizzed by the teacher.

In some cases, it was performing drills at all whether I'd mastered it or not. 3rd grade is multiplication tables territory. That's deadly boring even when you haven't mastered it yet. And it's one of the few times I really would advise just sucking it up and memorizing the danged thing.

I would advice to play some computer gain that trains multiplication. If you approach the problem in a gamified manner it's not boring and you will likely learn it faster.

Rather than memorize how to multiply a small number of permutations of numbers, learn in the general case how to multiply small numbers quickly.

Few people who memorized the 12x12 grid and then moved on can quickly say that 13 times 7 is (70+21=91).

Caching the products of small factors will develop naturally as a result of training the general skill.

Where I went to school, we started having multiple teachers in first grade, but in a much more limited sense than in Junior High/High school; it was basically one primary teacher, with a small amount of time for up to two other teachers. I'm actually having trouble remembering if which was a daily thing; I know that I actually missed most of third grade science because that class was with a different teacher, and I was doing blind people stuff during that time (somehow I didn't even notice until most of the way through the school year, since I brought home a different science book from the library every week just because I wanted to).

However, I wouldn't be surprised if this is not the norm; my VI teacher talked about her colleagues warning her that I'd start needing to travel between multiple classes, which left both of us kinda confused, but implies that most elementary schools don't do it that way. Even at mine, though, I'm not sure that the schedules between grades really lined up well enough for mixing it up to work very well.

I'll brainstorm suggestions, then.

• Ask him if there's a language he'd like to learn. If there is, provide him materials to learn the basics (grammar, alphabet, fundamentals) and promise to send him to a language school that immerses you for x months during a break.

• Ask him if he'd like tutored instruction in a subject; if he would, then, as others suggest, enslave a grad student.

• Gift him a "Learn X the Hard Way" book. Alternatives include Real Python; I don't know what else they include.

• Ask him if he has any life goals. If they are scientific in origin, take the goals seriously, lay out some milestones that might help in achieving them, and utilise Davidson's resources for all they're worth (including people).

• Ask if he'd like to learn an instrument and/or how to sing, with instruction in music theory being another option. Accommodate.

• Ask if he'd like to learn a martial art, and if he has any preferences. You could ask him this after taking him to a demonstration of the Shaolin Monks. If he has an interest in oriental languages, instruction in the language he's learning offers a practical immersive environment.

• Have family writing competitions - everyone writes a brief story together by candlelight for a set period of time. Comment on the stories afterwards, and everyone can vote on a favourite should they have one.

• Offer instruction in Go.

• See if you can work out a way to direct all his instruction in the classes that bore him towards producing something of value. In the humanities, this could amount to historical fiction set in the learnt time period, limericks about the mechanics of Linguistics, or analytical essays (should he like that sort of thing). In maths, challenge him to derive established proofs himself without telling him the proof beforehand, or teach with the frame of covering the knowledge necessary for solving a current problem in mathematics. In science, tell a story of the scientist who ran a particularly important experiment, or set of experiments; inform him what the scientist observed, and ask him to design an experiment testing that observation with varying aims. You could also just tell the story, if the one teaching is a good enough storyteller (exempli gratia Seven Ideas that Shook the Universe, by Spielberg and Anderson - although it doesn't actually teach the subjects).

• Give him a yet-to-be assembled computer with a completely empty drive, books on how computers work, books on how software communicates with computers, and let him play.

• Teach him skills known by the people he's studying, but not us, concurrent with his studies of those people: calligraphy, perspective art, court decorum, honorifics, hunting for sustenance, foraging, needlework, thread and wool weaving, soap creation, candle creation, paper manufacture, eyeglass manufacture, architecture, sailing, letter-writing, mercury ingestion, plague avoidance, honour, swordsmanship, fear of the inquisition, etc.

I'm curious - Davidson markets itself as solving boring instruction; what about it does he find uninteresting?

Good point on telling him it's an option. in elementary school, I only became aware of grade skipping when I encountered a student who had done so.

I had a similar experience. Apparently, I was offered the choice to skip a grade, but my parents decided (without involving me in the discussion) that it would hurt my social growth. This was irksome to find out. Their concerns were valid - I didn't connect well with my peers - but skipping a grade actually would have helped. In the end, the friends who drew me out of my shell, and had the greatest positive impact on me, were all two or three years older.

My guess: The Curse of the Gifted, and not being forced to learn self-discipline until a time when it was very expensive to learn.

I skipped a year while I was in the first school year, and I was heavily bullied for the rest of grade school. My interpersonal skills definitely suffered, or rather, developed only slowly and in the wrong direction.

In case you're wondering, academically I performed fine.

Being younger than the others can be a problem, from bullying (I never was badly bullied, but still a bit) to some emotional maturity problems. To make the things worse, I was even 2 years younger, not just one... that does lead to some little problems when you're 10-11 and still emotionally a child and are with schoolmates who are 12-13 and entering puberty. But overall, I don't regret it.

Has he read the Sequences yet?

Get him a copy of a tabletop role-playing game, a notebook for writing down campaign ideas, a couple of people willing to include him in their group as a part-time DM, and (importantly) an understanding from the teacher that when he is sufficiently done with the classwork, his time is his so long as he isn't disrupting other students.

Have him learn Go. It's not only a game; it forces you to examine your thinking patterns, review your expectations, and meta-model other people's model of your mind. It's a tremendous booster.

My son is 8 months old. I point to each word as I read them to him, but that's about it. Is there anything else I should be doing?