Six Successful Prodigies and What Parents, Teachers and Educators Can Learn From Them (or their Pare
- Afiqah Ayauf
- Aug 27, 2015
- 12 min read
Child prodigies are amazing because of their talent and fortunate combination of genetics that contribute to their intelligence and giftedness. Although this trait was obtained by chance, but the culmination of their giftedness is mainly achieved by nurture, and environment, meaning that given the right environment and the ample nurturing towards the right direction, these prodigies are able to attain and continuously demonstrate their giftedness.
Although parents, teachers, and educators inevitably cannot choose or change a child's talent or genetics, educators still have sufficient and ample opportunities to nurture their students and/or children towards the same excellence. However, it is unrealistic to expect children to be prodigies, if they were not gifted with the right genetics, and becoming prodigies is not the goal. The goal is equip kids to pursue excellence and prepare them for a life of pursuing excellence with integrity and success. So here are the prodigies:
1. Akrit Jaswal
Who Is This Prodigy?:
Akrit, who is now 22, performed his first surgery when he was only seven years old. He started talking at ten months, and by four years old, he was reading Shakespeare. He took interest in the sciences, especially in medicine, which lead the doctors in the area to allow him to watch them performing surgeries. He read several books and articles about surgeries, anaesthesia and medicine, before he actually conducted his first surgery. It was a successful surgery that prompted his fame internationally.
He recently graduated from an Indian University at the age of 12, and was interviewed by Oprah in her world renowned show - The Oprah Winfrey Show. He hopes to attend Harvard and find the cure for cancer one day.
What We Can Learn From This Genius?:
Being born and raised in rural India, in the 90s, we can assume that it was a pre-internet era, but despite this fact, Akrit was able to get his hands on college and post graduate level books on medicine, biology, chemistry and health, although the means he obtained these books is not well clarified in the media. From this information we can learn that children have a great ability to learn even during their younger years, whether they are geniuses or not.
Books help kids to learn a lot, even for kids that are younger, but keep it realistic. Let's not force three year olds to read Shakespeare. But give them the opportunity to read Oliver Twist at five if they are ready.
There are many kid-friendly encyclopaedias and atlases that kids can benefit from. These books cover several different subjects and explain complex ideas such as atoms and digestive tract to children in terms that are easy for kids to understand. These books may give inspiration and become a stepping stone towards a child's learning.
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2. Taylor Wilson
Who Is This Prodigy?:
Taylor Wilson is the teenage physics genius who developed a bomb at age ten (no, he didn't detonate it and take the lives of many), and built a working nuclear reactor at age 14 and won $50,000 at a science fair for developing a "device that can detect nuclear materials" according to an article by The Guradian.
Taylor, who is now 22, is currently working on his nuclear reactor projects in his own garage-lab. He has also worked with the University of Nevada, Reno, prior to winning his Thiel Fellowship grant of $100,000, and had the privilege of presenting his project to President Obama in 2012.
What Can We Learn From This Genius?:
According to the same article by The Guardian, Taylor had the privilege of having parents that nurtured his passion by getting him a crane - a real one; no, not permanently - for his fifth birthday after he demanded it. His parents continued to nurture his passions, and soon afterwards, he began to proactively obtain and seek for the materials and inspirations he needs to move forward with his passions.
From Wilson's success story, we can learn that nurture is a major - if not the only - contributor to a child's pursuit of excellence. When kids start to demonstrate some interest in a particular subject or field, this is the best time to unleash all of the support that you can afford to nourish this passion in your child, because this is not only an investment to their future materially, but it would enhance their self-esteem as well, in addition to empowering them with a confidence in their abilities, rather than powerlessness and dependence.
If college books are pricey, many other economically-friendly options that you could use to enhance their passions, including using safe recyclable items and DIY projects - ie - cost-effective ant farms and old radio parts. Of course, such lean projects would require a lot of creativity and even accounting and/or mini cost analysis, but it is not impossible, and though it might probably be time consuming at first, it can be made efficient in the long run. The benefits of equipping a child with powerful skills is well worth the costs.
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3. Nick D' Alosio
Who Is This Prodigy?:
Nick D' Alosio, the teen that built Summly - which became the biggest Yahoo sensation of last year, due to Yahoo's acquiring of the Summly team and company - was 15 when he developed the app. The technology behind the USD 30 million transaction that Marissa Mayer (Yahoo's CEO) described as a "technology that is going to be huge for Yahoo" was a summarization program that simplifies information for users.
Nick - now 19 and a computer programmer - is from England, and lives in London. According to an article from Wired, a tech news company, Nick taught himself to program from an early age and has developed several working programs before he actually worked with Summly. He decided to build it when he was studying for his history exam, from his frustration of encountering historical articles online that were not relevant.
Today, Nick D' Alosio has been interviewed by several tech news giants such as Tech Crunch and his story of success have been featured in entrepreneurial and business news agencies such as Inc and Business Insider. This young programmer is still programming and working on the next big thing.
What Can We Learn From This Genius?:
There are several things we can learn from D' Alosio's success story. First, he spent a considerable amount of time developing a skill, which parents can encourage and inspire their kids to do. A well developed skill, whether it is programming, machining, welding, knitting, or painting, etc, is itself a tool that we can equip our kids for a future of creating products of value or lucrative work.
It would be a great disservice to today's generation of kids if they reach the age of 18 and not being able to find a way to make or create things of value, especially, if the world, including the United States is going to continue with its capitalistic or free market path. Even in socialistic societies, having valuable skills proved to be important - ie - Germany.
Before I go on a rabbit trail of communism and economics, it is safe to say that the United States is still a free market, and will be in the next few decades, if not centuries, and having skills that create value is not only going to be beneficial to the young adult of 20 years from now, but may become the standard of tomorrow, just like the Bachelor's degree of today. And it is usually inexpensive to equip young people with these skills, especially programming, which basically needs a computer, the internet and maybe a software (depending on the type of programming one wants to work on).
The second thing that we can learn from Nick D' Alosio's story includes the notion that problems are opportunities, and D' Alosio saw the overwhelming amount of irrelevant articles collected on his internet browser as a problem, but also an opportunity to develop an app to summarize or simplify information on the articles so he could easily scan these articles without wasting too much time opening tabs or windows for these articles, and read them, only to find out that these articles were irrelevant to his study.
Children and teens can learn to see problems as opportunities of finding solutions as well, and that failure and mistakes are not the end of the world. We tend to fuss a lot when we or our kids or students encounter mistakes and failures, but kids need to see that there is no such thing as perfection, but that there is always a way to improve.
Sure, we need to show the importance of meeting standards, but not by showing them that when there is a problem, it is the end of the world, but that when problems arise they need to find solutions and when mistakes and failures are made they can learn from these mistakes and make up for these mistakes.
Sources:
4. Laura Deming
Who Is This Prodigy?:
As one of the recipients of the Thiel Fellowship Grant, Laura Deming started working in a lab specializing in aging research, and enrolled in MIT at 14, and dropped out at 17 to pursue further research in aging biology.
Laura, who is now 19, is still working on this research on expanding the human lifespan, or to decrease the effects of aging via genetic engineering and research. Her research team - called Fight Aging - has a website that frequently updates heavily technical news about the progress on this longevity research.
What Can We Learn From This Genius?:
Laura's education is a little on the fast track side. She met her science mentor, Cynthia Kenyon when she was twelve and started working in a University of California San Francisco's state of the art biological lab soon after. Since Deming encountered the death of her grandmother at the age of eight, she had messed around with science and math and thought about finding solutions for this problem.
Often, children wonder about things, and the world. Children and youth do want to solve problems, but more often than not, we, as parents and educators tend to discourage them from engaging in these entrepreneurial and scientific mindset, because we are afraid of being different and we want our kids to be just like everyone else's kids, and we want to be just like all of the other parents. We tell them to pass a test and make good grades or they won't amount to anything in life.
But what they need is our support to embrace life of learning, and that education doesn't stop at high school, college or grad school. It keeps going. One should keep on learning new things until the end, and it is only by curiousity one can be propelled forward to find solutions to problems and become innovative.
Sources:
http://www.takingonthegiant.com/2013/07/02/deming/
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/a-profile-of-laura-deming-thiel-foundation-fellowship-recipient.php
5. Richard Turere
Who Is This Prodigy?:
This 15 year old genius was six when he started herding his father's cows in the rural grazing areas of Kenya, Africa. It is culturally common for Maasai boys of his age to be assigned this task. One of the common problems that cattle herders faced in Kenya involved lions that prey on their cattle.
Cattle are not cheap in Kenya and killing lions are not necessarily a favorable option either. So Richard tried to come up with ways to solve this problem and came up with many answers, including setting up fires and later scarecrows near the cows to scare lions away from the cattle. However, the lions learned to overcome these tricks and got away with their beef.
One day, Richard observed that lions are afraid of moving torchlights and associate them with people, as lions in the area have a natural fear of people. So Richard built a set up in which he rigged bulbs and wires together that resulted into a bunch of flashing lights at night. The lions stayed away ever since. Soon, seven other families were asking him for these 'lion lights'.
Richard happened to enjoy taking electronics apart as a hobby, and collecting parts from old electronics for his own keeping and tinkering. He used these electronic parts and his learned tinkering to bring forward this 'lion lights' set up.
What Can We Learn From This Genius?:
Again, solving problems and finding solutions is the key advantage for this generation. Kids can take up these attitudes to become entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Taking up hobbies such as assembling and disassembling electronics and carpentry may help kids to solve problems that arise in their surroundings and the society with their creations.
Sources:
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/27/lions-no-match-for-young-boy-and-his-invention-richard-turere-at-ted/
6. William Kamkwamba
Who Is This Prodigy?:
Born and raised in Malawi of rural Africa, William Kamkwamba built a windmill to generate power for his home, despite having to drop out of secondary school due to his family's financial difficulty. Instead of giving up on his education altogether when he could not go to school at the age of fourteen, William took his education upon himself by going to the community library and learned several subjects on his own, before encountering a book about building windmills, from which he built his first prototype using a radio motor.
Later, he built a second windmill from an "broken bicycle, tractor fan blade, old shock absorber, and blue gum trees" according to Kamkwamba's biographical website on this link:-
http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/about.html.
Now 28, Kamkwamba's windmills have generated power to several projects in his village including providing power for his neighbors' use, for irrigation, and for bringing clean water to the village, among many others. He has since enrolled into a secondary school and subsequently a college in Africa to continue eith his education.
He graduated from Dartmouth college in 2014 and planned to return to his country of Malawi to work on a few developments in rural areas.
What Can We Learn From This Genius?:
As we can see, William did not come from a place of privilege. In fact, he was raised in a place that had a famine that forced him to drop out of high school. But this circumstance did not stop William from continuing his education but he went to the community library to keep learning instead.
He built a power generating windmill and gradually brought light and irrigation to his entire community. And to top it off, he even used scraps and disposed reusables for his projects, and succeeded. Apparently, he built his first windmill using a trial and error method, proving that his grit was the only element that propelled him to his success.
Many articles lament the 'ungrittyness' of millenials, including this one here - - but today's generation of children can learn the importance of grit early on, so they would be able to adapt it early on without having second thoughts on it. Learning to commit themselves to their success and taking charge of their own future and education are things that children of tomorrow can benefit from due to the changing circumstances of life.
No one can guarantee that tomorrow would be the same or better than today, but everyone can do everything they can to secure a better tomorrow. By equipping our children with grit, commitment, discipline and the ability to take charge of their own future would benefit them in the long run. It is basically teaching them how to fish instead of just giving them fish - from "give a man fish, you will only feed him for a day, teach a man how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime".
Getting materials from scraps, the way William did in order to build his windmill is basically a problem solving journey that children of today can learn in order to be successful, especially in the STEM and Business fields. In fact, problem solving is the cornerstone of these fields.
If it is not to solve problems, there would not be a need for businesses, inventions or technology. Humans create these things to solve problems in exchange of earning benefits. This concept is the reason why we need to keep the rewards in mind, and help our children see it in a tangible way. When we teach kids math, science, reading, and other subjects, students and children may wonder or ask the significance of learning them.
The reason for this skeptical behavior is because it is human nature to solve problems in order to earn benefits, and education is the tool that equips us to solve problems in civilized society, and it is difficult for children to see education as this tool, and it is up to us, parents, teachers and educators to be able to help our children to see education as such, and it is usually helpful if we can help them to see this benefit in a tangible way.
And this is also why rewarding kids, even with stickers and non-expensive items will help them to see that their efforts translate as the means to propel them to their success tangibly.
Sources
http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/about.html
http://www.williamkamkwamba.com/
Again, the I would like to stress that pointing kids to become prodigies is not my reason for writing this blog post. I cannot stress enough that I write this post about prodigies to break down their success stories and point out the factors that most likely contribute to their success - the factors other than their genetic abilities or their extraordinary intelligence and not make comparison to our children, which is of course, unrealistic and inappropriate.
After all, everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. And this quote may not guarantee that everyone has extraordinary intelligence, but that every single person has a potential to shine in their own way and in their own niches.
Let's not force every kid in our everchanging society to shine via in only academics and conventional sports. Maybe we should give them a chance to shine in entrepreneurship or scientific discovery. Let's give our kids this gift and privilege, after all, don't we want the best for them?
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