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[kayc]

My son has the highest IQ of anyone I know and is also very well adjusted and best of all has great common sense, something many high-IQers seem to be lacking in.  I'm not sure there is a generality when you speak of high IQ.  Maybe he's the exception.

There's worse things than being dumb, I know someone who is retarded and she had great adoptive parents that helped her learn life skills and learn to live on her own and be independent.  She's very well adjusted and happy.  So much for IQ.  

 

[Margm]

Because of being home schooled, my granddaughter has to take four months at the local vo-tech school.  This child's father came from Thailand and she is exceptionally smart, but for family problems she has social anxiety..  My mom went to this school, I graduated from it and met Billy at a party at the school.  (He was already working).  My daughter got her nursing degree from this same vo-tech.so I am hoping she has as much luck as the rest of us.  And, this is my goal.  This is what I live for at the moment.  Maybe other goals later on.  I do feel Billy's guidance in this if for no other reason than she was his heart. 

[Clematis]

You're right, Kay; I am speaking in generalities. It is very unusual to find a person with a high IQ that is very balanced-all the scores up high like an alpine meadow. It is much more typical to see very skewed scores that look like a mountain range, with significant dips. Also, people who have very low IQ's tend to be rather content because they take things at face value and don't get into neurotic overthinking about stuff because they don't have that ability. Probably a lot of us could learn something from that. For example, it might be better to think to yourself, "That person doesn't like me-I'm going to stay away from him/her" than to get all worried about what is wrong and why they don't like me and what can I do or not do about it and how and why it's unfair and all that.  But those are generalities; an individual is just that. 

One of my best friends has a dad who was astonishingly bright and educated-a retired professor. I think he had two PhD's, but could have been a college prof in probably any of the sciences or higher maths, as well as Chinese History, World History, and some other stuff. He has gone downhill quite a bit, which is very sad. It used to be that you would make a comment and he could deliver a fully prepared personal lecture that would pass muster anywhere, and was also entertaining. He doesn't talk as much anymore, I think mostly because he is painfully aware of how much he used to know and that he's sliding. He is 87 and I know he won't live forever, but he's doing ok today. We have been close for decades-he has been like a second father to me. Anyway, he told me something interesting about 15 years ago when his daughter had breast cancer and her dad and I were following her around to doctor's appointments taking copious notes and asking questions. He said, "Statistics tell you nothing about an individual. A certain problem could have a 99% rate of a good outcome, but for the one person in a hundred they have a 100% chance of a bad outcome."

So, statistics may be interesting, but they aren't personal and for an individual they may be totally meaningless...

[Clematis]

3 hours ago, Marg M said:

Because of being home schooled, my granddaughter has to take four months at the local vo-tech school.  

She sounds like a great girl and an interesting student. What is she supposed to take at the vo-tech school? I'm not familiar with these schools, but it sounds like a great idea. Can you tell me any more about them? 

[Margm]

Laura, they offer a lot of training for (I don't know what to call them), technical jobs.  Mine was business.  So was my mom's.  My daughter's was nursing.  They have mechanics, and I am going to start lying if I tell you all they do.  It is what schools were talking about when they were talking about getting rid of things like literature and subjects like that.  

Myself, I think I prefer studying history and things like that now more than I did in high school.  I hated school but could do shorthand and typing.  Shorthand went obsolete right after I finished, but this was over half a century ago.  I know they have all sorts of computer things.  I went to college when I was 29 and I enjoyed the heck out of it.  At `16-17-18 I was more interested in boyology.  My granddaughter would love to do something behind the scenes in her favorite subject.......Broadway.  They have a picture of her in her  yearbook asking her in the 3rd grade where she would most like to visit and she said Broadway.

She went to a counselor from Pakistan that was in the city in Arkansas and the woman told her she would like to take her to go see her biological father's home country of Thailand.  Brianna looked her in the face and said "Please, I would prefer to  go to New York City."

We were in Walmart when she was about four and this dark haired woman that had a table set out of tooled leather objects, she looked at her and said "that girl will be famous one day."  

Of course, she is special to me.  I want to take her up the east coast and show her Boston, show her the coast of Maine, and also find tickets to a Broadway show.  I might not live that long, but that is what I would like to do.  

[Clematis]

Maybe that is like a community college; they offer a lot of short programs that are geared toward something practical, but you can also use it as a stepping stone to a regular college. I know there are separate schools for specific skills like hair/makeup, mechanical work, technical/computer work, etc. but they seem to be all off by themselves. The school you describe sounds like it has multiple practical programs and maybe doesn't make kids take freshman English and algebra and all that stuff. 

Lots of kids are on the college path and that's great-the path is clearly defined. Other kids are in Special Education and the school is legally bound to help them on a transition plan to get them into some kind of program where they will learn a "trade" with which to support them. But what about the kids in the middle? What is supposed to happen with them? How are they supposed to figure out how to be successful as an adult if their parents can't help them. Many public school systems really drop the ball on a huge number of students.

I think your granddaughter is lucky to have you as a fan and supporter, even if you do talk about yourself as if you were in the running for the oldest person alive, who is about 116 years old I think...

[kayc]

Marg,

I wasted my time practicing shorthand four hours a day for two years in high school...graduated top of the Business Dept. but it did me little good.  As soon as I graduated they went to dictaphones and most bosses employed the cheapest kind that sounded muffled or skipped or beeped in the middle of a word so try as you might, you could not make out what they said.  I did medical dictation and deplored it because of that.  It's hard enough getting a 19 letter word down and spell it correctly without a stupid machine messing it up!  In the years since I left that part off of my resumes because I never wanted a job doing that again!  I'd rather be homeless!

While I think it's good to learn what you need to do a job, I hate to see the arts trimmed because to me, there is much to be learned from history and appreciated in art, to me they are not meaningless.  Whenever I had extra classtime to fill, I would fill it with literature!

I agree, Laura!  I think one of the good things about having the well-roundedness of all of the different kinds of classes at school, is it helps them explore what interests them, what they are good at, and develop some sort of an idea about what they want to go for in a career.  I'm not so sure they're doing a great job teaching them nowadays, they keep messing with how they're teaching them reading and math and some of it's not working!  The kids pay for their experimentation, unfortunately.