Hawai'i's gifted students struggling to adjust
By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer
Eugene So read at age 2. By 3 he had advanced to the encyclopedia.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
His parents, Korean immigrants Phil and Myung Won So, were relieved when kindergarten time arrived, ready to send their son to one of the state's top private schools. They looked forward to turning the job of schooling over to people better equipped to challenge him.
Piers Kimble-Rehm, 13, works on a biology project removing rodent bones from owl pellets. He will graduate from Academy of the Pacific on June 6 and attend Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., this fall.
"My English wasn't good," Myung Won So said. "We waited for kindergarten and hoped the school would pick him up and give him a good education."
The couple enrolled Eugene at Punahou School, where things went well for a few years. He received A's and made some friends, but by fifth grade, Eugene complained that he was "wasting my time, wasting my life."
Denise Kimble Rehm also knew that her older son, Piers, was smart from the beginning. He read chapter books at age 3 and could write computer programs before he entered kindergarten.
But when he arrived at the schoolhouse gate as a 5-year-old, things went downhill.
Piers became depressed. He landed in the principal's office every day, sometimes twice.
One night, 6-year-old Piers couldn't sleep and his mother taught him base 2 to base 16 numbers. He seemed happy for the first time since he had started school.
"It was the first time I had seen that sparkle in his eye," Denise Kimble Rehm said. "That was one of my first insights."
A small group of profoundly gifted children such as Eugene and Piers are moving through Hawai'i's public and private school system. Although their intelligence ranks them among the top 1 percent in the world, theirs is often an education of fits and starts, of intense struggle and rare satisfaction.
Too smart for a school system designed to meet the needs of the average child, gifted students with sky-high IQs often struggle through their classes. Instead of thriving and being challenged, they can end up labeled as discipline cases or develop emotional problems. Sometimes the smartest kids, who are developmentally the furthest apart from their peers, have the most difficult time adjusting to a traditional school environment.
"They literally are a non-fit for the education system no matter how hard we try," said Betsy Moneymaker, an educational specialist in gifted and talented and homeschooling for the Department of Education.
Another special-needs group
Some early signs of giftedness in young children: unusual alertness, less need for sleep, long attention span, high activity level, smiling or recognizing caretakers early, intense reactions to noise or pain, advanced progression through developmental milestones, extraordinary memory, early and extensive language development, excellent sense of humor and early interest in time. Source: Dr. Linda Silverman, director, Gifted Education Center What does gifted mean? On the Stanford-Binet Scale of Intelligence, average IQs range from 85 to 114, above average is 115 to 124 and gifted is 125 to 134. Only about 1 percent of the people in the world have IQs higher than 135. The profoundly gifted have IQs above 175.
Parents and education experts call giftedness the other end of the special-education spectrum. And with few financial resources directed toward gifted children, a lack of public magnet schools in Hawai'i and few private schools able to handle the challenge, raising and educating gifted students can be just as difficult and in ways more time consuming than those who have learning disabilities.
Signs of a gifted child
Usually, to feed the child's intense hunger for knowledge, families find they must go it alone.
"It is another special-needs group," said Dr. Linda Silverman, director of the Gifted Education Center in Denver, and author of several books and articles on giftedness. "Imagine you had a child who was two standard deviations below the norm with a 70 IQ. Federal law requires programming, funding, everything for their education. We are dealing with the same degree of discrepancy when we're dealing with the gifted, yet there are no resources and no support."
Just as a child with a low IQ and learning disabilities finds it impossible to keep up with regular-education students, children who are gifted cannot slow down enough intellectually to keep pace with their peers, Silverman said.
Gifted students struggle because their minds develop rapid-fire while their bodies and emotions stay rooted in childhood.
"A lot of people mistake giftedness with achievement," Silverman said. "It's not just mental age and chronological age. You're out of sync with the other kids, inside yourself, with the school curriculum and the expectations of the culture."
Piers ran into problems right away in elementary school. He says kindergarten was the worst year of his life: "It wasn't challenging at all. I didn't learn anything there." He said. "Well, I learned things, but the day they were taught. I started being the not-so-model student. I slacked off."
The previously well-behaved child suddenly couldn't sit still. "We sided with the school," Denise Kimble Rehm said. "We would say, 'Why can't you just sit in your seat when they say sit in your seat?'"
The family bounced between home-schooling and public schools for six years, sometimes pulling Piers out of his classroom mid-semester because things were going so terribly. In the second grade, he stopped talking for a while, unable to make his words keep up with the activity in his mind.
He was bottled up intellectually, emotionally and physically.
"Misery, misery, misery," Piers remembered.
In school, Eugene was also bored and frustrated. If he did the work he was capable of, other kids thought he was showing off. Even in summer programs for gifted students he got labeled as the "smart kid."
When he was 12, he got a perfect score on the math portion of the SAT. His verbal SAT scores were in the 96th percentile nationally and in the 98th percentile for Hawai'i. "They put me in advanced classes, but they weren't high enough," he said.
This year, the So family started homeschooling. "It's hard to change the system for one child. We cannot blame them for that," Myung Won So said. Instead, she has buried herself in research on homeschooling curricula.
"He asked me to make him busy," she said. And Eugene had never been busy at school before.
Finding their place
The DOE has gifted and talented programs, but not at all campuses. Moneymaker said that many people suggest letting gifted students take high-school classes. But even that coursework moves too slowly for them, she said.
"Lots of trends in education try to treat everyone in the same way. Everyone is concerned about getting people onto grade level," Moneymaker said. "The general program that I handle really is trying to get teachers to look at their kids and accept the idea that there are some kids who really are fast learners. What is it that we need to offer them in terms of options? I still think we have a bunch of kids that aren't being addressed."
Summer programs are one option for gifted students, but with high tuition costs and a short time frame, parents and students say those aren't the only answer.
Between 60 and 100 Hawai'i students this year are expected to attend a Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth summer program at Hawai'i Pacific University. The program, one of the nation's best-recognized for gifted students, had never come to Hawai'i but will return in future summers.
Piers, who will attend the CTY program, was eventually diagnosed by the DOE as a special-education student. The state placed him at a private school, Academy of the Pacific, which agreed to design a program for him.
He and his mom agree that it has saved his life. Without Academy of the Pacific, Piers pictures himself at Kapolei Middle School making F's and hanging out with the wrong crowd.
But last year at age 12, Piers passed the Advanced Placement Calculus test. This year, he's taking AP chemistry and English, an advanced computer class, biology and Japanese. He lettered in sailing.
Piers, 13, will graduate from Academy of the Pacific on June 6 and plans to attend Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in the fall. He has scholarships — including one from the National Science Foundation — and was treated as a celebrity on a recent campus visit. It's the first time that has happened to him. Other colleges nationwide called to ask him to apply, but none in Hawai'i.
Dorothy Douthitt, head of school at Academy of the Pacific, has been delighted to watch Piers make progress, but said that even on her small campus of 140 students she's had to rein him in. "He wanted to be a teaching assistant to the AP calculus class this year," Douthitt said. "I told him, 'You can't do that.' He wanted to know why not. I said, 'Those are our best students. It's going to bother them that you're only 13 and you're tutoring them. I can't let you do that to them.'"
Going to college
Eugene, who at age 14 is two years too young to enroll at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, has been taken under the wing of professors in the math department there. The So family wishes he could enroll officially, but counts the professors' willingness to let Eugene audit their classes and give him challenging work as a blessing. They say Eugene's intellect is a gift from God.
At UH this semester, he's studied abstract algebra, modern algebra, accelerated calculus III and non-Euclidean geometrics.
Recently, Eugene had the state's highest overall individual score in the MathCounts competition and had Hawai'i's best score at the national competition.
His mother handles his English and social studies lessons at home. He has finished high-school-level physics on his own and studies Latin by himself.
But Eugene and his mother consider home-schooling a mixed bag. From a desk in their Makiki condo, the polite and smiling Tommy Hilfiger-clad teenager is finally challenged academically, but says he misses his friends. His mother isn't sure whether she's doing a good job.
"My husband's and my philosophy was that if you want to make a great person you have to go through all of the steps of life," she said. "We wanted to keep him with his age group."
Now, Eugene hopes to enter a doctorate program at age 16.
"He knows he's not going to lead a normal life," Myung Won So said.
Eugene agrees. "I'll be missing out on a lot of things in my life," he said.
On Maui, an 11-year-old boy has been taking classes at Maui Community College for two years. After public schools and private schools didn't work, the family is trying a combination of homeschooling, college-level classes and private tutoring.
"This child is beyond me," his mother said. "I thought I had a great education. I can't keep up with him."
Her son walked at six months, talked at eight months and by 12 months could use scissors to cut red hearts from construction paper. "How do you spell 'I love you, Mommy'? " he asked. "He was never a baby," she said. By the time he reached preschool, the teachers there were telling her he was gifted. He could tell jokes and had an adult's sense of irony.
"The myth is that these kids need to be socialized," his mother said. "It's not about relating to his age group. Nobody thinks the way he does. When you're 9 and nobody wants to talk philosophy or psychology, who do you talk to?"
Reluctant to be identified publicly because of the struggle her son has had in school, the mother said her son seems to have found a place where he can thrive at the community college.
Clyde Sakamoto, Maui Community College provost, said the school takes exceptional considerations into account. At times, the school has accepted young teenagers and tried to create a program for them to follow.
"It's special education in a very real sense," Sakamoto said. "In this case there was a clear rationale for us to support this extraordinarily gifted young man."
Moneymaker and Silverman suggest that families of gifted students try to design a program of study within the regular school system first.
But Silverman said that if that doesn't work, families have no choice other than to homeschool or move to a city that has schools that cater to the gifted. "They deserve to be given advanced coursework," she said. "For us to hold these children back is terrible."
The giftedness challenge
Denise Kimble Rehm talks about when Piers was "diagnosed" with giftedness. "A lot of people say you shouldn't tell the child. Piers was already experiencing so much difficulty I thought he needed to know."
Piers shrugs his shoulders at the idea of his giftedness. "Everyone's gifted," he said. "I just happen to learn differently."
But he hopes that at college he will find a place of limitless learning, a place where being smart will be celebrated.
"My life is so hard," Piers said. "It's not that easy being gifted. I don't think people realize everything that's attached with it."
Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.
