We were never going to get out of this limbo without help. It was time to get an objective evaluation. So in August 2009, I took Jake in for a battery of achievement tests with Dr. Carl Hale, a neuropsychologist.
As usual, I went to the appointment with Jake, but I drastically underestimated how long the tests would take. In all, I sat in the empty waiting room for about four and a half hours, long after I’d finished the book I’d brought with me, as well as the magazine I’d found at the bottom of my bag.
Looking out the only window, I could see a gas station two long blocks away. A few hours in, I found myself staring at it wistfully, fantasizing about going over there to get a cup of coffee and another magazine. But I couldn’t leave. I didn’t know how much longer they were going to be, and I didn’t want Jake to come out to find me gone.
When he finally emerged, he looked like he’d had a grand time. Dr. Hale said that he would provide us with a formal report in about a week, but he was deeply impressed. Jake’s scores were off the charts, particularly in math and science.
Then Dr. Hale did a curious thing. He asked me about my own experience in the waiting room. I made a little joke about the padding on the chairs, but he was serious. He wanted to know what it had been like for me, waiting all those long hours in that empty room. When I finally admitted how bored and uncomfortable I’d been, he said something that changed my mind forever.
“Now you know what it’s like for Jake in a fifth-grade classroom. Being in regular school is like staring out a window, wishing your heart out for a cup of gas-station coffee. The worst decision you could possibly make is to keep your son in regular school. He is deeply bored, and if you keep him there, you will stifle every iota of creativity he has.”
I was horrified by the idea that Jake’s school days bore any resemblance to the mind-numbing hours I’d spent in that room. Instinctively, I knew that Dr. Hale was right, and I will always be grateful to him for having gone to such creative lengths to make his point. His waiting room wasn’t ordinarily so bare, but knowing that we were struggling with the question of whether to send Jake to college, he’d stripped it of magazines and other diversions before we arrived.
When Dr. Hale’s report arrived a week or two later, his recommendations were crystal clear. Jake had scored 170 on the Wechsler Fundamentals: Academic Skills achievement test, which measures broad skills in reading, spelling, and math. The normal range is between 90 and 109, superior between 110 and 124, and gifted between 125 and 130. Scores above 150 fall into the category of genius. Furthermore, Dr. Hale believed that Jake’s numerical operations score, which measured his math computation skills, was probably higher than 170 but could not be measured due to “ceiling effects”: One hundred seventy points is as high as the test can go for a kid Jake’s age.
Dr. Hale’s conclusion: “It would not be in Jacob’s best interest to force him to complete academic work that he has already mastered. Rather, he needs to work at an instructional level, which is currently a post-college graduate level in mathematics, i.e. post master’s degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy, or astrophysics.”
There it was, in black and white. This wasn’t my opinion, but an objective evaluation made by an expert. Jake belonged in college. (Actually, Dr. Hale seemed to be recommending that he proceed directly to graduate school, but this wasn’t the time to split hairs.) I took a deep breath and brought the report in to show Michael.
“Not in Jacob’s best interest. That’s bold and underlined,” Michael read aloud, his eyebrows raised. I nodded. He was still shaking his head, but there was a look of resignation on his face, and I knew that, thanks to Dr. Hale, the door had opened a crack.
After the report arrived, we finally told Jake about Dr. Russell’s offer. As we knew he would, he lit up like a Christmas tree and said, “Can I go to college? Please, Mom? Can I go to college?”
Michael was now open to a conversation, but he was far from convinced. I argued that going to college early couldn’t damage Jake’s chances for the future; it could only improve them. He was way ahead of his class, even in the elementary school’s gifted program. Even if Jake went to college and failed, if he didn’t learn a single thing or make a single friend, he could come right back and do junior high like everybody else. Ironically, the fact that Jake was so young also tipped the odds in his favor.
“I’m so far out of my comfort zone, I can’t even see it from here,” Michael grumbled. But he didn’t protest when Jake and I went ahead with an application to the university through SPAN.
Skipping a Grade—or Seven
From that point on, everything accelerated. Once I really understood how bored Jake was, that we’d unknowingly put his brilliant, active, growing mind in a box too small to contain it, college seemed like the only option.
Convincing Michael had been a significant hurdle, but the application itself was another. Dr. Russell wanted to know that Jake was capable of sitting through a longish lecture without acting out. Jake had been attending university classes for two years without a single issue, but I’d usually been in the seat next to him. Jake would have to do this on his own.
One of the deans at our high school had brought his kids to daycare when they were little, so he knew our boys. When I told him about this challenge, he offered to let Jake sit in on a math class, a review session to prepare the students for their calculus final. I wasn’t sure how it would go. Jake was good at sitting still, but he’d never had any formal math instruction past fifth-grade fractions, and they’d be covering an entire semester’s worth of work from the hardest math class in the Indiana public school system.
The class was scheduled two weeks out. I explained the situation to Jake: “Don’t worry; you don’t need to know calculus. All they’re watching for is your manners. You just need to be able to sit nicely through this class.”
Jake looked at me. “I’m not going to sit there if I don’t know what’s going on,” he said.
I sighed. Of course not.
He wanted textbooks, so we bought them for him. Then he sat on the porch in front of our house in the spring sunshine and learned the formal language of geometry, algebra, algebra II, trigonometry, and calculus. He did it all by himself and all in two weeks. As we subsequently discovered, Jake had already figured out the fundamental principles of math on his own. Just as you can understand the principle of addition without knowing what a plus sign is, Jake had already developed his own private system for calculus. He simply didn’t know yet how to write it down so that other mathematicians could understand it.
Jake took that calculus final along with the rest of the kids and aced it. In fact, he was the only one in the class able to answer the extra-credit question—a question so hard that the teacher asked him to come up and write the explanation on the board. The day I picked him up from the final, I found him surrounded by admiring high school students, all of them towering over him.
Even with that hurdle cleared, there was a lot to do to complete the SPAN application.
Jake told me one night at dinner that he’d found Indiana University High School online. “I want to enroll in AP U.S. History,” he said. We told him that was okay, and a couple of weeks later he came to us with another request. There was a computerized testing center down at the university where he could take a CLEP (College-Level Examination Program) exam, designed to help college students test out of subjects they were already familiar with, thus allowing them to earn college credits without having to waste time and money on taking the course. He wanted to try to test out of the U.S. History course he’d taken online.
The next weekend, we drove down to the campus. The woman behind the counter at the CLEP office asked if she could help, and I said, “Yes, we’d like to test out of AP U.S. History, please.”
“We?” she asked, confused.
“Well, my son, actually.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but he
has to be here to sign up for the test. You can’t do it for him.”
We looked at each other, both baffled, and then a little voice said, “Down here!”
She stood up and peered over the edge of the counter, where Jake was laughing and waving his hands at her. “Oh! Hi!” she said.
Jake didn’t have any photo identification, such as a student ID or a driver’s license (“Does my library card count?” he asked), so the woman had to call her manager in to assign him a log-in number. It took a while to get the system to allow him to take the exam, but she was obviously charmed by the idea of this little kid taking the test alongside the older students, and she figured it out. I remember looking up to check on him and seeing his little legs swinging under the chair as he clicked through the questions. The computer grades the exam while you wait, and sure enough Jake tested out of U.S. History that morning. The whole staff of the CLEP office cheered as if they’d known him his whole life.
That lit a fire under him. He went online and started taking every course he could find. And then every weekend, he’d want to go to the university so that he could test out. Eventually, I had to have a talk with him. It cost about $75 to take a CLEP exam. That was a mere fraction of what the course would have cost, but we flat out couldn’t afford for him to take a test a week. We settled on a compromise: one test every two weeks.
The astronomy exam was particularly funny. He used only fifteen minutes of the two hours he had to take it and ended up with an almost perfect score. The people in the CLEP office, friends by then, were truly shocked by that one.
Once we had completed all the items on Dr. Russell’s checklist, I submitted Jake’s reports—the IQ test and the assessment from Dr. Hale, notes from the professors whose classes he’d audited, and all his CLEP scores—as well as a note from the high school calculus teacher, vouching that yes, Jake was capable of sitting through a class. A few weeks later, Jake received his acceptance letter. He jumped up and cheered. Shortly afterward, Dr. Russell called us in for a brief welcome interview.
On the day of the interview, I put Jake in charge of bringing some change for the parking meter, as he liked to put the coins in the meter. In his excitement, he brought way too much money, so he had lots of coins in his pockets. When he sat down in the chair in front of Dr. Russell’s desk, all the coins fell out onto the floor. Jake couldn’t concentrate until he’d picked them up and stuffed them back into his pockets. The second he sat down again, all the coins tumbled out, rolling everywhere and making an appalling noise. Not to be deterred, Jake began scooping coins off the linoleum into his baseball cap. Of course, they immediately fell out through the hole in the back of the cap.
This disastrous business with the coins went on and on and on, like a never-ending Three Stooges routine. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been my son’s college interview. Dr. Russell kept trying to hand him a baseball cap and a backpack with the SPAN logo, but he couldn’t get Jake’s attention, because Jake was chasing runaway coins around his office. Eventually, after Jake got most of the coins under control, Dr. Russell gave him the backpack and cap, as well as a triangular IUPUI Jaguars flag for his wall. Still trailing coins everywhere, but now wearing his SPAN cap, Jake headed off down the hall.
The interview had been a complete disaster. When Dr. Russell put his hand on my arm, my heart sank.
“Based on what we’ve seen here today, I think we should start slow the first semester, with three credit hours,” he said. “Let’s be fair to Jake and give his social skills and his height a chance to catch up.”
The news that Jake could take only a single class that first semester was devastating, not least because we’d pulled him out of elementary school. I blamed myself. We usually do a practice run for any new situation, but who could have predicted an overflow of parking meter coins? Jake, of course, was distraught. He could see the promised land, but they wouldn’t let him in. Even acknowledging Jake’s lack of maturity, I wasn’t sure holding him back was fair. He still looked like a little boy, and he hadn’t exactly aced the interview, but three months wouldn’t make much of a difference in his height or anything else.
Nevertheless, he signed up for the one course he was allowed to take, an introductory course in multidimensional math. The first time I flipped through the textbook, I was stunned. Here were the geometric shapes Jake had been obsessed with since he was a toddler. It’s surreal to open a college textbook and finally have a context for your young child’s preoccupations. In my mind, I had always put Jake’s shapes in the same category as Legos or Lincoln Logs (which he sometimes used to build them): funny little toys that clogged up the vacuum cleaner and hurt when you stepped on them with bare feet.
By the third session, Jake had set up a study group and was tutoring the other kids in the class. The professor also wanted him to participate in a math club for high school students he ran on Saturday mornings, a training camp for the Mathematical Olympiad. I took Jake there one Saturday so that he could see what it was like, thinking maybe he’d meet some kids he got along with. Warning bells went off when the professor showed me the coffeemaker and pointed out the way to the college bookstore. Five hours later, I realized that this math club would mean that Jake would have to give up every Saturday to sit in a stuffy basement classroom with a bunch of kids doing math.
I love our weekend traditions. The whole family goes out to a little brunch place for pancakes, and then we go to the rec center or the pond across from our home, or to our neighbors’ for an afternoon barbecue. When it’s cold, we go to the bookstore and treat ourselves to new books and hot chocolate with whipped cream at the café, or we make cookies at home and invite friends over to play a board game. This time seemed especially important to me once Jake left elementary school. Maintaining the friendships he’d made there was our highest priority, and those kids were free on the weekends.
So when I went to pick Jake up, I steeled myself to tell him that he probably wouldn’t be participating again. He beat me to the punch. Getting into the car, he said, “That was cool, but I don’t think I need to do it again.” He’d found a sample Mathematical Olympiad problem set online the night before and had stayed up until two in the morning blowing through it for fun. It hadn’t been a challenge for him, and he didn’t want to take a win away from any of the kids who’d been studying so hard to get into the competition. “They’re all trying really hard, Mom. It’s not fair.”
I was so proud of him at that moment, prouder even than if he’d won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious math prize in the world. Jake knew he’d have his own victories in the world, and he understood that this one wasn’t for him.
An Original Theory
Because he was restricted that first semester to three credit hours and an introductory math class, Jake suddenly found himself with a big chunk of time. Mike, still unsure whether we’d thrown Jake’s whole future away, would find us sitting at the breakfast table together while Wesley, Ethan, and all the other kids in the neighborhood were getting dressed for school and trudging down to the bus stop. He couldn’t resist needling me a little: “Rigorous program you’re running here, Kris.” Then he’d turn to Jake and say, “Shouldn’t you have your backpack and a notebook or something?”
“Michael, he’s eating his breakfast. He doesn’t need a backpack to eat his breakfast,” I’d say.
“People don’t wear fuzzy frog slippers to school,” Michael would mutter as he left the room, shaking his head.
Eventually, I’d turn to Jake and say, “So what are you going to do today?”
Jake would say something like, “Um, supermassive black holes?”
I wasn’t worried. Mike knew as well as anybody that Jake’s mind never stopped running. Even while relaxing with his brothers at the pool, he’d be thinking about fluid mechanics. His education had also gotten a rocket-fueled boost thanks to iTunes U, a series of video pod-casts available through iTunes. These free lectures featured professors from top universities suc
h as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Oxford, speaking on hundreds of topics ranging from languages to Shakespeare to philosophy. There were lectures on relativity, special relativity, string theory, quantum mechanics—anything, in other words, an astrophysics-obsessed elementary school dropout could want.
Jake was hooked. As soon as breakfast was done, he’d hit the computer. His attitude was, “They’re not going to let me go to IUPUI? Fine, I’ll go to MIT.”
The question of how light moves through space, the concept that had captured Jake’s imagination during Dr. Betancourt’s class, had begun to percolate. Jake was already familiar with relativity and special relativity, but the lectures supplemented his own research and enabled him to delve more deeply into those topics than he had before. His hunger for knowledge was like a gigantic engine, driving him to search out and voraciously cram in as much information as he could get his hands on. It was as if he couldn’t bear to waste even a second of this precious time. Once again, I had to remind him to eat, to bathe, and to play. The question wasn’t how I could make him do the work, but how I could get him to stop.
He wanted more than anything to share his tremendous excitement about all the things he was learning. I’d be watching Ellen and tidying up the kitchen while the daycare kids took their afternoon nap, and Jake would come in, commandeer the television, connect his laptop, and physically drag me over to the couch so that he could show me the lecture he’d watched that morning. “It’s math and science story time with Mommy!” he’d say.
“Oh, no honey,” I’d beg. “Not organic chemistry. Can it be anything but organic chemistry?” (As if string theory would be better.) Sometimes he’d get so wrapped up in watching, I could sneak away to unload the dishwasher, but mostly I was stuck sitting there, my brain hurting, while Jake scribbled furiously away in his notepad.
The Spark Page 21
