The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  “I can’t think of a more worthy cause,” Brinsmead said.

  But Brinsmead was still on the fence about the project. Phaneuf had told Tiffany and Kenneth that he was hoping to get Brinsmead involved. “Ron thought he’d be great for Taylor,” Kenneth says. “He said he was well liked in the department and could figure out just about anything. And so we invited him over for dinner.”

  “I was a little nervous,” Brinsmead says. “I guess I was stereotyping. I mean, I hear that accent and I’m thinking Rebel flags and hicks and hate rallies. But they were nothing like that; there was no prejudice or kooky religion. They were smart and open-minded and they had two little geniuses whose talent they needed to cultivate.”

  Though they made an unusual combination, Brinsmead hit it off with Tiffany and Kenneth, and Joey too. As he was driving back home that night, Brinsmead says, he recalled his own boyhood, thirty years earlier, when he was bored and unchallenged and aching to build something really amazing and difficult (like the laser that he eventually did build) but dissuaded by most of the adults who might have helped him.

  “I decided that night,” Brinsmead says, “that I’d help Taylor build his star.”

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  * * *

  A Fourth State of Grape

  JAN AND BOB DAVIDSON spend a lot of time at the academy they founded. They drive down from their home in Lake Tahoe and often time their arrival to coincide with class changes. Side by side, they move through the throng of students like proud grandparents. Bob plays the gruff jokester; Jan, who has a motherly air, squeezes in a dozen hugs in the few minutes between classes.

  “Look at them,” Bob says as we maneuver through groups of students laughing and jostling their way toward classrooms. “We cling to this idea that children are better off socially with children who match them in age—despite decades of research that tells us that’s not true, that kids are comfortable with other kids at their own intelligence level.”

  After spending a few days at Davidson Academy, watching the students thrive in an environment with individualized learning plans and the opportunity to pursue their passions as far as they can take them, I can’t help feeling that this is the way every school should be. Davidson students may be outliers, at the top of the talent curve, but it’s hard to imagine that any child, whatever his or her gifts, wouldn’t bloom with this kind of pedagogy.

  When I mention this to Jan and Bob, they give me looks that would be accompanied, if they were the same age as their students, with the word Duh!

  “It’s not like we’ve invented a new paradigm,” Bob tells me. “We just looked at what works best in education and we applied it to gifted kids. We didn’t listen to the people who’ve done education wrong for a hundred years.” The approach is commonsensical, he says, and backed up by research. It works whether a child has a talent for intellectual learning or for some other field, be it athletics, art, or entertainment.

  “It’s simple,” says Jan. “First, recognize their talents, then try to find them opportunities that support them as individuals. Then, don’t put limits on them. Let them bloom, let them pursue what they want to pursue.”

  When the Davidsons were planning their academy, they approached the nation’s top gifted-and-talented-education researchers for advice on best practices, and they built much of what they learned, in addition to some of their own innovations, into their school. Though the academy has more flexibility than many public schools, much of what works at Davidson could be applied to just about any school:

  Individualize learning: Meeting each child’s unique needs is the keystone of the Davidsons’ educational philosophy, and it should probably be part of every school’s policy—though it clashes profoundly with the dominant model of one-size-fits-all education. “Basically, we teach deeper,” says Jan. “It’s not a race to check off courses, though it is very goal focused. These kids get big ideas, and we want to help them make them come true.” Each student at the academy has a learning plan that’s refined weekly in advisory meetings, every semester with an academic coordinator, and yearly in what’s-next meetings with Harsin. That intensity of contact would strain the resources of large public schools—but then, so do the behavioral problems of students who are underchallenged or struggling to keep up.

  Enable acceleration: “Don’t hold them back,” Harsin says. “If a ten-year-old is ready for a calculus class, arrange it for her.” Harsin groups core classes by period—all math classes during second period, all English during third, et cetera—so students can easily move up or down ac­cord­ing to ability. In large public schools where students fall more widely along the learning continuum, it can be trickier to create options for children who are ready to take on additional challenges. The best schools and districts strive for flexibility, involving families and finding creative ways to extend curricula and connect students with mentorship opportunities, online programs, transportation to advanced classes at other schools or colleges, or other solutions.

  Promote dual enrollment: The Davidsons parked their high school on a university campus, making it relatively easy to meet the needs of students like Taylor, who was ready to do PhD-level lab work in nuclear physics. Many high-schoolers are ready to start taking college classes; dual enrollment allows youngsters to take classes in both middle and high school or high school and college.

  Accept and celebrate diversity: Although Davidson Academy isn’t racially diverse, the student body includes a significant number of children who are what the gifted-education community calls twice exceptional. Some have autism-spectrum disorders; others have physical handicaps and emotional challenges. “We had to figure out how to meet needs that weren’t purely academic,” says Harsin. Just as important, Davidson students (many of whom were labeled by peers as “different” in previous schools) are encouraged to be who they are. “There are kids there who would, honestly, have a hard time in most other environments,” says UNR physicist Bruno Bauer, a Davidson parent. “At Davidson they don’t have to pretend.”

  Colleen Harsin faces several unique challenges in educating some of the world’s smartest kids. Not least among them are the intricacies of managing 130 personalized learning plans. “Customizing the learning experience was much harder than we imagined,” she says. “We’d assess them and get things figured out, but by the time they got here, they were in a different place. They learn and develop so quickly that it’s always a moving target.”

  Harsin also had to find a way to manage parents who had spent most of their children’s lives advocating for them and, sometimes, pushing them in ways that weren’t healthy in the long run. Students and faculty are quick to notice the influence of helicopter parents. “Yep, we’ve got quite a few of them here,” says Ikya Kandula, one of Taylor’s closest friends. “My parents were very driven, and they pushed me into one gifted program or another most of my life. I eventually found my own motivation and my own path—but only after my dad wanted me to be a doctor or a computer engineer and I said no. But a lot of parents here are very pushy.”

  Harsin says she’s learned to work with two kinds of parents at Davidson: those who are pushing their child along, and those who, like Tiffany and Kenneth, are being pulled along by their child.

  “There are parents who have their kids up at nine p.m. studying, prodding them,” Kenneth says. “We’re not like that; we’re far less focused on grades.”

  Harsin also sees many parents putting their child on a pedestal.

  “They’re very invested. But smart kids pick their noses too. I’m not here to provide global praise because they’ve rolled out of bed and are still breathing. ‘We don’t issue pedestals,’ I say.”

  In fact, one of the secrets to raising and educating supersmart kids may be not to tell them that they’re smart. Harsin has adopted the growth-mindset techniques developed by Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychology professor. According to Dweck, who authored Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, praising children’s intelligence or talent
can backfire because it puts them in a fixed mindset; a child can become afraid to take on challenging projects since failure could call into question his image of himself (or his parents’ image of him) as a whiz kid. These children become increasingly discouraged when encountering difficult problems and are more likely to lie about poor scores. Dweck’s research with children has shown that those who are praised for effort, rather than talent or outcomes, tend to develop what she calls a growth mindset; this creates a passion for learning and a sense that effort, rather than approval, is the key to creating knowledge and skills. Growth mindset also makes children more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition.

  “You focus less on the achievement itself,” Dweck says, “and more on what the child did to make the achievement happen. It’s not, ‘I’m so proud of you for building this.’ It’s ‘I’ve noticed that you’re really good at getting resources and that you took on a challenge that wasn’t easy.’ You focus on strengths and what they did to make their achievements happen.”

  The issue of motivation is one of the biggest debates in gifted education and in education in general. In the past few years, interest has grown in the concept of grit, which University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth defines as perseverance and sustained interest in long-term goals. A former New York City schoolteacher who pursued a PhD to study how students learn from a motivational perspective, she discovered that grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent and intelligence. “Talent doesn’t make you gritty,” Duckworth says. “Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments.”

  But do people have to be born with grit, or can it be cultivated? Is there a way to teach kids a solid work ethic? Certainly, grit and persistence are critical to long-term success, but they can be difficult to sustain when the task, the goal, or the subject is uninteresting.

  “Especially in domains where the acquisition of expertise is by no means fun,” notes Dean Simonton, “it’s easier to discourage than encourage. It’s difficult for extrinsic incentives to produce an intrinsic fascination.”

  What’s missing in most of modern education is a systemized attempt to align schoolwork with students’ particular interests. But that’s where the magic happens at Davidson Academy.

  “The real problem with school back in Arkansas was that I was bored,” Taylor tells me one day in Harsin’s office. “They wouldn’t let me do the things I was interested in. Here, they override the bureaucracy, and if they don’t have the resources, they let me go to the university. I can go as far as I want with the things I want to do. Where else could I do that?”

  Davidson Academy was founded with the goal of giving students the freedom to explore and the support of teachers who could offer novel, complex, and comprehensible yet challenging material, day after day.

  Philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey was among the first to pick up on the essential linkages between interest, curiosity, and effort. In the early twentieth century, Dewey argued that because interest is what drives active learning, “willing attention” is far more effective than “forced effort.”

  “If we can secure interest in a given set of facts or ideas, we may be perfectly sure that the pupil will direct his energies toward mastering them,” Dewey wrote. In contrast, he noted, an education based on forcing children to expend energy unwillingly only results in a “character dull, mechanical, unalert, because the vital juice of the principle of spontaneous interest has been squeezed out.”

  New studies have reinforced Dewey’s theories, showing that learning is optimized when students have an emotional interest in material and experience enjoyable feelings (such as absorption, fascination, and excitement), and when they feel that the activity is related to their lives and identities. Other recent research suggests that emotional interest and enjoyment can actually make learning more efficient and facilitate creativity, especially when combined with environmental factors such as freedom, support, and positive challenges. Having high emotional interest can also trigger a broad, exploratory frame of mind, a state of flow in which the activity feels effortless. Research shows that that sort of enjoyment can even buffer the depleting effects of mental effort and boost one’s fortitude to persevere in the face of setbacks.

  Though Davidson Academy’s encouragement of highly specialized endeavors wouldn’t be right for everyone, it might have been a good choice, had it existed, for some of history’s most innovative mavericks, iconoclasts, prodigies, and outsiders. Wagner, Picasso, Michelangelo, Newton, and Einstein were single-minded in pursuing their passions and often at odds with the dominant culture, which, then as now, did not reward youngsters who were quirky, creative, or recalcitrant.

  As a student, Einstein was known for his curiosity and rebelliousness; one teacher, Hermann Minkowski, said young Albert was a “lazy dog” when it came to studying mathematics. At root, he was just like any other child, driven by the desire to explore and create, an impulse that is very often at odds with the pressures toward conformity and parental, academic, and societal interests. Beethoven, an impulsive and rambunctious child who exhibited little hint of genius during his school years, would probably be drugged in one of today’s ordinary classrooms—or he might just sit in the corner with his smartphone, drugging himself.

  Of course, Einstein’s and Beethoven’s kind of raw genius is very rare—one in several million, Lubinski estimates—and it can’t be created by any school. “The more exceptional you become the less likely parents and schools can provide environments that accommodate those individuals,” says Lubinski. “You best approach it by providing optimal environments to kids to learn at their desired rates, and not topple the passions of the super-achievers.” In other words, you want to be attentive up to a point, help students find their passions and cultivate creativity, then give them the resources they need and get out of the way.

  Sometimes, experiential learning at Davidson can go in unexpected directions. One night, Taylor read that it was possible to create plasma in a microwave oven, using grapes. “The idea is that if you cut the grape exactly in half and place it precisely in the center of the oven and bombard it with microwave radiation, you can create a cloud of plasma,” Taylor says.

  And so he decided to try it—in the school cafeteria. Taylor and his partners in crime, two friends with a similar interest in crazy science experiments, set it up. They cut the grape in half equatorially, leaving a bit of skin attached to act as an antenna for the microwave energy.

  “A grape is just about the right size for microwaves to interact with and heat that region very intensely,” Taylor told the crowd of kids circled around him as he placed the grape halves on a plastic plate and then positioned it in the middle of the oven. “If we get it right, the water and carbon will heat up, and the high-energy microwaves will strip the electrons off, creating the state of matter known as plasma.”

  As he closed the door and pressed the start button, heads crowded in, straining for a look. Sure enough, within a few seconds a wispy blue-white cloud—the plasma—began to form over the grape halves. “Whoa!” kids gasped. “Look at that!”

  “Behold,” Taylor announced, “the fourth state of matter!”

  Then the experiment took an unexpected turn. There was a loud, zapping noise followed by sparks and a flame. The plastic plate had ignited, and acrid smoke began to fill the stove and then the cafeteria. They put the fire out quickly, but within a few minutes, Taylor and his friends were sitting in Harsin’s office. Harsin didn’t even have to ask who the ringleader was.

  “How was this a smart idea?” she asked, using one of her favorite phrases for the aftermath of student-induced incidents.

  “Well, it was a pretty good idea,” Taylor said, “right up till the plastic plate. We should have used glass.”

  “I made a new rule that day,” Harsin tells me as we look
out her office window at Shenanigan Central. “No more science experiments in the cafeteria.”

  She laughs, watching Taylor clowning with Sofia, Ikya, Biff, and a few other kids. He backs up and spins into a sort of helicopter dance—Jerry Lewis–meets–Whirling Dervish—without a trace of self-consciousness, making the other kids double over with laughter.

  “Can you imagine him in a normal school, bored by his grade level, not meeting other kids like himself?” Harsin asks. “Tuning out in class and thinking, I could be writing grants and building a nuclear fusion reactor and developing applications for it.”

  Taylor was flourishing, making new friends, getting going on his fusor project. But Joey, increasingly, was struggling; he missed his friends back in Arkansas. For Joey, being around smart people was nice, but it was far less important than being around his people. Whereas Taylor could, from the age of eleven, tell you his career plans—applied nuclear physics—Joey had no idea what he wanted to be.

  In fact, Taylor’s focus and self-motivation was so ingrained that he had trouble imagining that others could possibly lack it. One day, Taylor asked his mom, “What’s Joey going to do?”

  “He doesn’t know,” Tiffany said.

  “What do you mean?” Taylor said. “How can Joey not know what he wants by now? He has to know.”

  “Taylor just doesn’t get it,” Tiffany later tells me, “that everyone doesn’t have a passion by age ten and shoot for stars.”

  One night, Joey asked Tiffany, “Mom, is everyone supposed to have a dream, like Taylor? ’Cause I don’t have one.”

  “I told him that not everyone knows, that I didn’t know when I was in high school or even in college,” Tiffany says. “And I told him that it’s okay not to know.”

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