I was very good at math in school, but I hit a wall after calculus and my real talents fell in the humanities. I was lucky to go to schools as a kid where most of the teachers liked smart kids and wanted to challenge us, rather than resent them. (this happened to my little sister, whose English teacher picked on her…

I'm sorry. Yeah, it's shitty, and for a smart kid who sticks out for being smart it can be brutal. College kids are at least a little more compassionate

This kid will get plenty of that navigating without high school, I’m sure.

Totally been there. They had me splitting classes in first grade before they just stuck me in gifted and talented up til AP was an option. I was so excited for college level classes... Only to be in the same routine. It’s funny and also not funny because I never really NEEDED to study but also my study habits are…

Finally, I’ve found my people. I still retain some regret that my parents didn’t allow me to skip a couple years ahead, because I spent so much time getting in trouble for either not doing homework or doing the work ahead of time (if you’re going to force me to sit in your class and be quiet while you teach me…

It’s definitely a crappy position to be in. When you don’t really have to lift a finger to get good grades, when you actually NEED to study to do well on something you have no idea where to start. I bombed my first attempt at college because of it, but now I at least set aside the time to do the work I need for the…

It’s an interesting position to be in, but I think it’s easier to be someone less naturally gifted but with a work ethic than vice versa - the people I know who were smart but unfocused have suffered a lot more in life and are generally less happy.

Data point of one, but there was a 16 year old girl in my freshman dorm that fit in so well that nobody knew her age until her birthday. She was academically gifted, but there were a lot of brainy people so it wasn’t unusual. She had friends and dated and the only bummer for her was not being able to go to the bars…

I believe that sex offender registration and punishment is flawed, there are many people who are screwed over for life based on a technicality (like the 19 year old who met up with a 14 year old for sex, and he was punished even though she said she was 17, and she was on a dating site or app she was really too young…

That’s because it’s easy to extend in the humanities, both in the classroom and outside. And the huge range of topics means you could spend eigth years at high school just doing all the histories and languages, and model UN and debate and what have you. Mathematics is much more linear, particularly until you are…

I agree. I’m not in favor of sending 15 or 16 year olds off to live in the dorm, but if he’s living at home with his parents and taking classes at Cornell, I’m ok with that. Ithaca’s a quiet town (I live there and work at Cornell) and Cornell is not so big that he’d get lost in the shuffle.

Heh. I would’ve still done the homework just because I enjoyed algebra, but you know my pain!

Beyond being less objective, success in the humanities requires highly developed communication and rhetorical skills. Math, music and other pursuits often produce these prodigies because they are self-contained disciplines, where advancement can occur without concurrent development of other skills.

I got in trouble for reading ahead SO MANY TIMES. Also for not doing homework in Algebra 2 because I was making 100's on the tests and made a solid B without it.

This sounds awesome and I hope he’s having a wonderful time.

It’s hard to quantify humanities in a way that lets you sign off on “Okay, this kid knows the material, time to bump them up to the next level” in the same way that math does. Kids in public middle and high schools take math in, what — Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Trig somewhere on the side, Calc, and then the kid…

Oppression Olympia are exhausting and useless, but without diminishing the horror of lynching I want to note that women have suffered rape and murder at the hands of men for centuries with only rare legal intervention. The highest cause of death for young, healthy women is still domestic violence.

Ummm try white men, über rich black men, white women, then black men and women...and that über rich moniker is on the shakiest of foundations, ready to fall below white women at a white man’s mere whim.

Lynching had more to do with race than with “protecting women”—look at anti-trans bathroom laws, for example. The same people crowing about how they want to “save women and children” don’t seem to give any shits about sexual assault victims. It’s about bullying in (white) women’s names, not about “protecting” women.

It’s complicated- black men weren’t being lynched because white women were offended that they looked at them, it was white men thinking white women belonged to them, and punishing black men for looking at their trophies. I don’t really believe black men have it better than white women, I think they mostly face the…