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Printer-Friendly version Ten-year-old Terence Tao, or Adelaide, South Australia, is a prodigiously gifted young mathematician. Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) at Johns Hopkins University states that Terry has the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he has found in 14 years of intensive searching (Stanley, 1985). In May, 1983, at the age of 8 years 10 months, Terry took the Scholastic Aptitude Test-Mathematics (SAT-M) at Stanley's invitation and made the phenomenal score of 760 out of a possible 800. Only 1% of college-bound 17- and 18-year-olds in the United States attain a score of 750 or more on SAT-M and, so far as Stanley knows, to this date only one other 8-year-old has ever scored higher than 700. In some ways it is ironical that such a profoundly gifted student as Terry should have appeared in Australia, an obsessively egalitarian society where social antipathy towards gifted children and towards those who would set up special programs for the gifted is a powerful deterrent to the establishment of state-mandated gifted programs. Two Australian states, Western Australia and Victoria, do provide structured accelerated programs for highly gifted secondary school students within the government system, but these programs are under intense criticism from the teachers' unions, the media and many politicians. the few cases of acceleration which have arisen have proceeded from the interest and concern of individual teachers and have received little or no support from the state education system. Billy Tao, a pediatrician, feels that in Terry's case the absence of a formalized structure may have been an advantage rather than a hindrance: My wife and I have been fortunate in having been able to work very closely, first with the principals and staffs of Terry's primary and secondary schools and later with the faculty of Flinder University, to design a highly individualized program which has been tied in to Terry's levels of ability in all subject areas, not only in maths and the sciences but also in the humanities. If South Australia had already had well established gifted programs, Terry might have been drawn into a less flexible system, quite different from what has actually eventuated (B. Early Childhood Born in Adelaide on 15 July, 1975, Terry is the eldest son of Billy and Grace Tao, the latter a first-class-honors graduate in mathematics and physics, who met at the University of Hong Kong where both were educated before emigrating to Australia in 1972. Terry has two younger brothers, Trevor, aged 7 and Nigel, 5 Terry's intellectual precocity displayed itself at an early age. In common with a number of other intellectually gifted children (Salzer, 1984), he taught himself to read by watching Sesame Street; the difference, however, is that Terry acquired this skill before the age of 2 His reading came as a complete surprise to his parents; they found him playing with another child's alphabet blocks, arranging the letters in alphabetical order. Some of the blocks had numbers, and the Taos discovered that Terry could arrange these in numerical order and, shortly afterwards, do simple addition and subtraction. A few months after Terry's second birthday, the Taos found him using a portable typewriter which stood in Dr. he had copied a whole page of a children's book laboriously with one finger! At this stage his parents decided that, although they did not want to 'push' their brilliant son, it would be foolish to hold him back. They began to borrow and buy books for him and, indeed, found it hard to keep pace with the boy. They encouraged Terry to read and explore but were careful not to introduce him to highly abstract subjects, believing, rather, that their task was to help him develop basic literacy and numerical skills so that he could learn from books by himself and thus develop at his own rate. Tao, "we are sure that it was this capacity for individual learning which helped Terry to progress so fast without ever becoming bogged down by the inability to find a suitable tutor at a crucial time." By the age of 3, Terry was displaying the reading, writing and mathematical ability of a 6-year-old. The Tao parents feel that the single most important event in Terry's education was, ironically, the 'failure' of his attempt at early entrance into formal schooling: We were so carried away by the speed of Terry's progress between the ages of 2 and 3 that we took the rather naive and simplistic view that everything would be very easy and rosy and that if we sent Terence to school early the school would do whatever would be necessary to meet his needs, and he would be able to continue to develop at his own pace (B. Terry entered a private (independent) primary school in February, 1979 (the Australian school year runs from February to December) at the age of 3 years 6 months. This particular form of acceleration did not, however, meet Terry's very specific needs. Intellectually, he was far in advance of the 5-year-olds in his class. Socially, however, he was not yet ready to spend extended periods of time with children 2 years older than himself. His teacher could not cope with the situation and complained that Terry distracted the other students. After several weeks his parents and educators came to a mutual decision that Terry be withdrawn from school. The Taos entered him in a neighborhood kindergarten with children of his own chronological age. Numerous studies (eg, Worcester, 1955: Hobson, 1979: Alexander and Skinner, 1980) have shown that where under-age children are admitted to formal schooling on the basis of intellectual and academic precocity and social readiness, they perform as well as, or rather better than, their older classmates. However, the majority of children studied have been within 12 months of the usual minimum date of admission to school, and emotional maturity is recognized as being an important prerequisite for the child's social and academic success (Reynolds, Birch, & Tuseth, 1962). The Taos believe they learned several important lessons from this early experience: Firstly we realized that no matter how advanced a child's intellectual development, he is not ready for formal schooling until he has reached a certain level of maturity, and it is folly to try to expose him to this type of education before he has reached that stage. This experience has made us monitor Terry's educational progress very carefully. Certainly, he has been radically accelerated, but we have been careful to ensure, at each stage, that he is both ready and eager to move on, and that we are not exposing him to social experiences which could be harmful. Secondly, we have become aware that it is not enough for a school to have a fine reputation and even a principal who is perceptive and supportive of gifted education. The teacher who actually works with the gifted student must be a very flexible type of person who can facilitate and guide the gifted child's development and who will herself model creative thinking and the love of intellectual activity. Also, and possibly most importantly, we learned that education cannot be the responsibility of the school alone. Probably for most children, but certain for the highly gifted, the educational program should be designed by the teachers and parents working together, sharing their knowledge of the child's intellectual growth, his social and emotional development, his relationships with family and friends, his particular needs and interests... that is, all the aspects of his cognitive and affective development. This did not happen during Terry's first school experience but I am convinced that the subsequent success of his academic program from the age of 5 onwards has been largely due to the quality of the relationships my wife and I have had with his teachers and mentors (B. During the 18 months Terry spent in kindergarten his mathematical ability progressed at a phenomenal pace. Guided by his mother, Grace, he completed almost all the elementary school math curriculum (normally 7 years' work) before the age of 5 One of Terry's early mentors, a professor in...
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