I stumbled accidentally across an article in a publication I’d never heard of the other day and had to pick my jaw up off the floor after reading it. Such stories have always fascinated me as to why a few persons come along on occasion that just excel beyond the normal skill level.
As a retired teacher, my mind wanders back to those few classes where a single student in my 4th, 5th, or 6th grade class was cut above the average skill level of the grade level I.Q., could ace any assessment I had access to giving him/her, and the frustration which came with challenging him or her.
Yet, despite having a “Gift & Talented” class, they didn’t qualify for some reason or another. The public education has rarely been capable of challenging such students because it’s been focused on the lowest common denominator of student capability for many decades now.
What caused my jaw to hit the floor? Here’s the lead-in sentence just underneath the article’s title: “After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.” This young lady, homeschooled in Nassau, the Bahamas, while her dad took a job as a software engineer, advanced through the Kahn Academy’s standard curriculum, and at the age of 11 she’d finished calculus.
After consuming most everything math she could find on the WWW, she got connected with a professor to be tutored remotely. For Cairo, she found her interest in learning more about advanced math as an expansive from her non-expansive life at home.
At 14, she took part in a two-week summer program run by the Berkeley Math Circle. Her application listed an equivalent of an advanced undergraduate math degree; however, she doesn’t even have a high school diploma.
If you’re curious about what happened next when the professor who leads the group was presented with a paper from Cairo about a mathematical mystery she solved, but the leading math professor had grappled with, but couldn’t solve it, go read the full article here.
Makes me wonder whether she’ll go on to discover new breakthroughs and become the next “Einstein.”