What do children do in a nerd camp?

D: Your article is about the Center for Talented Youth, a summer program for gifted children--"nerd camp," as many participants called it--at Johns Hopkins University. What is nerd camp?
B: Nerd camp is a lot like any other summer camp, only the kids spend most of their time studying instead of playing, and they have to be really, really smart to get in. There are nerd camps all over the country these days--about fifteen thousand students attend them every year, and thousands more attend day programs--in part because so many schools have dismantled their gifted programs. Only about two cents of every hundred dollars spent by the federal government is earmarked for the gifted, so a lot of these kids have been stranded Most of them start the regular school year already knowing nearly half of the things they’re going to be taught. So these camps are places where they can stretch their legs, intellectually--which is a pretty astonishing thing to see. It’s not unusual for a student at one of these camps to cover a year of algebra in two weeks.
D: Do you think advancing or skipping grades a good idea?
B: Most schools practice grade acceleration in a fairly clumsy way. If a kid is bored in his class, and his parents complain enough, he might be allowed to move up a year. The problem is, if he’s as bright as many of the kids at the Johns Hopkins camp, he’ll soon be ready to move past those older kids as well. And, of course, being the smallest, brightest kid in a class has never been a recipe for popularity. When I talked to Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University, she told me that schools simply use the wrong criterion--age--to divide students up. Rather than lumping all the seven-year-olds in one group and all the eight-year-olds in another, they should group all students by ability-regardless of their age. "When they’re ready to take Algebra I, let them take Algebra I," she told me. "We don’t buy shoes or piano books for children based on how old they are. Why is reading or math any different?"
D: At the nerd camps you visited, what was the social life like? How do the kids deal with normal adolescent rites of passage?
B: I went to camps at Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt, and both places were pretty lively. The kids went to movies and excursions and weekly dances, and the dorms were predictably noisy. Some psychologists have suggested that students who are intellectually gifted also tend to mature faster than average, but I didn’t see much evidence of that. They had the same boy-girl problems, the same hormonal jitters. But there was a real giddiness in the campers--a sense of relief at finally getting to hang out with kids who were like them.
D: What about genius? How do we separate high intelligence from real genius, and how rare is it?
B: It’s hard to know exactly what qualities are the most predictive of genius. Intelligence is important, obviously, but it’s not nearly enough. In the nineteen--twenties, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman tried to find the most gifted kids in California by having teachers nominate candidates and then giving them the Stan- ford--Binet I. Q. test, which Terman had helped develop. He ended up with more than fifteen hundred exceptionally bright kids--people called them the "Termites"--and spent the rest of his life tracking their careers. Not one of them won a Nobel Prize. Ironically, though, two students who hadn’t made the cut--the physicists William Shockley and Luis Alvarez--did win it. So it’s hard to say if any of the prodigies at nerd camp will turn out to be the next Einstein. But, judging from the performance of other camp alumni, who have been tracked for more than twenty years, they’re very likely to get advanced degrees and to excel in their fields.
D: What’s the importance of intelligence, in the long run? Does it correlate with success?
B: It depends on your definition of success. When Camilla Benhow and her husband, David Lubinski, tracked the top scorers from the gifted camps, they found that the very cream of the cream tended to become physicists, those in the middle gravitated toward medicine, and those at the bottom became lawyers and businessmen. If they had looked at their salaries, though, I suspect that the order would have been reversed: the businessmen and lawyers would have come out on top, the physicists on the bottom. Intelligence is a wonderful asset for any career, but the life of the mind has never been all that well paid.
D: Thank you very much, Mr. Bilger, for sharing your findings about intelligence. I find them very enlightening, and hopefully, our audience will share my opinion. Thanks again for coming.
B: My pleasure.