Teachers Who've Taught a Legitimate Genius Describe What It Was Like

serious teachers of reddit have you ever taught a legitimate genius what made them so smart yes the ability to identify complex patterns apply unrelated knowledge to make sense of another subject generalizing specific concepts really quickly i really felt proud of myself using a computer science concept to solve a question in my statistics exam despite no such previous experience of doing that i've taught for 12 years all math algebra 1 ap calculus robotics engineering math and computer science all high school grades in that time i have taught a lot of really smart kids i have met a lot of really smart kids i am not sure just how you are qualifying genius but i am reading it to mean the truly exceptional student who displays intelligence in a way that outshines average best students to that extent i would estimate that i have taught about five such individuals what these kids all have in common is that everything came naturally to them almost like it was intuition tons of smart kids will get bored and actually do poorly in class they don't do their easy class work but usually the genius kids have a thirst for knowledge they are inquisitive and motivated to find answers as for what makes them so smart i would say that their lucky genetics plus an internal motivation to learn is what made them so smart i will end by saying that i think anyone can be smart with enough hard work depending on your genetics your environment and your determination it may take a little bit of work or a whole bunch of work i'm actually really stupid but people at work think i'm some kind of genius because i'm curious and i work hard it might just be personal bias but i think work ethic and self-motivation are just as if not more important than intelligence i've taught a lot of smart kids and while these two stories may not be the most genius kids i mean maybe they were but i can't really tell they are good stories one was a little boy i had when i taught first grade at that age he figured out that the squares of numbers always end in a pattern 0 1 4 9 6 5 6 9 4 1 and repeat he asked me what that was called and i didn't even know it was a thing i spent most of his first grade year trying to teach him how to not be so obvious when he thought people were wasting his time the kid could already read and do math but he did not yet know how to control his eye rolling that was sincerely the most useful skill i could teach him the other was a girl i taught in sixth grade a couple of years ago her parents had homeschooled her for a while and basically she just learned whatever she wanted to learn that worked for my class so she did random reports on the history of chinese food or essays about her grandmother or whatever just recently she was part of a young composer's workshop and i got to see professional musicians perform her work she's 13. the thing is geniuses don't always do stereotypically genius things the boy from the first story is now attending a pretty average state university i'm sure he will always be smart and always be great at what he does but that super amazing genius thing in only one aspect of a person i'm a pre-school teacher so i can't accurately judge a genius or not my students range from 3-5 but i did have one student that stood out he was a peer not special ed not on an iep and he was one of our younger students four we would often let kids have some supervised computer time playing on a site with lots of letter games math games etc for all grades this kid taught himself how to tell time addition subtraction multiplication and started division at the end of our school year he had little to no help with the work if he couldn't figure something out on his own he'd ask for help once and then be perfectly fine continuing on his own he's going on to kindergarten now and i'm so excited to see where he goes in life okay i'm going to shamelessly brag about this kid for the record i teach high school spanish we'll call the kid jason because that's nothing like his real name and i don't want to break ferpa jason played basketball and soccer he was in art club and beat a club and national honor society he was even the valedictorian jason basically taught himself spanish one and by the time he got to my spanish 2 class had vastly surpassed his classmates he asked great questions and even caused me to learn quite a few things about the subject his spanish was freaking impeccable he never made even a single bee in my class when we played games his team always won he studied hard he was focused and he was so freaking affable and he was like this in every freaking class including the ap classes he went on to the best college in the state full ride he's done study abroad in several countries and he's been recognized several times in the school's magazine and not a single person has a negative thing to say about him he's so genuine and good he's a serious preppy white boy that gets along with everyone the athletes the nerds the gothimo kids he can even freestyle i've gotten off track with the question but he just makes me so proud jason is a freaking genius he was not only a genius but a prodigy my former piano organ student now has a dma doctor of musical arts and is in demand for solo performances as well as concertos with orchestra he did all the work i just taught him seventh grade life science teacher a girl i taught this year was basically great at every subject i always sort of felt like the lab partner that was not prepared for the day she had raw talent and great genetics but the thing that set her apart from the others was effort she wanted to learn and spend time learning she was quick with everything and it came naturally but she always gave it 100 we had to give awards out to our students at the end of the year and i decided to not award her for her smarts since those are the awards she always receives instead i gave her the award for greatest effort displayed by any student she also is probably going to the olympics in a couple of years so she's got that going for her which is nice in high school my good friend was a genius and it annoyed the crap out of the teachers he would sit and annoy his friends or build stuff out of things he could find out of the classroom if he was paying attention he would interject with in-depth analysis and not quite relevant questions to side track the teachers or straight up correct them and end up in debates he also never did any homework he calculated out the exact amount he needed to pass and found out he could pass by only doing his tests which he always got 100 on but had no interest in doing work he got banned from playing pre-test studying games because he would always win and was used as the question maker for a while until he made the question so incredibly specific and impossible to answer he got switched to the judge he was also an all-around really cool person smart cute personable and popular and great at sports but he was by far the smartest person in our grade and probably the school and graduated with a 65 average because he just did not care i was similar to that in school while i don't consider myself a genius in any respect a long-term substitute in high school that i had a really good relationship with told me i was the worst kid off student due to the fact that i would never pay attention and goof off with my friends but when called upon i would get the answer right fifth grade teacher here i had a student who was absolutely a genius i was teaching him 6 7 8th grade math and science i found what challenges him most was my style of teaching which required a lot of collaboration and socialization i hope i helped him grow his strengths and weaknesses that year side note i'll never forget on the 20th of april he walked into my room and said hey it's four stroke 20 and gave me this slice mile ha hitler's birthday teach probably genetics and hard work anyway i would introduce two loosely related topics and she would fill in the gaps on how they were connected with having little background she somehow just was able to pull things together and build a story not a real story i'm talking like an experimental procedure in chemistry i barely had to explain and walk her through what she needs and what needs to be considered for the experiment to work etc art is where she really stood out as a third grader adults wanted to keep and frame her paintings she entered a number of competitions but got shut out until she was in junior high because the judges thought she had been coached or prepped somehow her work was so impressive that they wouldn't believe someone her age could have done it then as her age became more credible she started winning major awards gifted kids are often portrayed as rayman types but that turns out to be bs she has such incredible social and interpersonal skills i was never a teacher but i worked with a person that was absolutely brilliant i have no doubt he had a seriously high iq he and i were software developers at the time i've been in it for over 20 years had lots of jobs and worked with lots of smart people i have never met anyone even close to as smart as he was my theory on what made him so smart is that he had a photographic memory he would read something once and never forget it we don't work together anymore but are still friends and whenever we talk his memory never ceases to amaze me not just i.t stuff but everything world events dates of things people's names you name it we had one of my school last year in one of our kindergarten classes he could sound out multi-syllable phonetically irregular words he was sent to the second grade classes for math they wanted to skip him two grades but were hesitant because he's such a little pumpkin such a tiny sweetie i know they were working on conveying to his parents immigrants kid is also bilingual that no he's not just kind of smart and they need to find a program that can meet his needs i've had gifted kids in my class before but that kid is was a real deal genius i taught in the advanced placement program and had one student i would definitely classify as genius level what made him stand out among stays very bright piers was his ability to make connections between things he already understood and difficult new concepts my students were in fourth grade i was teaching the majority of the class sixth grade math but i was teaching him high school senior math simply because he was so quick to make connections with very little or practice needed to master a concept while other students were writing short stories in english this student wrote an entire novel not only was it full length it was well written complex deep and he fully illustrated it himself what do i think contributed to his genius a combination of a genetic predisposition and parents who worked hard to satisfy his curiosity when it came to learning i once taught a girl who was a genius she showed it in many ways but one always stuck out this was an a level physics class uk so 17 stroke 18 year olds and for a piece of homework there was one question that should take them about half a page of working to solve it was a proof so they knew what the answer was but they had to figure it out themselves using the input data selecting the right equations and then showing all the working she turned in her homework and said sir i've got the right answer but i'm not quite certain how i got there what she meant was she knew what she'd done was right but it didn't match the solution she was supposed to have i take a look and it's about four pages of working which ends up with the right numbers i tell her name i'm going to have to look into this overnight and get back to you if so i took it home and had a good read turns out that instead of using the given equations she'd ray figured out the same equations from first principles that is she started with the basics fundamental principles and figured out the same equations that the original scientists did but she did it when i was in my last year of high school we were expected to help two times a week in a first year class for the countries high school is about ages 12 18 in the uk i helped in the computing class most of it was login here open the internet here's how you open paint blah blah one girl however wasn't doing the stuff the others were doing i looked over her shoulder and she was coding she was writing code well beyond even final year high school level and that meant she was beyond what i could even do at the time remember she was just 12 at the time i asked her about it and apparently her dad was a programmer and he'd showed her the basics and that she thought it was really easy kinda humbling when you're 18 and a 12 year old is better than you at something you thought you were good at tldr taught english in china there was a 10 11 year old and more knowledge on every niche topic we discussed than the rest of the class which consisted of doctors ceos scientists when i was teaching english in china there was one kid who was just incredible so let me preface this with the admission that i am not an english teacher by trade i just needed a job to continue my travels in asia so i worked four days a week in a school and explored china each weekend i had with that in mind i used to diverge from the suggested teaching a lot and i really enjoyed one class called english corner which was essentially an open lecture that all students could attend other teachers hated this class as there was little or no coursework available for them to print out so after a few months i was basically giving every english corner class now they suggested topics like happiness studying sport etc mundane crap i hated that stuff and so did they so i started exploring niche topics to get them thinking and sharing ideas so we did things like the femi paradox time travel cosmetic surgery etc well there was one kid about 10 12 years old and he knew everything he had asthma and was overweight and as a result he could only string short sentences together with each breath but in every one one of these classes he'd start a sentence like did you know breath that xxx breath was actually why why why why why why he did this on every single topic we talked about he was 10 12 years of age and his knowledge on topics not usually discussed in china was off the charts these classes were for students who had advanced english so we had doctors ceos scientists etc all present in the class and this kid knew just as much as all of them i was just humbled by this kid's potential and capabilities i always wonder where he will end up my uncle is a genius has an iq of 154 he had serious problems he would always talk down and look down to everyone he was the youngest of six kids who were all smart and as a child would throw fits at dinner saying how no one would listen to him obviously his siblings didn't give a crap and were busy chowing down in the end he never really adjusted to life or kept a job because he didn't respect his bosses i guess it's not the end and he's still alive but his personality and brains has kept him from really reaching his abilities teaching one now she's five years old and is a mathematics whiz while i'm trying to teach her peers how to count an ad she's doing algebra and differential equations i have no idea what she's doing most of the time but the header of the year who taught high school math said she's doing advanced stuffs it depends on how you define genius i've never had a student i would suspect as genius level from an iq perspective but i had a very intelligent student who blew me away when i was student teaching i taught the most mature high school student i've came across in my life and probably the biggest workaholic i've ever seen in my life as well he was a 17 year old senior in high school and i noticed the first day he came to school in a work suit i found out this is because he runs two businesses of his own one is a lawnmower business father gave him and the other one is a laptop business he opened himself he would wear a suit every day to school he would come to school and easily work eight ten hours after school he would also do all of his homework from school study four tests and do test corrections he had straight a's in all of his classes he also took both the act sat several times that year and his junior year he defines workaholic now he's in college and doing very well as a business major some may argue he's not really a genius since he didn't have some remarkable iq i would say he is still very smart and more intelligent than 95 of students i came across given his schoolwork and the quality of it i guess i consider him more of a life genius given his goals and ambition in life i'm not a teacher by profession but coincidentally was thinking about a similar topic while showering yes shower thought what is true intellect from my years of experience with all sorts of people from children to adults students to business professionals artists and philosophers at least self-proclaimed etc etc the one common trait i find among people i consider truly intellectual and genius is their seemingly natural ability to understand or observe truth as objectively as possible i find this is often achieved by having the absence of ego when observing things and also riding themselves of the idea of difficulty they don't think at least i believe things are hard they simply are as that are and it's up to them to take the time to figure it out now it's not to say these people aren't egotistical or self-centered or anything though i often find that they aren't but at least when it comes to solving problems or observing truths they manage to put their ego aside how would we define genius here i'm a social studies teacher so maybe i'm not the best subject to determine i've had wonderful school smart students who can do homework and tests with ease i've had kids with so much potential but no drive i've had kids that can't do school to save their life but are really street smart which saves their life genius is subjective for me yeah i have a kid who can name all the countries in the world but realistically is he any better than my kid who knows the ins and outs of the city he lives in not a teacher but i work with am friends with someone who is he has an undergrad degree in mathematics from our state's most competitive university and had been working on a phd in physics i have a vague knowledge due to her cousin who works for nasa sending me educational materials throughout my childhood and not only can this guy spew knowledge off the top of his head but he can teach it as well on the downside he's mildly on the autism spectrum and those challenges interrupted his studies and social life he's been focusing on improving his mental health the last few years and is now working a part-time job in addition to website work for my non-profit he's planning out how he's going to get back into school and wants to get into a branch of physics in the medical realm so his knowledge will be used to help people i had a kindergarten who had not yet reached the age of five he had already learned long division before i met him i bought a fake money set and would play pretend he was a cashier i would place a bunch of random items on the table and tell him verbally the prices of things with really random digits like 19.24 cents and 72.87 and more i would do about five items and he would add them instantly in his head and give me the correct change back aside from this i was able to teach him uncommon denominator fraction addition and multiplication for reference it's not uncommon to have kindergarteners come in without knowing how to spell their names i work in before and after school care and worked with a kid who was amazing at science the first sign of him being pretty intelligent was when he was five and he was playing by himself he showed me that he had made a castle with a working drawbridge out of cardboard and string even his fine motor skills in cutting and designing this thing were far beyond the other kids his age let alone the fact that no one had shown him how to do anything of the sort next was when i was talking to the kids as a group he wasn't listening and kept pulling things off the shelf to play with and make buildings out of i held him back as he needed to know the information i'd given the other kids as well and he was able to immediately repeat verbatim what i had said five minutes before when it appeared he hadn't been listening totally casually while still trying to balance random toys on each other i had a huge soft spot for the kid and worked with him for a few years after that he was known as a troublemaker and his parents would frequently ask if i thought he was stupid [ __ ] their words not mine mentally or socially challenged they were lovely and had good intentions but the school was telling them that he was doing very poorly and they wanted him diagnosed with some sort of learning difficulties or adhd when forced to do what the class was doing it seemed he failed pretty miserably but when in my care he was allowed to do what he was interested in and dang did he flourish as i was in charge of the purchasing i would always make sure there were some robotics kits and other science activities that he could work with he loved those but would still often just come up with his own inventions using craft supplies often projectiles so we had a pretty common discussion that went along the lines of me saying hey that is awesome what are you going to do with it for me with an immediate response of not point it at anyone especially their faces even if it's not loaded some of my staff really struggled with him and it took a lot of supplies and convincing that if he was up to mischief it was because he was bored and needed something to occupy his mind honestly overall he was such a good kid and did fantastically well given the fact that he didn't really have anyone to support him and give him an outlet for his intelligence his parents just didn't know what to do with him and the school obviously didn't give them the support or knowledge they needed to raise a gifted child last i heard they were gearing up for a diagnosis and i was doing my best to remind his parents that even if he does indeed have something like adhd or autism doesn't mean that he is not intelligent and doesn't mean that it should be used by the school as an excuse not to teach him all the while he's off in the background redesigning a toy roller coaster to use its own momentum to self-relaunch in an endless loop i knew a kid that was an actual genius he tested very highly he didn't brag about it teachers bragged about it and you would never guess he's a genius kind of way came from a crappy upbringing didn't know who his actual father was his stepdad was a massive butthole that just got married to some fat chick with a kid so he wouldn't have to live in the barracks all of our parents made nearly the same amount of money but this kid wore oversized shirts with holes and hand me down camo pants all of the time he was an awesome friend but he was also the class clown which loops back to the you would never guess he was a genius comment he could do advanced math like it was nothing he routinely helped other people out and a lot of people had an interest in him in eighth grade he got a girlfriend that i think was his downfall and it's a little sad that is all it took one kid made a nasty comment about her and this smart kid beat him up he started acting a lot less intelligent than he was every once in a while you would get a glimpse of how smart he was especially when he built things or explained something but he had no interest in actually being smart he just wanted to hang out listen to music and act obnoxious about five years later he had freaked a girl at a party that told him she was 18 but she wasn't and then he went to prison for a little bit and then a little longer for violating probation and is now registered as a diddler and earns a living in construction if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: On Tap Studios

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Keywords: school, school stories, genius, genius kids, scary smart, smart, smartest kid, teachers, students, education, learning, high school, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, sub, reddit cringe, memes, comment awards, dankify, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, chill, story, stories, reddit on tap

Id: 9EZKQ9pajVo

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020