Word: abstract
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...years." They tend to be in chess, music and math, more in quantitative fields and less in qualitative disciplines, where "kids are gifted in ways that are hard to measure." But then there is Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old artist whom Quart visited, whose dozens of brightly colored abstract oil paintings have brought in $300,000, as well as calls from Oprah and David Letterman. Some prodigies make successful transitions to adult accomplishment, but others flounder as they get older. Gifted children, an intellectual step down from prodigyhood, tend to be identified with high IQ scores. (Quart is quick...
Still, there's good news. The central contention of my 2003 story was that the SAT's shift from an abstract-reasoning test to a test of classroom material like Algebra II would hurt kids from failing schools. I was worried that the most vulnerable students would struggle on the new version. Instead, the very poorest children--those from families earning less than $20,000 a year--improved their SAT performance this year. It was a modest improvement (just 3 points) but significant, given the overall slump in scores. And noncitizen residents and refugees saw their scores rise an impressive...
Even more inspiring are efforts by one children's network to fight the prevailing notion that TV is the Great Satan. Programs are explained in terms of how they improve a tot's language-comprehension skills, his abstract-thinking skills, his "auditory-discrimination" skills--which, as best as I can tell, involve a child's ability to sing the Dora the Explorer theme song at top volume until Mommy's ears bleed. The network's website has a parent's section detailing the miracle of "connected learning" that occurs via the media's ability "to help children make connections between...
...detection techniques are likely to remain in the same ambiguous ethical holding area as so many other privacy issues in the twitchy post-9/11 years. We'll give up a lot to keep our cities, airplanes and children safe. But it's hard to say in the abstract when "a lot" becomes "too much." We can only hope that we'll recognize it when it happens...
BOSTON, Mass.—His determinism is unnerving, his passions abstract, and his ability to relate to the world outside his cloistered laboratories is limited, at best. The scientist is a decidedly strange creature, or so our society seems to believe.But scientists would not agree with the public’s estimation, and they would be right not to: Our society’s conception of the scientist is warped beyond any resemblance to reality. Sitting at a lab bench in Boston, on the gray cusp between layperson and scientist, I’ve had a rare opportunity...