Posted on 03/03/2009 12:14:52 PM PST by Graybeard58
At 3, Hannah Faith Butler read — not just any children's books, but ones recommended for fourth graders. In kindergarten, her mother started her on pre-algebra lessons.
Today, the Rotella Interdistrict Magnet School fourth-grader with pinkish glasses and a room full of Barbies digests high-school concepts and performs virtual surgery in down time.
She looks adorably stunning, with a button nose, dark doe eyes and a thick head of lustrous black hair befitting a model. But Hannah wants to be a surgeon.
"You have to help people out, take out their problems and make people feel better," Hannah, 9, explained last week in her kitchen, which holds not only refrigerator and pans, but a computer, quiz cards and folders labeled "anatomy" and "phobias and ologies." The files hang a few feet from Hannah's larger-than-life dollhouse, whose large pink roof stands nearly as tall as she. Stickers featuring Barbie and phrases like "Super!" decorate completed worksheets in the folders.
Also in those files: Connecticut Mastery Test scores from last year, in which Hannah scored at the advanced level in math, reading and writing, far outpacing the Waterbury school district's average. Also in the file: IQ test results which put her level of intelligence in certain areas in ranges alternately described as "genius" or "very superior." She participates in a program for gifted students, called Focus, which brings her to Wallace Middle School regularly, where she works on an independent study project on the digestive system.
How does a young lady who still delights in dolls become such a scholarly phenomenon?
With a strong dose of intellect and a lot of hard work, both by she and her mother.
Hannah showed a voracious appetite for books early, breezing through beginner books by age 2. Today she cruises through school, with her mother supplementing her fourth-grade studies with occasional lessons in everything from the periodic table to linear equations.
It's not that she's overbearing or obsessed with goals for her daughter, Bernadine Coggins says. It's that her daughter truly likes to learn and demonstrated a strong aptitude for it. Hannah enjoys being quizzed — looking at the activity as a game, almost.
She displayed this sort of delight last week, pulling out "George" the skeleton, a Halloween decoration about a foot shorter than she.
"Here's the sternum, which is another name for the breast bone," she said, running petite hands over George's chest and making her way down the arm and legs, from the metacarpals to the fibula. "You don't see the ankle bone, but that's called the talus."
Later, she performed a virtual knee surgery with a program that prompted her to surmise what a patient's vital signs meant and click and cut on different parts of the knee an electronic voice identified only by name.
It's not lost on Hannah where her learning might lead.
"It's extremely important if you want to get a good job," she said between explaining how blood flows through the heart's valves and naming state capitals. "You have more opportunity open to you."
Not even dogged upper respiratory problems — which her mom says were recently diagnosed as asthma — that frequently keep Hannah home from school can keep her from success. She recounted a recent test she didn't prepare for by virtue of being out of school — one about "herbivores and stuff" — that she took not long ago. She aced it.
To be sure, neither the grades nor the brains come easy.
Coggins, a single mother who was nearly 40 when she had Hannah, does not work full-time because, she says, of Hannah's tendency toward health problems, particularly in winter. Coggins, who studied Spanish and journalism in college, substitute teaches in Waterbury. Otherwise, she spends hours scouring textbooks (some college level) and the Internet. She has gotten so involved at times, Coggins said, that she has occasionally stayed up all night preparing lessons for Hannah, and even missing work the next day. She crystallizes the information, then presents it in curriculum that the young girl soaks up.
"I get so excited putting it together when I think about what it's for. That's what drives me," said Coggins. "She's so easy to work with."
Hannah says sometimes other kids get frustrated with her when she wants to answer a question.
She's even had a few minor skirmishes over her studiousness, but now takes it in stride.
"I told her a lot of people who have gotten far in life have to go through a lot of things," said Coggins, explaining she never set out to cultivate a genius. It started with wanting to teach her only child to read early, then blossomed. "When she was a baby when she would see me approach her with a book she'd get so excited."
After Hannah demonstrated a profound ability and joy in conquering reading, they moved on to other areas.
This year, they've brushed up a little and reviewed some areas they've already studied, and Hannah is continuing with Spanish and anatomy lessons.
"It's fun the way my mom puts it. She makes everything fun and exciting," said Hannah, whose big dream is to travel to Disneyland.
Hannah recalled the time she and her mother caught caterpillars and kept them in a box, watching them cocoon and develop. "It turned into a moth," said Hannah. "I wanted it to turn into a butterfly."
Coggins envisions her daughter inevitably enrolling in college-level classes early. In a perfect world, Coggins said she would either home school her daughter, or win her a scholarship to a private school that could advance her learning even more. And she'd take Hannah to Disney.
SIDEBAR:
How Hannah learns:
Hannah says she often turns learning into a game. What works especially well for her, she says, is relating the information to different things in her life. When studying components of the human heart, she thought of her own apartment. Her room and her mother's room upstairs she thought of as the upper aorta and atrium, while the side-by-side kitchen and living room downstairs she thought of as the right and left ventricle, she explained. For a science lesson, she put her doll's go-cart in the book and rolled it across the picture, pretended to be in the dunes.
For her part, Hannah's mother does a lot of Googling. She queries such phrases as "muscle games" and finds sites like one called Anatomy Arcade, where Hannah plays a name-that-muscle, beat-the-clock game.
In earlier years, Coggins tried to make learning come alive by smearing chocolate in books they'd read that had a chocolate cake in them, or by having a feather "mysteriously" float down as Hannah read a section of a book about a pillow fight.
"I keep it balanced between learning and fun," said Coggins. "Some people think, 'Oh, don't push her so much.' They think she studies a lot and she doesn't. It's not an hour a day, it's not even every day."
This is the place to tell us about your precocious children/grandchildren, geniuses, one and all.
I know my children,grand children and great grand children are all brilliant - each one smarter than the other!
I hope they remember to keep some balance and try to ensure she has as normal a childhood as possible.
As I recall, Ruth Lawrence didn’t have a good time being pushed beyond her years and she won’t even speak to her dad now....
Someone ought to snatch up the mother as a teacher, sounds like she’s done a great job.
Today's been a weird day for me anyway.
She *is* cute. And, she looks genuinely happy! Not stressed out as though someone is “making” her perform. Thank God for all His wonders. And thank you for posting it.
I never seem to hear of these child geniuses (genuii??) after they’re not children any more. Do they ever go on to use their amazing skills for anything of note?
Once they’re full-grown, they don’t stand out as much, and I think a lot of them prefer to keep a low profile about their age. I knew a very precocious college student — graduated from a top college at 17, and had her pick of the nation’s VERY top PhD programs in Physics. I’m sure she drew a lot of attention when she was younger, but by late college you wouldn’t have known how precocious she was by looking at her or talking to her, and she was smart enough not to run around blabbing about her age.
Cheers!
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