Parental Pride?

Today's entry is quite possibly the best entry I have ever written.

Unfortunately, the brick wall that stands between me and the typed word will prevent you all from ever reading it!!

So instead...

A news piece here in England caught my attention this week. Entitled "2 year old girl joins Mensa", it made me wonder how the hell that could be possible.

Here is the version from the net:

Brainy toddler Georgia Brown has become the youngest member of Mensa – aged two. Georgia has an IQ of 152, putting her in the most intelligent 0.2 per cent of the population, reports the Daily Mirror.

Mum Lucy, 44, said: "She was crawling at five months and walking by nine months. She would sit and read with a book."

Prof Joan Freeman, who set the IQ test, said: "She swept right through it like a hot knife through butter."

Lucy, boss of charity Disability Initiative, said Georgia benefits from having a large family – siblings Ben, 24, Sophie, 22, Charlotte, 20, and Olivia, 16, plus carpenter dad Martin, 51.

She added: "There is always someone around to offer her something." Georgia, from Aldershot, Hampshire, can count to 10, draw a near perfect circle, and knows all her colours and the difference between a square and a rectangle.

Maybe I am just a cynic, but I beg to question how crawling at 5 months and walking at 9 correlates to being in the most intelligent 0.2% of the population!! I realise that it is a fairly early age to accomplish these tasks, but by no means are they unprecedented in baby world.

Now, at the age of 2 she can apparently count to 10 and knows all her colours. Is it just me or does this not seem all that remarkable?

Maybe it is an indication that she absorbs information easily, and retains it well. Maybe it is indicative of what might be if her thirst for knowledge continues as she grows older. It certainly makes a mother proud when her tot learns these things for the first time. I remember beaming when mine did it too.

She is obviously, at least for now, a bright girl, but it seems to me the British Press are blowing the story up for the sake of having a story. Not at all like the Press!!!

The other thought, that I can't shake off, is that bright, intelligent youngsters are rarely catered for in British Schools. Their love of learning, and their sheer ability to absorb and retain knowledge is all too often stripped away from them once they begin mainstream education. A teacher, with 30 pupils, cannot teach each one individually. If there is one unusually bright child amongst 29 average children, you can bet your life the bright infant will soon be bored and frustrated at the lack of anything challenging. The enthusiasm shown in the early years often wanes, until the good old British Education system has brought them down to the level of her classmates.

I hope for Georgia's sake, if she is potentially as intelligent as the report suggests, that she can be an exception. You go girl.