Sam Varghese
Thursday, 11 February 2010 13:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 4
Any parent who comes to the realisation that his or her child is gifted generally feels conflicting emotions: happiness and confusion. Happiness over the fact that one has an unusual child and confusion over how one is going to deal with this child.
For a geek, the situation is much the same. When
Andrew McMillan (below), a senior Debian GNU/Linux developer and a free software geek, found out that his elder son, Max, was unusually gifted, he reacted as any loving parent would.
"When my son first went to school we had lots of problems with his schooling when he was five," McMillan told iTWire in an interview. "The school brought us in on various occasions to work out how they were going to try and cope with this child who was difficult for them to deal with in class.
"As a result of that we went to a psychologist and got a full IQ test done and things like that. And he was assessed as being extremely gifted. He had a reasoning score that was in the top 0.2 percent of the population, and he had a processing speed score which was in the bottom five percent. It was quite an unbalanced sort of thing, which means that he could take a very long time to do something but what he did at the end of it was reasoned very, very well.
He and his wife, Heather Buchanan, had seen some difference much earlier. "We noticed certain elements of his unusual nature when he was two. When kids first learn to talk they learn to say yes and no. But when he was learning to talk, we would ask him a question - 'would you like to blah?', and he would say 'I would', rather than saying 'yes'. He had very unusual speech patterns and by the time he was three any adult he met on the street could understand what he was saying."
McMillan says the school managed to take some action around it and he got involved with the
New Zealand Association for Gifted Children. "There's a Wellington branch of the association and I was president of that for a few years; I'm still on the committee. And I was on the national board for the national association. As a free software geek I'm into communities and things like that, so I find it reasonably easy to get into that sort of thing."
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