At 10 a.m. on a recent Wednesday morning, the 5-year-olds were writing. Not, mind you, their ABCs, as most kindergartners would be doing. No, these tots were composing sentences, an entire paragraph--and with few errant periods or funny spellings. Their topic: "What I Would Do if I Were President."
In another room, the 11-year-olds were doing math. Not long division, not multiplication of fractions, but algebraic equations. X intercept, Y axis, eyes gleaming at the very mention. Manipulating fancy graphing calculators, these kids were not merely paying attention to the lesson, they were absorbed in it.
In the science lab, the 13-year-olds were furiously swaddling eggs in typing paper, masking tape and paper clips, which they soon would launch from the roof of a nearby building. They were conducting a physics experiment in terminal velocity--splat rate, for you dimwits out there. By the time these teens enter high school, they'll be years ahead of the crowd in physics and chemistry.
Extracurricular reading? Of course, plenty of it. But forget Harry Potter. Try "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero."
"It was brilliant," said Nicholas Sofroniew, the 13-year-old who gobbled up math teacher Robert Kaplan's weighty work of nonfiction in his free time.
If you've guessed that we're inside a school for geniuses, you are partially correct. To be labeled gifted, an IQ of 132 will do, but that still isn't enough to win passage through the black iron gate of the Mirman School in Bel-Air.
Mirman, a private school founded in 1962, is one of a handful in the country to cater to the tiptop of the intelligence scale: Only the highly gifted--children with an IQ of 145 and above--may apply.
Such exclusivity comes at a price. First of all, there's tuition--more than $12,000 a year for most of the 355 students (about 10% are on scholarship). The school, which serves youngsters ages 5 to 14, admits only about 40 new students a year, most of them at the earliest level.
Then there is the social fallout. Some parents feel that Mirman admission gives them bragging rights, a colossal turnoff for other parents who may already feel that schools for geniuses are undemocratic.
Mirman won't even hand out an application packet until a prospective student has aced an IQ test called the Stanford-Binet. And some critics scoff at the reliability of IQ exams to measure anything but cultural privilege--the luck of having parents who take their children to museums
