Gifted Children

U.S. immigration officials announced Friday that they would drop efforts to deport the illegal immigrant parents of an academically gifted American child, ending a nine-year battle over whether exceptional educational needs can avert deportation. Benjamin and Londy Cabrera, who illegally emigrated from Mexico and Guatemala, respectively, in the 1980s, argued that deportation would cause "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship" to their two American daughters, both Los Angeles natives.

As an alpha nerd, Harper Robertson naturally thinks her high school is kickwump -- a word her class coined. She wouldn't be prouder if it had the top-ranked football team on planet Earth, which it most decidedly doesn't and never will. "I knew I was going to a nerdy high school when I realized that the only elective was Java programming," she said. If you could set foot on Harper's campus -- you can't -- you'd see what she loves about it.

Other fledgling lawyers may toast the news that they've passed the bar exam by popping open a chilled bottle of champagne. Not Kathleen Holtz. When results of the most recent California bar exam are released next month, the 18-year-old law school grad will be too young to drink legally. And, as the youngest practicing attorney in California -- if not the nation -- Holtz is loath to break the law.

Despite efforts to portray it as an art for the aging, classical music has always been a young person's game. No other form of art or entertainment requires such early training. Kids often learn Bach on the piano long before they get around to mimicking Jimi Hendrix on the guitar. Prodigies, in fact, are classical's business model.

The first flush of youth, and then what? Will a wrinkle or two mean the end of a recording contract? Will burnout come early, maturity not at all? No one, of course, knows, but current CDs from soloists who were hot a decade or more ago and are now in their 30s offer encouragement, even if yet another recording of the Schumann Piano Concerto by Evgeny Kissin hardly seems like news.

Two weeks ago, Kerry and Lee Schmelzer left their Montana dream home and relocated to a rental in Reno. Pulling up stakes wasn't easy, but, they ultimately decided, it had to be done. Their 13-year-old daughter, Emma, needed a new school. For years, the Schmelzers had struggled to challenge Emma academically at their local public schools. Although some years were better than others, they believed Emma wasn't getting what she needed. "She learned a lot of things," says her mom, Kerry.

Being raised to be exceptional can cause exceptional problems; Alissa Quart should know. The 34-year-old author of a new book "Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child," Quart read at age 3 and wrote her first novel when she was 7. In her book, she argues that today's parents' need to enrich children with special classes, jammed-packed schedules and learning tools can leave a lasting legacy. And not one the parents had in mind.

If a genie ever granted him three wishes, Marc Yu knows what he would want. He'd ask to play with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The New York Philharmonic. And he'd like to play at Carnegie Hall. Marc plays Bach's Piano Concerto in F minor from memory. On cello, he glides through Vivaldi. He practices at least six hours a day. He has memorized more than 15 works, including a piece more than 20 pages long. He has composed 10 short pieces.

Seven-year-old Nicholas Green was killed by bandits nearly a decade ago in Italy, but his spirit lives on in another little boy's heart, a woman's eyes and hundreds of gifted U.S. schoolchildren who have won awards bearing his name. Now Nicholas' legacy has touched Orange County, where Laguna Niguel fourth-grader Magdalena Chau is the most recent winner of the Nicholas Green Distinguished Student Award.

Unless your children are star athletes, their chances of getting into a top college or university without honors and Advanced Placement classes are slim indeed. Clearly, those who attend schools that do not offer many of these classes are at a great disadvantage. But even attending a school with a wide variety of challenging courses is no guarantee that a student will actually be able to take any of them.