The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (28 page)

Jake told me one night at dinner that he’d found Indiana University High School online. “I want to enroll in AP U.S. History,” he said. We told him that was okay, and a couple of weeks later he came to us with another request. There was a computerized testing center down at the university where he could take a CLEP (College-Level Examination Program) exam, designed to help college students test out of subjects they were already familiar with, thus allowing them to earn college credits without having to waste time and money on taking the course. He wanted to try to test out of the U.S. History course he’d taken online.

The next weekend, we drove down to the campus. The woman behind the counter at the CLEP office asked if she could help, and I said, “Yes, we’d like to test out of AP U.S. History, please.”

“We?” she asked, confused.

“Well, my son, actually.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but he has to be here to sign up for the test. You can’t do it for him.”

We looked at each other, both baffled, and then a little voice said, “Down here!”

She stood up and peered over the edge of the counter, where Jake was laughing and waving his hands at her. “Oh! Hi!” she said.

Jake didn’t have any photo identification, such as a student ID or a driver’s license (“Does my library card count?” he asked), so the woman had to call her manager in to assign him a log-in number. It took a while to get the system to allow him to take the exam, but she was obviously charmed by the idea of this little kid taking the test alongside the older students, and she figured it out. I remember looking up to check on him and seeing his little legs swinging under the chair as he clicked through the questions. The computer grades the exam while you wait, and sure enough Jake tested out of U.S. History that morning. The whole staff of the CLEP office cheered as if they’d known him his whole life.

That lit a fire under him. He went online and started taking every course he could find. And then every weekend, he’d want to go to the university so that he could test out. Eventually, I had to have a talk with him. It cost about $75 to take a CLEP exam. That was a mere fraction of what the course would have cost, but we flat out couldn’t afford for him to take a test a week. We settled on a compromise: one test every two weeks.

The astronomy exam was particularly funny. He used only fifteen minutes of the two hours he had to take it and ended up with an almost perfect score. The people in the CLEP office, friends by then, were truly shocked by that one.

Once we had completed all the items on Dr. Russell’s checklist, I submitted Jake’s reports—the IQ test and the assessment from Dr. Hale, notes from the professors whose classes he’d audited, and all his CLEP scores—as well as a note from the high school calculus teacher, vouching that yes, Jake was capable of sitting through a class. A few weeks later, Jake received his acceptance letter. He jumped up and cheered. Shortly afterward, Dr. Russell called us in for a brief welcome interview.

On the day of the interview, I put Jake in charge of bringing some change for the parking meter, as he liked to put the coins in the meter. In his excitement, he brought way too much money, so he had lots of coins in his pockets. When he sat down in the chair in front of Dr. Russell’s desk, all the coins fell out onto the floor. Jake couldn’t concentrate until he’d picked them up and stuffed them back into his pockets. The second he sat down again, all the coins tumbled out, rolling everywhere and making an appalling noise. Not to be deterred, Jake began scooping coins off the linoleum into his baseball cap. Of course, they immediately fell out through the hole in the back of the cap.

This disastrous business with the coins went on and on and on, like a never-ending Three Stooges routine. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been my son’s college interview. Dr. Russell kept trying to hand him a baseball cap and a backpack with the SPAN logo, but he couldn’t get Jake’s attention, because Jake was chasing runaway coins around his office. Eventually, after Jake got most of the coins under control, Dr. Russell gave him the backpack and cap, as well as a triangular IUPUI Jaguars flag for his wall. Still trailing coins everywhere, but now wearing his SPAN cap, Jake headed off down the hall.

The interview had been a complete disaster. When Dr. Russell put his hand on my arm, my heart sank.

“Based on what we’ve seen here today, I think we should start slow the first semester, with three credit hours,” he said. “Let’s be fair to Jake and give his social skills and his height a chance to catch up.”

The news that Jake could take only a single class that first semester was devastating, not least because we’d pulled him out of elementary school. I blamed myself. We usually do a practice run for any new situation, but who could have predicted an overflow of parking meter coins? Jake, of course, was distraught. He could see the promised land, but they wouldn’t let him in. Even acknowledging Jake’s lack of maturity, I wasn’t sure holding him back was fair. He still looked like a little boy, and he hadn’t exactly aced the interview, but three months wouldn’t make much of a difference in his height or anything else.

Nevertheless, he signed up for the one course he was allowed to take, an introductory course in multidimensional math. The first time I flipped through the textbook, I was stunned. Here were the geometric shapes Jake had been obsessed with since he was a toddler. It’s surreal to open a college textbook and finally have a context for your young child’s preoccupations. In my mind, I had always put Jake’s shapes in the same category as Legos or Lincoln Logs (which he sometimes used to build them): funny little toys that clogged up the vacuum cleaner and hurt when you stepped on them with bare feet.

By the third session, Jake had set up a study group and was tutoring the other kids in the class. The professor also wanted him to participate in a math club for high school students he ran on Saturday mornings, a training camp for the Mathematical Olympiad. I took Jake there one Saturday so that he could see what it was like, thinking maybe he’d meet some kids he got along with. Warning bells went off when the professor showed me the coffeemaker and pointed out the way to the college bookstore. Five hours later, I realized that this math club would mean that Jake would have to give up every Saturday to sit in a stuffy basement classroom with a bunch of kids doing math.

I
love
our weekend traditions. The whole family goes out to a little brunch place for pancakes, and then we go to the rec center or the pond across from our home, or to our neighbors’ for an afternoon barbecue. When it’s cold, we go to the bookstore and treat ourselves to new books and hot chocolate with whipped cream at the café, or we make cookies at home and invite friends over to play a board game. This time seemed especially important to me once Jake left elementary school. Maintaining the friendships he’d made there was our highest priority, and those kids were free on the weekends.

So when I went to pick Jake up, I steeled myself to tell him that he probably wouldn’t be participating again. He beat me to the punch. Getting into the car, he said, “That was cool, but I don’t think I need to do it again.” He’d found a sample Mathematical Olympiad problem set online the night before and had stayed up until two in the morning blowing through it for fun. It hadn’t been a challenge for him, and he didn’t want to take a win away from any of the kids who’d been studying
so hard to get into the competition. “They’re all trying really hard, Mom. It’s not fair.”

I was so proud of him at that moment, prouder even than if he’d won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious math prize in the world. Jake knew he’d have his own victories in the world, and he understood that this one wasn’t for him.

B
ecause he was restricted that first semester to three credit hours and an introductory math class, Jake suddenly found himself with a big chunk of time. Mike, still unsure whether we’d thrown Jake’s whole future away, would find us sitting at the breakfast table together while Wesley, Ethan, and all the other kids in the neighborhood were getting dressed for school and trudging down to the bus stop. He couldn’t resist needling me a little: “Rigorous program you’re running here, Kris.” Then he’d turn to Jake and say, “Shouldn’t you have your backpack and a notebook or something?”

“Michael, he’s eating his breakfast. He doesn’t need a backpack to eat his breakfast,” I’d say.

“People don’t wear fuzzy frog slippers to school,” Michael would mutter as he left the room, shaking his head.

Eventually, I’d turn to Jake and say, “So what
are
you going to do today?”

Jake would say something like, “Um, supermassive black holes?”

I wasn’t worried. Mike knew as well as anybody that Jake’s mind never stopped running. Even while relaxing with his brothers at the pool, he’d be thinking about fluid mechanics. His education had also gotten a rocket-fueled boost thanks to iTunes U, a series of video pod-casts available through iTunes. These free lectures featured professors from top universities such as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Oxford, speaking on hundreds of topics ranging from languages to Shakespeare to philosophy. There were lectures on relativity, special relativity, string theory, quantum mechanics—anything,
in other words, an astrophysics-obsessed elementary school dropout could want.

Jake was hooked. As soon as breakfast was done, he’d hit the computer. His attitude was, “They’re not going to let me go to IUPUI? Fine, I’ll go to MIT.”

The question of how light moves through space, the concept that had captured Jake’s imagination during Dr. Betancourt’s class, had begun to percolate. Jake was already familiar with relativity and special relativity, but the lectures supplemented his own research and enabled him to delve more deeply into those topics than he had before. His hunger for knowledge was like a gigantic engine, driving him to search out and voraciously cram in as much information as he could get his hands on. It was as if he couldn’t bear to waste even a second of this precious time. Once again, I had to remind him to eat, to bathe, and to play. The question wasn’t how I could make him do the work, but how I could get him to stop.

He wanted more than anything to share his tremendous excitement about all the things he was learning. I’d be watching
Ellen
and tidying up the kitchen while the daycare kids took their afternoon nap, and Jake would come in, commandeer the television, connect his laptop, and physically drag me over to the couch so that he could show me the lecture he’d watched that morning. “It’s math and science story time with Mommy!” he’d say.

“Oh, no honey,” I’d beg. “Not organic chemistry. Can it be anything but organic chemistry?” (As if string theory would be better.) Sometimes he’d get so wrapped up in watching, I could sneak away to unload the dishwasher, but mostly I was stuck sitting there, my brain hurting, while Jake scribbled furiously away in his notepad.

I liked to tease him about torturing me, but the truth is, I treasured those afternoons together. I was struck by how natural it was for him to assume the role of teacher. Jake loved nothing better than to stand at his little whiteboard and teach me what he was learning. “Tell it to me like I’m a cheeseburger, Jake,” I’d say, and he would, going through each of the incredibly complicated ideas slowly and clearly until I understood. Even though I had little or no talent as a student, he had
an endless amount of patience for the process. You could see how much he loved it.

One of the kids in the daycare at the time, a boy named Noah, thought the sun rose and set on Jake. Noah loved nothing more than to lie on the floor at Jake’s feet, his legs up in the air, watching Jake do math. Even when I had to beg Jake to take a break to eat a sandwich or take a shower, he would always find time to show Noah the difference between acute and obtuse triangles, or how to measure the circumference and the diameter of a circle. Watching Jake with Noah helped me to see what motivated Jake to teach. It was his passion for the subject, pure and simple.

It’s hard for many people to relate to, but Jake genuinely thinks math and science are the most beautiful things on earth. The way a music lover thrills to a crescendo, the way a lifelong reader catches her breath in delight over a perfectly crafted phrase, that’s what math is like for Jake. This is a boy who dreams of tesseracts and hypercubes. I have come to understand that numbers and numerical concepts are like friends to Jake. His iPad password right now has twenty-seven characters, comprising numbers and formulae he likes. Every time he types it in, it’s like he’s high-fiving one of his buddies. I always tell him, “Jake, you don’t understand. Math scares people. It scares me.” I think this is why he’s so dedicated to stamping out what he calls “math phobia” wherever he finds it. He honestly believes that if I’d been taught differently, I’d love math as much as he does.

When I’d get tired, my head spinning from the numbers, Jake would talk to the dog. Since I’d had no idea what the experience of leaving elementary school would be like for Jake, and because I’d wanted him to know he had someone (besides me) who’d be there for him all the time, I’d gotten him a puppy, a St. Bernard he called Igor. By choosing a St. Bernard, I’d signed on for much more than I’d expected. Igor ate like a garbage disposal and grew and grew until he was bigger than Jake. Every day, I’d vacuum up a whole dog’s worth of hair. “How is that creature not bald?” Mike would ask, changing the vacuum cleaner bag yet again. In the spring, when it rains a lot in Indiana, I’d mop my kitchen floor, and then five minutes later, I’d have to mop it again.

Igor and Jake were inseparable, and I came to accept the giant dog as a permanent fixture in the kitchen, where Jake liked to do his math. Igor would sit there watching, head cocked and an intelligent look on his face, as the equations poured out of Jake. I was so grateful for the dog’s loyalty and attention, I didn’t even mind the drooling. Narnie always got a kick out of the scene. “In this house, even the dog is doing astrophysics,” she’d say. We both thought that Igor was probably absorbing more than either one of us was.