Gifted Children

Richard Feynman - as a model of genius

Toward the end of 1999 (or Year 6), Theo was set a school project to research the life of a famous person. The project was to be presented on a special "Famous Persons" evening, when each child would dress up as their chosen famous person, pretend to be that person, and be able to answer questions about "their" life and work as put to them by curious parents attending the evening.

(The evening proved to be a great success all round and I would genuinely recommend this idea to any parent or teacher viewing this page. You could contact Paddington Public School for details.)

I enjoy reading books about science and I had come across Feynman. He actually became famous for a book of humour ("Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!") more than for sharing the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on Quantum Electrodynamics (or QED for short). He was clearly "a character" and seemed to have a natural ebullience resembling Theo's happy good nature and high spirits.

Since Theo doesn't like reading, I did a lot of the heavy reading for this project (while also following my own curiosity about this "character"). Important sources included:

• "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
  by Richard P. Feynman 1988

• The Beat of a Different Drum
  The life and science of Richard Feynman
  by Jagdish Mehra 1994

• GENIUS
  RICHARD FEYNMAN and modern physics
  by James Gleick 1992

• QED: The strange theory of light and matter
  by Richard P. Feynman 1985

We came across some quirky resemblences between Theo and Feynman. For example, one photo (in one of the books) showed Feynman pointing to a mathematical expression on a blackboard. His forefinger is pressed against the board and is curled back in a typical sign of double-jointedness. Theo's forefinger is the same (and the others also).

Another curiosity was Feynman's IQ score: apparently he "only" scored 125 on an IQ test when in high school. This fact emerged when his son also obtained a similar "low" score and his teachers were so surprised that they questioned Feynman about it. It seems that Feynman was never brilliant in this IQ sense, although most commentators would agree that the label "genius" is appropriate in his case. Theo's IQ score is also "only" 125.

More conventional resemblances included an early aptitude for mathematics, a preference for "hands-on" learning, a passion for tinkering with modern technology (radios in Feynman's day) and a strong indifference to reading (even as a university professor, Feynman hardly read more widely than the "Physics Review" journal). Feynman's contempt for empty authority, his no-nonsense, practical approach to life, and his ruthless humour all appealed to Theo. Together, these qualities made up what might have passed as Feynman's religion and I think Theo might be more drawn to this than, say, Christianity.

It was clear to me that Theo found it easy to look up to Feynman as a role model. And this information is proving very useful to me as a parent, trying to negotiate the best educational deals for Theo. It's far more useful than IQ scores, that's for sure!