Academic Acceleration Quotes

My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.

When, in school, they were teaching algebra, I was studying differential equations at home.

I completed the first three years of primary school in one year and was admitted to the local school the age of six directly into the fourth year, some two years younger than all my contemporaries.

Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.

I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school.

What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master's in four years. It wasn't slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures.

I was a blond-haired kid with blue eyes, growing up in an Italian ghetto. I had a very high IQ. In elementary school, I skipped ahead twice. I was 10 years old when everyone else was 12.

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

I was so clear on the fact that I wanted to be a journalist that I asked my parents if I could go to a tutorial college to do my O-levels early, which I did when I was 13.

In Jamaica we had the English way of schooling from the age of four, so when I got to America I was already a few years advanced because I started school at the age of three-and-a-half rather than six and my grades moved up accordingly. In America, they start you at school at six because the grades are different. I had to take a test and they didn't know what to do with me. It wasn't that I was any smarter; I had just started younger. All of a sudden I was jumped from eighth to tenth grade. They said I was very smart, but I was only smart in languages, really.

I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.

The fact is, when I was 15 and a sophomore at high school, I played on the varsity baseball team for the college.

I was in public school until third or fourth grade, and after that, I was homeschooled. I was homeschooled until I was 14, and then when I was 14, I began attending college. Mom was not playing about that education.

I finished all the math books by third grade and most of the reading books. So I was considered disruptive.

I felt I ought not to be wasting time, and I hurried to graduate from high school to enroll at UCSD. I also hurried to finish college, to go on to higher studies. By the time I was in my teens, I had a strong sense of mission, wanting to discover something important or solve a major problem in biology or medicine.

I skipped kindergarten because I was reading at a pretty high level. That's a weird and cocky thing to say, but I was real sharp, and I knew that early on.

I went to night school and summer school, I made that whole year up and I actually graduated on time. Also, I got a part-time job at the radio station.

After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.

I think, like a lot of other people who have been in the service, you'd been delayed in what you were doing. You wanted to catch up and the best way to catch up was to move as fast as you could toward a degree.

I had a weird high school because I graduated early when I was 16. I moved out to California, but I was only there for freshman and sophomore year, and I was a bit of a brainiac.

My parents homeschooled my sister and me for many years. Why? Because the local school insisted that I, being three, should go to preschool, and my sister, being five, should go to kindergarten. The problem? You learn your alphabet in preschool, and I was already reading chapter books.

I was told I was talented when I applied to Falmouth School of Art and that I should consider skipping the course and proceeding directly to degree level.

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

At school, I was a lot more advanced compared to the other kids but I didn't like authority and was kicked out for fighting.

I'm actually graduating early. I got a lot of work done already. Being home schooled, I have had a lot of tutors help me.