As a 13-year-old, Lithonia resident Stephen Stafford II can usually be found sitting in front of the television playing video games or playing his drum set. But Stafford is no typical 13-year old – he’s a college student. The triple-major child prodigy is becoming a sensation at Morehouse College .“I’ve never taught a student as young as Stephen, and it’s been amazing, ” said computer science professor Sonya Dennis.. “He’s motivating other students to do better and makes them want to step up their game. ”
Even at age 11 when Stafford started at Morehouse, he got the highest score in his pre-calculus class. “He breezes through whatever I throw at him. If it’s an hour lab, he can do it in 20 or 30 minutes, ” said Dennis.
Stafford ’s mother, Michelle Brown-Stafford, home-schooled both her children (Stephen has an older sister also in college) and believes that parental involvement is essential for students to excel. But when she realized her son was starting to teach her instead of being taught, she knew he needed to be in a college environment.
“It was surreal because on one hand he’s talking about technical things I didn’t even understand, and on the other hand he was asking me to come watch Sponge Bob with him. So it was bittersweet to let him go. ”
fist tap My Main Man KP
27 comments:
School isn't irrelevant. Public schooling is increasingly being exposed for the farce it is, but that doesn't mean the concept of educating in group settings is the problem.
The problem is that there is no real impetus to educate the masses because they no longer need the continuous supply of labor that was once produced by the public education system, and so therefore can afford to ignore the future generations of poor and minority students who now make us the majority of public schools. And because the parents of these children have been irretrievably caught up in the rat race of simply trying to feed, clothe, and shelter said children, and these parents still believe that the state has an interest or responsibility for the education of their children, we have affectively lost a generation to a miseducation system that no longer even pretends to want to educate. They are more into training kids to be warehoused.
Me, I keep my seed close, and make sure she learns the flip side of everything the state mandates she be exposed to. Exactly how college is much (if any) better than the lower levels of state sponsored education, is a question I suppose we'll leave until little Stephen has his PhD.
"we have affectively lost a generation to a miseducation system that no longer even pretends to want to educate. They are more into training kids to be warehoused." EM
Yes.
As I said.
The Impending Irrelevance of School.
School for the sake of school, or group setting for the sake of 'group setting' ... is nearly a sacrosanct concept.
"Get yo eduuucashun" was the mantra that pushed many of our ancestors towards what was sold to them as "higher learning".
People forgot school was a means to an end.
Not an end.
The aim was to develop the individual. Not to just sit in school for the sake of being in "school".
The concept of "school" ... as a portal to the Promised Land is anachronistic.
That's an old model that can no longer compete with the emerging learning models available to us now.
If you are reading this ...
Schools of the future will look more like the one you are attending ... right here ... right now.
Lil dood is a prodigal nerd period. Doesn't really matter the setting in which the information was presented - he was going to feed his own head prodigious amounts of data, because that's his essential neurotype.
To claim that this exceptional (though familiar) phenomenon THE GLOBAL SYSTEM OF NERD SUPREMACY has any general bearing on the relevance of school is a priori ridiculous.
FAIL!
Schools of the future will look more like the one you are attending ... right here ... right now.
Except they will be handheld or projected up on a convenient surface from a handheld device.
Economics will dictate the delivery medium.
Lastly, it's the mechanics of contemporary literacy that are driving the transition as much as anything else.
The printed page and the literacy which it defined, is dying on the evolutionary threshing floor as its subsumed by ergodic "text" and more generalized ergodism.
^^ OK ....
Like I said.
The Impending Irrelevance of School.
Isn't little dude going to college?
Seems like he thought college, another popular whipping boy here, was in fact very relevant. I hope little man changes the world though.
still gotta do something with the infinitely less promising non-nerd demographic..,
unless of course you're now getting on board with the glue-factory vector being diligently worked by those in pursuit of minimal regret population levels?
AAAHHHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!
Big Man is truth....,
"Isn't little dude going to college?
Seems like he thought college, another popular whipping boy here, was in fact very relevant. I hope little man changes the world though." Big Man
Is he attending college?
Yup.
LOL. In fact he is tutoring the 20 year old products of the School System while there:
“When I saw how much knowledge Stephen has at such a young age, I wondered what I had been doing with my life,” laughed third-year student, Eric Crawford. A psychology major and computer science minor, Crawford wanted to step up his game so much that he got Stephen to tutor him. “Even though I’m older, Stephen is like a mentor and my elder in computer science,” said Crawford.
Nerd?
LOL.
Shiiiiiiii.
Pump your brakes Sci Fi.
Peep my man's freestyle on YouTube first.
DeVil....,
{{{SMH}}}
nerds invented freestyling same way we appropriated and repurposed the wheels of steel son.
why, we even made up break dancing and tagging to give you PE/Art type muhphuggaz something to do with yourselves while we reprogrammed your heads with those mad beats and flows...,
"nerds invented freestyling"
OK LeVar.
Show us:
bust me a perl script and I will Scratch....,
Irrelevance of school, but he goes to college and college is school. He is also being taught 'plantation science' as you term it. In what way is he not a minion of the plantation system which you so often discuss?
"Irrelevance of school, but he goes to college and college is school." M
1) IMPENDING Irrelevance of School
"He is also being taught 'plantation science' as you term it" Mahndisa
2) Who says he is being taught Plantation Science?
If he comes out waving the flag of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming", Mass Vaccinations and defending the HIV / AIDS Hypothesis as if it were a religion ... then we can declare Plantation Science.
"In what way is he not a minion of the plantation system which you so often discuss?" M
3) He was taught at home, by his mother. He didn't attend school until he was in College.
Now he seems to be spending a great deal of his time there ... teaching.
How much less of a Plantation School System product can the cat be Mahndisa?
You and your leaps of logic DV.
I think it is impressive that dude was homeschooled, but is his sister doing. Seems like dude might have just be special like that...
Then again, home-schooling probably allowed him to get the knowledge without having to deal with all the social issues of skipping a bunch of grades in school. However, while college is a great place to acquire knowledge, anybody with a brain can do the same thing on their own. But, I've always thought that there was more to college than going to class and learning. The other stuff was real nice.
You and your leaps of logic DV.
rotflmbao...,
A standard assortment of DV's leaps of logic....,
^LOL^
(Here's the part where cats pick little play fights when they feel it, but don't get it)
Well it might be a leap in logic for the slow ass and the unimaginative who confuse reality with consensus.
But to the Blackest Man on the Planet ... it's a moonwalk in logic.
Got your lips poked out at my memes. LOL.
Which make my memes ... your reality.
^(Today's lesson)
Now please don't twist my celebration of this young fellow as a call to set all schools aflame.
Schools are Blockbuster.
Online Learning is NetFlix.
Schools are Tower Records.
Home Schooling is iTunes.
Which model do you think is going to thrive in 2015?
By 2020 a 16 year old kid sitting up in Benjamin Bannecker High School ... in a Social Studies class, will not have chance in life.
It will already be too late.
I'll be glad when they broadcast this on NPR so ya'll Negros will come around and catch up.
John Gotto is the new John Gotti
IMOHO - There is nothing wrong with taditional schools.
The problems arise when many parents assume the schools are doing a good job teaching marketable skills and knowledge.
Traditional schools offer resources to many who have none.
If parents focus more on their children doing better at using the system the system would work better for them.
In schools wouldn’t be as they are unless that suited the most important men and women in the world; obviously if schools displeased the managers of society, they would cease to exist as they are over time.
Through most of American history, most kids didn’t go to secondary school. Yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut, inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; presidents, like Washington and Lincoln…none of these names were ever sentenced to 12 years in a classroom.
…Although 50 years ago schools commonly talked of these alternative route triumphs, they don’t anymore; nor do America’s important news outlets focus your attention on how many people make it without benefit of schooling.
…By 1820, Prussia was teaching the important countries of the world that forced schooling could be a habit-training laboratory for obedient subjects, men and women whose responsiveness to political and economic exhortation could be counted upon.
…it was seen that school could be a conditioning laboratory, making children susceptible to any sort of authoritarian command, including the soft-core authoritarianism of advertising and public relations.
Anyone can sell ice to Bombay as New England merchants proved 200 years ago; it’s selling ice to Eskimo’s or $150 sneakers to poor children…that takes marketing. It’s an art, but what if it could be made into a science? How? By isolating children far from the everyday world, by confining them with total strangers in strange, sterilized environments where various inputs could be studied, where growing children could be scrutinized, labeled and numbered for different future utilizations? And where data collected from these children could be passed on to other levels of authority for evaluation. Out of this flow of information, materials toward a science of marketing and a science of management would inevitably arise.
…two congressional reports, one made in 1915 known as the Walsh Committee Report, the other printed in 1953 as the summary the aborted Reece Commission. Both reached the same conclusion 38 years apart-American schooling has been largely the creation (and ongoing management) of a group of private corporate foundations.
- Educating Your Child in Modern Times
John Taylor Gatto
Hamza Yusuf Hanson
Dorothy Sayers
…it was seen that school could be a conditioning laboratory, making children susceptible to any sort of authoritarian command, including the soft-core authoritarianism of advertising and public relations.
the roots of dopamine hegemony...,
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