I read on the Internet about this famous experiment that two guys did way back in 1964. They gave a test to some kids at a place called the Oak Elementary School. After the test they said the results showed that a portion of the kids were going to make fantastic progress during the school year. They called those special kids the “bloomers.”
Then they gave the teachers lists of all the bloomers so that the teachers could watch those certain kids change during the year. And the kids did. The kids on the bloomer lists all made amazing progress—real progress.
And here’s the best part: The information was fake! The names of the special kids, the bloomers? Those names were picked out of a hat! The only thing that wasn’t fake was the expectation of the teachers. The teachers actually expected certain kids to make progress, and that expectation was real, and the results at the end of the year were real too. The “bloomers” all made huge progress. All because of the expectations. Because expectations can be powerful.
And by Thursday morning almost every fifth grader and all my teachers were expecting to see the new and improved Nora Rowley, girl genius.
Getting the news about me to the kids had been Stephen’s job. It hadn’t been hard. Philbrook Elementary School had a gossip grapevine, and Jenny Ashton was the chief grape. One whispered phone call to Jenny on Sunday night was as good as a live press conference on CNN.
Mrs. Hackney had taken care of getting the news to all my teachers. I saw the principal’s memo on Mrs. Noyes’s desk during homeroom. It said, “After testing and observation, Dr. Trindler has determined that Nora Rowley is a profoundly gifted child. She has apparently been keeping this to herself for quite some time.”
So everybody was expecting to see a genius. Which was fine. Stephen and I were ready for that. On Thursday I was going to live up to everyone’s expectations. And maybe create some new ones.
In language arts class we were studying reading strategies like scanning and prereading and predicting. Mrs. Noyes passed out a three-page story and we had to leave the sheets face down on our desks. Then she said, “When I tell you to begin, I want all of you to turn the sheets over, and you’ll have fifteen seconds to scan the story. Then we’ll turn the pages face down again and talk about predicting what the whole story might be about from what you’ve been able to scan. So is everyone ready? . . . Begin scanning.”
Fifteen seconds later Mrs. Noyes told us to turn the sheets over, and she said, “All right, now based on what you saw in your scan, who can predict what happens in this story?”
When I raised my hand, the other kids who had their hands up pulled them down. They wanted to hear what the genius had to say.
I was the only person with a hand in the air, so Mrs. Noyes said, “Nora, what do you think this story’s about?”
I took a deep breath and said, “This story’s about a girl who lived during the Great Depression, and she needed to earn money so she could buy a birthday present for her father. Her mother had died the year before, and she knew her dad was so sad about it that he was almost ready to give up. There were no real jobs, but the girl finds this shopkeeper who says he’ll pay her ten cents every afternoon to sweep the sidewalk in front of his store. Some of her friends from school see her working and they make fun of her, but she doesn’t care. She keeps working, but time is running out and she can’t earn enough money. She tells her best friend and the friend tells the other kids at school. The day before her dad’s birthday, all of the other kids chip in enough so she can buy the present—it’s a little silver frame for her dad’s favorite photograph of her mom. Her dad had been so sad, but when he sees how much his daughter loves him, his whole outlook changes and he sees that he has a lot to be glad about and so much to live for. And I think this is a story about how hard work and love and unselfishness can change a person’s life.”
Mrs. Noyes didn’t know what to say. I had just told her exactly what happened in the story, because during that fifteen seconds I had read all three pages. I’ve always been able to read that way—I sort of see a whole page as one or two big blocks of words.
Mrs. Noyes said, “That’s very good, Nora. But was that really predicting? Didn’t you just give us a summary of the whole story?”
I nodded my head in agreement. “Yes. What I said was more like reviewing. When you know for certain what’s already happened, you can’t actually predict about it anymore. Because that’s an epistemological impossibility. Prediction has to include the idea of uncertainty—like a theory in scientific analysis, or an educated guess based on heuristic evidence.”
Mrs. Noyes nodded slowly and said, “Um . . . yes. Well, class, let’s move on and see if we can spot some of the clue words on the first page of the story. Remember, we’re looking for words that will help us make some predictions.”
I could feel everyone in the class staring at me. Showing off and using some big words like that made me feel uncomfortable. Then I took a quick glance over at Stephen, and he had this big, proud grin on his face. And instantly I felt perfectly at ease.
The class moved ahead, slowly picking out clue words. Mrs. Noyes didn’t call on me again during the rest of the period.
I was obnoxious all day long. In every class I found a way to put on my genius show. During art I got going with Ms. Prill about spectroscopic analysis and the different wavelengths of the primary and tertiary colors, and in social studies I had quite a lot to say about the effects of an unregulated financial market on the Great Depression.
In math class Mrs. Zhang and I had a ten-minute discussion about the best way to design a statistical analysis to try to discover the percentage of kids who would ever need to use the process of deriving the lowest common denominator once they left elementary school.
In music, when Mrs. Card said that the musical scale is made up of eight notes, I was able to point out that that’s true only if you are talking about the traditional Western diatonic scale—because there are also scales like the pentatonic scale and the twelve-tone scale. And then that led naturally into a brief discussion of the use of different modal scales like the Mixolydian or the Dorian mode as the basis for musical composition.
Gym class was a challenge because it’s not easy to get a conversation going with Mr. McKay. Still, I managed to offer some general comments about the structure of the inner ear and the way it affects balance and coordination.
Science was my best performance of the day. Mrs. Zhang was explaining about the speed of light. She said, “Since the sun is 93 million miles away, and since light travels at 186,000 miles per second, if the sun went out right now, we would still have another seven minutes of sunlight. The light traveling from the sun to the earth takes seven minutes to pass through that much space.” Which was interesting and quite true. But then she said, “Nothing travels faster than light.” And an idea popped into my mind.
I raised my hand, and when Mrs. Zhang nodded at me, I said, “But what about thought? If you say the word ‘sun,’ my thought can travel all the way across that 93 million miles to the sun and all the way back again in about one second. So since there are 420 seconds in seven minutes, doesn’t that mean that thought actually travels 840 times faster than light?”
Mrs. Zhang made a strange face as she tried to get her mind around that idea. Then she shook her head. She said, “But thought isn’t like light. Light is real. You can see it. You can’t see thought.”
I said, “Are you saying that a light wave or a light particle is more real than a thought is?”
Mrs. Zhang said, “Well . . . no, not exactly.”
And I said, “So are you saying that my thought can’t travel that far that fast? How about if I say ‘Alpha Centauri’? See? My thought has already traveled out into space, all the way to that star and all the way back again. And light would take almost nine years to make a round-trip to Alpha Centauri. Unless you can prove that my thought didn’t just go all the way there and back, then I’m sticking with my theory: Thought travels at least 840 times faster than light.” And all around the room, kids were nodding their heads, agreeing with me.
Now, if Mrs. Zhang had said, “Nothing material travels faster than light,” then she would have had me, and we could have talked for a while about the difference between physics and metaphysics. But she didn’t take her thinking that far.
Like I said, I was obnoxious all day Thursday. A real know-it-all.
When I went to the library after school, Mrs. Byrne smiled and nodded at me when I came in, but instead of motioning me to come and talk, she quickly turned away to do some other work. Which was probably the smart thing to do. She had apparently decided to keep clear of me for a while.
Stephen came in a little after I did and sat at the opposite end of my study table.
“Well?” I whispered. “Was I horrible enough?”
He grinned at me. “You were fantastically awful! Every kid is talking about you. And probably all the teachers, too. I bet they’re in the teacher’s room right now, swapping Nora stories. It was a perfect setup—perfect!”
Because that was the idea. Thursday was the setup day, the day to build up some expectations. Then we had some important events on Friday. And the big payoff would come on Monday. And probably Tuesday, too.
Our plan was in motion.