Taking Care of Late Bloomers

Our oldest son would be categorized as a late blooming basketball player. When he was a high school freshman, he was one of the smallest on the court. As a high school senior, he was ignored by universities and only attended the University of Houston as a walk-on through the good graces of then new coach Kelvin Sampson. But then something happened. Our oldest started to grow into his body. He grew to 6 foot 3 inches and spent time in the weight room. He started to shoot 3-point shots at an impressive percentage, after spending hundreds of hours shooting thousands of shots in a gym occupied by only him. He started to throw himself around a college basketball floor like someone unwilling to lose the ball to his opponent. He didn’t like to lose, and he loved to play – and he loved to make his teammates better. He finished his college basketball career as a team captain and a player whose Houston basketball team lost to Michigan in the 2018 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. He now plays professional basketball overseas.

When it comes to learning, why are we so quick to reward early bloomers, or in other words, kids who demonstrate the ability to read, write, problem-solve, play sports, sing well, and the list goes on and on, early in their learning career? And why are we so quick to give up on those late bloomers who struggle and sometimes fail early in the learning process?

David Brooks recently wrote an article for The Atlantic on the topic of late bloomers. Here’s some excerpts:

“Paul Cezanne always knew he wanted to be an artist. His father compelled him to enter law school, but after two desultory years he withdrew. In 1861, at the age of 22, he went to Paris to pursue his artistic dreams but was rejected by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, struggled as a painter, and retreated back to his hometown in the south of France, where he worked as a clerk in his father’s bank.”

“He returned to Paris the next year and was turned down again by the Ecole. His paintings were rejected by the Salon de Paris every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit paintings until 1882, but none were accepted. He joined with the Impressionists, many of whose works were also being rejected, but soon stopped showing them as well.”

“By middle age, he was discouraged. He wrote to a friend, ‘On this matter I must tell you that the numerous studies to which I devoted myself having produced only negative results, and dreading criticism that is only too justified, I have resolved to work in silence, until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavors.’ No Cezanne paintings were put on public display when he was between 46 and 56, the prime years for many artists, including some of Cezanne’s most prominent contemporaries.”

…

“Things began to turn around in 1895, when, at the age of 56, Cezanne had his first one-man show. Two years later, one of his paintings was purchased by a museum in Berlin, the first time any museum had shown that kind of interest in his work. By the time he was 60, his paintings had started selling, though for much lower prices than those fetched by Manet or Renoir. Soon he was famous, revered. Fellow artists made pilgrimages to watch him work.”

“What drove the man through all those decades of setbacks and obscurity? One biographer attributed it to his “inquietude” – his drive, restlessness, anxiety. He just kept pushing himself to get better.”

…

“The years after his death [at 67], a retrospective of his work was mounted in Paris. Before long, he would be widely recognized as one of the founders of modern art: ‘Cezanne is the father of us all,’ both Matisse and Picasso are said to have declared.”

“Today we live in a society structured to promote early bloomers. Our school system has sorted people by the time they are 18, using grades and SAT scores. Some of these people zoom to prestigious academic launching pads while others get left behind. Many of our most prominent models of success made it big while young – Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan. Magazines publish lists with headlines like ’30 Under 30’ to glamorize youthful superstars on the rise. Age discrimination is a fact of life. In California in 2010, for example, more people filed claims with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing for age discrimination than for racial discrimination or sexual harassment. ‘Young people are just smarter,’ Zuckerberg once said, in possibly the dumbest statement in American history. ‘There are no second acts in American lives,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, in what might be the next dumbest.”

…

“Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak Dinesen published the book that established her literary reputation, Out of Africa, at 52. Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s leading chipmaker, at 55. If Samuel Johnson had died at 40, few would remember him, but now he is considered one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. Copernicus came up with his theory of planetary motion in his 60s. Grandma Moses started painting at 77. Noah was around 600 when he built his ark (though Noah truthers dispute his birth certificate).”

“Why do some people hit their peak later than others? In his book Late Bloomers, the journalist Rich Karlgaard points out that this is really two questions: First, why didn’t these people bloom earlier? Second, what traits or skills did they possess that enabled them to bloom late? It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable – they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers ‘fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,’ Karlgaard writes, ‘surprising even those closest to them.’”

Brooks highlights some of the traits late bloomers possess that others don’t – intrinsic motivation, early screw-ups, diversive curiosity, the ability to self-teach, the ability to finally commit, the mind of an explorer, crankiness in old age, and finally – wisdom.

How many young learners are dismissed as “behind” or ignored because “they can’t keep up”? Young learners who are held back in the 3^rd grade because of slow reading skills, only to “catch up” with the help of a strong tutor? Young learners who are discouraged to explore their own personal interests, only to spend time on skills that don’t really matter to them at the time? Young learners who are punished, in comparison to their peers, because they just aren’t ready to “learn” what “we want them to learn”?

Learning should be the constant and time the variable. In our traditional K-12 school system, too many times it’s the opposite.

So here’s to all the world’s “late bloomers”, including our son, the professional basketball player. And here’s to the hope that, very soon, we will offer those “late bloomers” a learning system that embraces them for who they are and what they will contribute to our world.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB