Child genius

[AnonymousTomato]

Is anyone watching on channel 4?

He looked positively gleeful.

I don't know why I'm surprised I've seen plenty of nasty parents when my dcs have been taking part in various sports. However surely if you know cameras are on you, you'd pretend to be nice

You'd think wouldn't you? Staggering lack of awareness.

I was increasingly irritated by the way that Rahul's dad would keep turning his head round sharply to his wife, usually if it looked as if Rahul had got something wrong or another child was pulling ahead of him. Not sure if he was saying something to her, expressing shock or what, but it somehow looked confrontational.

I am still wondering if the spellings, general knowledge etc were given to them so they all had the same stuff.

I'm quite sure the spellings were given to them in advance because there is no way all those children would have come across those words accidentally. I also noticed last night that when they were mugging up on word meanings they all seemed to be working from a batch of papers stapled together: you'd think if it was general revision they would have been working from dictionaries or something. I suspect they were also given the same material for things like science and possibly history.

It makes it all the more ridiculous to call this Child Genius. The reality is that they aren't spelling the words, they're regurgitating random strings of letters that they've memorised. The ability to do that doesn't make anyone a genius.

You have a point Ceto. Dh and I actually had a bit of a ding dong over the inclusion of spelling and vocabulary. He says they shouldn't be included because "knowing how to spell won't lead to any scientific breakthroughs" . I'll remind him of that next time he's composing an important email and wants to check the spelling and vocabulary.

Indeed, my likely-dyslexic DD could have a good stab at those rounds if given a list because she has a good long term memory for that sort of thing. She can't spell for toffee IRL though!

I'd thought it looked like they all had the same papers too, but wasn't sure if they'd all googled for lists of fancy words or something. But there seemed to be virtually no asking for definitions/sentence examples/etymology this year even though they still had that option - surely that would've happened more if they had never seen the words before. I remember in a previous series it looked like several kids had the same encyclopaedia so we weren't sure if they'd all been given them, or if it was coincidence.

I agree it's silly if they're all given stuff to learn from. Surely part of genius is that you're voracious for facts and you'll pick up loads, do your own reading and think for yourself what would be the best way to increase your knowledge base for the competition.

Not having your mum actually write your revision notes for you as in Rahul's (and possibly others TBF) case.

I'm pretty sure they differentiated for age in the earlier rounds, does anyone else think so or remember it being mentioned?

How would they do it though, do you mean with question difficulty?

I got the impression that they all started with easier questions that gradually got harder, for example the last questions on the royal families and bus route rounds seemed to have a set format with more information required. In previous years I've had the impression they get easier again if the child gets them wrong. Hard to tell when it's so edited though!

Ronan was amazing. He seems so mature and relaxed. I thought Rahul was the deserving winner. He was strong across almost all areas. I think some of the comments about him on here are really mean. He is only twelve and most of the time he was polite and behaved well most of the time. He may have come over a little 'smug' but that's hardly surprising.

I'll admit to not being a fan of the Dad but I disagree that he was being nasty by laughing when Ronan got the maths question wrong. Everyone was laughing in a sympathetic 'oh no' sort of way and I think that Rahul's Dad was doing the same.

Sorry for crappy English

I thought the younger ones got easier spellings and less complex connections from the memory rounds. But as I'm not a genius I may be wrong

I think rahuls 'strategy' his dad talked about was pressing the button first and working put the answer when his brain caught up (which was fast). I think both kids knew the answers (both smart as whips) but he had the advantage of a split second thinking time.

What was Rahul's specialist subject? I missed the first few mins of the programme

Fed ward Jenner and smallpox.

Apart from the lass who chose Martin Luther King, all the specialist subjects were precocious.

Thomas Frith, 2015 winner, goes to my dcs' school. He's just got 2 more A levels today - to add to the two Maths-based ones he already had. He's going into Year 10 in September and is off to the UKMT Olympiad training camp.

Thanks for this. I always wanted to know what happened to Thomas. He seems like he's a lovely boy.