Ian Baker entered the Reception class at his local state elementary school two months after his fifth birthday. Ian’s phenomenal abilities in number and language, and his remarkable gift for cartography, have been described in this and previous chapters. During his first few months in school no allowance was made for his mathematical abilities, and only after his parents had gently informed the teacher that he had just finished reading E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web was he permitted to forego the reading readiness exercises undertaken by the rest of the class.

Ian was bored, deeply unhappy and restless at school, but his parents were not informed of any serious behavioural problems. However, as was described in Chapter 1, after Ian had been at school for some eight months, the school administration asked for a meeting with Brock and Sally Baker. In this meeting the parents were rather brusquely informed that Ian was uncontrollable in class, that he was displaying bouts of frightening physical violence towards other children, and that the school wished to have him psychometrically assessed with a view to transferring him to a school for behaviourally disturbed children. This special school was attached to the psychiatric department of a large children’s hospital. ‘We were totally devastated,’ says Brock Baker. ‘We felt as though we had managed in five and a half years to bring up a violent criminal who was about to be expelled from school before he had completed one year.’

In some ways, however, the news of Ian’s aggressiveness at school confirmed a concern that Brock and Sally already had about aspects of his behaviour at home.

We had always felt that Ian was reasonably bright, and we had noticed that whenever he became bored he stormed around the place like a caged lion looking for a fight. When he was in that mood he became physically aggressive and verbally nasty towards anyone in reach, especially smaller children. When he was mentally stimulated, then his behaviour improved considerably. Accordingly, we were only too happy to have him assessed. We felt sure that if he was indeed identified as bright and in need of further stimulation, then the school would respond to this. In addition, any help the psychologist could give us to improve our handling of Ian at home would be most welcome!
(Brock Baker, father of Ian)

Ian was assessed on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Test at the age of 5 years 11 months and was found to have a mental age of 9 years 10 months and an IQ somewhere in excess of 169. (Subsequent testing at the age of 9 years established a mental age of 18 years and a ratio IQ of 200.) To complement the Stanford–Binet testing, the educational psychologist administered a test of reading achievement and found that Ian’s reading accuracy and comprehension were at the twelve-yearold level – an advancement of more than six years. The psychologist confirmed Brock and Sally Baker’s belief that Ian’s emotional swings were directly related to the amount of intellectual stimulation he was receiving, and emphasized the importance, for the emotional health of such an exceptionally gifted child, of providing him with academic work at sufficiently challenging levels, and with the companionship of children of like abilities and interests. He referred Ian to the State Association for Gifted and Talented Children, and recommended to the school that it establish some form of enrichment and extension program to respond to Ian’s intellectual and social needs.

At first, the school, and Ian’s class teacher, responded to the challenge with enthusiasm.

Ian’s teacher, who had never had such a student in her class before, took it upon herself to stimulate Ian and did not force him to do the same work as the others if he did not want to. She scoured resource centres looking for suitable curriculum material and put in a great deal of extra work to ensure that the problem of boredom did not recur. Ian stayed with this teacher right through Grade 1 and Grade 2 and she gave him a variety of really stimulating maths tasks – some of them right up at Grade 8 level. In addition, the principal was very encouraging towards the gifted children in the school. He set up special pull-out sessions, taught both by himself and other staff members, which Ian and several others in the school attended. These two years could not have been better for Ian, and as a result the whole family benefited.
(Brock Baker, father of Ian.)

Unfortunately, this situation was relatively short-lived. Shortly after the start of the year in which Ian entered Grade 3, the elementary school principal retired, and the school was led until the end of the year by a temporary ‘acting’ principal. The pull-out program for gifted and talented students, which had been happening less and less regularly during the last few months of the old principal’s stay, was finally disbanded. During the first semester, Ian’s teacher permitted him to work on an individualized maths program using a Grade 7 mathematics text; however, he received no guidance or assistance, and no other children to work with, and during the second semester, with little encouragement to continue, Ian gradually reverted to the Grade 3 maths curriculum of his classmates.

Ian has a very frustrating attitude of never telling us what is happening at school except to say that it is boring, so it was well into the year before we realized what was happening. All the negative behaviours had returned and our home life was gradually turning sour again, but we had assumed that the school, having found what worked for Ian, would be keeping up the good work. When we finally got it out of him that there no longer was a pull-out program and that he was back to doing Grade 3 maths, we were appalled.
(Brock Baker, father of Ian)

The new principal was a politically alert young woman who was aware of the hostility of the Australian teachers’ industrial unions towards special programming for the gifted, and the disapproval of gifted programs openly voiced by a number of influential senior administrators in the state Education Department. She was also made aware, by her new staff, that they had ‘had enough of gifted children and special programs for the gifted’, which they felt had been foisted upon them by the old principal. The Bakers sought an interview to ask her if something could be done to alleviate Ian’s boredom and frustration. She was not unsympathetic, but was adamant that Ian should not receive any special program or provision that was not offered to the other children in the school. She stated frankly to Brock and Sally that it would be ‘political suicide’ for her to establish gifted programs within her school.

Ian completed Grade 3 in a quiet fury of anger, intellectual frustration and bitterness. The verbal and physical aggressiveness returned in full spate; however, as he was now two years older than he had been in Grade 1, he was able to maintain a tighter control on his emotions while at school, and his teachers remained quite unaware of the emotional toll levied on the child. At home, however, he released all his frustration and resentment and he became, in Brock’s words, ‘almost impossible to live with’.

This situation lasted for the remainder of Grade 3 and through the whole of Grade 4. The Bakers made regular visits to the school to plead with the teachers and the principal to provide some form of intellectual stimulation for Ian, but they were met with vague promises of enrichment that never, in fact, materialized.

During his Grade 4 year, Brock and Sally decided to have Ian reassessed by an independent psychologist with a special interest in intellectually gifted children. Accordingly, at the age of 9 years 3 months Ian was assessed first on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC–R) and subsequently on the Stanford–Binet L–M, the scale on which he had first been tested at age 5. Ian ceilinged out on the WISC–R, scoring scaled scores of 19 (the maximum possible) on all subscales of both the verbal and performance sub-tests. On the Stanford–Binet Ian, in the words of the psychologist’s report, ‘sailed through all the items through to the highest level of all, Superior Adult Three. Here he did start to fail on some tests, but nevertheless his IQ came off the top of this scale also.’ Ian scored a mental age of 18 years 6 months, exactly twice his chronological age, and thus a ratio IQ of 200. In addition, the psychologist administered standardized achievement tests of maths, reading and spelling. Ian’s reading and spelling were at adult level, and on the British Ability Scales maths test, he scored more than five years above his chronological age.

The psychologist was appalled to hear that a child of such exceptional talent was being forced to plod through a lock-step curriculum with other Grade 4 students. Her written report, reproduced in part in Chapter 1, expressed her extreme concern that Ian was required to undertake the regular curriculum with age-peers, and recommended, quite unequivocally, that for his educational and psychological welfare, he urgently needed acceleration, especially in the area of maths. The report was ignored.

Half way through Ian’s Grade 4 year, it became clear to the Bakers that there was little hope of his school, under the new principal, ever re-establishing its programs for, or its interest in, highly able students. Brock Baker wrote to me describing his frustration:

During the last year and a half we feel that Ian has only been marking time and has not been advancing at a rate comparable with his ability. We consider this to be far from satisfactory. So much so that we are considering moving Ian to another school, but are being quite frustrated by the almost total lack of interest shown by the schools so far contacted. In most cases the principals are aware of the problems that can stem from having gifted children in the school, but do not have special programs for such children and are not prepared to set them up ... The only time a gifted child gets fair treatment, let alone special treatment, is when there is an individual teacher prepared to do extracurricular work to seek out and provide the stimulating material for these students. The education system in this State is in no way geared towards helping gifted children. In fact it actually works against them.

Despite its assurance that Ian’s academic needs would be addressed, his new school was at first slow to make appropriate provision and, in Sally’s words, ‘we had to do our fair share of reminding them of the promises they made before he was enrolled, which were the basis for our decision to enrol him!’ A request to the principal that he be permitted to take maths with the Grade 7 class was met with the response that there would be little point in this as his achievement level was already many years ahead of Grade 7! However, during the first semester of Grade 5 he was permitted to participate in pull-out programs for mathematically gifted children in Grades 5–7, and when his Grade 5 teacher admitted, with commendable courage and honesty, that she simply did not have the skills or knowledge to extend his phenomenal maths capacities within the regular classroom, the school sought, and found, a mentor for him. This was a maths teacher from the senior school, who has authored several maths texts and is regarded as extremely able in his field. This teacher worked with Ian in a mentorial relationship for the rest of the year, taking him through the Grades 8 and 9 maths curricula, and filling in the gaps in his knowledge. The target was to bring Ian up to the Grade 10 standard in maths so that the following year, 1990, he could work with the Grade 10 students in a program of subject acceleration.

This indeed occurred. In 1990 Ian, aged 10, was based with the Grade 6 students but undertook maths with the top stream of Grade 10. The school swiftly recognized the academic and emotional benefits that arose from his maths acceleration, and proposed to the Bakers that Ian should skip Grade 7 and go straight into Grade 8 at the start of 1991. To complement the grade-skip, the school, with the Bakers, designed a program of subject acceleration in Ian’s areas of particular strength. This found him, at the age of 11 years 10 months, based in Grade 8 but taking maths and computing with Grade 11, science with Grade 10 and social studies with Grade 9.

In 1989 the school entered Ian, along with other mathematically gifted students, in two Australia-wide maths competitions. Normally students are not eligible to enter these competitions before Grade 7; however, in recognition of Ian’s phenomenal abilities, he was permitted to enter while still in Grade 5. In both competitions he out-performed all other entrants from his school. Ian was jubilant but slightly dazed.

His achievements in these competitions finally meant that he received some public recognition for his scholastic abilities. The certificates and trophies were presented at school Assemblies, and, in addition, his achievements were referred to during the junior school principal’s annual report presented on Speech Day. This was the first time in Ian’s life that anyone had publicly acknowledged and praised his abilities. For Ian, and his parents and grandparents, Speech Day was a very high High.
(Brock Baker, father of Ian)

The Bakers have been relieved to note that certain unpleasant physical symptoms that plagued Ian for some time dissipated with the disappearance of the intellectual frustration. ‘As the anger and aggressiveness lessened,’ says Sally, ‘so did the blinding headaches, and the nausea and the stomach pains. He is a different child.’

Ian Baker’s mathematical ability is certainly on a par with that of Christopher Otway and may well equal that of Adrian Seng. Unlike Adrian and Chris, however, his astonishing potential has largely been ignored by the education system; indeed, for a substantial proportion of his elementary schooling, his progress in maths has been deliberately suppressed. It is unfortunate that he had to suffer through four years of appalling educational mismanagement before his astonishing intellectual abilities were at last acknowledged.