The boy who knew too much: a child prodigy

This is the true story of scientific child prodigy, and former baby genius, Ainan Celeste Cawley, written by his father. It is the true story, too, of his gifted brothers and of all the Cawley family. I write also of child prodigy and genius in general: what it is, and how it is so often neglected in the modern world. As a society, we so often fail those we should most hope to see succeed: our gifted children and the gifted adults they become. Site Copyright: Valentine Cawley, 2006 +

Saturday, February 02, 2013

The value of the unexpected.

For me, one of the most interesting qualities in a conversationalist, is the ability to surprise. It is what really grabbed my interest about my wife, when I first met her: she was constantly saying unexpected, unpredictable things, which I had never heard anyone say before. Until then, I had been accustomed to being able to predict basically what people were going to say next from the context of what they had already said: people were eminently predictable. My wife changed all that, by being eminently not so.

Ainan, too, has this quality of being unpredictable, though his unforeseeability has much more logic about it than my wife’s. I note that my spell checker doesn’t like the word “unforeseeability” – but I do, so it shall remain.

On Monday, 28^th January, Ainan observed: “There is a point at which buildings are too tall to be dangerous. That is when it takes so long to reach the ground that scientists would have invented teleportation by then.”

I laughed. I liked the playfulness of this comment – and its unexpectedness. It is a quality of mind of much merit, to entertain thoughts that no-one else has had – and to do so, in good humour.

Ainan’s mind appears to be an interesting blend of my wife’s and my own. From me, he has his scientific intellect, and a tendency to entertain big ideas; from his mother he has a seasoning of artistic license. Ainan commingles the two, never failing to be logical but, at the same time, often succeeding in being absurd. I cannot decide whether he will become a great scientist or a humourist! Probably both...one who crafts darkly humourous scientific jokes!

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Labels: a sense of humour, Ainan Celeste Cawley, comedic sense, comedy in children, sense of the absurd, the future, the unexpected

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 5:48 PM 4 comments

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Children’s conversation, overheard.

Fintan and Tiarnan were deep in conversation, when their mother, Syahidah passed by, a few days ago, and caught a little snippet of what they were saying.

“What is important?”, asked Tiarnan, just turned 7, over a week ago.

“Many things are important,” began Fintan, 9, very seriously, “wearing underwear is important – and COMPUSLORY”.

Syahidah was too overtaken with the hilarity of the moment, to investigate further, and find out the context.

This kind of slightly surreal comedy is not uncommon with our younger two sons. They speak in somewhat off the wall ways, that reveal a characteristic and appealing view of the world. The most bizarre of our sons is Tiarnan, but perhaps the most comedic, is Fintan – though, Ainan, too has a penchant for comedy.

Syahidah left them to discuss the Rules of the World, in their very sober tones, allowing herself a wide smile, at her glimpse into their world.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

Labels: a sense of humour, Fintan Cawley, Fintan's Logic, Fintanism, In the eyes of a child, the funny things children say, Tiarnan Hasyl Cawley, world view

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 6:44 PM 0 comments

Monday, January 28, 2013

Ainan’s curious sense of humour.

Tonight, as I walked through rain soaked streets, beneath neon lights, with Ainan, he observed:

“Humans have ten fingers. An octopus has eight tentacles. An octopus would be worse on the piano, than a human.”

My laughter lit up the drizzle, all around. It was such an unexpected remark, coming out of nowhere, that I found it immensely funny. Odd thoughts are typical of Ainan – he considers the everyday world and never fails to see something unusual in it. In this case, he looked at the number of appendages different creatures have and related that to the problem of being an effective pianist. How funny.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

Labels: a sense of humour, Ainan's viewpoint, In the eyes of a child, incongruity, octopus, pianist, the unexpected

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 1:50 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 24, 2013

A child’s eye view of technological change.

Ainan has a funny way of looking at the world. Sometimes he sees in it absurdities, and oddities others overlook – or manages to make seem absurd that which we have come to accept as ordinary.

A week or two ago, he remarked:

“Technology is declining. A couple of decades ago, your dishwasher had a name and could talk. Now? They can’t even move.”

He has a point. Why do we always seem to think that a machine is superior to a human, at various tasks? Sometimes, the human is altogether more, well, human, to have around.

This remark of his is not unmotivated however. It is an expression of a serious underlying attitude he has towards the future, in that he thinks we are likely to face a decline, rather than a “golden era”. He ruminates on the likely problems ahead and, for a young boy, is not altogether happy about the likely prospects for us all. Yet, he can still joke, which is, I suppose a good thing.

Then again, perhaps Ainan would like to do the dishes?

Posted by Valentine Cawley

Labels: a sense of humour, Ainan's apocalyptic future, future of Mankind, humans vs machines, In the eyes of a child, predicting the future, technological decline, technological progress, the future of science

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 2:49 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 30, 2012

On being predictable

Yesterday, my eldest son, Ainan, 13, sidled up to me, with an intent unreadable expression in his eyes.

I was busy with something on the computer, so my attention wasn't fully available to attend to his forthcoming words.

“Daddy, I know what you are going to say next.”

“What am I going to say next?”, I said, half-turning around in my chair, to him.

“See.”, he said, with a little smile that said it all.

For a moment, I felt very dumb.

I had to laugh. It was the only answer to properly defuse the sense of imminent idiocy, that threatened to submerge me.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

Labels: a sense of humour, Ainan Celeste Cawley, falling for a joke, how to feel dumb, on being predictable, on doing the expected, playfulness, predictability, teasing

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 3:00 PM 0 comments

Friday, August 31, 2012

Self-deprecating humour of a child prodigy.

Some able people praise themselves, a few others do what Ainan does: be self-deprecating.

About a month ago, Ainan remarked: “If people learn from their mistakes, I must be the most knowledgeable person in the world.”

He smiled at the end, and snorted a little laugh. His eyes twinkled at me.

I laughed with him.

Now, it must be said that this is Ainan’s style – to underplay or downplay himself. It must also be said that his remark is not true – for he does not make an unusual number of mistakes, in fact, he seems to make many fewer than most. Yet, this remark of his, is certainly typical of the way he refers to himself. He is even able to bring humour into how he describes himself.

I suppose that this self-deprecating humour of his may actually endear him to people. There is nothing more irritating than someone who spends their days boasting about themselves. By the same measure, there is something disarming about someone who downplays their many achievements and abilities and even speaks of them in a humorous way.

I do worry sometimes, though, that Ainan is a little too self-deprecating, on occasion. It makes me wonder whether he is actually being humorous – or, in fact, cannot see himself as he is, in relation to others. I think a clear vision of one’s place in the world and relation to others, is most helpful in guiding one’s choices in life. I do hope that Ainan’s tendency to self-deprecate won’t get in the way of that.

Having said that, Ainan’s approach will probably win him more friends than the opposite tack would garner. He is not one to push people away with a massive ego...he simply doesn’t have one. If anything he has the opposite of an ego. He is a quiet boy, who does not impose a self-image on the world, but holds it in reserve. When he speaks of himself, it is occasionally to disarm what others might think of him. He also manages to do it with humour. Indeed, humour is one of his more notable characteristics and it leaks into most areas of his life. He even began to make scientific jokes as early as six years old – but that is another tale.

I like this new wittiness that I see growing in Ainan. He has become a fashioner of one-liners. Most of them are not self-deprecating however, and are neutral in content. I shall keep an eye on the self-deprecating side of him, though, because I would not like to see that become too dominant. It is dangerous to do that too much – for one day the person uttering such lines, might come to believe in them – and that wouldn’t be healthy.

In the meantime, I shall enjoy Ainan’s spontaneous humour and learn from the glimpses it reveals, of how he thinks about himself, and the world.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

Labels: a scientific comedian, a sense of humour, a way with words, Ainan Celeste Cawley, Ainan's viewpoint, comedy in children, funny moments, humility, In the eyes of a child, self-awareness, self-esteem, self-image

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 9:31 PM 2 comments

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Clint Eastwood is not the only one.

Fintan, 8, can be a rather cool kid, sometimes. By this I mean, cool in the way that certain iconic film stars have been, in my lifetime – with their pithy lines and their meaningful expressions, saying so much more than the words they have used. I mean the kind of cool that makes an impression on the viewer that is still remembered many years later. Fintan has that kind of cool, without really being aware of it.

A week or so ago, Fintan was playing Team Fortress 2 – a “shoot em up” style computer game.

He played with an easy flair of one accustomed to such things. At one point he shot a rocket at the feet of an opponent, which blasted the intact man far into the air.

“You don’t want to have a dead man’s body falling from the sky!” he remarked to his elder brother Ainan.

Then he fired again at the man, in mid air, catching him in a direct hit.

“You want pieces of him!”

The man exploded scattering chunks of redness everywhere.

His action and attendant words were so deft, so skilled, so well timed, that Ainan laughed to see him do it. When I heard the story, it immediately called to mind the pithy sayings of Clint Eastwood’s, or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s filmic alter egos, in which they would, in a few words, make comic what is, in fact, disagreeable to anyone of any sensitivity.

I don’t expect that Fintan is aware of what he is doing when he speaks in such a way, but actually he is being quite comically skilled. He creates an expectation with one statement – in this case that he disagreed with the idea that a dead man should be falling from the sky – and then follows it up with an even worse fate for the dead man. That is a structure which evokes laughter in the unprepared. What strikes me about it is that a young boy can be aware of and make use of such a structure, without perhaps being conscious that he is doing so. Comedy seems to emerge spontaneously in child development, humour being one of the more interesting manifestations of a developing personality. What is particularly interesting about it is that it appears spontaneously in some children, but not, it seems, in all children. What is it, I wonder that allows for the development of humour in some but not others? Why are some children simply funnier than their fellows? One aspect, I believe is the ability to consider the unexpected and the unlikely and bring them into the conversation. Some children do that readily, it being, perhaps, a property of imagination. Other children are stuck in the real, in what is, and what is before them, and cannot readily do this – so they are not funny.

All three of our sons are funny in their own ways. This humour often depends on the bizarre quality of their thought. In seeing them in action, I am often moved to consider the nature of their parents, and the origins of such a tendency to the bizarre. In that, I would say both their parents are to blame to some extent. It is funny though, to see these attributes reincarnated in the next generation and see them manifest in different ways. Few things in life are more interesting than observing how elements of oneself are reborn in the subsequent generations. My children’s style of humour is one of them. I look forward to much enjoyment to come.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

Labels: a sense of humour, child development, comedic sense, comedy in children, cool dude, coolness, dark humour, In the eyes of a child, verbal gift

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 6:59 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Fintan's very own season's greetings.

Fintan, 8, is a young boy of much whimsy. He has his own particular way of expressing himself that often leads to bizarre, or comic results.

Today, I phoned home to the UK to let my children speak to my parents. Just before the phone call went through, Fintan made a remark, which the others paid particular attention to.

I asked the boys to sing my parents, the song that begins: “We wish you a Merry Xmas...”

My father answered the phone.

The boys duly began singing.

“We wish you a HAIRY Xmas, we wish you a HAIRY xmas, we wish you a HAIRY xmas and a Happy New Year!”

“Could you hear them?”, I asked my father, wondering if he really had.

“Yes. They were wishing me a Merry Xmas.”

He seemed quite pleased at their singing.

“No.”, I said, “they were singing you: “I wish you a HAIRY Xmas...””

He laughed. “Oh were they?”

He turned to my mother, to explain what they had done.

Now he seemed even more impressed.

I have no doubt it was the first time, in my father’s life, that anyone had wished him a Hairy Xmas. That was what Fintan had remarked upon, before I put the call through. He is always coming out with off the wall remarks and reinterpretations of things he sees and hears. It is refreshing to hear his thoughts.

As for me, it is certainly a Hairy Xmas, since I have a beard at this time.

Anyway, in the spirit of Fintan, I would like to wish you all a Hairy Xmas, and a Happy New Year.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Labels: a sense of humour, Christmas Celebration, Fintan Cawley, In the eyes of a child, individuality, making a joke, the uniqueness of the individual

posted by Valentine Cawley @ 10:25 PM 8 comments

The boy who knew too much: a child prodigy

Saturday, February 02, 2013

The value of the unexpected.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Children’s conversation, overheard.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Ainan’s curious sense of humour.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

A child’s eye view of technological change.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

On being predictable

Friday, August 31, 2012

Self-deprecating humour of a child prodigy.

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Clint Eastwood is not the only one.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Fintan's very own season's greetings.

The boy who knew too much: a child prodigy

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