Good NewsBoy genius: 5-year-old Gus Dorman inducted into Mensa
Gus Dorman is only 5 years old.
To qualify for admission into Mensa, an individual needs to score 135 on an IQ test. Gus is now one the exclusive high-IQ society's youngest members.
The kindergartener can recite the periodic table of elements and list every American state and every country in the world from memory. While his peers are just learning to read, Gus read the newspaper and Wired magazine while potty training.
"He started reading when he was 18-months-old," Gus' dad, Rob Dorman, told the St. Louis Post Dispatch. "He was sitting on the porta-potty reading a newspaper. I noticed that he liked to look at maps so I put one up. In about a week's time, he had memorized everything on it. He's just always been very clever."
"He got into an argument with me because I told him that the capital of Alaska is Anchorage," Dorman told ABC News. "But it's not, it's Juneau."
The Collinsville, Illinois, youngster is obsessed with black holes and astrophysics — and is struggling to enjoy his current kindergarten curriculum: "They teach me stuff I already know."
"He's so far advanced, he is bored and he gets into trouble," Dorman said of his son. "He thinks he's a bad kid but he just needs to be challenged."
The Dormans are currently looking for better schooling options for Gus — hopefully a gifted program — in their current school district.
"As parents we’re lost," Dorman told ABC News of Gus’ school options. "I don’t think homeschooling is the way to go. He needs the camaraderie in the social portion of school. The books are one thing, but you have to have the social part too."
The Atlantic Wire reported that these super-young geniuses are more common than we realize.
"Mensa is an organization that's arguably friendlier to the youngs than the olds. Part of the reason for that might have to do with how our brains work, but it also helps the organization to induct these headline-grabbing kids whenever it can. It's no cake walk, though. There are hard requirements for membership. You must score in the top 2 percent on an approved standardized test. Little Gus took the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale and scored in the 99th-percentile," wrote Adam Clark Estes.
He continued, "Gus's story is impressive, but he's upstaged by three-year-old Sherwyn Sarabi, the world's youngest Mensa member who popped up in the press earlier this year. This young British boy doesn't quite have the numbers that Gus, the American kindergartener, does — his IQ is only 136 — but he did knock the socks off his pediatrician when he started naming the countries on a map in the doctor's office."
