The greatest challenge with gifted kids, however, may be that they’re not challenged enough. If the goal of education is to help every child reach his or her potential, then gifted kids—whose potential far exceeds educational standards—are America’s greatest underachievers. The Weismann boys spent kindergarten at Lake Harriet Elementary, where it’s doubtful they learned anything. While other kids were memorizing the alphabet, Henry and Charlie were reading chapter books, and Henry, utterly unengaged, would sometimes disrupt his classes. In one study of gifted children, half had been written up for bad behavior.

Gifted kids may not be challenged until college—where they often have no idea how to cope with the workload, says Theresa Boatman, a Plymouth-based psychologist who specializes in counseling gifted kids. As many as 60 percent of gifted kids drop out of college, studies suggest, and not just to form their own companies, as Harvard dropout Bill Gates did. “They drop like rocks,” says Dave Eisenstadt, who recently retired from teaching at Atheneum Magnet School for gifted kids in Inver Grove Heights. “They’re pushed to the point that they can’t do the work. It’s like being born with any other handicap.”

— Tim “Chairman of the Party” Gihring, my favorite Minnesota in-print personality, writes about MN’s left behind smart children in MNMo