13-year-old aces 1st year at UPEI

Elementary school was excruciating for Vivian Xie.

At seven, Vivian knew how to add, subtract and multiply negative numbers and decimals, while her classmates were just learning basic patterns and shapes.

"I was surpassing them in terms of the amount of knowledge I knew," Vivian said in a phone interview.

She had learned to read and write Mandarin when she was two, before her family moved to Charlottetown from China. Now, at 13, Vivian has just wrapped her first year at the University of Prince Edward Island.

The mature, friendly and soft-spoken teen was just 12 when she began university and is on track to finish a biology degree before she can get behind the wheel of a car.

'A regular graduate out of high school'

So far, university has been a breeze: Vivian finished her first semester with grades above 91 per cent.

"I was expecting a bit more stress than high school," she said. "Sometimes I find in university there was too little to do."

When she wasn't cramming for exams, Vivian said she read ahead. She picked up a couple of credits for a minor in anthropology, and she made a few friends on the way.

Larry Hale, an associate professor of biology at UPEI who taught Vivian last semester, said she seemed no different than any other new student.

"It did catch me off guard when I met her," Prof. Hale said. "She just really came off as a regular graduate out of high school. She has a very mature demeanour about her."

No parental pressure

Despite being incredibly advanced for her age, Vivian says her childhood wasn't that much different from other children. But instead of playing sports like her classmates, she says she spent most afternoons in the library. She likes reading, painting and drawing, and table tennis.

She went to birthday parties and fundraisers with her older friends.

She says her love for learning came from her grandmother, a high school biology teacher.

"She taught me, at a very young age, material from junior high," Vivian said. "And she did all this without me knowing. We'd go to the park and she would make up a game and I wouldn't even know that I was learning."

Vivian said her parents never pressured her to get ahead in her studies.

"As long as she stays on the right path, it doesn't matter to me. I want her to be healthy, be happy and have some form of contribution to society," Hai Yan Jiang said in a phone interview in which Vivian served as translator.

Her parents have been supportive of her drive to seek knowledge, she said. Her only obstacle: P.E.I.'s public school system.

Lobbying to skip grades

Despite Vivian's excellence in all subjects, she said school officials were concerned that she wouldn't keep up socially with her older peers if she were to skip more than one grade.

It was Vivian's idea to skip grades, but she said her principal preferred to discuss it with her parents instead of her.

"The principal definitely enjoyed listening to my parents' voices instead of mine."

I was profoundly bored throughout my early grades.- Vivian Xie

Her frustration remains palpable. In December, she wrote to the Charlottetown Guardian newspaper to call for a more flexible system.

"Imagine you are playing an exciting video game. You defeated the boss and are ready to move onto the next stage. However, you discover that the game requires you to wait until every other player has finished. Imagine the boredom you would experience and the loss of desire to play afterwards," she wrote.

"In our current educational system, this is how it works."

She said that if kids are to believe the sky's the limit, they should be allowed to fly when they're ready. The school system, she said, should be more open to grade-skipping.

"I was profoundly bored throughout my early grades; concepts came relatively easy to me, and I waited through grades instead of learning. Although being accelerated one grade forward was simple, further advancement was near impossible. After a while, my interest decreased exponentially," she said in her letter.

When she started Grade 1 in Charlottetown, Vivian says she demonstrated better self-awareness than her classmates and understood advanced mathematics.

Near the end of the year, she learned how to read and write in English through the school's ESL resource. She started to excel in all her classes and by Grade 2 she felt more knowledgeable than her classmates.

By Grade 4, she decided she needed to move her education along.

Vivian said she moved with her family from P.E.I. to Halifax to attend a private school where it was possible for her to skip Grade 4. After several tests, she says teachers placed her in Grade 8.

Back to P.E.I.

After a brief high school career in British Columbia while staying with her older sister, Vivian returned to P.E.I. to attend university, where she hopes to gain the skills to become a veterinarian while still a teenager.

She turned down an offer from the University of Victoria because of UPEI's "outstanding vet program."

Vivian still holds on to parts of her childhood, including her favourite book,Alice in Wonderland, and her stuffed animals. But she said she hasn't had a problem fitting in with her much older peers.

After attending classes with people in the 18-to-22 age range, she's managed to make some friends.

"Most of them have graduated and have found work already," she said. "And they don't really party much, so I don't feel left out."

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