12-летняя гениальная ученица из Монреаля начинает последний год школы в обычном классе

On the outside, Charlie Maya Marcotte is a stereotypical teen. Her bedroom door is festooned with pink lipstick kisses, which she admits took some time to do. There is a Leonard Cohen album cover on one wall of her room, a painted portrait of her mom — who used to be a model — on the other. Her vinyl record collection runs the gamut from Billy Joel to old timey jazz and Led Zeppelin. Conversation runs a whole other gamut: COVID, Marxism vs. capitalism, Artificial Intelligence, the Middle East and antisemitism. The main topic, though, is what it’s going to be like for a 12-year-old girl with the maturity and intelligence of an 18-year-old, a young woman with a genius-level IQ, to attend high school with peers five years her senior. Marcotte is part of a blended family of high achievers. Her older siblings have all skipped grades. She and her mother, Claudia Raymond, are originally from Montreal. They moved to Saint-Jérôme during COVID but returned to Montreal where Raymond has been undergoing treatment for stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. It’s just the two of them, now, in their small Montreal apartment. Marcotte hasn’t spent a lot of time, lately, in a school setting. But she is about to start her last year of high school at the age of 12. The Quebec educational designation for students like Marcotte is Haut Potentiel Intellectual (HPI), or gifted. While she was not exactly homeschooled, she did complete the equivalent of four years of high school in three months, studying on her own at her kitchen table, easily acing her exams. “I learn very quickly,” she tells The Suburban. Whether it is something she is taught, or if she reads it in a book, “I will memorize it and remember it for the rest of my life.” Raymond explains that they had trouble finding a school in Montreal that would not only take her but could accommodate her. Private school is not an option. So, after intervention from le Protecteur national de l’élève (Quebec’s student ombudsman), the pair finally settled on Saint-Luc High School in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Marcotte is also a budding singer-songwriter. She has been writing and performing from a very young age. More recently, she has been recording her own music, working with Quebec musicians Robert Marchand, who played with Céline Dion, and Benoit David, who famously replaced Jon Anderson as the lead singer of Yes. n