Way Ahead of the Class : Past and Present Gifted Students Honor the Teacher Who Guided Them

It was a common end-of-school scene: a sweltering afternoon in the junior high school auditorium, the school orchestra playing, students putting on skits and a retiring teacher wiping away a tear as he is handed a plaque.

But Paul Mertens’ students and former students--who along with their parents made up the audience of 400 at Walter Reed Junior High in North Hollywood on Saturday--are different.

Among them:

* An 18-year-old geneticist who plans to spend the summer looking for the gene that triggers antibodies for AIDS.

* An astronomer fresh out of Caltech and on his way to the prestigious doctoral program at the University of Hawaii.

* A jazz saxophonist.

* A lot of Harvard-trained lawyers and a slew of doctors.

They are Los Angeles’ real-life Doogie Howsers, students and former students with IQs between 145 and 200.

And they say that without Mertens--a Belgian immigrant who made them learn Latin in the seventh grade--they might have wound up like so many highly gifted youngsters: underachieving, unhappy, unable to understand that they think differently from other kids because they are smarter, not dumber.

“We learned how to learn,” said Michael Nassir, the budding astronomer, who attended Reed Junior High from 1982 to 1985. “We learned how to achieve and how to think.”

Mertens came to the United States in 1948, at 16 a graduate of one of Belgium’s Royal Academies and the youngest freshman at the University of Arizona. After college, he volunteered to fight in the Korean War and became a U.S. citizen as a result. He earned a master’s degree in medieval history from UCLA.

Thirty-five years ago, Mertens accepted a position at Reed Junior High, and began working on a program for highly gifted youngsters. In 1971, he created the Individualized Honors Program, with help from William Fitz-Gibbon, who still teaches at the school, and Judy Selsor, who retired two years ago.

“I always felt that people did not give recognition to highly gifted students because they felt it was undemocratic,” Mertens said. “But I felt just the opposite. If a person has special abilities, they deserve as much to develop their talent as a student who is handicapped or blind.”

Students in the program are screened not only by intelligence, but by motivation. Mertens and two other teachers work with them for three years, from the seventh through the ninth grades. To keep them well-rounded, students attend classes with regular students for a portion of the day, but study math, science, social studies and English in the special program.

Children withstand bus and car rides as long as two hours to attend the program, the only one of its kind in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

A group of 27 families who live on the Westside charter a private bus to take their children to North Hollywood because the district does not provide transportation.

Josh Rosenblum’s parents thought so much of the program that they drove him to North Hollywood from Thousand Oaks every day for three years. Rosenblum graduated this year from Andover Academy, the exclusive boys’ prep school in Massachusetts, and plans to study economics at Stanford University in the fall.

“The great majority of our students go to Yale, Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA,” Mertens said. “At one time, we had 10 or 11 students at Harvard, and the students jokingly called it ‘Reed East.’ ”

A slight, gray-haired man with dancing blue eyes, Mertens speaks with a mild Belgian accent that inspired his students’ favorite joke. They are always talking about how they learned not to engage in “foozy tinking”--that’s fuzzy thinking--in his class.

Adults recall him as a stern but encouraging teacher. Today’s crop of students agree.

“He has this weird control over class,” said Sonja Kallstrom, a 12-year-old seventh-grader. “I don’t know how he does it. He lets kids talk in the middle of class while we’re discussing things, but there’s still control.”

The key, according to Mertens and teacher Fitz-Gibbon, is to figure out how to reach inside squirmy adolescents to stimulate the nearly adult intellectual capacity within.

“There is no training for teachers of the highly gifted,” Fitz-Gibbon said. “It’s a forgotten field.”

In Mertens’ classroom last week, students learned about the civilization of ancient Greece through their teacher’s use of the Socratic method. Books in the classroom included Platonic dialogues, Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” and Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.”

Mertens tried to make the day’s topic relevant to modern life: He compared elements of life in ancient Greece to the McCarthy era in the United States and the current xenophobia in Germany.

Houman Hemmati, the young geneticist who, between experiments, hopes to help Mayor-elect Richard Riordan set up a commission on education, said that was typical of classes he remembers: “He really fostered a sense of social responsibility in us.”

“They had a lot to do with shaping who I am, my character,” said Adam Pines, who is attending law school at New York University. In Mertens’ classes, Pines said, students as young as 12 learned formal logic and ancient history.

Mertens said he plans to learn to play the piano in his retirement, and work to foster better education for highly gifted students throughout the state. He and his wife, Betty, have bought a home near Yosemite National Park.

He says there is a lesson in his success with gifted students: set high goals, and the students--whomever they are--will come up to meet them.

Times staff writer Gary Libman contributed to this report.