Tavi Shaffer-Green, a 2 1/2 year boy from Kansas, can draw maps and name countries better than most (take the little quiz in the sidebar to see if you can match his brains). Writes the Lawrence Journal-World: “Tavi is still in diapers and hasn’t yet started preschool, but he can identify all the countries in the world — with the exception of maybe a Pacific island or two — and can draw many of them by hand. He’s known all the planets since he was 20 months old and can tell you during what time period Antarctica formed.”

This is quite something to read about but to actually see this boy at work is something else. Watch the Channel 6 news story on Tavi.

“Tavi’s next big step is to start half-day Montessori preschool in the fall in California. His parents say they mainly want him to learn social skills and haven’t given too much thought to what his schooling step will be after that. It should be interesting, though. When he went to visit the preschool, he looked at a map on the wall and saw that something was amiss. Tavi says he told the teacher: “This a very old map. The Democratic Republic of the Congo was still Zaire.”

And to think he just wants to be an astronomer or a spaceman.

By way of atlas(t)