There have always been students whose abilities overshadow their fellows. In some cases, these students even outshine their teachers, even from a young age. While most teachers feel honored to have such a brilliant student in their midst, a lot of times the student feels a lot worse about the arrangement than the teacher does. Typically, these are the students most likely to clown around in class and act the fool, just because they get bored.
This boredom tends to come about because a student isn’t being sufficiently challenged intellectually. A student in this boat will tend to see their education as nearly pointless, because they tend to grasp what their teacher is talking about immediately. At that point the teacher just keeps talking, trying to hammer home the point to the lowest common denominator. While the smart student might be fine with this for a moment, it won’t be long before they’re cracking wise and trying to get something more interesting to be talked about. A lot of times the subject is just too easy for them.
However, a wily teacher can use this intelligence to its greatest advantage through actually encouraging this student to do research on a challenging topic during class time. While it might at first seem like administering special treatment, if you set up a few challenges leading up to this, it can be a great way for other students to push themselves to perform at the top level, and be assigned difficult projects as well. You can even set it up so that the student reports in once they get what you’re lecturing about, and test their comprehension speed.