A local Detroit wiz kid is continuing to defy the odds with an extraordinary achievement.
Joe Faryean III was just 12-years-old when he began his freshman year at King High School and in just a few weeks, he will be the youngest in the Detroit Public School System graduating class at age 16. Joe’s father told the the Detroit Free Press that he knew his son was gifted very early in his life.
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“The teacher in Ghana, he called me one day to tell me, ‘You’ve got to keep an eye on your son, you’ve got to take care of him. He’s very gifted,'” the proud father said. “With other kids, you have to tell them to study. With him, I have to tell him, ‘You’ve got school in the morning, you have to go to bed.”
After skipping 2-3 grades before relocating to the United States, Joe went through a brief adjustment period, but it didn’t take long for his teachers to take note of his gifted level of intelligence.
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“As a teacher, once every five or six years you have a student where you’re just kind of in awe of them, and Joe is definitely one of those students,” his calculus teacher David Menczer said. “He is so far above the curve in work ethic and determination that it’s humbling.”
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Joe will graduate third in his class of 347 students with a near perfect GPA and has already been accepted into 9 colleges. He hopes to pursue a career in neurology and is currently deciding between Wayne State University and Michigan State.
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