HE wasn’t coached or tutored.

He didn’t go to extra classes, nor was he part of a study group.

Ten-year-old Gianluca Webster got a grade I in Human and Social Biology all on his own, and the most difficult part, according to the Old Harbour Primary School student who is just about to enter grade six, was perhaps learning to write with a pen.

“I had to give him pens to practise with because you know CXC (Caribbean Examinations Council) doesn’t accept pencils,” his father Michael Webster, a corporal in the Jamaica Defence Force, tells the Sunday Observer.

Sure, he had to pore over the assigned textbook for two hours each day, but it didn’t matter to the boy who was already such a voracious reader that his parents literally have to hide his textbooks to keep him from completing the exercises before school starts each year.

“I read a book that my father gave me about the subject and I did some research online,” Gianluca says of his preparation for the exam, usually taken at the end of the fifth form year in high school. He completed the hour-and-50-minute-long essay paper within an hour and was equally quick with the multiple choice component.

“(Balancing my time between regular schoolwork and preparing for the CSEC subject) was easy to manage because usually, after school when I go home I would read the book for one or two hours and then I would go and, like any regular child does, play and watch TV. After that, I would do my homework,” he explains.

To prepare him for the challenge, his parents regulated time for study and play, and encouraged him mentally.

“We wanted it to be as natural as it could have been so we did not try to get even a tutor or any evaluation from any trained individual or anything like that,” his father says. “He’s a natural reader. We can’t send him to his room for any punishment; he will just go there and take out five or six books, spread them out on the bed and just read, because he has a lot of books.”

That love for reading, which started to bloom from “a very tender age”, was the reason Michael knew he could challenge his son to sit the CXC-administered exam even though he had not yet sat the high school qualifying Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT).

“My father was the one who wanted me to do the subject. At first I thought, how could I, at an age like that, do such a big test. Then I finally decided it was best that I do it because my parents knew that I loved the subject and if I did it and achieved, it would make my family proud,” says Gianluca.

He had no doubt he would have passed, but he didn’t think he’d get a distinction.

“Honestly, I thought I would have got a II (but) I’m very happy and very excited,” he gushes.

His classmates don’t yet know of his success, but his teachers, whom he says are “very excited and very proud of me” do, and are planning to pull out all the stops to prepare him for GSAT so that he can cop a government scholarship for high school.

When Michael bought the subject syllabus last October and went through it with Gianluca to determine his knowledge, he realised that his son already knew half of the course content.

“There and then I decided to pay for the subject,” the father says, adding that a couple months later when they misplaced the document during relocation, he didn’t replace it, but allowed the boy to prepare without it.

But even that didn’t daunt the 10-year-old. What he didn’t understand at first, he researched and figured out on his own. His parents didn’t coach him but quizzed him often to assess his progress.

“Most of it was easy for me to understand,” he tells the Sunday Observer. “The difficult parts were mostly some parts about the systems of the body. There were a few of them that I did not know about like the lymphatic and the endocrine system.”

The JDF corporal says he chose Human and Social Biology because of the relatively small amount of preparation time it required.

“I realised that because of his love for reading and the time of course, he could read and pass the subject without aid because the subject didn’t require any workshops or any labs or anything like that. I didn’t want to put him under any pressure to change his lifestyle from his normal activities as a child. I have always stressed that; that I want him to lead as relaxed and as normal a kid life as possible and I try to maintain that.

“It was just my evaluation. Knowing the child that he was, I decided and he accepted the challenge and just ran with it,” he says, the pride in his eyes hard to miss.

“His mom was extremely instrumental in his preparations though. She played great role in ensuring that she regulated time to study and to play,” he adds.

The boy’s raw talent seems to be in his genes; his mother — Dorrette Webster — is a reading specialist at the school he attends, and his dad is a telecommunications technician who says he always topped his science class and was a good Math student while in high school.

Described as a straight A student who is “always doing stuff way above his age level”, Michael says his son is a genius, but Gianluca is modest about his abilities. Asked if he thought himself a genius, he replied: “Well, maybe. I don’t really consider myself a genius. My friends sometimes call me a know-it-all.”

Giving examples of his love affair with books, Gianluca’s dad talks of the time the family was in Kingston and got him a few books, all of which he completed by the time they got back home to Old Harbour, St Catherine. He referenced another occasion when his son read through “three or four” novels, including Gulliver’s Travels, in one day.

“He read them all before I reached home. I was so surprised so I started skipping through and asking him to tell me about the stories. I can remember the Gulliver story. For the most part, everybody really believed that Gulliver was really a giant. I really wanted to see if he had grasped the story. I think he was in about grade three at the time, and he said to me, ‘No, he was no giant. It was the people who were small’.”

There was also the instance when, as a four-year-old in infant school, Gianluca was asked to name an animal whose name began with ‘W’. Much to the bewilderment of his teachers, he said wombat, an Australian mammal that closely resembles the badger.

“None of the teachers knew what that was so I had to go and research it and show them,” says the boy, pointing out that his knowledge of the wombat came from watching television channels such as Animal Planet, NatGeo and Discovery Channel.

“My father didn’t want me to watch any cartoons even though I liked to watch them,” he says.

These days, however, he is into what his father calls “teenage television series” such as those broadcast on Disney Channel like iCarly. And when he’s not hunched over a book, he’s either doing that or playing with his 22-month-old brother Alex who, from all indications so far, is as athletic as he is clever. He doesn’t have many friends in his neighbourhood, thanks to the family’s two labrador and pitbull dogs, but when he’s at school, tag, ‘mama lashy’ and ‘sightings’ are some of the games he and his classmates like to play.

Gianluca says he might become a palaeontologist because he’s interested in prehistoric life, but it’s not set in stone. In fact, his dad says he intends to give him a research project on careers so he will make an informed choice in terms of ability as well as financial viability.

“As you know, a career is not all about what you love but you must live from it. I’m hoping that after I give him that project to do he will not change, but have a better understanding as to how to choose a career path,” says the boy’s father. Laughing, he says he wouldn’t be averse to his son enlisting in the JDF and following in his footsteps.

“He will have to come better than I am… The sky is the limit for him and we’re putting everything in place where he can be the best he can be.

For now though, Gianluca is focusing all his time and energy to preparing for the GSAT exam. He hasn’t given thought to which high school to attend, and to whether or not he will be sitting other CSEC subjects in the near future.

“I want to focus on GSAT, because if you don’t do GSAT you won’t even go to high school,” he says, conjuring images of a wizened, grey-bearded man.

“I thought about something that would complement GSAT,” the corporal adds. “There might be a subject that complements it, but I don’t want to go above and beyond the school system and retard certain aspects by giving him several things to do.”

The education system is structured in such a way that CSEC examinations are sat at the end of fifth form when a student is around 16, but legally there is no age requirement or academic prerequisite.