8 ms·

So often, when it comes to gifted education, I hear people crying elitism and even making snide remarks about gifted students, which nobody seems to have a prob

by amykhar 11y ago

So often, when it comes to gifted education, I hear people crying elitism and even making snide remarks about gifted students, which nobody seems to have a problem with. What people are missing is that average and below average students are challenged in school from day one. And, in being challenged, they learn to stretch and to work harder to learn the material. So often, gifted programs do not exist in very early elementary school. Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying. They learn that tests and homework are a joke. So, when the day comes that things aren't quite as easy, they don't have the necessary skills to help them level up. Every kid deserves to be challenged and to be taught to do their very best. Sadly, in the United States, that didn't happen - even before the stupid No Child Left Behind rules kicked in.

navait 11y ago
From a cost standpoint it makes sense. You're capturing most students. How many students will use a gifted program? They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum. That's not cheap, and not subsidized by the federal government, unlike students under IEPs.
- Retric 11y ago
  Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact which justifies increased investment. The real issue is most 'gifted' programs are a joke with little impact.
  - navait 11y ago
    > Economically gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact If you do that, you basically just dumped a bunch of money into kids that are immediatley leaving for somewhere else. It's like global warming; why cut emissions for someone else's benefit compared to your own?
    - jschwartzi 11y ago
      Can you please elaborate or share some kind of story on why you think this would happen? Where are they leaving to, and why?
    - jerf 11y ago
      We fund schools because on the whole it all works out; if San Francisco teaches a kid who moves to New York, well, New York taught a kid that moved to Portland and Portland taught a kid that moved to a Kansas farm and Kansas taught a kid that moved to Texas, and in the end everybody wins pretty well.
    - afarrell 11y ago
      jerf, the problem is that there is nothing to keep Alabama from defecting, except for the fact that educated people like to live around places with good education systems and tend to vote in favor of education.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    Edit: Parent was missing a comma. Punctuation is important.
    - smanatstpete 11y ago
      I think Retric meant Economically, gifted students...
    - Jtsummers 11y ago
      Or you can realize that GP left out a comma, or with a slight rephrasing: Economically speaking, gifted students ...
    - graeme 11y ago
      I think they forgot a comma. "Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact" If there's a sensible read of someone's comment it's preferable to use that interpretation. "Economically gifted" makes no sense in the context of the discussion. The OP was saying your tax dollars are likely to get a good return by fostering the progress of gifted students.
    - brewdad 11y ago
      I think there's a comma missing there. Plenty of gifted students in my son's school qualify for the free lunch program.
    - Glide 11y ago
      Seeing as a lot of people are pointing out the omission of a comma, what would you say to a person who wasn't economically fortunate but ended up in a GT program? Would that justify the tax expense?
  - wfo 11y ago
    Economically, education is a public subsidy that helps private wealth. Taxpayers pay for your worker training for free. In exchange society makes some demands on the educational process, primarily that it spend some amount of time preparing students to be responsible citizens/members of society alongside the office drone prep these gifted programs want to accelerate. Keeping all the smart kids locked in an ivory tower where they don't have to deal with humanity or ever get any context into how society actually works is how you get Ayn Rand afficionados well past the age-appropriate teenage years, and nobody wants that.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  That may be less true if you consider the costs of dealing with the disruptions caused by the behavioral problems frequently displayed by unchallenged gifted students. But, yes, there's a lot of government policy at all levels that favors focussing on the low end and ignoring the high end of the ability scale -- that's exactly the thing that seems to be the focus of the complaint. So saying that the thing being complained about makes sense because of the exact thing being complained about is, somewhat circular logic.
- goodcanadian 11y ago
  So it is OK to use dedicated teachers and staff as well as a special curriculum for the kids at the bottom, but when you suggest it for kids at the top, it is too expensive? Your point about government subsidy is on the mark, but why are the kids at the bottom subsidised while those at the top are left to languish? It illustrates a double standard that has somehow become embedded in the culture of the country. If Americans truly believed in giving each child their fair share, then politics would force the resources to be spread more evenly.
  - 6stringmerc 11y ago
    Regarding the "why" notion of so much effort being put into the kids at the bottom, it's my personal experience that the most vocal parents tend to come from the pool toward the bottom, be it physically or mentally disabled. They have a point, certainly, in asserting their children have a right to equal access...but I do think the costs associated with such access typically burden the state far more than the parent in terms of accommodation. As in, some special needs kids genuinely don't belong in mainstream education environments, but through parental outcry and pressure, sometimes this gets over-ruled. What has bothered me the most, time and again, is the assumption that smart kids will 'turn out fine' without additional challenges and, by contrast, there's any reasonable ROI expectation with the a large portion of developmentally challenged / mentally deficient kids. It's a sensitive issue for sure. Somehow just postulating this kind of thinking draws up feelings of insensitivity, but I'm trying to focus on some empirical observations. Difficult tight rope!
  - douche 11y ago
    In absolute terms, it would really be much cheaper to provide the resources to push the gifted students than what is spent on the lowest-performing students. $1000 dollars worth of books, software and a cheap laptop per student per year is far cheaper than hiring a one-on-one ed tech at $20-30k to babysit children with severe learning disabilities and behavior issues, or the still greater sums on the "severe and profound" students that have to be "educated" until they age out.
    - GauntletWizard 11y ago
- jackmaney 11y ago
  You aren't accounting for an enormous cost, should we stay on this path for much longer: brain drain.
- benkuykendall 11y ago
  Magnet schools can fix this issue. If you have 10 high schools, running 1 as a gifted program and the other 9 as before should not cost significantly more. Of course, people complain about negative effects on the remaining schools [0] on the basis that removing gifted students hurts the remaining ones. This seems like a strange concern to me -- why should gifted students be responsible for pulling up their peers? [0] http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/magnet-schools-more-harm-than-good/ http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/magnet-schools-m...
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >why should gifted students be responsible for pulling up their peers? Some variant of academic socialism? Could it be packaged with social socialism for the gifted kids who lack in other social areas?
  - AlexEatsKittens 11y ago
    It's an interesting concept. I agree with you completely, but we're basically saying that the gifted have no responsibility to the average and below average. While in this specific situation, it seems obvious that a child shouldn't have to receive a lower quality education in order the help those with less ability, that concept has some Randian implications if you extrapolate it to society in general.
    - peterfirefly 11y ago
      They are going to spend the rest of their lives helping those with less ability -- who do they have to be handicapped in school so as to be less capable of doing so? And have a miserable time of it to boot?
  - dublinben 11y ago
    The gifted students are already segregated into their upper level classes. They have little to no contact with average students outside of the cafeteria or gym class.
    - 11y ago
- ironchef 11y ago
  "From a cost standpoint it makes sense." Only if you view education as a cost center. What's the ROI of spending on gifted education? I've not seen such studies; however, what if you could dramatically improve GDP, etc. based on supporting gifted individuals. "How many students will use a gifted program?" Approximately 6 to 10% are gifted "They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum." Not necessarily. They may (depending on levels of giftedness); however, differentiation and what not are also acceptable approaches in some cases.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tcfunk 11y ago
This, I feel, is the exact story of my childhood...I figured out at somewhere around 6th grade or so that I could get all the same grades w/o doing any of the homework or studying. So I figured, why bother? Fast-forward a few years to college, and it turns out that I have no idea how to study, how to push myself to do the work required for classes. I had a very hard time turning that around.
- _rs 11y ago
  Are there any resources you might recommend to others who have fallen down that same kind of path?
  - steverb 11y ago
    I had the same issue. TOtally quit doing homework in the 5th grade, coasted through highschool (mostly) with a 3.5. Fortunately (for me) I had a not so good HS Counselor who I never met and who never explained to me that it was possible to go to college without having rich parents. So I joined the Army straight out of high school, and that's where I learned how to work my ass off. Not mentally so much, but in general how to have an expectation of myself that I should always keep pushing myself to do better. That was 25 years ago mind you. Your mileage will definitely vary.
    - jackmaney 11y ago
      When I was in academia, some of the students I rooted for the most were non-traditional students, especially those who were former/current military. None of that "b...but, when will I ever use this in REAL LIFE! Waaahhh!" or "will this be on the test?". Just a willingness to work their ass off.
      - 6stringmerc 11y ago
        When I was in academia, some of the most intolerable time wasting, tangential and selfish people were non-traditional students taking courses because they had the means and time to do so...just sayin'
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sarciszewski 11y ago
I was in a gifted program grades 1-6 and 8, and I still wasn't challenged by the material we were covering. I took the entire 7th grade off (officially I was homeschooled, but my parents didn't teach me anything) and played on the computer every day. I taught myself how to be a better Javascript and PHP programmer and explored math concepts that interested me on my own. I came back ahead of the class. I'm not convinced there's much value in the gifted program I was enrolled in. (I'm also not convinced that I'm exceptionally intelligent by any meaningful measure.)
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  I spent most of my childhood reading and doing sports. Didn't ever pay attention in school except math and history, where I lucked out and had good teachers who kicked our asses. Reading/screwing around with computers was a great way to learn, honestly, but I'd prefer to have a good teacher if possible. My best teacher was in 3rd grade, and he was made to quit because some parents thought he graded too hard. Dude was chill, read us Beowulf, Watership Down, made us write poetry every night.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    > Reading/screwing around with computers was a great way to learn, honestly, but I'd prefer to have a good teacher if possible. My point was that, despite being lazy for a year and only advancing at the rate that my curiosity dictated, I ended up ahead of my peers who spent 7 hours a day in class learning school stuff, and countless hours doing homework. This led to a very boring 8th grade year.
- bane 11y ago
  One of the interesting problems gifted programs deal with is that "gifted" students are often gifted in very different ways and in different subject areas, and the system hasn't yet figured out how to determine these narrow gifted areas and how to challenge those. The programs also try to cultivate those gifted areas instead of trying to bring the non-gifted parts up to speed as well. So the gifted student gets disservice from both ends.
Floegipoky 11y ago
> Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying. Or, even worse, these 8 year olds are incapable of sitting in a chair without any stimulation for 6 hours a day. So they're labeled as troublemakers, spend a lot of time with the principal (or these days, the police), and end up getting put on drugs that turn them into compliant zombies.
pjmorris 11y ago
I can still hear my high school science teacher's warning/chide/encouragement to everybody else 'Just wait until those smart people who don't have to study get to college. They're going to be stuck, while those of you who have to work for it will be prepared.' She was right, I knew she was right, and experience proved her out. Alternatively, my best friend and chief competitor in 8th grade made me a better problem solver. A checklist on the wall listed the various math modules to be worked through in a self-paced course, and he and I were out in the lead as measured by checkmarks. I'd probably have coasted otherwise. Too bad we moved the next year.
lbruder 11y ago
It's the curse of the gifted: http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20...
wishinghand 11y ago
I hypothesize this happened to me somewhat. I was just under the radar enough for the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education ) Program that I didn't get in. 4th grade through graduating High School was a breeze, even when my bad study habits caught up with me. I even got into university too! But once there, I got a major kick in the ass. Classes were hard all of a sudden. They would fail you and leave you behind if you didn't catch up. I also tend to flail when doing a thing, it goes well for a bit and then all of a sudden it gets hard. My formative years in school didn't really prep me for handling a challenge.
slowmovintarget 11y ago
This is, in large part, the result of prioritizing self-esteem over self-control, and equivalence over excellence. This is not done in high-achieving Asian schools, nor in Germany. Schools in those settings also do not allow children to define the culture in the schools (popularity contests based on fashion, media, or cliquishness).
Spoom 11y ago
You have almost exactly described high school for me. Everything before, say, grade 10 was a cakewalk. When things started to require actual, you know, work, I crashed and burned. And I was in Ontario, which had dedicated gifted classrooms (at least in grades 5 through 8). As a result, my performance suffered in the last years of high school, which resulted in my going to a community college because I couldn't meet the entrance requirements for Computer Science University degree programs. It took me a while to figure out how to consistently apply real effort to hard projects. There was always this nagging sense that things should be easier since they were in the past.
chucksmash 11y ago
This is a good point; it's very important to provide advanced students with a challenging environment. I'd argue that just as important, however, is the access to other advanced students that comes along with it. TL;DR for the below brain dump: when your peer group values low achievement as its own form of achievement, it takes a lot of lucky breaks and facepalm worthy epiphanies to right the ship. PS: having now written the below, I realize the entire thing sort of hinges on whether I am actually smart and a reader has no reason to assume that is the case. I'm leery of looking like a narcissistic humblebragger but at the same time need to justify including myself in the group "smart people." My "I'm pretty smart" creds: pre-personal dark age, I won my middle school geography bee and did decently at the state-level competition; post-personal dark age I scored a 1600 on the GRE. I'm loathe to mention either and never do IRL because they were both kinda gimmes I was born into vs achievements earned via hard work but I think here they provide useful context. The anecdote proper: Growing up, I was in gifted classes through 7th grade. Life got hard in the way it does for kids that age though and, with my grades slipping, I was moved into normal classes. As a smart kid taking standard difficulty classes, one is very much exposed to the anti-intellectualism that is so popular in America currently. If getting picked on for being a dweeb in the half of the day i wasn't in the advanced classes wasn't optimal, moving out of them completely was markedly less so. Some people adapt and overcome. Personally, I internalized the bullying and negative feedback, adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy and proceeded to waste years trying to impress the wrong people with how normal and cool I could be. I graduated in the bottom quartile of my class, one F shy of spending a fifth year in high school. On the strength of an oddly incongruent SAT score and a letter of recommendation that I would give my right hand to read, I still managed a very good scholarship to an out of state public school. Even with this opportunity dropped into my lap, I had to be talked/coerced(!) into taking the scholarship. I just did. not. get. it. AT ALL. I went to college because my parents were going to start charging me rent and I more or less thought I'd party for a while and then drop out and "join the Marines or something." My first semester I found a new group of bros just like the ones from high school and earned a 1.7 GPA. Something else happened that semester though. When I did manage to make it to my lectures, I really enjoyed them. I'd skip tests and not do classwork but I'd read and listen to lectures diligently. There was one specific class called "Primates, People and Prehistory" that particularly blew my mind. If curiosity is a pilot light, that course was the spark that reignited it. I came back that Spring ready to work, just missed a 4.0 (damn you, B+ in Português!) and managed to bring my grades up above a 3.0 to keep my scholarship. I spent several more years gradually learning to be okay with the fact that I enjoyed learning. I still hid it behind an "aww shucks, I'm just here to party" veneer but every semester I drifted further from my friends, had more excuses to bail on them and read until we were entirely different people. I still care about them and keep in touch, but I'm definitely the "weird one" now. Were it not for a ridiculous letter of recommendation, or that long shot scholarship, or the awakening to the broader world of learning that first semester, my life would be entirely different. I had a huge "working hard and caring is for suckers" chip on my shoulder in high school and I think wherever I'd ended up, I'd still be sneering at the try hards and glorying in how I could have done just the same if I'd wanted to. It's taken years to recover from that detour and get my head right about who I am. I'd like to think that if I'd stayed on the track most of my middle school peers were on, if I'd stayed surrounded by people who gave a damn, my detour into doubt and self-loathing might have been curtailed. As a 29 year old, I feel like it has only been in the past 2-3 years that I've shifted out of neutral and really earnestly started engaging with the world. I'm wholeheartedly in favor of anything we as a society can do to save other "dumb smart kids" similar heartburn.

by amykhar 11y ago

navait 11y ago

From a cost standpoint it makes sense. You're capturing most students. How many students will use a gifted program? They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum. That's not cheap, and not subsidized by the federal government, unlike students under IEPs.

Retric 11y ago
Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact which justifies increased investment. The real issue is most 'gifted' programs are a joke with little impact.
- navait 11y ago
  > Economically gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact If you do that, you basically just dumped a bunch of money into kids that are immediatley leaving for somewhere else. It's like global warming; why cut emissions for someone else's benefit compared to your own?
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    Can you please elaborate or share some kind of story on why you think this would happen? Where are they leaving to, and why?
  - jerf 11y ago
    We fund schools because on the whole it all works out; if San Francisco teaches a kid who moves to New York, well, New York taught a kid that moved to Portland and Portland taught a kid that moved to a Kansas farm and Kansas taught a kid that moved to Texas, and in the end everybody wins pretty well.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    jerf, the problem is that there is nothing to keep Alabama from defecting, except for the fact that educated people like to live around places with good education systems and tend to vote in favor of education.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  Edit: Parent was missing a comma. Punctuation is important.
  - smanatstpete 11y ago
    I think Retric meant Economically, gifted students...
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    Or you can realize that GP left out a comma, or with a slight rephrasing: Economically speaking, gifted students ...
  - graeme 11y ago
    I think they forgot a comma. "Economically, gifted students are likely to have an outsized impact" If there's a sensible read of someone's comment it's preferable to use that interpretation. "Economically gifted" makes no sense in the context of the discussion. The OP was saying your tax dollars are likely to get a good return by fostering the progress of gifted students.
  - brewdad 11y ago
    I think there's a comma missing there. Plenty of gifted students in my son's school qualify for the free lunch program.
  - Glide 11y ago
    Seeing as a lot of people are pointing out the omission of a comma, what would you say to a person who wasn't economically fortunate but ended up in a GT program? Would that justify the tax expense?
- wfo 11y ago
  Economically, education is a public subsidy that helps private wealth. Taxpayers pay for your worker training for free. In exchange society makes some demands on the educational process, primarily that it spend some amount of time preparing students to be responsible citizens/members of society alongside the office drone prep these gifted programs want to accelerate. Keeping all the smart kids locked in an ivory tower where they don't have to deal with humanity or ever get any context into how society actually works is how you get Ayn Rand afficionados well past the age-appropriate teenage years, and nobody wants that.
dragonwriter 11y ago
That may be less true if you consider the costs of dealing with the disruptions caused by the behavioral problems frequently displayed by unchallenged gifted students. But, yes, there's a lot of government policy at all levels that favors focussing on the low end and ignoring the high end of the ability scale -- that's exactly the thing that seems to be the focus of the complaint. So saying that the thing being complained about makes sense because of the exact thing being complained about is, somewhat circular logic.
goodcanadian 11y ago
So it is OK to use dedicated teachers and staff as well as a special curriculum for the kids at the bottom, but when you suggest it for kids at the top, it is too expensive? Your point about government subsidy is on the mark, but why are the kids at the bottom subsidised while those at the top are left to languish? It illustrates a double standard that has somehow become embedded in the culture of the country. If Americans truly believed in giving each child their fair share, then politics would force the resources to be spread more evenly.
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  Regarding the "why" notion of so much effort being put into the kids at the bottom, it's my personal experience that the most vocal parents tend to come from the pool toward the bottom, be it physically or mentally disabled. They have a point, certainly, in asserting their children have a right to equal access...but I do think the costs associated with such access typically burden the state far more than the parent in terms of accommodation. As in, some special needs kids genuinely don't belong in mainstream education environments, but through parental outcry and pressure, sometimes this gets over-ruled. What has bothered me the most, time and again, is the assumption that smart kids will 'turn out fine' without additional challenges and, by contrast, there's any reasonable ROI expectation with the a large portion of developmentally challenged / mentally deficient kids. It's a sensitive issue for sure. Somehow just postulating this kind of thinking draws up feelings of insensitivity, but I'm trying to focus on some empirical observations. Difficult tight rope!
- douche 11y ago
  In absolute terms, it would really be much cheaper to provide the resources to push the gifted students than what is spent on the lowest-performing students. $1000 dollars worth of books, software and a cheap laptop per student per year is far cheaper than hiring a one-on-one ed tech at $20-30k to babysit children with severe learning disabilities and behavior issues, or the still greater sums on the "severe and profound" students that have to be "educated" until they age out.
  - GauntletWizard 11y ago
jackmaney 11y ago
You aren't accounting for an enormous cost, should we stay on this path for much longer: brain drain.
benkuykendall 11y ago
Magnet schools can fix this issue. If you have 10 high schools, running 1 as a gifted program and the other 9 as before should not cost significantly more. Of course, people complain about negative effects on the remaining schools [0] on the basis that removing gifted students hurts the remaining ones. This seems like a strange concern to me -- why should gifted students be responsible for pulling up their peers? [0] http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/magnet-schools-more-harm-than-good/ http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/magnet-schools-m...
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  >why should gifted students be responsible for pulling up their peers? Some variant of academic socialism? Could it be packaged with social socialism for the gifted kids who lack in other social areas?
- AlexEatsKittens 11y ago
  It's an interesting concept. I agree with you completely, but we're basically saying that the gifted have no responsibility to the average and below average. While in this specific situation, it seems obvious that a child shouldn't have to receive a lower quality education in order the help those with less ability, that concept has some Randian implications if you extrapolate it to society in general.
  - peterfirefly 11y ago
    They are going to spend the rest of their lives helping those with less ability -- who do they have to be handicapped in school so as to be less capable of doing so? And have a miserable time of it to boot?
- dublinben 11y ago
  The gifted students are already segregated into their upper level classes. They have little to no contact with average students outside of the cafeteria or gym class.
  - 11y ago
ironchef 11y ago
"From a cost standpoint it makes sense." Only if you view education as a cost center. What's the ROI of spending on gifted education? I've not seen such studies; however, what if you could dramatically improve GDP, etc. based on supporting gifted individuals. "How many students will use a gifted program?" Approximately 6 to 10% are gifted "They will require dedicated teachers and staff, and their own curriculum." Not necessarily. They may (depending on levels of giftedness); however, differentiation and what not are also acceptable approaches in some cases.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tcfunk 11y ago

This, I feel, is the exact story of my childhood...I figured out at somewhere around 6th grade or so that I could get all the same grades w/o doing any of the homework or studying. So I figured, why bother? Fast-forward a few years to college, and it turns out that I have no idea how to study, how to push myself to do the work required for classes. I had a very hard time turning that around.

_rs 11y ago
Are there any resources you might recommend to others who have fallen down that same kind of path?
- steverb 11y ago
  I had the same issue. TOtally quit doing homework in the 5th grade, coasted through highschool (mostly) with a 3.5. Fortunately (for me) I had a not so good HS Counselor who I never met and who never explained to me that it was possible to go to college without having rich parents. So I joined the Army straight out of high school, and that's where I learned how to work my ass off. Not mentally so much, but in general how to have an expectation of myself that I should always keep pushing myself to do better. That was 25 years ago mind you. Your mileage will definitely vary.
  - jackmaney 11y ago
    When I was in academia, some of the students I rooted for the most were non-traditional students, especially those who were former/current military. None of that "b...but, when will I ever use this in REAL LIFE! Waaahhh!" or "will this be on the test?". Just a willingness to work their ass off.
    - 6stringmerc 11y ago
      When I was in academia, some of the most intolerable time wasting, tangential and selfish people were non-traditional students taking courses because they had the means and time to do so...just sayin'

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sarciszewski 11y ago

I was in a gifted program grades 1-6 and 8, and I still wasn't challenged by the material we were covering. I took the entire 7th grade off (officially I was homeschooled, but my parents didn't teach me anything) and played on the computer every day. I taught myself how to be a better Javascript and PHP programmer and explored math concepts that interested me on my own. I came back ahead of the class. I'm not convinced there's much value in the gifted program I was enrolled in. (I'm also not convinced that I'm exceptionally intelligent by any meaningful measure.)

meatysnapper 11y ago
I spent most of my childhood reading and doing sports. Didn't ever pay attention in school except math and history, where I lucked out and had good teachers who kicked our asses. Reading/screwing around with computers was a great way to learn, honestly, but I'd prefer to have a good teacher if possible. My best teacher was in 3rd grade, and he was made to quit because some parents thought he graded too hard. Dude was chill, read us Beowulf, Watership Down, made us write poetry every night.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  > Reading/screwing around with computers was a great way to learn, honestly, but I'd prefer to have a good teacher if possible. My point was that, despite being lazy for a year and only advancing at the rate that my curiosity dictated, I ended up ahead of my peers who spent 7 hours a day in class learning school stuff, and countless hours doing homework. This led to a very boring 8th grade year.
bane 11y ago
One of the interesting problems gifted programs deal with is that "gifted" students are often gifted in very different ways and in different subject areas, and the system hasn't yet figured out how to determine these narrow gifted areas and how to challenge those. The programs also try to cultivate those gifted areas instead of trying to bring the non-gifted parts up to speed as well. So the gifted student gets disservice from both ends.

Floegipoky 11y ago

> Gifted kids are often not challenged. It's all too easy. They learn to coast by without studying. Or, even worse, these 8 year olds are incapable of sitting in a chair without any stimulation for 6 hours a day. So they're labeled as troublemakers, spend a lot of time with the principal (or these days, the police), and end up getting put on drugs that turn them into compliant zombies.

pjmorris 11y ago

I can still hear my high school science teacher's warning/chide/encouragement to everybody else 'Just wait until those smart people who don't have to study get to college. They're going to be stuck, while those of you who have to work for it will be prepared.' She was right, I knew she was right, and experience proved her out. Alternatively, my best friend and chief competitor in 8th grade made me a better problem solver. A checklist on the wall listed the various math modules to be worked through in a self-paced course, and he and I were out in the lead as measured by checkmarks. I'd probably have coasted otherwise. Too bad we moved the next year.

lbruder 11y ago

It's the curse of the gifted: http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20...

wishinghand 11y ago

I hypothesize this happened to me somewhat. I was just under the radar enough for the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education ) Program that I didn't get in. 4th grade through graduating High School was a breeze, even when my bad study habits caught up with me. I even got into university too! But once there, I got a major kick in the ass. Classes were hard all of a sudden. They would fail you and leave you behind if you didn't catch up. I also tend to flail when doing a thing, it goes well for a bit and then all of a sudden it gets hard. My formative years in school didn't really prep me for handling a challenge.

slowmovintarget 11y ago

This is, in large part, the result of prioritizing self-esteem over self-control, and equivalence over excellence. This is not done in high-achieving Asian schools, nor in Germany. Schools in those settings also do not allow children to define the culture in the schools (popularity contests based on fashion, media, or cliquishness).

Spoom 11y ago

You have almost exactly described high school for me. Everything before, say, grade 10 was a cakewalk. When things started to require actual, you know, work, I crashed and burned. And I was in Ontario, which had dedicated gifted classrooms (at least in grades 5 through 8). As a result, my performance suffered in the last years of high school, which resulted in my going to a community college because I couldn't meet the entrance requirements for Computer Science University degree programs. It took me a while to figure out how to consistently apply real effort to hard projects. There was always this nagging sense that things should be easier since they were in the past.

chucksmash 11y ago

This is a good point; it's very important to provide advanced students with a challenging environment. I'd argue that just as important, however, is the access to other advanced students that comes along with it. TL;DR for the below brain dump: when your peer group values low achievement as its own form of achievement, it takes a lot of lucky breaks and facepalm worthy epiphanies to right the ship. PS: having now written the below, I realize the entire thing sort of hinges on whether I am actually smart and a reader has no reason to assume that is the case. I'm leery of looking like a narcissistic humblebragger but at the same time need to justify including myself in the group "smart people." My "I'm pretty smart" creds: pre-personal dark age, I won my middle school geography bee and did decently at the state-level competition; post-personal dark age I scored a 1600 on the GRE. I'm loathe to mention either and never do IRL because they were both kinda gimmes I was born into vs achievements earned via hard work but I think here they provide useful context. The anecdote proper: Growing up, I was in gifted classes through 7th grade. Life got hard in the way it does for kids that age though and, with my grades slipping, I was moved into normal classes. As a smart kid taking standard difficulty classes, one is very much exposed to the anti-intellectualism that is so popular in America currently. If getting picked on for being a dweeb in the half of the day i wasn't in the advanced classes wasn't optimal, moving out of them completely was markedly less so. Some people adapt and overcome. Personally, I internalized the bullying and negative feedback, adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy and proceeded to waste years trying to impress the wrong people with how normal and cool I could be. I graduated in the bottom quartile of my class, one F shy of spending a fifth year in high school. On the strength of an oddly incongruent SAT score and a letter of recommendation that I would give my right hand to read, I still managed a very good scholarship to an out of state public school. Even with this opportunity dropped into my lap, I had to be talked/coerced(!) into taking the scholarship. I just did. not. get. it. AT ALL. I went to college because my parents were going to start charging me rent and I more or less thought I'd party for a while and then drop out and "join the Marines or something." My first semester I found a new group of bros just like the ones from high school and earned a 1.7 GPA. Something else happened that semester though. When I did manage to make it to my lectures, I really enjoyed them. I'd skip tests and not do classwork but I'd read and listen to lectures diligently. There was one specific class called "Primates, People and Prehistory" that particularly blew my mind. If curiosity is a pilot light, that course was the spark that reignited it. I came back that Spring ready to work, just missed a 4.0 (damn you, B+ in Português!) and managed to bring my grades up above a 3.0 to keep my scholarship. I spent several more years gradually learning to be okay with the fact that I enjoyed learning. I still hid it behind an "aww shucks, I'm just here to party" veneer but every semester I drifted further from my friends, had more excuses to bail on them and read until we were entirely different people. I still care about them and keep in touch, but I'm definitely the "weird one" now. Were it not for a ridiculous letter of recommendation, or that long shot scholarship, or the awakening to the broader world of learning that first semester, my life would be entirely different. I had a huge "working hard and caring is for suckers" chip on my shoulder in high school and I think wherever I'd ended up, I'd still be sneering at the try hards and glorying in how I could have done just the same if I'd wanted to. It's taken years to recover from that detour and get my head right about who I am. I'd like to think that if I'd stayed on the track most of my middle school peers were on, if I'd stayed surrounded by people who gave a damn, my detour into doubt and self-loathing might have been curtailed. As a 29 year old, I feel like it has only been in the past 2-3 years that I've shifted out of neutral and really earnestly started engaging with the world. I'm wholeheartedly in favor of anything we as a society can do to save other "dumb smart kids" similar heartburn.