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When I was in 3rd grade, I was placed in a remedial math course. My mother requested I be removed from it. I was. Today, I am a senior machine learning engineer

by kahnjw 9y ago

When I was in 3rd grade, I was placed in a remedial math course. My mother requested I be removed from it. I was. Today, I am a senior machine learning engineer working on my third math heavy degree. Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception. Now, many of my higher performing peers from 3rd grade are lost. Hopping from career to career, city to city without a sense of direction. A few of the high performers have gone on to do impressive things, but nothing shocking, nothing that is any more impressive than what my stoner friends and I were able to accomplish after a few extra years to mature. It took me more time to find that what I really enjoyed was engineering and math. Of course, this is a first person account, so take it or leave it. Worth noting that there is a whole lot of very bad education research, so anyone whipping out journal articles to prove a point should be cautious. The problem with treating "gifted" students differently is similar to gender bias in STEM, and racial bias in education overall. Some people are told they can, and other are implicitly told they can't. These messages get internalized by students, especially if you are unlike myself and don't have a mother who will stick up for you, and take you out of that remedial math course.

nopinsight 9y ago
I have taught a few tens of gifted students. I could identify them based on a short test from grade 1 (5-6 years old) onwards. I could even identify some just by a short conversation. All of them went on to become successful in college (only a few have graduated so far). They consist of medical students in top medical schools in the country, one International Physics Olympiad gold medalist (currently at MIT), one International Chemistry Olympiad gold medalist (currently at U of Tokyo). All of them from a 200k-people city in a developing country and I only taught math to a few classes of these students (for about 4 years) before moving on to another education venture. I would say it is highly likely most of these students would go on to have very good careers. We still do not know whether they will achieve great things but their trajectory is much brighter than average kids. I agree that putting young kids in remedial classes could be problematic, but gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education.
- spraak 9y ago
  But what if you'd given the non-gifted students the same experience? This sounds like selection bias. And it'd be helpful if you explained more about the test, as just claiming that you can isn't evidence that what you did was by any means valid.
  - nopinsight 9y ago
    There were some kids their parents tried to push them into our gifted class (as a tutoring center, we had regular classes too), and they got borderline scores, so we let them in. They could not follow after a while. I would say they did alright in later schooling but not to the same level of academic success as those in gifted classes. There are few Academic Olympiad gold medalists from the city. In fact, I only know of these two who were my own students so far and another bronze medalist many years previously. (From his later scholarship--he is now a math professor--I think he would have earned a gold medal had he have gifted education back then.) That said, it was not a controlled experiment so you can think of it as a case study but not gold-standard randomized controlled trial. The test was a set of challenge-style math problems for primary kids. Solving them would require more creativity and facility with thought than regular math problems.
- yelloweyes 9y ago
  there's nothing "gifted" about going to medical school in a top university or winning a math competition
  - nopinsight 9y ago
    I followed the standard definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Characteristics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Char...
- kahnjw 9y ago
  >gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education If you show me that other students don't benefit from suitable gifted education, then you'll have an argument. Claiming that treating children with gifted education increases their chance of success is obvious, but misses the point, does it not? I can specifically remember back to when the TAG Math students (Talented and Gifted) were learning what negative numbers were. I kept hearing about them. I imagined what they might mean, how you use them. When I was finally introduced one year later, I was disappointed, you mean it's literally just subtraction? I could have done that one year ago. And same with all the other students in the normal math course, if they had the same level of attention and care. The worst part was this: the students in TAG math had a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, while the normal math students had a ratio of 20:1. The remedial students had a ratio of 10:1, but the remedial teacher was from the special ed department, not a specialized math teacher that the TAG and normal students got. The TAG program at my school was praised, and the teacher acted as if she was doing God's work. Of course, she had children who were students at the school, and of course, they were in all of her classes. Now, looking back on it, I realize how broken this frame of thinking is. Yes, students will benefit if you put them in an elite math course with more resources than other children. Other students will bare the cost. I think a better allocation of our time and money would be to spread resources evenly. If you really want to get ahead by one or two years, take summer classes in middle or high school. That way, the students bares the cost of the additional time and effort, and we can still evenly allocate resources so every eight year old gets the same opportunity. EDITS: spelling bear -> bare
briandear 9y ago
Is it fair to suggest though that some kids actually need remedial math? I was in the “slow” reading group for the first half of first grade, then quickly got moved to the “fast” group and eventually ended up scoring a perfect score on the verbal portion of the MCAT as well as top percentiles on other standardized tests. My point is that sometimes remedial has nothing to do with potential. We should stop viewing remedial as “bad.”
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kahnjw 9y ago
  I think it is fair, but I think there are ways to give students who need it extra attention without singling them out. Children are smarter than we give them credit for, they know when they're being judged or singled out by adults and peers.
golemiprague 9y ago
You say something and then come to an opposite conclusion, what I learn from your story is that it doesn't matter what you are being told but rather whether you got inclination to do something, women and certain races don't have this inclination and it doesn't matter how hard you will push it down their throat. On the other hand you and your stoner friend ended up ok even though you were not pushing yourself to this direction in a younger age.
gameswithgo 9y ago
Perhaps we can quantify how silly it is to try to find talent in 8 year olds, rather than just assert it is silly.

by kahnjw 9y ago

nopinsight 9y ago

I have taught a few tens of gifted students. I could identify them based on a short test from grade 1 (5-6 years old) onwards. I could even identify some just by a short conversation. All of them went on to become successful in college (only a few have graduated so far). They consist of medical students in top medical schools in the country, one International Physics Olympiad gold medalist (currently at MIT), one International Chemistry Olympiad gold medalist (currently at U of Tokyo). All of them from a 200k-people city in a developing country and I only taught math to a few classes of these students (for about 4 years) before moving on to another education venture. I would say it is highly likely most of these students would go on to have very good careers. We still do not know whether they will achieve great things but their trajectory is much brighter than average kids. I agree that putting young kids in remedial classes could be problematic, but gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education.

spraak 9y ago
But what if you'd given the non-gifted students the same experience? This sounds like selection bias. And it'd be helpful if you explained more about the test, as just claiming that you can isn't evidence that what you did was by any means valid.
- nopinsight 9y ago
  There were some kids their parents tried to push them into our gifted class (as a tutoring center, we had regular classes too), and they got borderline scores, so we let them in. They could not follow after a while. I would say they did alright in later schooling but not to the same level of academic success as those in gifted classes. There are few Academic Olympiad gold medalists from the city. In fact, I only know of these two who were my own students so far and another bronze medalist many years previously. (From his later scholarship--he is now a math professor--I think he would have earned a gold medal had he have gifted education back then.) That said, it was not a controlled experiment so you can think of it as a case study but not gold-standard randomized controlled trial. The test was a set of challenge-style math problems for primary kids. Solving them would require more creativity and facility with thought than regular math problems.
yelloweyes 9y ago
there's nothing "gifted" about going to medical school in a top university or winning a math competition
- nopinsight 9y ago
  I followed the standard definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Characteristics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Char...
kahnjw 9y ago
>gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education If you show me that other students don't benefit from suitable gifted education, then you'll have an argument. Claiming that treating children with gifted education increases their chance of success is obvious, but misses the point, does it not? I can specifically remember back to when the TAG Math students (Talented and Gifted) were learning what negative numbers were. I kept hearing about them. I imagined what they might mean, how you use them. When I was finally introduced one year later, I was disappointed, you mean it's literally just subtraction? I could have done that one year ago. And same with all the other students in the normal math course, if they had the same level of attention and care. The worst part was this: the students in TAG math had a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, while the normal math students had a ratio of 20:1. The remedial students had a ratio of 10:1, but the remedial teacher was from the special ed department, not a specialized math teacher that the TAG and normal students got. The TAG program at my school was praised, and the teacher acted as if she was doing God's work. Of course, she had children who were students at the school, and of course, they were in all of her classes. Now, looking back on it, I realize how broken this frame of thinking is. Yes, students will benefit if you put them in an elite math course with more resources than other children. Other students will bare the cost. I think a better allocation of our time and money would be to spread resources evenly. If you really want to get ahead by one or two years, take summer classes in middle or high school. That way, the students bares the cost of the additional time and effort, and we can still evenly allocate resources so every eight year old gets the same opportunity. EDITS: spelling bear -> bare

briandear 9y ago

Is it fair to suggest though that some kids actually need remedial math? I was in the “slow” reading group for the first half of first grade, then quickly got moved to the “fast” group and eventually ended up scoring a perfect score on the verbal portion of the MCAT as well as top percentiles on other standardized tests. My point is that sometimes remedial has nothing to do with potential. We should stop viewing remedial as “bad.”

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kahnjw 9y ago
I think it is fair, but I think there are ways to give students who need it extra attention without singling them out. Children are smarter than we give them credit for, they know when they're being judged or singled out by adults and peers.

golemiprague 9y ago

You say something and then come to an opposite conclusion, what I learn from your story is that it doesn't matter what you are being told but rather whether you got inclination to do something, women and certain races don't have this inclination and it doesn't matter how hard you will push it down their throat. On the other hand you and your stoner friend ended up ok even though you were not pushing yourself to this direction in a younger age.

gameswithgo 9y ago

Perhaps we can quantify how silly it is to try to find talent in 8 year olds, rather than just assert it is silly.