9 ms·

I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolat

by jtms 7y ago

I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.

JimboOmega 7y ago
I was awkward, and it was about the only place I could focus entirely on academics and be among peers that valued that. My identity is complicated (and queer) and while my adolescence would have been a mess no matter what, having something that I could work hard on and had meaning - grades - made a ton of difference. At a school where everyone was an awkward geek, I didn't stand out. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
thaumaturgy 7y ago
I was fortunate enough to get into a GATE extracurricular program when I was in elementary school in the East Bay, a long time ago. In my case, I got to socialize more with some peer groups, visit a planetarium, make oddball things, get a good grasp of the sciences way ahead of the regular school curriculum, and participate in a problem-solving program that influenced my thinking for the rest of my life. BUT: in retrospect, those programs are mostly for kids who just happened to be fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances at the right time. East Bay public schools were pretty good at the time, I was born just in time to learn about computers just ahead of the rest of the world, I had a somewhat stable home life, and my family supported learning and nerdy hobbies. I was a social outcast for most of my youth too, but that had less to do with GATE and more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. It took getting out into the world in my late teens to begin realizing just how much of an idiot I really was. So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I'd at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)
- bayareanative 7y ago
  Did California's GATE actually have a purpose? I was in it for 13 years (~1982-1996) and it seemed completely and utterly pointless. No extracurriculars, no meetings, no resources... it seemed like a smart-kid inventorying service for (insert random conspiracy theory here). Worse, I was constantly pulled out of class to take IQ tests and then bored to death because I was 3 years ahead after coming from a private school that had phonics and aggressive material plans (Challenger).
- jnbiche 7y ago
  > more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. Massive props to you for having the self-awareness to make that realization. So many people don't. And so many smart people fail to realize that being smart is just one gift among many. And all things considered, once you reach a certain minimum, other attributes are probably more important in life success (like work ethic, and social ability). It took me until my mid-20s to make that realization.
blackflame7000 7y ago
I was also in the gifted program and the thing that helped me the most was getting involved in youth sports like little league, rec basketball, and soccer. It allowed me to be friends with both the smart kids and athletic kids. I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids
- btilly 7y ago
  Let me guess. You don't have a coordination problem? I do. I received about a year of therapy for the fact that my left hand quite literally doesn't know what my right hand is doing. That helped. But being clumsy still made school sports really unpleasant for me. Just because sports was right for you doesn't mean that it is right for everyone.
  - RHSeeger 7y ago
    For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is not a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X isn't a good thing, it just means it isn't for everyone.
    - mrob 7y ago
      If schools do not take into account those people for whom X is not reasonable, it's entirely possible for the marginal net benefit to be negative. E.g. the students who benefit most from sport would do plenty of exercise anyway, but the students who are most harmed be sport will end up permanently hating exercise.
    - isostatic 7y ago
      OP stated "I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids" Based on a sample size of one. For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X is really important, it just means it's important for one person.
      - blackflame7000 7y ago
ryandrake 7y ago
I was in a similar situation. My elementary school recommended to my parent that I skip a grade and join the [GRADE+1] cohort, which would remove me from my (already small) group of friends. This ended up happening over my strong, for a 10 year old, objection. In the first quarter I deliberately engineered my grades to be all C’s (was previously a straight A kid) which triggered school admin to reverse the decision. I consider this my first “achievement unlocked” moment.
Ensorceled 7y ago
It was the best thing that happened to both of my step kids. They met great people, learned amazing things, socialized with people who had common interests and talent. Best of all they stopped hating school and flourished. I only regret it wasn't around when I was young.
- wccrawford 7y ago
  I was in "GIFTED" in elementary and middle school. The elementary school one was amazing, and I would recommend it to anyone. The middle school one was mediocre at best. I liked it, but it wasn't actually any better than regular classes. So it can vary pretty wildly, even in the same school system.
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    Agreed and can vary even on teachers in the program. But I've never heard of it being worse than regular school, worst case, you're with other gifted kids.
btilly 7y ago
I am sorry that your experience was so terrible, but the plural of anecdote is not data. For a counter-anecdote, my experience of gifted programs is that it was the first place where I wasn't bullied for being more interested in books than sports. This didn't help me fit in with other kids my own age, but it did wonders for my self-confidence and significantly improved my odds of having a decent life. My wife's experience is similar. The moral is that gifted programs are not in and of themselves good or bad. What they are is good for some kids and bad for others. The trick is figuring out which is better for any particular kid.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I am sorry that your experience was so terrible, but the plural of anecdote is not data. Actually it is. Data is just many individual anecdotes collected. They just need interpretation.
  - btilly 7y ago
    No, it really isn't. Having a representative sample is essential to being able to do statistics. And collecting self-reported anecdotes does not constitute a valid sampling technique. It doesn't matter how your massage your observations afterwards, GIGO still holds and what you received was statistical garbage.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >Having a representative sample is essential to being able to do statistics. That's orthogonal. Whether the collection is representative or not individual data elements are still anecdotes. (Plus, not all data is used for statistics, nor do we always have an advance knowledge of what is representative -- e.g. when researching an unknown domain).
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Submitted data is still data, just at worst biased. Which may or may not be important. The question is always what bias and whether collecting much less data yourself is preferable. Your non-submission sampling tactic may be biased too. (E.g. telephone questionnaires select for people having free time on demand. Emails select for people with bad spam filters and present in mailing list. Walking to ask has other limitations such as range and again availability. Asking third parties may be biased too, just like asking first parties.) Usually when there are lots of unique submissions the question of bias or lack of representation can be put to rest. If e.g. there are racial biases compared to baseline population due to submissions, this can be taken into account. Likewise if there is his due to some school districts responding less or more. You will have to handle these issues anyway. If you guess what the representative sample might be, you may be committing scientific fraud...
code_duck 7y ago
I would imagine it varies a lot. I went through three different programs in my midsize town growing up, with different class sizes and teachers. They varied in many ways and one way was the attitude of other children. When the program was large, like a magnet school, there weren’t social problems. When we had a class of 12 kids in a school of 300 we were ostracized. I stood out so much in normal classrooms that it was difficult to participate. I was about three years or more ahead of everyone, reading at a college level in fourth grade while some students still struggled to read compound sentences. I felt very fortunate to be put in a class with a few people my age who were at a similar level of intellectual ability.
your-nanny 7y ago
In middle school I was placed, by standardized testing, into bonehead classes, where I was extremely bored, not because I was so smart that I knew it already, but because it was boring. I took a writing elective course, impressed the teacher sufficiently that she got me into eighth grade honors English, where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. I lived it, but I struggled to get my C. Getting extra credit for reading Chaucer, on my own initiative, probably made the difference--or more likely my teachers good will and support. Teachers count. Not sure I would have ended up where I did but for their intervention.
- kermitismyhero 7y ago
  >where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. The greatest teacher I ever had was a middle-school english teacher who marked strictly on the basis of attendance and participation, never opened a textbook, enthusiastically read aloud from books of his students' choice as if he were performing them professionally on stage for half the class time, and spent the other half of the time just casually discussing the books with the students. The first words he said to the class on day one was "I don't want to hear the word preposition, and I don't think you do either."
  - your-nanny 7y ago
    Actually the sentence diagramming was useful introduction to a type of analysis. Not too different from computer science foundations of programming languages, automata, etc
    - kermitismyhero 7y ago
      I would argue that sentence diagramming is of dubious use outside of an ESL or primary school class. And even then the English language is such a self-contradicting mongrel tongue that it's effectively rule-less. It's a living, evolving, consensus language. It can't be nailed down to an algorithm. It's a language in which writers who break the rules become legendary. Would James Joyce or Charles Dodgson or the Bard himself have diagrammed a sentence? Heck no. They played with grammar and spelling the way a child plays with a pile of lego: with enthusiasm and imagination and a gleeful disregard for the instructions.
TallGuyShort 7y ago
I think there's a right and a wrong way to run these programs. Some schools just pick a couple of outliers and make it obvious they're outliers. If you're going to group some kids by ability for some classes, do it to everyone. Yes, a few kids are really advanced. A few others are almost there. Don't make the first group so uniquely isolated at the expenses of making the second group miss out on similar opportunities entirely. I see the benefit of keeping everyone together some of the time, but I'm screaming inside when I see my daughter reading at a 3rd grade level next to kids who still don't know the alphabet, and her teacher has to keep them all in one big reading group. She has an alternative but it's strictly an addition to all her other work: which is how it was for me, so I got A's in the gifted program, and D's in my regular school work because it seemed pointless and stupid. My high school was only told about the D's so it took me 2 years to get back into Honors classes. Whoever designed that program was not gifted. Let everyone spend some time grouped by ability. Don't just burden them with more busy work. And please make sure the teachers running special programs have a clue what they're doing to kids... edit: Furthermore, I always thought it pathetic that I went from being a very average student in 2 other countries, moved to America and was suddenly seen as a gifted genius who was years ahead of my peers in math and science. I've obviously never seen it that way - I think kids are capable of for more than the American school system expects of them, but their intellectual growth is being stunted at a very young age.
- bluGill 7y ago
  There is one more thing that is important that most people miss: a "gifted" student (whatever that means) mixed in with the rest challenges the other students to do better.
  - bena 7y ago
    Do you support putting intellectually challenged students with the rest to encourage them to do better?
    - bluGill 7y ago
      That is a complex question that cannot be answered as a one size fits all. "intellectually challenged" can mean many different things. In some cases yes - it is good for the "smart" kids to learn to deal with the "stupid". In some cases no, the "stupid" just hold back the "smart". Note that this is all levels, the above average student sometimes needs to be at a lower level than the very smartest, and sometimes together. There is a difference between subjects as well. I've been in choir with some "intellectually challenged" kids who had great voices: I was the one being challenged.
cglace 7y ago
I was in the gifted program in elementary school and it was the absolute best part of school. I was normally completely bored but "horizons" was the only class I got to learn at my own pace, explore what I found interesting, and be with other kids like me.
dkarl 7y ago
I don't think that's always true. I found "gifted" programs much less isolating that regular school. I was lucky enough to participate in some summer academic programs, and while I still had a lot of social difficulty, at least there was a feedback loop where people would engage with what I was saying and I could evaluate and adjust my behavior according to people's reactions. I remember gaining a lot of social confidence in those summer programs and going back home and starting the school year thinking, I'm finally catching on, I've learned how to engage in this back-and-forth where I interact with people and watch their reactions to me, I've learned how to learn, only to go right back to being isolated and mystified in school, unable to see a relationship between my behavior towards people and their behavior back towards me. For me, I needed to have a little bit more in common with my peers before I could even get traction socially. In fact, it might have been a net negative for me to be surrounded by other kids and cut off from them at the same time, because it messed with my confidence so badly. In the long run it is proving harder to unlearn the bad habits that stemmed from that than it was to learn basic social skills when I got the chance.
mcguire 7y ago
I have a friend who was in a gifted program when he was growing up. (They didn't have them when and where I grew up. Hmph.) As I understand it, they effectively took the gifted students and put them into their own school. He says it didn't do much academically or in terms of later life, but it did do something he values very much: it gave him a normal childhood. According to him, they took the ostracized nerds out of other schools and combined them so that some of them were the jocks of their school, some were the nerds, most were run-of-the-mill students, and so on. He's pretty damn smart.
fancyfish 7y ago
As another anecdote, I was in one and do recommend it. Yes, the social isolation is a real thing and you have to work harder to meet other kids outside the program. However, I made lasting friendships with others in the program who remain my closest friends today. I think I covered more ground academically and it set me up well to take advanced classes in middle school. Note, this was in a well-funded public school and over 15 years ago so your mileage may vary.

by jtms 7y ago

JimboOmega 7y ago

I was awkward, and it was about the only place I could focus entirely on academics and be among peers that valued that. My identity is complicated (and queer) and while my adolescence would have been a mess no matter what, having something that I could work hard on and had meaning - grades - made a ton of difference. At a school where everyone was an awkward geek, I didn't stand out. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

thaumaturgy 7y ago

I was fortunate enough to get into a GATE extracurricular program when I was in elementary school in the East Bay, a long time ago. In my case, I got to socialize more with some peer groups, visit a planetarium, make oddball things, get a good grasp of the sciences way ahead of the regular school curriculum, and participate in a problem-solving program that influenced my thinking for the rest of my life. BUT: in retrospect, those programs are mostly for kids who just happened to be fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances at the right time. East Bay public schools were pretty good at the time, I was born just in time to learn about computers just ahead of the rest of the world, I had a somewhat stable home life, and my family supported learning and nerdy hobbies. I was a social outcast for most of my youth too, but that had less to do with GATE and more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. It took getting out into the world in my late teens to begin realizing just how much of an idiot I really was. So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I'd at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)

bayareanative 7y ago
Did California's GATE actually have a purpose? I was in it for 13 years (~1982-1996) and it seemed completely and utterly pointless. No extracurriculars, no meetings, no resources... it seemed like a smart-kid inventorying service for (insert random conspiracy theory here). Worse, I was constantly pulled out of class to take IQ tests and then bored to death because I was 3 years ahead after coming from a private school that had phonics and aggressive material plans (Challenger).
jnbiche 7y ago
> more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. Massive props to you for having the self-awareness to make that realization. So many people don't. And so many smart people fail to realize that being smart is just one gift among many. And all things considered, once you reach a certain minimum, other attributes are probably more important in life success (like work ethic, and social ability). It took me until my mid-20s to make that realization.

blackflame7000 7y ago

I was also in the gifted program and the thing that helped me the most was getting involved in youth sports like little league, rec basketball, and soccer. It allowed me to be friends with both the smart kids and athletic kids. I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids

btilly 7y ago
Let me guess. You don't have a coordination problem? I do. I received about a year of therapy for the fact that my left hand quite literally doesn't know what my right hand is doing. That helped. But being clumsy still made school sports really unpleasant for me. Just because sports was right for you doesn't mean that it is right for everyone.
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is not a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X isn't a good thing, it just means it isn't for everyone.
  - mrob 7y ago
    If schools do not take into account those people for whom X is not reasonable, it's entirely possible for the marginal net benefit to be negative. E.g. the students who benefit most from sport would do plenty of exercise anyway, but the students who are most harmed be sport will end up permanently hating exercise.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    OP stated "I can't stress enough how important youth sports are for kids" Based on a sample size of one. For any given activity X, there will be people for which X is a reasonable thing. That doesn't mean X is really important, it just means it's important for one person.
    - blackflame7000 7y ago

ryandrake 7y ago

I was in a similar situation. My elementary school recommended to my parent that I skip a grade and join the [GRADE+1] cohort, which would remove me from my (already small) group of friends. This ended up happening over my strong, for a 10 year old, objection. In the first quarter I deliberately engineered my grades to be all C’s (was previously a straight A kid) which triggered school admin to reverse the decision. I consider this my first “achievement unlocked” moment.

Ensorceled 7y ago

It was the best thing that happened to both of my step kids. They met great people, learned amazing things, socialized with people who had common interests and talent. Best of all they stopped hating school and flourished. I only regret it wasn't around when I was young.

wccrawford 7y ago
I was in "GIFTED" in elementary and middle school. The elementary school one was amazing, and I would recommend it to anyone. The middle school one was mediocre at best. I liked it, but it wasn't actually any better than regular classes. So it can vary pretty wildly, even in the same school system.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  Agreed and can vary even on teachers in the program. But I've never heard of it being worse than regular school, worst case, you're with other gifted kids.

btilly 7y ago

I am sorry that your experience was so terrible, but the plural of anecdote is not data. For a counter-anecdote, my experience of gifted programs is that it was the first place where I wasn't bullied for being more interested in books than sports. This didn't help me fit in with other kids my own age, but it did wonders for my self-confidence and significantly improved my odds of having a decent life. My wife's experience is similar. The moral is that gifted programs are not in and of themselves good or bad. What they are is good for some kids and bad for others. The trick is figuring out which is better for any particular kid.

coldtea 7y ago
>I am sorry that your experience was so terrible, but the plural of anecdote is not data. Actually it is. Data is just many individual anecdotes collected. They just need interpretation.
- btilly 7y ago
  No, it really isn't. Having a representative sample is essential to being able to do statistics. And collecting self-reported anecdotes does not constitute a valid sampling technique. It doesn't matter how your massage your observations afterwards, GIGO still holds and what you received was statistical garbage.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Having a representative sample is essential to being able to do statistics. That's orthogonal. Whether the collection is representative or not individual data elements are still anecdotes. (Plus, not all data is used for statistics, nor do we always have an advance knowledge of what is representative -- e.g. when researching an unknown domain).
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Submitted data is still data, just at worst biased. Which may or may not be important. The question is always what bias and whether collecting much less data yourself is preferable. Your non-submission sampling tactic may be biased too. (E.g. telephone questionnaires select for people having free time on demand. Emails select for people with bad spam filters and present in mailing list. Walking to ask has other limitations such as range and again availability. Asking third parties may be biased too, just like asking first parties.) Usually when there are lots of unique submissions the question of bias or lack of representation can be put to rest. If e.g. there are racial biases compared to baseline population due to submissions, this can be taken into account. Likewise if there is his due to some school districts responding less or more. You will have to handle these issues anyway. If you guess what the representative sample might be, you may be committing scientific fraud...

code_duck 7y ago

I would imagine it varies a lot. I went through three different programs in my midsize town growing up, with different class sizes and teachers. They varied in many ways and one way was the attitude of other children. When the program was large, like a magnet school, there weren’t social problems. When we had a class of 12 kids in a school of 300 we were ostracized. I stood out so much in normal classrooms that it was difficult to participate. I was about three years or more ahead of everyone, reading at a college level in fourth grade while some students still struggled to read compound sentences. I felt very fortunate to be put in a class with a few people my age who were at a similar level of intellectual ability.

your-nanny 7y ago

In middle school I was placed, by standardized testing, into bonehead classes, where I was extremely bored, not because I was so smart that I knew it already, but because it was boring. I took a writing elective course, impressed the teacher sufficiently that she got me into eighth grade honors English, where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. I lived it, but I struggled to get my C. Getting extra credit for reading Chaucer, on my own initiative, probably made the difference--or more likely my teachers good will and support. Teachers count. Not sure I would have ended up where I did but for their intervention.

kermitismyhero 7y ago
>where my dear teacher lectured on grammar like it was a game of chess. The greatest teacher I ever had was a middle-school english teacher who marked strictly on the basis of attendance and participation, never opened a textbook, enthusiastically read aloud from books of his students' choice as if he were performing them professionally on stage for half the class time, and spent the other half of the time just casually discussing the books with the students. The first words he said to the class on day one was "I don't want to hear the word preposition, and I don't think you do either."
- your-nanny 7y ago
  Actually the sentence diagramming was useful introduction to a type of analysis. Not too different from computer science foundations of programming languages, automata, etc
  - kermitismyhero 7y ago
    I would argue that sentence diagramming is of dubious use outside of an ESL or primary school class. And even then the English language is such a self-contradicting mongrel tongue that it's effectively rule-less. It's a living, evolving, consensus language. It can't be nailed down to an algorithm. It's a language in which writers who break the rules become legendary. Would James Joyce or Charles Dodgson or the Bard himself have diagrammed a sentence? Heck no. They played with grammar and spelling the way a child plays with a pile of lego: with enthusiasm and imagination and a gleeful disregard for the instructions.

TallGuyShort 7y ago

I think there's a right and a wrong way to run these programs. Some schools just pick a couple of outliers and make it obvious they're outliers. If you're going to group some kids by ability for some classes, do it to everyone. Yes, a few kids are really advanced. A few others are almost there. Don't make the first group so uniquely isolated at the expenses of making the second group miss out on similar opportunities entirely. I see the benefit of keeping everyone together some of the time, but I'm screaming inside when I see my daughter reading at a 3rd grade level next to kids who still don't know the alphabet, and her teacher has to keep them all in one big reading group. She has an alternative but it's strictly an addition to all her other work: which is how it was for me, so I got A's in the gifted program, and D's in my regular school work because it seemed pointless and stupid. My high school was only told about the D's so it took me 2 years to get back into Honors classes. Whoever designed that program was not gifted. Let everyone spend some time grouped by ability. Don't just burden them with more busy work. And please make sure the teachers running special programs have a clue what they're doing to kids... edit: Furthermore, I always thought it pathetic that I went from being a very average student in 2 other countries, moved to America and was suddenly seen as a gifted genius who was years ahead of my peers in math and science. I've obviously never seen it that way - I think kids are capable of for more than the American school system expects of them, but their intellectual growth is being stunted at a very young age.

bluGill 7y ago
There is one more thing that is important that most people miss: a "gifted" student (whatever that means) mixed in with the rest challenges the other students to do better.
- bena 7y ago
  Do you support putting intellectually challenged students with the rest to encourage them to do better?
  - bluGill 7y ago
    That is a complex question that cannot be answered as a one size fits all. "intellectually challenged" can mean many different things. In some cases yes - it is good for the "smart" kids to learn to deal with the "stupid". In some cases no, the "stupid" just hold back the "smart". Note that this is all levels, the above average student sometimes needs to be at a lower level than the very smartest, and sometimes together. There is a difference between subjects as well. I've been in choir with some "intellectually challenged" kids who had great voices: I was the one being challenged.

cglace 7y ago

I was in the gifted program in elementary school and it was the absolute best part of school. I was normally completely bored but "horizons" was the only class I got to learn at my own pace, explore what I found interesting, and be with other kids like me.

dkarl 7y ago

I don't think that's always true. I found "gifted" programs much less isolating that regular school. I was lucky enough to participate in some summer academic programs, and while I still had a lot of social difficulty, at least there was a feedback loop where people would engage with what I was saying and I could evaluate and adjust my behavior according to people's reactions. I remember gaining a lot of social confidence in those summer programs and going back home and starting the school year thinking, I'm finally catching on, I've learned how to engage in this back-and-forth where I interact with people and watch their reactions to me, I've learned how to learn, only to go right back to being isolated and mystified in school, unable to see a relationship between my behavior towards people and their behavior back towards me. For me, I needed to have a little bit more in common with my peers before I could even get traction socially. In fact, it might have been a net negative for me to be surrounded by other kids and cut off from them at the same time, because it messed with my confidence so badly. In the long run it is proving harder to unlearn the bad habits that stemmed from that than it was to learn basic social skills when I got the chance.

mcguire 7y ago

I have a friend who was in a gifted program when he was growing up. (They didn't have them when and where I grew up. Hmph.) As I understand it, they effectively took the gifted students and put them into their own school. He says it didn't do much academically or in terms of later life, but it did do something he values very much: it gave him a normal childhood. According to him, they took the ostracized nerds out of other schools and combined them so that some of them were the jocks of their school, some were the nerds, most were run-of-the-mill students, and so on. He's pretty damn smart.

fancyfish 7y ago

As another anecdote, I was in one and do recommend it. Yes, the social isolation is a real thing and you have to work harder to meet other kids outside the program. However, I made lasting friendships with others in the program who remain my closest friends today. I think I covered more ground academically and it set me up well to take advanced classes in middle school. Note, this was in a well-funded public school and over 15 years ago so your mileage may vary.