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Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration (2006) [pdf]

263 points by waterhouse 7y ago

kaptain 7y ago
A friend of mine who is a teacher pointed out to me that “highly gifted” children were actually special needs children. She used this term because she worked in a highly competitive district where parents were constantly harassing her to consider their children “highly gifted”. Once she used this term, it became easier for parents to accept that their children were doing fine in “normal” class, which was quite good anyways because of the average aptitude of the students.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Parents of very gifted kids routinely seek out support groups to help them cope. It's absolutely not all upside. Social challenges are a very big part of the problem.
  - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
    I remember being in one of those “accelerated” programs. If I recall it was for math. I was not in that class for long. It wasn’t that I did poorly in the class, it was the fact that I told the teacher to go fuck herself. Suffice it to say I’ve never been particularly fond of authority figures. As a child you understand inherently that all people are equal. Why should anyone be above anyone else? At least that was how my childish mind perceived it. Hierarchy is something that learned socially.
    - 77pt77 7y ago
      >As a child you understand inherently that all people are equal. Why should anyone be above anyone else? At least that was how my childish mind perceived it. Hierarchy is something that learned socially. I remember when I was very young other children saying exactly the opposite and as an adult I've met young children that are very attuned to one's social standing. Also there are strong biological reasons as to why it is highly innate but modulated by culture.
      - Mirioron 7y ago
        I think that it's more about children thinking that everyone is equal in having to keep their word. If you make a promise then you're supposed to keep to it. What often disillusions children is that people in positions of authority often make promises, but don't keep them, yet when it goes the other way around those people will coerce everyone else into keeping the promises to them.
        bartwe 7y ago
        It's a naive position of someone with a nice upbringing without bullies to show that under the veneer there is suppressed brutality of those willing to use violence.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      Some gifted kids are especially bad about having strong views about things like justice and morality and equality. It's part of why I'm on parenting blog number three, which isn't exactly catching fire. My stories about raising my sons and my views on such were seemingly popular, at least with a vocal minority, on an email list that was basically a support group for parents of gifted kids (which is why I originally began blogging at all). My oldest was accepted to college at age thirteen. The classes he had tried to sign up for all fell through for different reasons and then he told me he didn't really want to take college classes. He wanted me to keep homeschooling him. I wasn't thrilled. At age 14, he explained Einstein's Theory of Relativity to me, which was helpful to me in understanding some of my college classes. I absolutely wasn't qualified to keep teaching him in some subjects. He already knew more science than I did. But he also has a serious medical condition and a variety of other problems. So I heaved a big sigh and said "Okay. I can't teach you, but I can keep supplying you learning materials for those subjects and I can still teach you in other subjects, like math." So, yeah, there's lots of problems you run into with gifted kids, one of them being that some of them have little tolerance for "idiot adults" who may not know anymore than they do, so they tend to not be very accepting of the idea that adults have some right of authority simply because they are older. "Older and wiser/know more" don't necessarily follow. Edit: Someone asked, then deleted their comment. It's called Raising Future Adults. https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/ https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/ There's not much there currently.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - gorgoiler 7y ago
        How do the strong views about justice and morality typically manifest themselves in a way that’s negative rather than positive? I’m not challenging you on that by the way. I see this too and I think I have a pretty good idea what you mean but didn’t want to second guess what you meant, incorrectly.
        DoreenMichele 7y ago
        It's not necessarily that it's negative, though it can be. It's just that it's usually socially unacceptable to take a strong moral stand and turn X thing into a hill to die on (especially if you are five, but not only if you are a child). Most people cannot and will not live up to the strict moral standards of some five year old on their high horse. When the five year old screams "The emperor has no clothes and you're a liar!!!!" multiple times per day and will not stop when punished for it, it creates a lot of problems. One of my sons was like that. I homeschooled and I can live up to his expectations for things like fairness and keeping my word. But when adults don't live up to those expectations and they have some tyrannical little would-be civil rights activist on their hands, it sometimes turns abusive because they need the kid to just shut up and give it a rest already and they run out of ideas for how to keep the kid from being a troublemaker. (Alternately, in school, they are constantly in detention or similar.)
    - aspenmayer 7y ago
      An innate sense of equality without appreciation of power dynamics can make institutional power and authority figures seem adversarial to a certain kind of precocious mind, perhaps younger ones especially so. Learning should be a journey that instills the value of knowledge as well as the labor to acquire it and transform it into useful and amusing ends. Otherwise, a failure to grasp knowledge itself can create a disdain for the entire enterprise of learning and a kind of self-hating self-sustaining self-induced oppositionally-defiant ignorance. I still love the USA, though.
      - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
        I too love the USA. I love all Americans, even those whom I disagree with on every axis, but love as people. But I find myself at a crossroads (or at least, what I feel is a crossroads). What should I do next? Should I stay in a country that taxes me without representation of my views? I think Balaji Srinivasan said it best. In political science, you have two options: voice and exit. Voice is protesting what you find intolerable in a system by voting against policies that negatively affect you. Or, there is exit. Exit is leaving that system entirely, such that it amplifies the dissenting voice. I find myself contemplating exit. I'm actually considering an authoritarian state, Singapore, as a place to emigrate to. Because while my views won't be represented, at least they won't tax me for it. I'm almost sort of okay with that.
        aspenmayer 7y ago
        You’re only chasing safety. To me it seems you feel like a victim of a street robbery. “Your money or your life,” the voice behind you asks, weighing options as you weigh yours. “I’ll take the money, since I’m not overly attached to my current way of life,” you reply confidently, at least you hope that’s how it sounds. The reply sings. You cry, for a part of you just died. If you’re lucky, you’re still clinging to a convincing enough simulacrum of your former life to enjoy whatever money you were able to keep. FIN In all seriousness, I feel like leaving is what everyone else in the country would tell you to do. Anyone who would give up on the experiment of America is foolish to do so. They give up their leverage, power, and credibility in the eyes of their fellow citizens. That may not mean much to you. I’m not saying it should. But if nothing else, throwing in the towel and doing as you say feels like taking your ball and going home. We’re in this together. It’s sink or swim, but a rising tide raises all boats, large and small. The economy isn’t a zero sum game, but most of politics in this country is winner take all, which isn’t far off. Yet change happens here anyway. The best life for you is one where you can live your best life. No one can tell you what that looks like. Hopefully you recognize it when you see it, and it might be a lot closer to home than you realize. But hey it’s your choice either way. There’s no shame in being an expat. I’ve lived overseas and it made me who I am as much as any other thing, and I still like me most days. If you’re lucky the door swings both ways. You can always come back. Just don’t let it hit you on the way out.
    - devmunchies 7y ago
      I was transferred to a “gifted” program in 5th grade but I moved back out after a month or 2. It was nice having more rigorous material but it also meant more homework and I was terrible at doing homework. Plus the kids were more dry, less jokes.
      - joejerryronnie 7y ago
        > Plus the kids were more dry, less jokes. Gifted children simply prefer British humour over American humor.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - gorgoiler 7y ago
      Very well said, thank you. For me, the turning point was learning that: (1) hierarchies are a partial order: ones manager is ones superior only at work, and not in all aspects of life. It’s weird if they are. It feels challenging when they are subordinate to you on some other axis (e.g. your manager is younger or less socially popular than you) until this axiom sinks in. Becoming a company man is risky once you’ve learned this because you may end up surrendering yourself to the idea that the company hierarchy is total in all aspects of life. Having the boss round for dinner, bowing and scraping, 1950s stereotypes etc. (2) In a healthy hierarchy power and responsibility go hand in hand. One accepts authority figures in life because they also take responsibility for things working properly. Your manager at work gets to deal with the awkward underperforming colleague, not you. If people gather to you socially, you have a responsibility to bring something positive to their lives. Learning that hierarchies were there to provide a service to me — something which felt counter intuitive for a long time — was eye opening. It does also make you double down on attacking hierarchies where power is wielded irresponsibly.
    - non-entity 7y ago
      I was in and out of "gifted programs" for most of my schooling, if you could call them that. A few of the people in there were generally smart, many not so much. Personally I always hated them. Except for a brief program when I was in 4th grade all they were for us was just am increased workload. Me, being the lazy pos I am, just neglected to do any of the extra work and I focused on my own thing. I remember in 4th grade when I was kicked outthe first time transferring from the accelerated class that had me doing boatloads of dull readings and "paper work" in the accelerated clas to the normal class with a much less mind-numbing workload where I had time to work on what I wanted to when because I finished early. Eventually they would realize I'm moving faster than most of the class, stick me in the gifted class and the cycle would repeat up until graduation. When I was a senior I. I recall my senior year one of the kids who was in the giftedprograms their entire schooling asking me if a 23 was a good ASVAB score. Ibrelaize these programs are going to vary depending on your school district, so for context, this was a mostly lower-middle class and middle class suburb of a southeastern metro. I personally dont think I'm very smart, likely average, maybe a little less than I used to be nowadays, but I consider a lot of these programs a sham.
      - proverbialbunny 7y ago
        Yah. I think many of us can relate here. Starting in 2nd grade I started ditching class and going to the computer lab to write code. For some sort of reason my teacher didn't notice I was missing as long as I was in for attendance during first period. She did realize I wasn't turning in any work, so I got put into some sort of special program I never went to. They didn't expect me to come, because I never came, and my teacher expected me to be gone, giving me all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted. I took this trick all the way through high school signing up for programs, or more, stating I was part of programs that would let me ditch classes. However, in 6th grade, the computer lab shared a window with my homeroom, so a substitute teacher made a comment about it. Turns out I had hacked the admin password and was sending mail, in the form of leaving text messages onto the distract administrator's desktop, where we'd chat about all sorts of stuff. The district didn't know what to do with me. Should I be punished? So they changed the admin password, which I immediately broke into, and that was it. I stayed in the computer lab and my homeroom teacher treated that like normal.
    - esoterica 7y ago
      You seem to think that sharing that anecdote paints you in a positive light but it really doesn't. It just makes you seem like you haven't matured much since you were a child. I mean really, bragging about how you were hurling expletives at your teachers because you were too smart and enlightened to acknowledge authority figures? Come on. You're very clearly embodying a specific archetype of the socially maladjusted outcast who thinks they keep clashing with other people because they are a misunderstood genius when really they are just difficult and abrasive.
      - dang 7y ago
        No personal attacks in HN comments, please, regardless of how much someone else has matured. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pfarnsworth 7y ago
  My son is profoundly gifted, although he's not in the same league as some of those children described in the study. I absolutely consider him a special-needs child. He's been kicked out of two schools (including a "gifted" school) at this point for his behavior, but it turns out his behavior was because he was profoundly bored. His current school accelerated him by 2 grades and now he's more manageable. He's still bored, but at least he feels like his classmates are more his level, even though he probably needs to skip 1 or 2 more grades to match his academic abilities. I'm loathe to accelerate him further because I worry about emotional well-being, being the youngest kid in the class, but this study has given me food for thought. Thank you OP for posting this.
  - ttty 7y ago
    I'd usually bring my own work at school. I liked to build web application, so I used most of my boring school time to architect them on paper. Then when at home, I could implement it. My teachers bothered me a bit, but I was passing the exams, so they couldn't complain too much. Your kid could have his own little project and do it at school.
  - leshokunin 7y ago
    You haven't mentioned anything outside of school, so have you considered giving him something on the side? I would extrapolate that he's very frustrated he understands something faster than the others, regardless of whether it's a few grades beyond him or not. It's ok for school to be a certain speed. Some hobbies have infinite depth, and aren't inherently limited by the pace of school and the routine of school days. Examples include: games such as Chess / Tetris / Go, literature, learning finance, making things (woodwork, electronics...).
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > Once she used this term, it became easier for parents to accept that their children were doing fine in “normal” class, which was quite good anyways because of the average aptitude of the students. Your child could be doing work three grades ahead, learning things that would challenge them and help them grow intellectually. Instead we’ll keep them here with the normal children where at best they’ll learn to shut up and not bother the teacher.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    The GP is talking about competitive parents whose kids aren't genuinely exceptionally gifted. The parents are just looking for bragging rights and/or another edge.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Keeping children who’re perfectly capable of doing sixth grade work doing fifth grade work isn’t as bad but it’s still a waste off their time and a lesson in the actual priorities of the school system, which certainly don’t have learning among the top five.
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        Some parents don't really have the best interests of their children at heart. "Hot housing" children does not make for better future outcomes. It just deprives children of their childhood.
        barry-cotter 7y ago
        > "Hot housing" children does not make for better future outcomes. I would welcome any research to that effect if you have it to hand. I am not an expert but if you search gwern.net for “gifted education”, “acceleration” “SMPY” or “Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth” you’ll find many papers on this general topic. There’s nothing there showing negative effects and quite a bit that’s positive.
- mlyle 7y ago
  Yah. You can be super bright without being in the category that needs all the support and scaffolding. My oldest is super precocious mathematically. And has adjustment problems, impatience, social struggles, etc. Massive but undeveloped sense of justice/fairness that borders on fascism, too. He is doing OK, but... it takes a lot of enrichment and support for him to make it and stay sane. My middle kid is nearly as capable mathematically and stronger verbally... but he's chill, and patient, adept socially, ... good at, and content, slacking. Fits in perfectly in a mainstream classroom without a lot of accommodation. (The youngest? Who knows. We'll see, he's only 6).
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Your middle kid sounds like how I was. If he really is like I was, then please give him the same enrichment and support as your more difficult eldest. The middle one may have learned to slack and chill out and not rock the boat, but it's still a coping mechanism for a problem that needs support.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      Hey-- thanks for the message. We get it / try -- when he doesn't successfully weasel out of it (he is good at that). The flip-side is, social adaptation/easy-going-ness actually makes it easier for his teachers to challenge him, etc. The oldest reminds me of me, struggles and all. I have to think my middle kid has an easier path of things than I did.
      - xcasperx 7y ago
        I too was the middle kid. Here's my own anecdotal advice: I started slacking in school from about 3rd-9th grade. I found programming between 9th-10th grade during the summer through pretty much sheer dumb luck, timing, and being in the perfect environment. After that, my grades improved, confidence improved, everything improved. The school system may not be able to offer your kid the opportunity they need to really find the inspiration that can kick them into drive. Maybe try to expose them to as many things as you can, and see what clicks? Another thing is how they learn. I learned through modding video games and could see instant results, via changing just a few variables, of what programming could do, and would share these with my friends. This instant gratification and social "confirmation" from my friends, as well as the communities I joined, really pushed me forward. Plus, I really enjoyed it. Shortly after modding video games, I tried getting into creating websites but didn't quite see the instant gratification or have the social "confirmation" to push me as hard as I did with modding video games.
- notechback 7y ago
  You see a global move towards "inclusive" education which aims to provide opportunities for all levels of performance and background/conditions, including the gifted. Eg Portugal and Norway are impressive reference cases.
nopinsight 7y ago
Two main possibilities to match the curriculum to the needs of highly gifted children: 1) Put them together in a special class composed entirely of students with similar level of giftedness, taught by specialized teachers using a gifted curriculum. 2) Move them to a higher grade, which means they will need to study with (possibly much) older students. Option 1) is superior for their social development since they are not more mature in all respects. It should be pursued whenever possible. Option 2) may also subject the kids to bullying and jealousy by their older peers, some of whom might do worse than the gifted one in many academic subjects despite age difference. Early grouping by ability is also more desirable. From the paper: "In both Australia and the United States, schools tend to delay acceleration and ability grouping until the middle years of elementary school. This policy is fundamentally flawed. It is in the early years of school that we should be identifying exceptionally and profoundly gifted children and developing programs of acceleration and grouping to provide a more effective response to their accelerated intellectual and emotional development." It is in the interest of society to develop highly gifted students fully since they have more potential to invent groundbreaking technologies or contribute to society in an extraordinary way. Source: I have taught many gifted and highly gifted students over the years.
- lainga 7y ago
  In my experience I got both at once pretty early (skipped 2nd grade and was in a "gifted" class from 4-7). Looking back, I think the class was a dumping ground for trouble students (oops!). My memories were - we went through six teachers, didn't get along, were isolated from the rest of the school, and didn't learn very much. My high school, OTOH, was iron-firm about sticking everyone together - no advanced classes (until AP) and no advancing grades. The first few months were a shock; after that I had a great time and really applied myself. Never could make up that extra year in height, though.
  - nopinsight 7y ago
    Did you and classmates have a teacher who understood the needs and special curriculum for highly gifted kids too? If otherwise, it could be lackluster since most teachers don’t know how to handle them or keep them engaged. Einstein’s tutor when he was a kid was an medical student who later became a noted ophthalmologist with a Wikipedia entry of his own. Gauss’ 4th grade teacher asked the class he was in to sum from 1 to 100, hoping to engage them for the whole period, and couldn’t believe how fast Gauss finished it. ADDED: For exceptionally gifted students, I estimate they should have someone with the intellect equivalent to a PhD or a masters graduate from a top program to teach them once they are in late primary school (and sometimes sooner).
knzhou 7y ago
I tutor some exceptionally gifted students as a side gig (for scale: calculus at 10, publishing research papers and learning graduate-level general relativity at 14), and I can say that the lessons of papers like these have been taken to heed. Today, there are tons of resources for kids like these, and the explosion continues every year. Professors are taking them for research projects, summer camps are bringing them together, and free online courses are spoiling them with knowledge. We're at the point where full courses are regularly put on Youtube in every field, with better teaching quality than almost all "real" courses! The kids seem to be quite happy for it, and I'm looking forward to the results in a couple decades. My magnet high school was a smaller example of this. It had a reputation around the area for producing great outcomes for students with rigorous coursework, so people fought like crazy to get in. But once we did, we found that we had almost zero homework and spent half of each school day just sitting around. The real magic was in what we got to do with all that free time!
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > I can say that the lessons of papers like these have been taken to heed. This isn’t true. Gifted and talented education receives maybe 1% of the funding that special needs education does, if that. In NYC de Blasio is trying to dismantle the existing system because the students are too Asian. Most of the US has nothing approaching that system. Normal high schools are at best indifferent to students who want to go higher than AP; they’re certainly not going out of their way to help and encourage those capable of doing college work to do so. Face it, at barest minimum 10% of 16 year olds could be in high schools like those associated with Bard College at Simon’s Rock[1], where they graduate with an Associate’s degree having completed half of the coursework for a Bachelor’s. I don’t know what percentage of 14 year olds could do the same or complete a Bachelor’s before 18 but it’s 100s of times greater than those who actually do. [1] https://simons-rock.edu/ https://simons-rock.edu/
  - knzhou 7y ago
    My point is that there's been an explosion in opportunities that kids can use that go around what schools provide. Even when I was in high school, you could get most of an undergraduate education from MIT OpenCourseWare for free, and the situation is even better now. (You couldn't get a credential out of it... but who cares, when either way you'll have the knowledge?) Though I'm upset about the political drama over NYC magnet schools, it's important to note that their outcomes aren't due to magic teachers or better equipment. The kids are making things happen on their own! The core benefit these schools provide is mostly that they allow the kids to meet each other.
preston4tw 7y ago
I'm currently 35 and I was ID'd as a gifted child, so this paper caught my attention. There's a section that discusses outcomes based on whether gifted children were allowed to skip grades or not, and my personal experience largely matches what is described for what would be my group, the nonaccelerands: "Several of the nonaccelerands have serious and ongoing problems with social relationships. These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because having been, to a large extent, socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice in their formative years in developing and maintaining social relationships. Six have had counseling. Of these, two have been treated for severe depression. If educators were made responsible to ethics committees, as are researchers, such developmentally inappropriate educational misplacement would never be permitted." I wonder how this group is doing these days. I wonder if the runners of the study ever considered introducing members of this group to the others to form a support group.
- twomoretime 7y ago
  I've long thought that Asperger's and tail end IQ can be really difficult to distinguish. They may be one and the same. And unlike autism, Asperger's apparently responds well to the right stimulation. And I think programming fits that niche well enough that "smart" people disproportionately code when they come across the opportunity. It could be that Asperger's is distinguished from autism by being a condition acquired by high IQ when improperly stimulated or undersocialized.
  - notechback 7y ago
    Just to point out that all autism spectrum disorders have quite a spectrum. Some Asperger's cases are barely able to function, others excell in various fields.
    - twomoretime 7y ago
      Yes, and the spectral nature of autism makes it an easy mistake to make if it turns out that Asperger's is actually separate from autism. It's not like we know anything with certainty here. AFAIK there is known cause for either condition. Plenty of speculation.
PostOnce 7y ago
This always leads to discussions of "what kind of school is right?" and not of "is school right?" Perhaps the answer is always yes, but it'd be nice to see it discussed. Marcus Aurelius said 2000 years ago to "spare no expense on private tutors" -- this is going to be cost prohibitive at the very least, but it's also worth thinking about. Another thing worth thinking about is every extra minute you spend building another this-or-that at work and not with your kids is an advantage you give your employer while simultaneously depriving your kids of your care, knowledge, and enthusiasm for subject matter (to a degree). There's a balance to be found, of course, but it's something I imagine people struggle with. Work always wants one more thing, but it can wait until Monday.
- Balgair 7y ago
  > Marcus Aurelius said 2000 years ago to "spare no expense on private tutors" Taking parenting advice from people thousands of years ago is not the wisest idea. Let alone Roman child rearing advice. Let alone from an emperor. Let alone from Marcus Aurelius. His son, Commodus, was one of the worst emperors. I'm not saying that Aurelius was wrong, but his record on child rearing is clearly terrible considering the lives of his children. Getting into working more or less for the benefit children is very individual. Each family is unique and changes over time. You raise your kids, yes, but they raise each other and themselves too. They are real people too.
  - PostOnce 7y ago
    Sometimes we draw a bad hand, and no amount of parenting can save some of the mentally disturbed, like Commodus -- you can't read Meditations, though, and say it's not full of startlingly relevant advice to modern life. From education to work ethic to reflective, thoughtful consideration of one's actions, to coping with trauma. Also, that isn't Marcus Aurelius theory on parenting, he said he learned it from his grandfather, which eventually led to him being one of the Five Good Emperors, so how does that change our analysis? Anyway, pretty much every single study ever done says the smaller the class, the more direct the instruction, the better the academic result, from 0AD til 2020AD, the way we're wired hasn't really changed. It's not likely that receiving 1/30th of the attention of your teacher is going to be as valuable to you as 100% attention, or 50% attention, or 25% attention, vs 3% in a normal school. If kids raising themselves and each other was reliable, we wouldn't have disadvantaged youth. Poverty means busy parents (2 jobs, etc), busy parents mean less time with the kids. It's going to be hard to convince anyone that more time with your kids is going to be anything but beneficial.
m0zg 7y ago
Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion?
- lowiqengineer 7y ago
  Don’t you believe people like me are lower IQ because I got rejected from Google?
  - m0zg 7y ago
    I'd bet most people who work(ed) at Google were rejected at least once. I was. I'd also bet that if the current engineers working at Google were to be re-interviewed, at least a half of them would be rejected by Google's interview process. What you've experienced is mostly an artifact of having 100+ people apply for each open position, it says nothing at all about your intelligence.
  - kalium-xyz 7y ago
    Just do what Ben Pridmore[1] did and study efficient ways to encode information in memory other memory techniques. It breaks some IQ tests so you can walk into Mensa and such (its not that meaningful but neither is using IQ as a metric for getting rejected at google). unrelated but by your long history of posting about having a low IQ yet working for amazon, what is a low IQ to you? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore
    - lowiqengineer 7y ago
      Low IQ is apparently getting into Google. I don't think many people regard getting into Amazon as requiring a genius IQ or even an above-average one.
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  > Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Nope. (Well, there are people who believe that, but there are also people who believe that vaccines cause autism.) As a scientific consensus, the concept IQ is well supported by psychometric research. The individual IQ tests, of course, may contain mistakes. And any online test is most likely completely made up. > Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion? Of course there was progress in reducing bias in tests. For example, older IQ tests often contained questions about history, which is more an evidence of cultural background than of raw intelligence. Or verbal tasks, which disadvantage people who don't take the test in their first language. Modern tests are more about patterns, see e.g. Raven's Progressive Matrices. Yes, even this can be discriminatory against e.g. blind people. It's not perfect, but there is definitely a progress.
elamje 7y ago
I remember some of my best memories were being in a GT program at my middle school where about 30 kids in my grade took the same core classes together every year for all 3 years. I didn’t appreciate it then, but in hind sight being separated from most 6th-8th graders who barely care about school and being mostly around kids that did, had a tremendous impact on driving me through high school and college. Most of the kids were way smarter than me and are doing incredible things now. Years later, when I studied in Sweden, I became great friends with a public school teacher there. I told her about AP classes, and GT and magnet programs and it was quite literally, a foreign concept. She said that in Sweden it would be discriminatory for children to be separated like that. I’m worried that the world is moving more and more in this direction, but I hope not! I felt extremely lucky to be put around peers that pushed me and had shared goals because most of the kids where I’m from don’t have that, and I could have easily ended up on a different path. In college, I realized I was in an entirely different league when all of my classmates were in the top couple of graduates from their huge high schools, and I could barely hang on. Around that time I met a couple of 14 year olds in my dorm that were dual majoring in computer sci and math, and then I realized that there are so many different levels of intelligence in the same age buckets, schools have been doing it wrong for so long! In an ideal world everyone could be grouped at the appropriate level regardless of age, but then again, there is a huge difference in 14 year olds vs 18 and 19 year olds, so there seems to be some merit to the age bucket system. All that being said, the only thing I know is that world is a complicated place :)
contingencies 7y ago
Can anyone recommend any tried and true, globalist/international perspective distance education / homeschooling groups? Less focused on base academic outcomes (assume this is covered), more focused on co-exploration and organic learning with distributed friends in a semi-structured or periodically adult-stimulated fashion. We don't need to download rote learning worksheets or lesson plans, we'd prefer to explore real world subjects freely, asking questions and allowing one subject to function as a lead-in to others. Unsure if this exists.
jiggybling 7y ago
I wonder how strong the long-term inverse effect is having gone to a magnet high school and seeing a certain level of self esteem fallout for many people that I would say were hard working but nowhere close to "profoundly gifted".
anon104109348 7y ago
I wonder a lot about how much giftedness matters, for children below exceptionally gifted. My IQ was measured at about 150 twice, at age 3 and 15. I am definitely not exceptionally gifted - I was able to be on the cusp at some programs that had exceptionally gifted participants and I was in awe of them. But as an adult I've never really felt limited by intelligence, but instead by motivation and social skills. So I don't know what to stress for my children. I was deeply unhappy through public school. Would I have more motivation and better social skills if the public school had been less boring and had less bullying? Would I just be more of a jerk? My kids are in early elementary, and they are also not exceptionally gifted, but they are easily 2-3 grade levels ahead in math, and a little ahead in reading. The other stuff at school could certainly be better for them, but in ways that I suspect would be better for all the kids there. I think I'd be happy with their school if they had more recess, the kids were nicer and the math were more advanced, but I don't know where to find that for them.
- lowiqengineer 7y ago
  I was GT in my very mediocre public school - shit was still hard for me, academically. I got a B in calculus 2 in high school. I constantly feel limited by intelligence and social skills (which harms motivation). Most of this thread is just bragging - “dumb” people like me don’t get the benefit of the doubt and don’t receive any of the societal benefits either.
mncharity 7y ago
> If educators were made responsible to ethics committees, as are researchers, such developmentally inappropriate educational misplacement would never be permitted. This is a recurring theme. For example, when doing education research with a control group. Sometimes, while the study is still in progress, the benefit of the intervention becomes so clearly dramatic, that by IRB standards, continuing to deny the intervention to the control group becomes ethically fraught, suggesting the experiment be stopped. Even though by education standards, the intervention is unlikely to be widely adopted any year soon. Similarly, part of why science works, is researchers' fears of being embarrassed in front of their peers, by getting things carelessly wrong. This doesn't always exist - my favorite example being astronomy education content that gets the color of the Sun wrong. So there's a question of what community characteristics are needed to support it. Awareness of ethical issues in education, such as "equity", seems greater now than in decades past. So looking ahead, might a perception of embarrassment, or of ethical failure, be encouraged and leveraged to improve content and pedagogy? And what might that look like?
laichzeit0 7y ago
A lot of people in this thread thinking they are Terrence Tao, Karl Frederick Gauss, Leonhard Euler, John Von Neumann, etc. Nope you don’t have the faintest idea of what it means to be exceptionally gifted. These people are close to a different species or race of men entirely.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  ... have you known any of those personally? I somewhat get your point, but the top .1% of intelligence and 1% of intelligence probably share more in common socially and within the social structures of education.
8589934591 7y ago
I can relate to studies like these in many ways. Growing up in India, I faced a hell lot of issues. At the age of 2, I was able to remember names and faces of all my relatives, at 3 I was able to read fluently. By the time I was 5, thanks to my relative I was made to repeat a grade because I was born on a certain month. By 9, I was able to do 10th grade math with ease. My mom observed this and asked the school things can be accelerated. I was placed in 10th grade and just got myself bullied. School's verdict was I was that I am socially inept and hence I must have cheated to solve 10th grade problems. School saying that broke my mom's heart, and mine. I was eternally depressed (was not aware of it though) from then onwards till college. Throughout my school life all I faced was bullying cos I don't share the same interests as the others. College wasn't any different. I grew up watching OCW physics and thought college would be similar. Turned out wrong. I have ruffled feathers with every faculty there that I wanted more work, to be challenged more. And all I got was "you should be more humble and patient. You should wait for the other students to catch up. Go with the pace, don't run, walk. blah blah" After 4 years, I came out as a person with no motivation, mentally lethargic, depressed, just wanted to coast through life. It had been hammered into me that I was the problem, not the system. Thank god I met my wife, we both were very similar and had experienced very similar situations in life. It took a long while to understand that the problem is not me. We identified as gifted children, reading up on articles, matching traits. My mom regrets that she didn't know about any of these "gifted stuff". All of us recognize the negative intentions of the people who grew up / lived with us. Both my wife and myself are trying to get back into the groove, finding ways to challenge each other, to learn to work hard, to motivate, to get back the lost years from when we could have been accelerated. Hopefully we catch up on time. I am positive that my kid will most probably be a gifted child. I will be doing everything in my power to take care of him in a proper manner. I relate to so many people in this and many other threads in HN. You all have my deepest support and sympathies for your bad experiences. Please don't let go of life. You can still be the smart person you once were. Being smart isn't being entitled, it's just who you are.
- mydongle 7y ago
  What will you do if your kid isn't a gifted child and falls below your expectations? Hopefully you'd still love them and treat them in a "proper manner" right? Just be prepared for that very possible outcome.

263 points by waterhouse 7y ago

A friend of mine who is a teacher pointed out to me that “highly gifted” children were actually special needs children. She used this term because she worked in a highly competitive district where parents were constantly harassing her to consider their children “highly gifted”. Once she used this term, it became easier for parents to accept that their children were doing fine in “normal” class, which was quite good anyways because of the average aptitude of the students.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
Parents of very gifted kids routinely seek out support groups to help them cope. It's absolutely not all upside. Social challenges are a very big part of the problem.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  I remember being in one of those “accelerated” programs. If I recall it was for math. I was not in that class for long. It wasn’t that I did poorly in the class, it was the fact that I told the teacher to go fuck herself. Suffice it to say I’ve never been particularly fond of authority figures. As a child you understand inherently that all people are equal. Why should anyone be above anyone else? At least that was how my childish mind perceived it. Hierarchy is something that learned socially.
  - 77pt77 7y ago
    >As a child you understand inherently that all people are equal. Why should anyone be above anyone else? At least that was how my childish mind perceived it. Hierarchy is something that learned socially. I remember when I was very young other children saying exactly the opposite and as an adult I've met young children that are very attuned to one's social standing. Also there are strong biological reasons as to why it is highly innate but modulated by culture.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      I think that it's more about children thinking that everyone is equal in having to keep their word. If you make a promise then you're supposed to keep to it. What often disillusions children is that people in positions of authority often make promises, but don't keep them, yet when it goes the other way around those people will coerce everyone else into keeping the promises to them.
      - bartwe 7y ago
        It's a naive position of someone with a nice upbringing without bullies to show that under the veneer there is suppressed brutality of those willing to use violence.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Some gifted kids are especially bad about having strong views about things like justice and morality and equality. It's part of why I'm on parenting blog number three, which isn't exactly catching fire. My stories about raising my sons and my views on such were seemingly popular, at least with a vocal minority, on an email list that was basically a support group for parents of gifted kids (which is why I originally began blogging at all). My oldest was accepted to college at age thirteen. The classes he had tried to sign up for all fell through for different reasons and then he told me he didn't really want to take college classes. He wanted me to keep homeschooling him. I wasn't thrilled. At age 14, he explained Einstein's Theory of Relativity to me, which was helpful to me in understanding some of my college classes. I absolutely wasn't qualified to keep teaching him in some subjects. He already knew more science than I did. But he also has a serious medical condition and a variety of other problems. So I heaved a big sigh and said "Okay. I can't teach you, but I can keep supplying you learning materials for those subjects and I can still teach you in other subjects, like math." So, yeah, there's lots of problems you run into with gifted kids, one of them being that some of them have little tolerance for "idiot adults" who may not know anymore than they do, so they tend to not be very accepting of the idea that adults have some right of authority simply because they are older. "Older and wiser/know more" don't necessarily follow. Edit: Someone asked, then deleted their comment. It's called Raising Future Adults. https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/ https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/ There's not much there currently.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - gorgoiler 7y ago
      How do the strong views about justice and morality typically manifest themselves in a way that’s negative rather than positive? I’m not challenging you on that by the way. I see this too and I think I have a pretty good idea what you mean but didn’t want to second guess what you meant, incorrectly.
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        It's not necessarily that it's negative, though it can be. It's just that it's usually socially unacceptable to take a strong moral stand and turn X thing into a hill to die on (especially if you are five, but not only if you are a child). Most people cannot and will not live up to the strict moral standards of some five year old on their high horse. When the five year old screams "The emperor has no clothes and you're a liar!!!!" multiple times per day and will not stop when punished for it, it creates a lot of problems. One of my sons was like that. I homeschooled and I can live up to his expectations for things like fairness and keeping my word. But when adults don't live up to those expectations and they have some tyrannical little would-be civil rights activist on their hands, it sometimes turns abusive because they need the kid to just shut up and give it a rest already and they run out of ideas for how to keep the kid from being a troublemaker. (Alternately, in school, they are constantly in detention or similar.)
  - aspenmayer 7y ago
    An innate sense of equality without appreciation of power dynamics can make institutional power and authority figures seem adversarial to a certain kind of precocious mind, perhaps younger ones especially so. Learning should be a journey that instills the value of knowledge as well as the labor to acquire it and transform it into useful and amusing ends. Otherwise, a failure to grasp knowledge itself can create a disdain for the entire enterprise of learning and a kind of self-hating self-sustaining self-induced oppositionally-defiant ignorance. I still love the USA, though.
    - 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
      I too love the USA. I love all Americans, even those whom I disagree with on every axis, but love as people. But I find myself at a crossroads (or at least, what I feel is a crossroads). What should I do next? Should I stay in a country that taxes me without representation of my views? I think Balaji Srinivasan said it best. In political science, you have two options: voice and exit. Voice is protesting what you find intolerable in a system by voting against policies that negatively affect you. Or, there is exit. Exit is leaving that system entirely, such that it amplifies the dissenting voice. I find myself contemplating exit. I'm actually considering an authoritarian state, Singapore, as a place to emigrate to. Because while my views won't be represented, at least they won't tax me for it. I'm almost sort of okay with that.
      - aspenmayer 7y ago
        You’re only chasing safety. To me it seems you feel like a victim of a street robbery. “Your money or your life,” the voice behind you asks, weighing options as you weigh yours. “I’ll take the money, since I’m not overly attached to my current way of life,” you reply confidently, at least you hope that’s how it sounds. The reply sings. You cry, for a part of you just died. If you’re lucky, you’re still clinging to a convincing enough simulacrum of your former life to enjoy whatever money you were able to keep. FIN In all seriousness, I feel like leaving is what everyone else in the country would tell you to do. Anyone who would give up on the experiment of America is foolish to do so. They give up their leverage, power, and credibility in the eyes of their fellow citizens. That may not mean much to you. I’m not saying it should. But if nothing else, throwing in the towel and doing as you say feels like taking your ball and going home. We’re in this together. It’s sink or swim, but a rising tide raises all boats, large and small. The economy isn’t a zero sum game, but most of politics in this country is winner take all, which isn’t far off. Yet change happens here anyway. The best life for you is one where you can live your best life. No one can tell you what that looks like. Hopefully you recognize it when you see it, and it might be a lot closer to home than you realize. But hey it’s your choice either way. There’s no shame in being an expat. I’ve lived overseas and it made me who I am as much as any other thing, and I still like me most days. If you’re lucky the door swings both ways. You can always come back. Just don’t let it hit you on the way out.
  - devmunchies 7y ago
    I was transferred to a “gifted” program in 5th grade but I moved back out after a month or 2. It was nice having more rigorous material but it also meant more homework and I was terrible at doing homework. Plus the kids were more dry, less jokes.
    - joejerryronnie 7y ago
      > Plus the kids were more dry, less jokes. Gifted children simply prefer British humour over American humor.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    Very well said, thank you. For me, the turning point was learning that: (1) hierarchies are a partial order: ones manager is ones superior only at work, and not in all aspects of life. It’s weird if they are. It feels challenging when they are subordinate to you on some other axis (e.g. your manager is younger or less socially popular than you) until this axiom sinks in. Becoming a company man is risky once you’ve learned this because you may end up surrendering yourself to the idea that the company hierarchy is total in all aspects of life. Having the boss round for dinner, bowing and scraping, 1950s stereotypes etc. (2) In a healthy hierarchy power and responsibility go hand in hand. One accepts authority figures in life because they also take responsibility for things working properly. Your manager at work gets to deal with the awkward underperforming colleague, not you. If people gather to you socially, you have a responsibility to bring something positive to their lives. Learning that hierarchies were there to provide a service to me — something which felt counter intuitive for a long time — was eye opening. It does also make you double down on attacking hierarchies where power is wielded irresponsibly.
  - non-entity 7y ago
    I was in and out of "gifted programs" for most of my schooling, if you could call them that. A few of the people in there were generally smart, many not so much. Personally I always hated them. Except for a brief program when I was in 4th grade all they were for us was just am increased workload. Me, being the lazy pos I am, just neglected to do any of the extra work and I focused on my own thing. I remember in 4th grade when I was kicked outthe first time transferring from the accelerated class that had me doing boatloads of dull readings and "paper work" in the accelerated clas to the normal class with a much less mind-numbing workload where I had time to work on what I wanted to when because I finished early. Eventually they would realize I'm moving faster than most of the class, stick me in the gifted class and the cycle would repeat up until graduation. When I was a senior I. I recall my senior year one of the kids who was in the giftedprograms their entire schooling asking me if a 23 was a good ASVAB score. Ibrelaize these programs are going to vary depending on your school district, so for context, this was a mostly lower-middle class and middle class suburb of a southeastern metro. I personally dont think I'm very smart, likely average, maybe a little less than I used to be nowadays, but I consider a lot of these programs a sham.
    - proverbialbunny 7y ago
      Yah. I think many of us can relate here. Starting in 2nd grade I started ditching class and going to the computer lab to write code. For some sort of reason my teacher didn't notice I was missing as long as I was in for attendance during first period. She did realize I wasn't turning in any work, so I got put into some sort of special program I never went to. They didn't expect me to come, because I never came, and my teacher expected me to be gone, giving me all the time in the world to do whatever I wanted. I took this trick all the way through high school signing up for programs, or more, stating I was part of programs that would let me ditch classes. However, in 6th grade, the computer lab shared a window with my homeroom, so a substitute teacher made a comment about it. Turns out I had hacked the admin password and was sending mail, in the form of leaving text messages onto the distract administrator's desktop, where we'd chat about all sorts of stuff. The district didn't know what to do with me. Should I be punished? So they changed the admin password, which I immediately broke into, and that was it. I stayed in the computer lab and my homeroom teacher treated that like normal.
  - esoterica 7y ago
    You seem to think that sharing that anecdote paints you in a positive light but it really doesn't. It just makes you seem like you haven't matured much since you were a child. I mean really, bragging about how you were hurling expletives at your teachers because you were too smart and enlightened to acknowledge authority figures? Come on. You're very clearly embodying a specific archetype of the socially maladjusted outcast who thinks they keep clashing with other people because they are a misunderstood genius when really they are just difficult and abrasive.
    - dang 7y ago
      No personal attacks in HN comments, please, regardless of how much someone else has matured. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pfarnsworth 7y ago
My son is profoundly gifted, although he's not in the same league as some of those children described in the study. I absolutely consider him a special-needs child. He's been kicked out of two schools (including a "gifted" school) at this point for his behavior, but it turns out his behavior was because he was profoundly bored. His current school accelerated him by 2 grades and now he's more manageable. He's still bored, but at least he feels like his classmates are more his level, even though he probably needs to skip 1 or 2 more grades to match his academic abilities. I'm loathe to accelerate him further because I worry about emotional well-being, being the youngest kid in the class, but this study has given me food for thought. Thank you OP for posting this.
- ttty 7y ago
  I'd usually bring my own work at school. I liked to build web application, so I used most of my boring school time to architect them on paper. Then when at home, I could implement it. My teachers bothered me a bit, but I was passing the exams, so they couldn't complain too much. Your kid could have his own little project and do it at school.
- leshokunin 7y ago
  You haven't mentioned anything outside of school, so have you considered giving him something on the side? I would extrapolate that he's very frustrated he understands something faster than the others, regardless of whether it's a few grades beyond him or not. It's ok for school to be a certain speed. Some hobbies have infinite depth, and aren't inherently limited by the pace of school and the routine of school days. Examples include: games such as Chess / Tetris / Go, literature, learning finance, making things (woodwork, electronics...).
barry-cotter 7y ago
> Once she used this term, it became easier for parents to accept that their children were doing fine in “normal” class, which was quite good anyways because of the average aptitude of the students. Your child could be doing work three grades ahead, learning things that would challenge them and help them grow intellectually. Instead we’ll keep them here with the normal children where at best they’ll learn to shut up and not bother the teacher.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  The GP is talking about competitive parents whose kids aren't genuinely exceptionally gifted. The parents are just looking for bragging rights and/or another edge.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Keeping children who’re perfectly capable of doing sixth grade work doing fifth grade work isn’t as bad but it’s still a waste off their time and a lesson in the actual priorities of the school system, which certainly don’t have learning among the top five.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      Some parents don't really have the best interests of their children at heart. "Hot housing" children does not make for better future outcomes. It just deprives children of their childhood.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        > "Hot housing" children does not make for better future outcomes. I would welcome any research to that effect if you have it to hand. I am not an expert but if you search gwern.net for “gifted education”, “acceleration” “SMPY” or “Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth” you’ll find many papers on this general topic. There’s nothing there showing negative effects and quite a bit that’s positive.
mlyle 7y ago
Yah. You can be super bright without being in the category that needs all the support and scaffolding. My oldest is super precocious mathematically. And has adjustment problems, impatience, social struggles, etc. Massive but undeveloped sense of justice/fairness that borders on fascism, too. He is doing OK, but... it takes a lot of enrichment and support for him to make it and stay sane. My middle kid is nearly as capable mathematically and stronger verbally... but he's chill, and patient, adept socially, ... good at, and content, slacking. Fits in perfectly in a mainstream classroom without a lot of accommodation. (The youngest? Who knows. We'll see, he's only 6).
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Your middle kid sounds like how I was. If he really is like I was, then please give him the same enrichment and support as your more difficult eldest. The middle one may have learned to slack and chill out and not rock the boat, but it's still a coping mechanism for a problem that needs support.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    Hey-- thanks for the message. We get it / try -- when he doesn't successfully weasel out of it (he is good at that). The flip-side is, social adaptation/easy-going-ness actually makes it easier for his teachers to challenge him, etc. The oldest reminds me of me, struggles and all. I have to think my middle kid has an easier path of things than I did.
    - xcasperx 7y ago
      I too was the middle kid. Here's my own anecdotal advice: I started slacking in school from about 3rd-9th grade. I found programming between 9th-10th grade during the summer through pretty much sheer dumb luck, timing, and being in the perfect environment. After that, my grades improved, confidence improved, everything improved. The school system may not be able to offer your kid the opportunity they need to really find the inspiration that can kick them into drive. Maybe try to expose them to as many things as you can, and see what clicks? Another thing is how they learn. I learned through modding video games and could see instant results, via changing just a few variables, of what programming could do, and would share these with my friends. This instant gratification and social "confirmation" from my friends, as well as the communities I joined, really pushed me forward. Plus, I really enjoyed it. Shortly after modding video games, I tried getting into creating websites but didn't quite see the instant gratification or have the social "confirmation" to push me as hard as I did with modding video games.
notechback 7y ago
You see a global move towards "inclusive" education which aims to provide opportunities for all levels of performance and background/conditions, including the gifted. Eg Portugal and Norway are impressive reference cases.

nopinsight 7y ago

Two main possibilities to match the curriculum to the needs of highly gifted children: 1) Put them together in a special class composed entirely of students with similar level of giftedness, taught by specialized teachers using a gifted curriculum. 2) Move them to a higher grade, which means they will need to study with (possibly much) older students. Option 1) is superior for their social development since they are not more mature in all respects. It should be pursued whenever possible. Option 2) may also subject the kids to bullying and jealousy by their older peers, some of whom might do worse than the gifted one in many academic subjects despite age difference. Early grouping by ability is also more desirable. From the paper: "In both Australia and the United States, schools tend to delay acceleration and ability grouping until the middle years of elementary school. This policy is fundamentally flawed. It is in the early years of school that we should be identifying exceptionally and profoundly gifted children and developing programs of acceleration and grouping to provide a more effective response to their accelerated intellectual and emotional development." It is in the interest of society to develop highly gifted students fully since they have more potential to invent groundbreaking technologies or contribute to society in an extraordinary way. Source: I have taught many gifted and highly gifted students over the years.

lainga 7y ago
In my experience I got both at once pretty early (skipped 2nd grade and was in a "gifted" class from 4-7). Looking back, I think the class was a dumping ground for trouble students (oops!). My memories were - we went through six teachers, didn't get along, were isolated from the rest of the school, and didn't learn very much. My high school, OTOH, was iron-firm about sticking everyone together - no advanced classes (until AP) and no advancing grades. The first few months were a shock; after that I had a great time and really applied myself. Never could make up that extra year in height, though.
- nopinsight 7y ago
  Did you and classmates have a teacher who understood the needs and special curriculum for highly gifted kids too? If otherwise, it could be lackluster since most teachers don’t know how to handle them or keep them engaged. Einstein’s tutor when he was a kid was an medical student who later became a noted ophthalmologist with a Wikipedia entry of his own. Gauss’ 4th grade teacher asked the class he was in to sum from 1 to 100, hoping to engage them for the whole period, and couldn’t believe how fast Gauss finished it. ADDED: For exceptionally gifted students, I estimate they should have someone with the intellect equivalent to a PhD or a masters graduate from a top program to teach them once they are in late primary school (and sometimes sooner).

knzhou 7y ago

I tutor some exceptionally gifted students as a side gig (for scale: calculus at 10, publishing research papers and learning graduate-level general relativity at 14), and I can say that the lessons of papers like these have been taken to heed. Today, there are tons of resources for kids like these, and the explosion continues every year. Professors are taking them for research projects, summer camps are bringing them together, and free online courses are spoiling them with knowledge. We're at the point where full courses are regularly put on Youtube in every field, with better teaching quality than almost all "real" courses! The kids seem to be quite happy for it, and I'm looking forward to the results in a couple decades. My magnet high school was a smaller example of this. It had a reputation around the area for producing great outcomes for students with rigorous coursework, so people fought like crazy to get in. But once we did, we found that we had almost zero homework and spent half of each school day just sitting around. The real magic was in what we got to do with all that free time!

barry-cotter 7y ago
> I can say that the lessons of papers like these have been taken to heed. This isn’t true. Gifted and talented education receives maybe 1% of the funding that special needs education does, if that. In NYC de Blasio is trying to dismantle the existing system because the students are too Asian. Most of the US has nothing approaching that system. Normal high schools are at best indifferent to students who want to go higher than AP; they’re certainly not going out of their way to help and encourage those capable of doing college work to do so. Face it, at barest minimum 10% of 16 year olds could be in high schools like those associated with Bard College at Simon’s Rock[1], where they graduate with an Associate’s degree having completed half of the coursework for a Bachelor’s. I don’t know what percentage of 14 year olds could do the same or complete a Bachelor’s before 18 but it’s 100s of times greater than those who actually do. [1] https://simons-rock.edu/ https://simons-rock.edu/
- knzhou 7y ago
  My point is that there's been an explosion in opportunities that kids can use that go around what schools provide. Even when I was in high school, you could get most of an undergraduate education from MIT OpenCourseWare for free, and the situation is even better now. (You couldn't get a credential out of it... but who cares, when either way you'll have the knowledge?) Though I'm upset about the political drama over NYC magnet schools, it's important to note that their outcomes aren't due to magic teachers or better equipment. The kids are making things happen on their own! The core benefit these schools provide is mostly that they allow the kids to meet each other.

preston4tw 7y ago

I'm currently 35 and I was ID'd as a gifted child, so this paper caught my attention. There's a section that discusses outcomes based on whether gifted children were allowed to skip grades or not, and my personal experience largely matches what is described for what would be my group, the nonaccelerands: "Several of the nonaccelerands have serious and ongoing problems with social relationships. These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because having been, to a large extent, socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice in their formative years in developing and maintaining social relationships. Six have had counseling. Of these, two have been treated for severe depression. If educators were made responsible to ethics committees, as are researchers, such developmentally inappropriate educational misplacement would never be permitted." I wonder how this group is doing these days. I wonder if the runners of the study ever considered introducing members of this group to the others to form a support group.

twomoretime 7y ago
I've long thought that Asperger's and tail end IQ can be really difficult to distinguish. They may be one and the same. And unlike autism, Asperger's apparently responds well to the right stimulation. And I think programming fits that niche well enough that "smart" people disproportionately code when they come across the opportunity. It could be that Asperger's is distinguished from autism by being a condition acquired by high IQ when improperly stimulated or undersocialized.
- notechback 7y ago
  Just to point out that all autism spectrum disorders have quite a spectrum. Some Asperger's cases are barely able to function, others excell in various fields.
  - twomoretime 7y ago
    Yes, and the spectral nature of autism makes it an easy mistake to make if it turns out that Asperger's is actually separate from autism. It's not like we know anything with certainty here. AFAIK there is known cause for either condition. Plenty of speculation.

PostOnce 7y ago

This always leads to discussions of "what kind of school is right?" and not of "is school right?" Perhaps the answer is always yes, but it'd be nice to see it discussed. Marcus Aurelius said 2000 years ago to "spare no expense on private tutors" -- this is going to be cost prohibitive at the very least, but it's also worth thinking about. Another thing worth thinking about is every extra minute you spend building another this-or-that at work and not with your kids is an advantage you give your employer while simultaneously depriving your kids of your care, knowledge, and enthusiasm for subject matter (to a degree). There's a balance to be found, of course, but it's something I imagine people struggle with. Work always wants one more thing, but it can wait until Monday.

Balgair 7y ago
> Marcus Aurelius said 2000 years ago to "spare no expense on private tutors" Taking parenting advice from people thousands of years ago is not the wisest idea. Let alone Roman child rearing advice. Let alone from an emperor. Let alone from Marcus Aurelius. His son, Commodus, was one of the worst emperors. I'm not saying that Aurelius was wrong, but his record on child rearing is clearly terrible considering the lives of his children. Getting into working more or less for the benefit children is very individual. Each family is unique and changes over time. You raise your kids, yes, but they raise each other and themselves too. They are real people too.
- PostOnce 7y ago
  Sometimes we draw a bad hand, and no amount of parenting can save some of the mentally disturbed, like Commodus -- you can't read Meditations, though, and say it's not full of startlingly relevant advice to modern life. From education to work ethic to reflective, thoughtful consideration of one's actions, to coping with trauma. Also, that isn't Marcus Aurelius theory on parenting, he said he learned it from his grandfather, which eventually led to him being one of the Five Good Emperors, so how does that change our analysis? Anyway, pretty much every single study ever done says the smaller the class, the more direct the instruction, the better the academic result, from 0AD til 2020AD, the way we're wired hasn't really changed. It's not likely that receiving 1/30th of the attention of your teacher is going to be as valuable to you as 100% attention, or 50% attention, or 25% attention, vs 3% in a normal school. If kids raising themselves and each other was reliable, we wouldn't have disadvantaged youth. Poverty means busy parents (2 jobs, etc), busy parents mean less time with the kids. It's going to be hard to convince anyone that more time with your kids is going to be anything but beneficial.

m0zg 7y ago

Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion?

lowiqengineer 7y ago
Don’t you believe people like me are lower IQ because I got rejected from Google?
- m0zg 7y ago
  I'd bet most people who work(ed) at Google were rejected at least once. I was. I'd also bet that if the current engineers working at Google were to be re-interviewed, at least a half of them would be rejected by Google's interview process. What you've experienced is mostly an artifact of having 100+ people apply for each open position, it says nothing at all about your intelligence.
- kalium-xyz 7y ago
  Just do what Ben Pridmore[1] did and study efficient ways to encode information in memory other memory techniques. It breaks some IQ tests so you can walk into Mensa and such (its not that meaningful but neither is using IQ as a metric for getting rejected at google). unrelated but by your long history of posting about having a low IQ yet working for amazon, what is a low IQ to you? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore
  - lowiqengineer 7y ago
    Low IQ is apparently getting into Google. I don't think many people regard getting into Amazon as requiring a genius IQ or even an above-average one.
Viliam1234 7y ago
> Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Nope. (Well, there are people who believe that, but there are also people who believe that vaccines cause autism.) As a scientific consensus, the concept IQ is well supported by psychometric research. The individual IQ tests, of course, may contain mistakes. And any online test is most likely completely made up. > Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion? Of course there was progress in reducing bias in tests. For example, older IQ tests often contained questions about history, which is more an evidence of cultural background than of raw intelligence. Or verbal tasks, which disadvantage people who don't take the test in their first language. Modern tests are more about patterns, see e.g. Raven's Progressive Matrices. Yes, even this can be discriminatory against e.g. blind people. It's not perfect, but there is definitely a progress.

elamje 7y ago

I remember some of my best memories were being in a GT program at my middle school where about 30 kids in my grade took the same core classes together every year for all 3 years. I didn’t appreciate it then, but in hind sight being separated from most 6th-8th graders who barely care about school and being mostly around kids that did, had a tremendous impact on driving me through high school and college. Most of the kids were way smarter than me and are doing incredible things now. Years later, when I studied in Sweden, I became great friends with a public school teacher there. I told her about AP classes, and GT and magnet programs and it was quite literally, a foreign concept. She said that in Sweden it would be discriminatory for children to be separated like that. I’m worried that the world is moving more and more in this direction, but I hope not! I felt extremely lucky to be put around peers that pushed me and had shared goals because most of the kids where I’m from don’t have that, and I could have easily ended up on a different path. In college, I realized I was in an entirely different league when all of my classmates were in the top couple of graduates from their huge high schools, and I could barely hang on. Around that time I met a couple of 14 year olds in my dorm that were dual majoring in computer sci and math, and then I realized that there are so many different levels of intelligence in the same age buckets, schools have been doing it wrong for so long! In an ideal world everyone could be grouped at the appropriate level regardless of age, but then again, there is a huge difference in 14 year olds vs 18 and 19 year olds, so there seems to be some merit to the age bucket system. All that being said, the only thing I know is that world is a complicated place :)

contingencies 7y ago

Can anyone recommend any tried and true, globalist/international perspective distance education / homeschooling groups? Less focused on base academic outcomes (assume this is covered), more focused on co-exploration and organic learning with distributed friends in a semi-structured or periodically adult-stimulated fashion. We don't need to download rote learning worksheets or lesson plans, we'd prefer to explore real world subjects freely, asking questions and allowing one subject to function as a lead-in to others. Unsure if this exists.

jiggybling 7y ago

I wonder how strong the long-term inverse effect is having gone to a magnet high school and seeing a certain level of self esteem fallout for many people that I would say were hard working but nowhere close to "profoundly gifted".

anon104109348 7y ago

I wonder a lot about how much giftedness matters, for children below exceptionally gifted. My IQ was measured at about 150 twice, at age 3 and 15. I am definitely not exceptionally gifted - I was able to be on the cusp at some programs that had exceptionally gifted participants and I was in awe of them. But as an adult I've never really felt limited by intelligence, but instead by motivation and social skills. So I don't know what to stress for my children. I was deeply unhappy through public school. Would I have more motivation and better social skills if the public school had been less boring and had less bullying? Would I just be more of a jerk? My kids are in early elementary, and they are also not exceptionally gifted, but they are easily 2-3 grade levels ahead in math, and a little ahead in reading. The other stuff at school could certainly be better for them, but in ways that I suspect would be better for all the kids there. I think I'd be happy with their school if they had more recess, the kids were nicer and the math were more advanced, but I don't know where to find that for them.

lowiqengineer 7y ago
I was GT in my very mediocre public school - shit was still hard for me, academically. I got a B in calculus 2 in high school. I constantly feel limited by intelligence and social skills (which harms motivation). Most of this thread is just bragging - “dumb” people like me don’t get the benefit of the doubt and don’t receive any of the societal benefits either.

mncharity 7y ago

> If educators were made responsible to ethics committees, as are researchers, such developmentally inappropriate educational misplacement would never be permitted. This is a recurring theme. For example, when doing education research with a control group. Sometimes, while the study is still in progress, the benefit of the intervention becomes so clearly dramatic, that by IRB standards, continuing to deny the intervention to the control group becomes ethically fraught, suggesting the experiment be stopped. Even though by education standards, the intervention is unlikely to be widely adopted any year soon. Similarly, part of why science works, is researchers' fears of being embarrassed in front of their peers, by getting things carelessly wrong. This doesn't always exist - my favorite example being astronomy education content that gets the color of the Sun wrong. So there's a question of what community characteristics are needed to support it. Awareness of ethical issues in education, such as "equity", seems greater now than in decades past. So looking ahead, might a perception of embarrassment, or of ethical failure, be encouraged and leveraged to improve content and pedagogy? And what might that look like?

laichzeit0 7y ago

A lot of people in this thread thinking they are Terrence Tao, Karl Frederick Gauss, Leonhard Euler, John Von Neumann, etc. Nope you don’t have the faintest idea of what it means to be exceptionally gifted. These people are close to a different species or race of men entirely.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago
... have you known any of those personally? I somewhat get your point, but the top .1% of intelligence and 1% of intelligence probably share more in common socially and within the social structures of education.

8589934591 7y ago

I can relate to studies like these in many ways. Growing up in India, I faced a hell lot of issues. At the age of 2, I was able to remember names and faces of all my relatives, at 3 I was able to read fluently. By the time I was 5, thanks to my relative I was made to repeat a grade because I was born on a certain month. By 9, I was able to do 10th grade math with ease. My mom observed this and asked the school things can be accelerated. I was placed in 10th grade and just got myself bullied. School's verdict was I was that I am socially inept and hence I must have cheated to solve 10th grade problems. School saying that broke my mom's heart, and mine. I was eternally depressed (was not aware of it though) from then onwards till college. Throughout my school life all I faced was bullying cos I don't share the same interests as the others. College wasn't any different. I grew up watching OCW physics and thought college would be similar. Turned out wrong. I have ruffled feathers with every faculty there that I wanted more work, to be challenged more. And all I got was "you should be more humble and patient. You should wait for the other students to catch up. Go with the pace, don't run, walk. blah blah" After 4 years, I came out as a person with no motivation, mentally lethargic, depressed, just wanted to coast through life. It had been hammered into me that I was the problem, not the system. Thank god I met my wife, we both were very similar and had experienced very similar situations in life. It took a long while to understand that the problem is not me. We identified as gifted children, reading up on articles, matching traits. My mom regrets that she didn't know about any of these "gifted stuff". All of us recognize the negative intentions of the people who grew up / lived with us. Both my wife and myself are trying to get back into the groove, finding ways to challenge each other, to learn to work hard, to motivate, to get back the lost years from when we could have been accelerated. Hopefully we catch up on time. I am positive that my kid will most probably be a gifted child. I will be doing everything in my power to take care of him in a proper manner. I relate to so many people in this and many other threads in HN. You all have my deepest support and sympathies for your bad experiences. Please don't let go of life. You can still be the smart person you once were. Being smart isn't being entitled, it's just who you are.

mydongle 7y ago
What will you do if your kid isn't a gifted child and falls below your expectations? Hopefully you'd still love them and treat them in a "proper manner" right? Just be prepared for that very possible outcome.