New research suggests new ways to nurture gifted children
economist.com
economist.com
After this test, his guidance counselor sat him down and asked him how smart he thought he was. Answer, a morose and defeated "I'm stupid." Mind you, this answer came out of an 8-9 year old.
After being told repeatedly that he was not good at school and that classes were too hard for him, he fully believed he was stupid.
Once the adults around him stopped seeing a redneck country kid, once the adults recognized his poor school track record as a reflection of their biases and their poor performance he excelled.
He is now captain of his high school robotics team. The team just won a position to compete in an international robotics competition in the next couple of weeks. Assuming they can raise the $30k to travel to Kentucky, ship their robots, find lodging, etc. It's a large fund raising amount for a non-Texas, non-football red state.
It seems to me that the key to nurturing success is building motivation, rather than having high expectation. The former is much harder than the latter.
Or perhaps I'm "having high expectation" in a wrong way, and would love to learn how to do it right.
If you inherently believe that a child can’t accomplish “x”. They feel and know that is the expectation. However, if you fundamentally “believe” they can do x, you are setting them up to accomplish x.
But I must say, this is not something that can be faked. You have to genuinely believe the expectation.
Kids are smart, and they will see through any fake beliefs you “think” you are imparting. It is important to value them for what they are, and inherently value how incredible they are.
I really appreciate it :)
https://www.gofundme.com/the-vexrobotics-world-championships
my young relative's school has raised about 2/3rds the money towards their goal. I think they will be sending some part of the team and their robots. So thank you again for your help and generosity. They have 3 weeks left to fund raise, so whatever happens from here is gold.
It stuns me that people are tracked into special education without an assessment that included, at a minimum, an intelligence test. (I had public school teachers raise concerns that I should be in special ed in early years, was given an assessment that identified a speech impediment and a high IQ, was subsequently given a performance assessment that wasn't limited to be grade-level skills, and it was realized that I was performing well beyond grade level. So I was skipped ahead a grade and moved into the gifted program.
And this was back in 1980. I thought that virtually as long as gifted education has existed it was widely recognized that gifted students frequently underperform other students when not challenged, and, similarly, I thought it was a fundamental concept of special education that it required individualized assessment of the particular needs and abilities of the student.
Taking a test requiring abstraction and pattern matching skills is all the same. It doesn't matter what the features are. The best you can do is also test memory.
First because some of those tests were not really smart in retrospective: False positives tagged as stupid that maybe just had a bad day or did not understood the questions by cultural reasons. Some years after, unsurprisingly, there is not any correlation between the results of the test and the success of this men and women.
And worse, because being tagged as a gifted guy can be a curse. Is an unforgivable sin in some societies. People will start acting resentful and treating you as if you were martian or a danger to them. Is really, really, annoying.
Probably should have described it as "remedial education", rather than special ed. I think the young man's troubles with educators was inherited from his Dad's issues, an early diagnosed case of ADHD before ADHD was the thing that it is now. With the family history and the small town phenomena of everybody knowing everybody's business, there were a lot of assumptions made about this young man.
>There is evidence that aspects of gifted education should influence education more broadly. Project Bright Idea, developed at Duke University, saw 10,000 typical nursery and primary-school pupils taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids—fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than similar peers.
Another way to phrase this is that this study demonstrated that people may become "high-achieving" because of gifted education programs, and not the other way around. Or perhaps typical pupils can become high-achieving by exposure to high-achieving pupils.
The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable." Plomin's more recent (2015) research suggests this estimate was far too high, and should really be about 30% phenotypically, which makes me think there's no point in trying to find young Einsteins. If students are of average or slightly above average intelligence, Bright Idea style programs will be best for them, and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did.
I disagree with this. The fact that some young prodigies proved it early and eventually became productive adult geniuses is not, to me, evidence that young prodigies will show themselves. Rather, I would expect that there are more young Einsteins who do not receive adequate mentorship, resources, or opportunities to become old Einsteins.
Some make it anyway. Ramanujan is an interesting case. By Hardy's estimate, he was one of the best mathematical minds of the 20th century, and he demonstrated clear mathematical talent by high school age. And he still barely made it, thanks to a fragile chain of people who recognized his talent and drive. It's very easy for me to imagine a world in which Ramanujan stays in India and remains a bureaucrat doing math on the side.
But as I understand it, pedagogy for young Einsteins is still not that well understood.
That strikes me as an unrealistic evaluation of the system. The safe assumption is if a child isn't thriving, we haven't learned how to teach them to do so.
A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and stated that the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. Ramanujan's first Indian biographers describe him as a rigorously orthodox Hindu. He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Mahalakshmi of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Afterward he would receive visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes
Kanigel, Robert (1991). The Man Who Knew Infinity: a Life of the Genius Ramanujan
PS: I'm atheist.
Not that folks shouldn't try. Just don't have expectations that someone that capable will have obviously applicable methods for everyone else.
Saying that, I can hope to be wrong. :)
I went to a private school for K-3 so was way ahead of public school by at least 2 grades, and was bored 4-7. Oh and then my parents wouldn’t allow me to participate in grade skips or an internship at IBM Research Bernal Road. fml. I had the same cookie-cutter education as everyone else.
In switching from private to public in California schools, I had a similar experience. Grade 3 was private, grade 4 public. There was little learning happening in grade 4, but my grade 5 teacher at a public school was one of the best influences in my life.
I think individual attention is the single biggest factor. An experienced and observant teacher will find something in a pupil to drive their interest and enthusiasm. If one teacher has 40 kids to teach, that amount of attention is simply not possible.
Meanwhile we are struggling to teach her basic fractions.
I got poor grades when the homework started kicking in. I had a little bit of homework in 5th grade. 6th grade I had a few hours per night. In 8th grade, they put me into regular classes and I had zero homework simply because they were so much easier. I was bored all day, but made great grades. I made Ok grades the next year or two, depending on the class. my sophmore year, we moved again. This school had a more balanced gifted program, and my grades stayed up.
Now, I realize I have my own sort of issues with some of this stuff and maybe others word differently: I have a lot of symptoms of mild dyslexia, which would have been easily overlooked in the 80's and 90's (I moved countries as an adult, learned a second language, and made friends with a psychologist with a dyslexic brother. She spotted it with my spelling problems, but I've not been tested). But the point more is that 8 year olds, even intelligent ones, are still 8-year olds and often have the maturity of 8-year olds. 14 year olds still have a normal 14-year old's hormones.
His tutor went on to become a successful ophthalmologist who was well known for his success in treating cataracts. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Talmey)
http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/einstein/section1/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
I agree with a sibling comment that the world probably misses out on many potential Einsteins because of inadequate mentorship and nurturing of high-potential children.
I agree with you that many ideas from gifted programs should be implemented in curricula for 'regular' and above average kids as well.
Is there evidence that such a thing exists? Is there a "Central European protestant culture" at all? A central European culture? That's a big place. Many people in many communities around the world value hard work and education; many Protestants in Central Europe do not.
Many school systems find that flunking folks requires a disproportionate amount of effort. There are ways to work through that, but in the end there has to be a public will to do it. At least in the US, there is a very large thread of public discourse that thinks the goal in the education system is to minimize the cost of educating other people's kids, not to maximize what they learn.
Learn. Or learn not. There is no fail.
In the USA, there's just a general pushing through of all kids to the next step regardless of whether or not they actually learned anything, which is simply broken, too. It's missing any notion of failure.
However, what we shouldn't do is effectively discard failing kids from ever succeeding, dumping them to the wayside. They just need different types of help than was offered by the bulk instruction, either in content or style.
No, it doesn't, any more than any other expectations do. (The expectations that are being discussed are the assumptions of ability that set content and instructional approaches. How you respond to differing acheivement is a nearly orthogonal question, and that's the domain that flunking is in.)
> Many school systems find that flunking folks requires a disproportionate amount of effort.
Which is why they don't flunk students, even when they fail to succeed with the low expectations that underlie their instructional approach.
For example, your address is very heritable.
Likewise, attendance to a given school is also heritable.
No, it's not.
> Likewise, attendance to a given school is also heritable.
No, it's not.
Think about it for a moment, just in the twin study framework. You have monozygotic and dzygotic twins, and twice the difference in their correlation is the heritability. How correlated are the addresses of two dyzgotic twins? Well, they're going to live in... the same house. Just like monozygotic twins are. The exception will be cases of divorce, but the brokenness of their family will have nothing to do with their twinship & genetic relatedness and they will be about as likely to be split up either way (which is minimal). Since there is no difference, twice the difference is still zero, and therefore, the heritability will be zero. Or if that doesn't convince you, consider an adopted child; what address do they live at compared to their adoptive siblings, and what school do they go to?
There certainly will be between-family differences, which will be genetic in the parents, but that falls elsewhere into shared-environment (because all the kids in a family will share the same parents putting them into a better or worse zip code/school) or possibly passive gene-environment correlation.
Given that it is impossible to measure heritability directly, various estimation methods are the best that can be done. You can estimate the heritability of any trait, with or without twins. Applying those methods to geographic features will uniformly indicate that they are heritable.
No it can't. Twins certainly do differ in intelligence, personality, income, level of education, patent count, adult SES, or pretty much everything which could plausibly be lumped into a term like 'giftedness'.
> Given that it is impossible to measure heritability directly, various estimation methods are the best that can be done.
??? Is it possible to measure anything 'directly', under your redefinitions of words?
> Applying those methods to geographic features will uniformly indicate that they are heritable.
They would indicate that there are between-family genetic differences, certainly. They would not indicate that they are heritable and it would be wrong or misleading to criticize heritabilities drawn from twin studies on this basis of gene-environment correlation. You can't simply lump together every kind of genetic pattern under your redefinition of the term 'heritability'.
This article is a reasonable summary of the issues with heritability:
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article-pdf/35/3/525/2195546/dy...
The tl;dr is that the people who trot out additive models of heritability as evidence of anything in particular are by and large those invested in the notion of genetic determinism.
I can't read the article because I've exceeded my limit, I guess, but how does this follow?
For the purposes of a gifted program all that matters is that intelligence is real and measurable. It could be totally randomly distributed (ie not heritable) and it could still make sense to identify and specially educate smart kids.
1.) 50% is a lot of variance.
2.) There is more to learning and achievement then just where you stack against other kids.
But also, Einstein had good education and his family cared about his education. Moreover, Einstein is effectively outlier - arguing that single most known and popular scientist is repeatable framework does not make sense.
Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception.
Now, many of my higher performing peers from 3rd grade are lost. Hopping from career to career, city to city without a sense of direction. A few of the high performers have gone on to do impressive things, but nothing shocking, nothing that is any more impressive than what my stoner friends and I were able to accomplish after a few extra years to mature.
It took me more time to find that what I really enjoyed was engineering and math. Of course, this is a first person account, so take it or leave it. Worth noting that there is a whole lot of very bad education research, so anyone whipping out journal articles to prove a point should be cautious.
The problem with treating "gifted" students differently is similar to gender bias in STEM, and racial bias in education overall. Some people are told they can, and other are implicitly told they can't. These messages get internalized by students, especially if you are unlike myself and don't have a mother who will stick up for you, and take you out of that remedial math course.
All of them went on to become successful in college (only a few have graduated so far). They consist of medical students in top medical schools in the country, one International Physics Olympiad gold medalist (currently at MIT), one International Chemistry Olympiad gold medalist (currently at U of Tokyo). All of them from a 200k-people city in a developing country and I only taught math to a few classes of these students (for about 4 years) before moving on to another education venture.
I would say it is highly likely most of these students would go on to have very good careers. We still do not know whether they will achieve great things but their trajectory is much brighter than average kids.
I agree that putting young kids in remedial classes could be problematic, but gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education.
There are few Academic Olympiad gold medalists from the city. In fact, I only know of these two who were my own students so far and another bronze medalist many years previously. (From his later scholarship--he is now a math professor--I think he would have earned a gold medal had he have gifted education back then.)
That said, it was not a controlled experiment so you can think of it as a case study but not gold-standard randomized controlled trial.
The test was a set of challenge-style math problems for primary kids. Solving them would require more creativity and facility with thought than regular math problems.
If you show me that other students don't benefit from suitable gifted education, then you'll have an argument. Claiming that treating children with gifted education increases their chance of success is obvious, but misses the point, does it not?
I can specifically remember back to when the TAG Math students (Talented and Gifted) were learning what negative numbers were. I kept hearing about them. I imagined what they might mean, how you use them. When I was finally introduced one year later, I was disappointed, you mean it's literally just subtraction? I could have done that one year ago. And same with all the other students in the normal math course, if they had the same level of attention and care.
The worst part was this: the students in TAG math had a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, while the normal math students had a ratio of 20:1. The remedial students had a ratio of 10:1, but the remedial teacher was from the special ed department, not a specialized math teacher that the TAG and normal students got. The TAG program at my school was praised, and the teacher acted as if she was doing God's work. Of course, she had children who were students at the school, and of course, they were in all of her classes.
Now, looking back on it, I realize how broken this frame of thinking is. Yes, students will benefit if you put them in an elite math course with more resources than other children. Other students will bare the cost. I think a better allocation of our time and money would be to spread resources evenly. If you really want to get ahead by one or two years, take summer classes in middle or high school. That way, the students bares the cost of the additional time and effort, and we can still evenly allocate resources so every eight year old gets the same opportunity.
EDITS: spelling bear -> bare
I was just responding to this paragraph:
> Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception.
You're thinking about this as if they're taking your resources. Let me turn this around for you. What if they aren't being given special treatment because they need the resources, but because they need an environment where the way they think is acceptable? How many of them would still show any talent or aptitude in normal class with normal classmates? Think about your reaction to negative numbers versus their own. Maybe gifted and talented classes aren't so much giving them more resources as they are giving them an appropriate education. Maybe it's about creating a safe environment for kids who tend to be more abstract to flourish.
The notion that gifted students need a special environment to learn is comical. If they're actually talented and gifted, they should certainly be able to learn effectively in the same environment as "normal" students.
Learning to read and do arithmetic is important in the 3rd grade, but it isn't as important as learning social and communication skills. I don't deny that there are gifted individuals among us, I'm advocating that we wait on trying to identify the gifted ones at least until puberty.
Another data point from a personal perspective: I was fairly gifted (though far less than the names I mentioned) and came up with the idea of limits in math on my own when I was 9 years old. I never got any proper mentorship and the development of my math skills and intuition was held back by the boring classroom materials and routine homework I needed to attend/finish. I did not have access to or even aware of any advanced materials I could learn from, and thus wasted several of the best years to develop those math skills and intuition.
They may need a special environment to be allowed to excel in learning without getting bullied.
All kids would likely benefit from a better form of teaching than the conventional school methods. However if you get a classroom of gifted children and you add a non-gifted child, the non-gifted child likely won’t be able to keep up at the same pace. There’s something to be said about segregating children with similar learning abilities so that the pace of the classes are at good levels for everyone in the class.
My son is already reading at an advanced level and doing math while his classmates barely know the alphabet. He hates school because it's so boring. We are sending him to a class with similarly gifted children so that he won't hate school and will be challenged. Keeping him in a class where kids don't learn as quickly as he does would definitely be a disaster in this case.
Sure, but why?
I was in the “slow” reading group for the first half of first grade, then quickly got moved to the “fast” group and eventually ended up scoring a perfect score on the verbal portion of the MCAT as well as top percentiles on other standardized tests. My point is that sometimes remedial has nothing to do with potential.
We should stop viewing remedial as “bad.”
If we accept the above correlation, there seem to be 2 likely explanations for this, outside of pure coincidence.
One may posit that this relationship is due to some inheritable trait which causes high income earners to consistently produce offspring who make the same sound decisions they made based on intelligence.
If this were true, I would expect to see far more high functioning individuals at the top of the economic pie. Purely observationally, this seems not to be highly correlated. There are lots of exceptions, but high income seems to be associated mostly with a history of high income.
Alternatively, and I believe more likely, this difference can be explained by the difference in access to resources which wealth provides.
If IQ is just a proxy for family wealth, what can or should we do about it? It seems most equitable to simply provide broad access to high quality education to those who can keep pace at a cost (both in terms of money and social friction) approaching zero.
http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2465/Intelligence-Family-Twi...
"In twin studies of over 10,000 pairs of twins, monozygotic (genetically identical) twins averaged an 0.85 correlation of "g," whereas for dizygotic (fraternal, like brothers or sisters) same-sex twins the "g" correlations were 0.60. These twin studies suggest that the heritability (genetic effect) accounts for about half of the variance in "g" scores."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Cites this particular twin study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7945151
"The powerful quantitative genetic design of identical and fraternal twins reared apart (112 pairs) and matched twins reared together (111 pairs) was employed to assess the extent of genetic influence on individual differences in cognitive abilities during the last half of the life span. General cognitive ability yielded a heritability estimate of about .80 in two assessments 3 years apart as part of the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging. This is one of the highest heritabilities reported for a behavioral trait. Across the two ages, average heritabilities are about .60 for verbal tests, .50 for spatial and speed-of-processing tests, and .40 for memory tests."
Note that this is a population-wide number, however real it is, and it doesn't really have anything to do with upper-end intelligence. You can't take a 95th percentile kid and make him an Einstein. What you can do is try to give every kid a non-abusive education system that treats them like somebody who can accomplish something. I think early age gifted programs are more useful in their role of not boring the smarter kids than, say, causing them to be educated faster.
IQ has a weird characteristic in that heritability increases dramatically as we age. In youth the heritability of IQ ranges from upwards of 40%, but the really crazy thing is in adulthood that number skyrockets to values that recent research is showing may be north of 80%! So perhaps the goal ought not be to find young Einsteins, but 'old Einsteins'!
In my opinion the reason for the success of 'gifted' programs is quite simple. In the US many children have little to no interest in actually learning. That leads to a poor environment for both teachers and the kids in the class that would like to learn. 'Gifted' programs help connect students who are interested in learning and teachers that would like to genuinely teach, instead of those just going through the motions for the paycheck. And that's going to lead to greater outcomes for everybody. Basically, education often devolves to the lowest common denominator, and in public classes that denominator tends to be very low. 'Gifted classes' don't really filter to amazing students, but instead get rid of the awful ones.
Here's a radical idea: let them have childhoods!
I strongly support letting kids be free to develop and think for themselves. If a 'gifted' child can succeed despite being imprisoned in a school for many years, imagine how much they could grow and contribute if they were free?
For anyone with children, or who cares about the future of western democracy, please look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
I'm in the process of winding up my commitments now so I can commit all my resources to the journey.
Were you able to include Sudbury data in your research?
I do agree that "gifted" programs are mostly a waste, given that schoolteachers are unlikely to have any useful advice for any given students' area of interest.
In my personal opinion pushing students to do different things is a good way to introduce new ideas and skills to people. I totally disagree with those who say things like cursive or literature are useless when you "just want to be a programmer", they all give the possibility of finding new ways of thinking or improve some parts of the brain. In the context of cursive for example, I think acquiring better motor skills means that a programmer could type faster thus making that faster-typing programmer a bit better than other programmers.
If I were given the choice to do what I wanted to do I would suck at what I would want to do. For example I don't like math much, but if I weren't forced to "just" do it I wouldn't understand way too many basic concepts in for example programming.
Though I do agree with the idea of mentors guiding students, I remember reading a paper about it being super effective compared to regular classroom teaching, I really wish I would have had that chance back when I was younger.
My kids' teachers will be there community, with myself and my partner as facilitators. It's time to get back to learning how to learn together.
Not enrolling them means educating them about how humanity:
• goes through cultural phases, sometimes cyclically
• is currently in a transitional phase between creating legal systems that don't recognize the freedom to choose any strategy to meet a fundamental need for life (eg. the freedom from money) and creating legal systems that do.
• changes through culture, so what we do with our lives can be considered a voting system
• is going from a point in time where programming ourselves on the individual level is done intuitively without explicitly defining the mathematics of doing so to a point where we can use category theory of the brain & mind to explicitly define models we're using to program ourselves
• is going through a period where we don't see how we can cooperate without laws to a period where we can start defining culture-driven, decentralized ways of life
• periods are identifies by the messages within their culture and the actions those messages lead to and stem from
• old periods use shame, blame, criticism, judgment, anger, scarcity, control, and other forms of denying needs in their actions/messages
• can make up and choose whatever messages to believe, on an individual and collective level
• can learn through our example
• can learn to accept that helping someone materially can be repaid emotionally/physically/mentally/spiritually/socially, so material possessions aren't necessary
• is comprised of individuals who experience a world they're modeling based on what they sense and perceive, so anytime they say anything, it's to a person in their head and not the real person, so nothing is personal
The primary focus will be on self-programming skills and studying how human needs naturally emerge from a basic definition of life (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/mit-physicist-proposes-new-mean...).
I'm packaging all this as a religion of absurdity devoted to helping the world through hacking the self. It's a choose-your-own-religion religion. The reason for making it into a religion is because that's what happens when we radically decentralize: everyone governs themselves how they like, including what beliefs they choose and laws that follow. I'm be curious to see how it stands up against current religious legal theory in the US, as well as around the world.
If I teach my kids this stuff and we talk about the needs they're meeting or trying to meet through their actions, we can diagram it all out and reason about things in a clearer way.
Or at least that's the hypothesis I'm testing through experimenting on my kids in this way.
(note: if you have a trust fund set up or something, then I guess it balances out. Just get ready for them to rebel in their teens by becoming neoliberals and putting up posters of Henry Kissinger on their walls.)
Ultimately, for the time being, we can only seek to minimize how we interact with money until the law catches up with human understanding. It's really hard to dump capitalism altogether and/or overnight, so it's about progressively stepping down/back.
And capitalism? You aren’t going to enroll them in capitalism? How’s that work? You’re not going to let them buy things or work for money?
Before you try to “facilitate” education for your future children, it might be a good idea to facilitate your own education first.
I'm going to explain to them there are other ways of meeting human needs, like developing a supportive community among people who all help each other. I'll also minimize the things we use money for, as well as the ways we bring money in. There are already groups online geared toward this goal, such as Buy Nothing groups. This is how capitalism will start to be phased out and how I intend on doing my part.
I'll also teach them to realize sometimes forgetting to proofread is not an indication of being uneducated.
There's a difference between challenging a child and loading that child up with busy work. My "college prep" school was mostly busy work; I spent more time on schoolwork in high school than college.
For example, exposure to history is important, but do you really need to push all the smart kids to the dry, dense history books? Do all the smart kids need to take only advanced classes in foriegn languages? I stumbled on anything that required wrote memorization.
By my senior year I started taking the "dumb" courses for fun. Ironically, I learned more in those courses than "college prep" because there was less busy work.
The best lesson from the advanced courses is when to run away from someone wasting my time on their ego trip.
Part of challenging a child is finding the right challenges.
But also, I would push my kid both to go outside/to sport and to socialize if they seemed to spend too much time inside or in isolated all the time. You cant learn social skills without practice and your body need physical movement to be healthy. And many kids act badly if they don't have it (they might not be fully aware of causes and consequences, but they do behave better when they had movement). It is great when kid knows what it wants, but that does not mean that it is reasonable to limit education to that single one thing.
I don't know what your gifted education programs were like, but I never recall feeling like I missed out on my childhood. Occasionally I would take different classes to some of my friends (but with others), and that was about it.
Far from keeping people from being free to develop and think for themselves, most of the gifted classes I took actively encouraged that, with open-ended problem solving and free-form classes often led by student interest.
But children need to be reined in, they don't have the reasoning skills or understanding of adults; the one time I was allowed to fully control my own syllabus it led almost directly to me losing the ability to speak Cantonese, which I'd been fluent in up to that point. As a kid who'd spoken it all his life, I simply didn't believe all of the people who told me I'd forget it without practice. Because I was a child.
I don't know exactly how free-form Sudbury Schools are, but I'd have extreme reservations about sending my children to one.
Did you instead learn these things?:
• exercising that power could lead to you losing a skill
• doing so is bad
• you don't have the power to choose your own course corrections when you notice a skill waning
Based on your suggestion that children need to be controlled, I think your experience was limited and too short.
I don't even know if you're arguing in good faith, because your second dot point isn't really a thing that even a child needs to learn.
I'll also thank you not to suggest that our differences of opinion are due to your superior understanding of my upbringing.
And I don't assume to have an understanding of your upbringing. That's why I was posing it all as questions. The points I made are things I think can potentially hinder learning and are commonplace in society.
Teach them to tap into intuition, ask (not demand) for help when support is needed, and learn how to learn.
No doubt about that. They'll obsess over whatever they enjoy. And the following line that "all people are creative if they are allowed to develop their unique talents" implies that your average person's creative ouput is important or even worthwhile to society.
As a child who experienced both "regular" and gifted education, I can say with some certainty that: My "childhood" began when I entered gifted school.
Before that I was bullied, I didn't fit in, I wasn't challenged, and I was unhappy.
It was my personal experience and the experience of many of the students around me at gifted school that this was what we wanted. We were happy and grateful to be around "our kind". Precisely because we could be the kids we wanted to be.
That feeling certainly wasn't universal. It wasn't for everyone. And I will readily grant that schools -- even gifted schools -- are prison-like and could be improved.
But I reject the notion you seem to be arguing that these programs are prima facie harmful (or at best not helpful), as compared to the standard-education alternative.
I can't take any article seriously that doesn't appreciate that giftedness is an educational concept, not a function of intelligence.
My insight regarding giftedness is that if we could afford it, all kids would thrive if they could be placed in the kinds of small classroom creative learning environments that gifted kids can only thrive in. In other words, we're all "gifted", it's just that some of us are less adaptable than others.
And while intelligence might be heritable, nurture is far more important when it comes to the development of children. The argument that it's largely heritable is the argument that the educational system is fine as it is and doesn't need any new ideas or money.
So, the “right” solution would involve giving kids opportunities to challenge themselves in avenues where they are strong, and ensuring a rounded experience.
Which is what schools are supposed to do, but they find it hard enough to cater to the “average” student :-/
Finland is tops in education and lots of their teaching is letting kids pursue projects together and individually especially, the latter is very important for self-confidence. Finland does this through project- or phenomenon-based learning (PBL)[2]. This empowers kids and more closely resembles real life, you constantly have projects of all sorts going on in your life over overlapping timeframes, sometimes in a team, sometimes all by yourself.
The best teachers also encourage projects. My 6th grade teacher had Apple II's and let us experiment with building games in BASIC of which I built a Tron game. I still think of it to this day. He also always had access to educational games like Oregon Trail. My high school computer lab teacher Mr Iles had gaming, programming and media/internet hardware and software setup to experiment with, many of the kids in that class and group are great programmers and some worked for intel while there. We had TV running on computers and internet before most saw those things and built things on it. He also let us play Scorched Earth and let programming projects be self-driven. My art teachers did critiques so you learned to take criticism and explain why. At Chandler High School there was a video class where you had to come up with video content, edit, produce, direct, write etc and that was amazing in terms of fun projects where I learned a great deal. All of this led to great educational outcomes both in team projects and individual.
As long as a program is project based, a kid from anywhere or any level can benefit. We need more project based education in the US. Most gifted programs that do well do have a project based element to it, but not dictated to the kids as much as curriculum but a set of requirements and the rest is a creative exercise.
Or create a game for kids to learn math, it must be targeted at kids ages 6-8 and include addition, subtraction, multiplication and division but it cannot be flash cards. Then see what they come up with. The game creation projects really teach people to simplify and iterate especially when you get feedback from players.
Every kid needs the basics but besides that, projects to apply those skills. Rote memorization doesn't work as well as application to a project. So you find something that you can apply those skills. For instance math can better be taught by making a software/web game, algebra/trigonometry/vector maths can be fun that way. Markets can be taught with stock market games. Economics can be taught with simulated mini economies. Critical thinking with looking at the news and seeing sources of funding/content.
Check the BBC link on Finland for some of their ideas, their project based programs have critical thinking skills in learning about fake news, sources of those and why, learning about fallacies and making projects around that. It also has projects where kids learn about immigration and what to do with refugees including market research. Kids can learn to setup computers or networks and then make something on top of it, or teach younger kids skills they already know. I truly believe Finland is a mobile gaming startup hub because of their project based education system and possibly a bit of Nokia influence.
An example of one in Finland:
> They use 3D printers to create a miniature of their Roman building, which will eventually be used as pieces for a class-wide board game.
This is a history lesson with a difference, says Aleksis Stenholm, a teacher at Hauho Comprehensive School. The children are also gaining skills in technology, research, communication and cultural understanding.
"Each group is becoming an expert on their subject, which they will present to the class," he explains. The board game is the culmination of the project, which will run alongside normal classroom teaching.
> The school's skate park came from an idea suggested by the children, who helped design and raise funds for it
Other great things about Finland education systems:
- Teaching is a highly respected, well-paid profession
- School days are short and the summer break is 10 weeks
They get more freedom and more projects in Finland and generally school is more fun but they are still testing well for basic skills.
For nearly two decades, Finland has enjoyed a reputation for having one of the world's best education systems. Its 15 year olds regularly score amongst the highest in the global Pisa league tables for reading, maths and science.
Many times the projects are teaching through learning to teach or educate others or make games for others. The moment you teach the ability to teach, the mind opens up a bit more.
So to recap correct me if I’m wrong:
1. Learn basics
2. Form a project with rules where basics are applied (often teaching through learning to teach or educate others or make games for others).
3. If that doesn’t work get tutoring from other kids and teachers.Finnish kids have more time to work on projects and play in addition to school that is more interesting.
In academics the path to a Ph.D. is known, you can figure it out even for newborns. The problem is that in life there is no determined path. Gifted Education lacks the ability to teach children how to get from A to B without a determined path. So many of these programs are teaching kids how to be great students but not how to excel in life, 2 different goals.
What society needs from their brightest are trailblazers that solve problems and make advances in any given field. What these programs produce are great professionals that aren't likely to be leaders in any field.
I truly believe that once these kids know the basics these programs should help them figure out how to excel at life when the path is unknown by letting them make their own decisions and nudging them in the right direction rather than showing them how to get there.
Also, every time I read about these kinds of programs, they try to identify the best by some kind of IQ. But as we all know smarts, not necessarily high IQ, and hard work is what makes the successful individual. Given 2 smart kids at the same level, hard work will determine who comes in on top. There needs to be a way to ID these kids so that it's not just IQ but a combination of hard work and intelligence.
Also Gifted is a horrible name. It should be high achievers. My view is that geniuses are made not born.
> Within each of 18 classrooms, an average of 20% of the children were reported to classroom teachers as showing unusual potential for intellectual gains. Eight months later these “unusual” children (who had actually been selected at random) showed significantly greater gains in IQ than did the remaining children in the control group. These effects of teachers’ expectancies operated primarily among the younger children.
[0]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.495... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
0. There is a shared environmental component for deprived shared environments, but it has to be very extreme to not washout by adulthood.
As an example, let's look at teaching them to use the word "yet" when speaking negatively about themselves.
This is a practice I took up at one point in my recovery from information addiction. It wasn't enough to really open me up. I had to make several other language hacks. I learned how to speak in active voice, largely dropped the words can't/should/shouldn't, and redefined a whole host of words for myself. I had to believe what I said, too, which we're awful at teaching how to do. I'm guessing it's because science is taught in a way that typically undermines the skill of choosing beliefs.
I had to hack my language way more and I think a generalized approach to teach kids how to identify words they use to undermine themselves will work better than being told what words they need to change. The purpose of the hacks is to change their perception, after all. Language is an indicator, but without a process to identify what meaning they give you words and what they believe, we probably won't see much improvement if we focus on superficial language hacks. Hacking perception takes more than that.
>I had to hack my language way more and I think a generalized approach to teach kids how to identify words they use to undermine themselves will work better than being told what words they need to change.
Is this approach of yours about being more positive and less normative, and also being more optimistic that you can improve?
I dropped most words with opposites as a practice in nonjudgment. I kept a few around, like "love" and "can" because they're useful. "Can't" implies a belief that something's impossible. Believing that can keep us from imagining ways things CAN happen. It's therefore not useful to adopt the belief of "can't" if we want to explore possibilities. Having an exploratory mindset is really helpful while trying to learn how to meet one's needs.
This approach is about seeing a way through things by learning to let go of how I judge something in order to see a way through it. Everything is a learning opportunity, so I'm working to enable/configure myself to learn more frequently. I do experience deep optimism. As for positivity, I prefer to acknowledge both sides of the coin.
Does that answer your questions?
>I dropped most words with opposites as a practice in nonjudgment.
Don't pretty much all words have opposites? Looking at verbs, it's hard to think of ones that lack an opposite.
I really like this general idea, and thinking about it, I want to alter my language accordingly. I would appreciate any resources.
A core set of principles and language hacks came from nonviolent communication. I practically started with it and added a practice of acknowledging both words and their opposites (Maybe I mean adjectives with opposites, but maybe try it with whatever opposite-having words you catch?).
Here's a great free resource for NVC: https://youtu.be/O4tUVqsjQ2I
The nonjudgment practice went something like this:
1. Hear/read a word I detected as having an opposite.
2. Say "eh...<first word>...<its opposite>...eh" while shrugging and mentally considering the opposite within the same context.
3 weeks after having adopted the practice every day, I started enjoying foods I'd historically hated. Then I began enjoying everything in the world more, including people, country music, and watching sports.
Let's connect off-site and keep this convo going.
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
As long as we agree that education should be a part of childhood, a good middle ground would be normalizing "skipping grades." It was definitely beneficial for me from a life and academic standpoint, the only negatives were social ostracism which decreased as I got older. I think this ostracism from peers would decrease if it was considered normal to skip.
1) All students should be learning the fundamentals.
2) If you are gifted, being able to work with, communicate with, and help people less gifted than you is going to be a valuable life skill.
3) Finding new intellectually challenging things to do even in boring circumstances is a useful skill to learn. Even Einstein had to sit through boring faculty meetings.
4) In a gifted class, the child is probably substantially smarter than the teachers. Highly gifted people aren't going into elementary education in large enough numbers for their to be enough gifted teachers for the number of gifted students.
5) With the Internet and widespread knowledge, the truly gifted can learn so much on their own. Once a child knows how to read, curiosity, ability, and time are the only limits. With a truly gifted child, the less challenging the schoolwork is, the more time and energy they can dedicate to other things.
6) A stable, nurturing family that values and encourages intellectual achievement is probably far more important than what kind of school you go to as long as the school is competent.
With regards to number 5, how many of you that learned programming as a kid, leaned it in school vs learned it on your own by reading books or via the Internet?
As a society we should strive to make school something that teaches to basics well for all children and stimulates curiosity and gives children the necessary tools to learn on their own.
* As an example of a gifted child, Von Neumann https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann is a much better example than Einstein.
And after having suffered immensely, simultaneously, particularly because no one accepted what I actually said: "I need peace and quiet to work." "Stop fighting." "Just leave me alone."
Number one way to nuture gifted children (per me): TEACH THEM TO STAND UP FOR THEMSELVES. AND TO RESPECT THEMSELVES, RATHER THAN CONSTANTLY DIMINISHING THEM WITH "CORRECTIONS" AND "COMPLIANCE".
I was a pretty nice kid. And I've tried to be a pretty nice guy, as an adult. (I don't know, maybe I ended up partly being that "nice guy", as well... Clueless.)
I didn't need a bunch of "socialization". I needed some acknowledgement and acceptance of what worked for me, and what didn't.
And some HONESTY. Some of the things that most fucked me over, were people being dishonest. Whether maliciously or with "good intentions".
So, if someone had taught me how to (physically, when necessary) keep the bullies off. And that I could indeed trust my intuition.
Well, retrospect, but I kind of think I would have had the rest.
In most of my classes, I pretty much ended up teaching myself, anyway. And I remember the subset of genuinely good instructors who did teach me things.
They didn't merely recite. They paid attention, and added things they could see would be informative and useful to me.
"Gifted". Right there, in the use of that term: You're often dealing with someone who doesn't "get it".
/bitterness
P.S. Lately, I've been on a medication that tends to get me a bit ramped up while also short-circuiting some of my natural "attention to detail" (aka "pause and check", etc.) This may be reflected in some of my posts. Sorry.
Also, why didn't I do this for myself, as an adult. Well, the last couple of years of college and right after, prior history culminated in a couple of serious injuries that took away from my physical capabilities.
I'll add that, in my personal experience, that's a real cut-off: Once you experience physiological losses you can't recoup, your world changes. The journey back from that is much more difficult, especially if/when they start to snowball.
Another real reason to teach kids how to take care of themselves. And to respect themselves (NOT what you arbitrarily tell them). Get them self-sufficient in keeping themselves in good health. "Health is wealth". Boy, did I learn the aptness of that as I got older.
"But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."