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Comment by fatjokes | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical. If the minority gifted* students could change the culture of the regular classroom the bullied nerd wouldn't be such a trope.

*Let's say that by definition, gifted = a small top percentage of students.

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You'd be surprised. Having 2-3 gifted students who can explain basic concepts to the "average" kids and help them with assignments takes a significant load off the teachers back (who can then focus on helping kids with serious learning difficulties).

I think this is more an argument for smaller class sizes and more individualized instruction, not necessarily eliminating honors classes altogether.

There's a significant shortage of teachers in the US & Canada, especially for math & sciences, so I'm not sure how we could realistically reduce class sizes in the short to medium term

Yeah, fair point. I guess from my perspective (my sister is a teacher at a charter school in Iowa that does have lower class sizes and much better educational outcomes) smaller class sizes seem like such low hanging fruit if the objective is simply to improve learning, not over-specify some testing metric.

This is a terrible approach to teaching. I’ve been in high school classes where I played the TA role, and when I couldn’t switch to another class I started skipping. It slows down the students who learn too quickly for the class, there’s no point for smart students to drill concepts as much as the others.

As someone who was in equivalent programs in the US, I can tell you my experience was that most people in the normal classes didn’t really care, and that attitude is far more likely to discourage the 2-3 gifted students than it is for gifted students to somehow lift up all the other students.

As others have said, gifted students weren’t just smarter students, they were mostly the students who cared.

The 'gifted' students should not be forced (or expected) to offload the burden of instruction from the teacher.

> Having 2-3 gifted students who can explain basic concepts to the "average" kids and help them with assignments takes a significant load off the teachers back

Calling @treis who claimed[0] 4 days ago that "Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job". Well, here ya go.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27563940

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