Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

I want to get rid of the “gifted” connotation.

I was a so-called gifted child and it honestly made me feel sick and guilty. “Do I really deserve this? Am I really gifted? What if I don’t reach my high expectations, will the rest of my life be a disappointment?”

I know that others have similar feelings. Being called gifted and special messes with your psyche almost like being called inferior.

But also, whenever a kid is easily completing all of his work so it’s just busy work to him, he should get harder work. Otherwise you’re wasting their time.

There are kids who spend all their time on schoolwork, literally have no exercise or social life, and yet their grades suck and they’re not even smart because their “homework” and “studying” is rote memorization and garbage. I feel really bad for those kids.

My idealistic recommendation for his education should work is this: give each student work until they learn, then give them harder work. Also let students have some choice over the type of work, and try to make problems as interesting as possible, while still making sure each student gets a general education and learns important key details. Each student spends X amount of time on schoolwork, like a full-time job, then they have other activities and free time. Some students will get more work done in the same time period, and advance further. Once the students grow up, they know what academic path or career they should take based on how far they’ve progressed.

Ok, what about AP classes? What about honors math? Should we do away with calculus?

Call it something different fine but tracking is tracking.

Neither I nor anyone else in my gifted program expressed any angst about the label. It's just a recognition of a simple reality.

>whenever a kid is easily completing all of his work so it’s just busy work to him, he should get harder work. Otherwise you’re wasting their time.

Agreed. The most efficient way to do this is not to have every teacher running multiple teaching levels within each class. It is to take all those kids who are completing the work early and getting bored, and putting them all on one teacher who can run a single lesson that matches their ability.

You're just asking for a gifted program that's done individually instead of in batches - same thing but infeasibly expensive.

What GP is describing sounds like impostor syndrome, it's not uncommon. When I worked in education we were specifically working with primarily gifted students (it wasn't, strictly, a gifted program but access to it was limited and pretty much only went to the top students around the state, which largely corresponded with students in the gifted category). We spent a good bit of time talking about impostor syndrome and how to identify it to try and get help to students in need.

This isn't something that impacts every student, and most students won't come out and say that they feel this way, especially not to their peers. It's like depression or anxiety. People don't often come out and say, "I feel depressed and have constant negative thoughts and suffer from suicidal ideation." They keep it to themselves for fear of how they will be perceived if they admit they don't belong or feel that they don't belong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

Agreed, "gifted" implies a static frame, which is anathema to learning. Alternatively, "accelerated", implying the student must work to keep up the pace.

I think the issue is that we're going to end up with a Euphemism Treadmill where society will come up with new terms to describe the concept of "gifted", and use them until those new terms get loaded with the same connotations that made them want to change it in the first place. I don't see this ever going away because human beings value intelligence and like to categorize people as "smart" or "dumb".

> I know that others have similar feelings. Being called gifted and special messes with your psyche almost like being called inferior.

This is not a direct problem of gifted programs or gifted kids — it’s a problem of unreasonable expectations about what gifted means.

It’s not an issue of “deserving” anything. Being gifted is as much a curse as a blessing. Furthermore, being gifted is typically negatively correlated with success in aggregate (average income decreases as iq increases past about 140-150 or so).

There is an idea that occasionally bounces around (iirc, I first read it in the book Greatness in grad school) that folks with a certain IQ differential (+/-20 to +/-30 is the range I usually see) fundamentally perceive the world in a different way. This often leads to communication breakdown since two people can be talking about the same thing from very different baselines.

The beauty of gifted programs, imho, is that you are able to put together these people who perceive the world very differently than most of their peers.

On a personal level, this was incredibly calming. All of a sudden, not only was my perspective on the world not unique, but my peers were able to extend and expand on my perspectives. Furthermore, I was able to reciprocate. Most/all of my peers (we had a separate high school) felt the same, and we intensely missed that environment after leaving high school despite many of us going to very elite schools.

Gifted programs, when done well, are a great place for genius to develop and grow. Forcing these gifted kids into classes with few or no gifted peers is, to me, like capping the high-end potential of your society.

The high expectations is indeed something to think about. It has never been harder to be extraordinary at something; I feel like there's just too many people on this planet and the competition is fierce. So I don't know who those gifted programs track - but if it's simply your 130ish IQ top 2%, that's really nice and all but doesn't really mean these kids will achieve anything great. Most of them will be successful lawyers, programmers or doctors and that's it. Nothing extraordinarily gifted about them when they will reach adulthood. They are not likely to be pioneers in their fields, to win awards or do anything memorable or great. So why create this insane pressure for them to show how unique and gifted they are?

It's terrible branding because it makes other parents jealous and then this happens.

It doesn't matter what you call it, people will know what it means. Look at how special ed turned special into a euphemism for disabled.

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