What it means to teach gifted learners well
nagc.org
nagc.org
Anyway, I think that many, perhaps most kids need mentors/coaches. Parents can only do so much, and teenagers don’t want to listen to their parents anyway. Gifted learners surely aren’t any different. The ‘content’ problem seems solved - there is just so much interesting stuff out there, and so many great resources. The guidance and encouragement and diversity of influences is what is missing. This seems very hard or impossible to scale up.
There is an old saying: it takes a village to raise a child. So I am looking forward for the villages to revitalize with smart people ..
In middle school I was in the most advanced computer class offered. It involved lots and lots of typing practice and basically just doing office-work projects in random Mac programs. My biggest regret was that the promised "programming" lessons consisted of typing printed Java code from a piece of paper and into a text file. No explanation of what the symbols were, what Java was, nothing. I was pissed. I failed that module. I felt so misled that I flat out refused to do the assignments.
From then on I resolved to teach myself. I somehow convinced my mom to buy us a computer. Once we got dial-up, I struggled with VBA, Flash Actionscript, C++, Tcl, Python and on and on. None of it had a manageable learning curve for me.
One day, I discovered Game Maker. The day Mark Overmars introduced the C++/JS mash-up that is Game Maker Language changed my life. I learned how to plan projects, how to invoke spells of hyperfocus, how to read technical documentation and on and on. It taught me algebra concepts way before I knew what algebra even was. That was all possible because I could type some stuff into the editor, and within a few minutes, actually see sprites move around and respond to my input.
Damn. It's been 20 years. I feel like I should be a coding God now. It's funny because I don't expect myself to be Shakespeare just because I've been writing words my whole life... Anyways, my mind wanders.
Oh, tutors. I never had a tutor. If you want to make your kid a genius, get them a 1:1 tutor. That provides social modeling, mentorship, immediate feedback and personalized lessons. I would venture to say that tutors may still be valuable, even to adults...
Thats actually a good point, why do we have this assumption in tech?
In writing this comment, I think doing a short code review of what I produced in the last session might make sense. The more quickly I advance at some skill, the more quickly I can add/tweak my code review.
From my understanding and experience, that sort of reflection on each output of skillful work turbo charges improvement. I did it at a phone center job, where I kept a spreadsheet with a prediction of what service rating the customer would give me, and a short blurb of what I did well and what I could improve. That seriously blasted me to the top. This also worked when I was in a band. When rehearsing, we would play through our set in full while recording, then afterwards we would immediately run to the computer to listen back and discuss what to work on. Within weeks we were able to meet our goal of playing with our main influence, a band called Protomartyr.
In the US there's definitely a big effort to have CS/programming courses in high schools but the big problem is finding qualified teachers. Since teachers in the US tend to get paid much less than even low-end software developer jobs in the same city, most people with any CS skill tend to go into the software industry instead of teaching.
I would take a pay cut to work as a teacher, especially for the ~70 working days off, which is about triple what I have now. A 50% cut isn't feasible though.
Depending on what "as a kid" means and your age, did you not try to find such people on internet forums dedicated to (for example) C? I also wanted to learn C when I was a child and did so with those resources (as well as books, which were as impenetrable back then as you already indicated).
I’ve found that somewhat liberating as a parent. We should all embrace and encourage that if we can find it for our kids.
I get it. Bad stuff happens sometimes. The message is clear though that (especially as a male), I’m not trusted around kids until confirmed and on record to be safe.
That’s not conducive to natural relationships with kids - you’re constantly on guard and cognizant of the fact that you’re a perceived threat.
edit: That was a little negative. I should add that it's still worth doing. There's no way to change that perception other than by doing good and reassuring people. More importantly, kids having good experiences because people make the time for them matters more than resenting being perceived as a creep all the time. Yeah, it's a drag, but mostly I ignore it and hike with the kids, teach them knots, or whatever. It's fine.
The school started off saying they don't offer advanced instruction, then grudgingly agreed to assess our child to see if she even would require it. But all of their "assessments" are closed-ended, which means she cannot actually demonstrate her proficiency level.
Even when faced with her clearly advanced abilities (3.5 grades ahead in math, according to the diagnostic from the online math platform they use), they are still doing their best to hold her back. Their rallying cry? "Even Steph Curry practices dribbling".
After hearing this for the third time, I finally pointed out that Steph Curry wouldn't have become who he is if he were never allowed to practice anything but dribbling. The school has continued dragging their feet.
The unsurprising result is that advanced students leave for private schools. We never would have bought a home in an expensive district had we anticipated departing for a private. I would recommend that parents interested in good schooling in this area look into Redwood City over Menlo Park or Palo Alto, since it has a magnet program for 3-8 and is considerably less expensive.
This whole process has been very disappointing (and surprising) for me, since I had a very different experience growing up. I went to public schools in Sacramento, where magnet programs were freely available and students could open enroll from anywhere in the region. We had classmates who lived halfway to Tahoe. It was great. I understand their programs are still up and running, and it's shocking that the well-heeled districts around here are so hostile to advanced instruction.
Happy to connect with other nearby parents of young kids. Contact info is in profile.
Closed-ended testing is standard for Gifted and Talented programs throughout the country. Are you saying that she did not meet the requirements using those tests?
They did the same thing with reading: don't give a student the chance to show higher proficiency, and you effectively cap the level a student can be 'assessed' at.
We took our kiddo on a trip to Colorado to the Gifted Development Center which was a good helpful first step (and connected a lot of dots for us). More than happy to share experiences at matt at mindvault dot com.
To make matters worse, it's quite common for very gifted students to also have issues like ADHD or OCD, which qualifies them for a label of twice exceptional. When I was raising my now adult sons, schools typically wanted to label a child either gifted or special needs and often seemed incapable of comprehending that a child could be both.
I ended up homeschooling and as a consequence I was involved with an online voluntary health and welfare organization for the gifted. My impression was that it was pretty common for people with very gifted or twice exceptional children to homeschool due to frustration with how schools handle such students.
They need custom help that few people are qualified to adequately provide.
Edited because: autocorrupt.
I'm going to have to steal this one. It gave me a big chuckle!
'A' people teach 'A' people, 'B' people teach 'C' people. 'D' people teach 'F' people. Just do the math.
This seems like bad news for the concept of sports coaching.
Menlo Park and Palo Alto school districts are overrun with parents who want to push their child into advanced classes from the moment they can put sentences together. Having talked to many friends over the years who work in tech with me who grew up in these school districts (I didn't, my experience was very different), their parents constantly applied pressure to school administrators and counselors to push their child into advanced instruction. I know parents that would spend hours a day trying to pressure school administration to push their child along. I can only imagine this form of sandbagging is just to put the brakes on you and every other parent who wants to push their child as much as possible. You're competing against every other wealthy, pushy parent trying to push their children into advanced classes as well.
Palo Alto parents recently filed a lawsuit [1] claiming that PAUSD's system for offering advanced math unfairly discriminates against girls (who make up just 35 of the 162 students receiving advanced placement in middle school). Apparently the process involves an objective test and a subjective test, and you have to pass both in order to qualify.
1: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2021/11/04/lawsuit-claim...
probably because a fair chunk of the kids aren't actually gifted, and if you cave to the parent's demands then you end up with a "if everyone is gifted, then no one is gifted" situation.
That doesn't mean that the dilemma you mention wouldn't arise, but presumably there are objective tests that could be used to make determinations. It wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be better than ignoring advanced students like they're doing now.
So if the school’s student body as whole outperforms the national average, then that school’s curriculum is enriched to meet the students where they are. State standards are a floor, not a ceiling.
This is good for the kids but not easily visible to the parents the way that placement in a gifted program is. Unfortunately, for families interested in markers of achievement, sometimes they will be unsatisfied with anything short of that letter that their child has been placed in the gifted program.
see https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/03/cdc-report-youth-suic...
https://nextshark.com/children-of-affluent-parents-in-palo-a...
and
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
When I was in first grade, the public school I was attending told my parents they didn't have the resources to teach me at the pace I was learning and recommended that my parents tried to enroll me in a private school.
The private school I ended up attending had me go through an assortment of tests and at the end I placed well enough on them that my parents were given significant financial aid.
The fact is, it's extremely difficult to find people who are cutting edge teachers of young minds. You can get them advanced course material and work with your child as long as your mind can keep up, but when it comes to outsourcing it or finding a mentor for pedagogy, if you don't know somebody, all you can really do is do the footwork, network, and pray to cross paths with someone who fits the bill.
The curse of course being that someone with advanced understanding isn't actually who you are looking for, but someone exceptionally good at teaching how to build understanding of complex topics. Those people will be in high demand, everyone will claim to be one, and a bad choice on your part distinguishing the frauds from the real thing could do much more harm than good.
Good luck. If it were me, I'd just try to get in as much extracurricular time as possible, or network with the type of people who could help, which you're already doing; so...
We eventually home-schooled. At some point, you look at all the time you spend lobbying school administrators and selling band candy, and decide it takes less time to just home school.
They offered a summer academy that hopefully will start back up again after covid and also have an online program that may be a good alternative to full home-schooling if you were considering going that route.
Update: Beast Academy is wonderful. AOPS is great too. Both very good suggestions. Your daughter may also like the math content produced by Poh Shen Loh [1].
Consider that a gifted and talented program is maybe not the best option for your daughter. Not because she isn't capable. Because gifted and talented programs, especially for the very young (which it sounds like your daughter is), trade improvements in your child's strengths for exacerbating their weaknesses. Often this translates to children who have difficulty communicating with their peers no longer really being able to interact with their peers and getting the "other" label applied quite literally.
The benefit of course is that students in gifted and talented programs get inordinate amounts of money spent on them compared to their peers (class sizes of 10-15!! Individual attention from the best and most accomplished teachers!). This is an extremely hard benefit to pass up, and I don't envy you making that decision if you buy in to above (although I expect you won't, very few people I have this conversation with agree with me).
Food for thought anyways
So is your opinion that such a program is not a good option for any student? Why not conclude instead that there should be good advanced programs, not like the ones you've seen?
> Often this translates to children who have difficulty communicating with their peers no longer really being able to interact with their peers and getting the "other" label applied quite literally.
As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates. Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything. IMO, that's worse than the picture you paint.
FWIW, I'm not looking for smaller classes at all. Her current class is 15 or 16. I'm looking for instruction that is at an appropriate level. It could be with her own class, or by having her sit with another class for math or reading. Class size is not the point; it's all about having appropriate instruction.
She's getting good grades. They have other students who aren't. She's not in their top twenty list of priorities. That's school.
It also doesn’t explain why she can only use the math app at her grade level or one above. They are rate limiting her.
Education schools have been very clear for decades that acceleration and other accomodations for gifted students are wrong and evil.
If you want to be a tiger parent, do what the tiger parents do and send them to afterschool programs. (well that's what I think they do anyway.)
1. The material wasn't challenging; I didn't grasp what the point of "proving" a bunch of obvious stuff was, although I was willing to go through the motions. So I was an 11-year-old smart aleck in a room filled with 14 year olds who found me annoying (because, truthfully, I was super annoying at that age!). This contributed to:
2. The 14 year olds were super mean to me, AND they basically revolted against the teacher when I was in the classroom
In the end the teacher was happy to just privately tutor me, which was kind of her, but I have to acknowledge that I was genuinely disruptive to her class.
So I think there are real repercussions to allowing socially undeveloped kids into a classroom filled with kids at a very different (social) level.
There might have been a different outcome if I'd been in a school with a larger pool of moderately-to-very-gifted-at-math kids.
The next year my parents sent me to a school that had an agreement with the local university to send kids gifted at math to take university classes. The college kids were much more tolerant of me as a curiosity (and I was actually challenged, so I didn't spend my time annoying anyone, which probably helped, too).
Schools could be like other institutions which focus their attention and assess themselves based on the best they produce. Even some schools are like this (or American schools anyway) with sports. Is Coach worrying about how good the average student is at basketball, or the lowest quartile? I think not.
We have decided that it is essential that everyone reaches a minimum level, that the average performance should reach a certain level and that these two things are very important and much more so than making sure that the very best students can reach their maximum level.
Again, I'm not saying I think that is wrong. In a democracy, it has a lot going for it, but it isn't the only way to run a society either.
Welcome to the “parents of gifted children” club. I agree with the previous commenter that G&T probably isn’t the right place for your kid, at least not for now, although you might not have any practical alternatives.
Let’s be real though: one need not invoke resentment-laced arguments about fairness to see that public schools just do not have the resources to properly educate (upper) outliers. Pretend you had a child whose growth curve put him on track to be a future 7-footer—you might consider investing in some private basketball coaching. Different gift, same idea.
Let's also be real though. This was a conscious policy decision made by school boards across the country.
G&T programs used to be what school's public and private marketed. Now the public schools where I grew up don't even offer AP classes, and a huge portion of their budget now goes to special education.
Why did we decide we have the resources to spend on the lower end of "special" scale but not the upper?
Anyway, to answer your query, my belief after decades of observing the education system here (BC, Canada) is, politicians and decision-makers basically feel that smart kids have a huge advantage and they don't need the help. They will succeed and be useful members of society whether we leave them for dead or help them thrive. So... the dollars can be allocated to "those who really need it". I have heard this overall sentiment shared over and over and over, as far back as when my parents and I attended city council meetings appealing for ANY sort of "gifted" program implementation, even a tiny hint of one. The answer was always "find a private school", "I heard there's this virtual school you can attend on the computer", "we'll think about it", etc. I honestly don't see this changing anytime soon.
I could say way more on the subject but didn't feel like posting much more of such a personal topic. Happy to chat about it more with whoever, though.
If one goes through life expecting people they encounter to care about them, they'll be bitterly disappointed. Some of my teachers were nice to me, and would go out of their way to help if I asked. Did they really care about me? I doubt it. They were just good people. The rest of of my teachers were pretty indifferent. A couple actively disliked me (my own fault).
But what I wanted was not caring, but for them to do their job.
So, she's starting to unschool herself (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling ). Perhaps she could use some help in that process, but it's not inherently a bad thing.
It is extremely hard to draw such broad conclusions. I do think on the whole G&T programs are a net negative- if only because they have drained so many resources from the vast majority of students. I think there is a reasonable middle ground to be had somewhere.
> Why not conclude instead that there should be good advanced programs, not like the ones you've seen?
I have seen quite a few advanced programs and I can attach various adjectives to them, and I think some were objectively good from the standard measure. I think the entire concept is flawed in a fundamental way though. All children will benefit from small class sizes, individualized lesson plans, encouragement to pursue their passions, etc etc. Its heartbreaking that we offer those services primarily to children who are academically exceptional.
> As it is, my child is coming to the conclusion that school is boring/easy and that she is smarter than her classmates
This is certainly a struggle. Do keep in mind that your daughter will take your cues to heart in how you interact with her schooling. Finding the challenge in the mundane is a skill I did not develop until I was much too old to take advantage of it.
> Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything. IMO, that's worse than the picture you paint.
Thats certainly not a good situation. I wish you the best of luck in addressing it however you deem best. As I concede above, its hard to paint with broad strokes; every child is different and will respond differently to identical situations.
It is far more heartbreaking seeing those resources wasted on the comparatively incapable. You can bring a student to math, but you can't make him/her learn. Moreover it guts both our national competitiveness and eschews meritocracy in favor of classism, where the have's can privately acquire those services.
I understand that as a parent you’d want to do what you can for your child to give them a normal experience. I’d probably do the same in their shoes. As a society we should probably place limits on that. As far as I could tell he was one step above “vegetable” and gained nothing from the experience and it took an insane amount of potential resources away from the rest of the students.
Class size has nothing to do with it. As I've mentioned above multiple times, this is not what we are after. It is also not necessarily something that these programs offer; the program I was in 30 years ago did not have small class sizes.
Equally important, evidence does not strongly support the theory that smaller class sizes improve performance. Most of the studies show no benefit or a small benefit but only for certain types of students (white/Asian, not URM).
Similarly, we're not looking for individualized lesson plans. Just let her do the regular math for a different grade level. No customization needed. I realize that would require matching up 'math time' for her class and another class, but this is a school with 7 classes per grade. There are many ways to make this happen (for her and for other students who could also benefit from above-grade-level instruction).
> I do think on the whole G&T programs are a net negative- if only because they have drained so many resources from the vast majority of students.
> Its heartbreaking that we offer those services primarily to children who are academically exceptional.
I'm curious where you're getting your numbers from. I work in education technology, and the common wisdom is that tons of money is spent on Title I schools and special education. I have literally never heard anyone claim that GATE is a lucrative market.
I went to a magnet school for high school. While we did have a decent amount of swanky equipment for labs, that was pretty much all donated or begged off of companies. That does comport with your tales that GT isn't particularly graced with extra funding.
1) a lower student to teacher ratio 2) better, newer equipment 3) better, more experienced teachers
I've never talked to someone who didn't admit to those advantages, only argued about how important they were or how expensive they might be. I can imagine it isn't a cash cow for the industry because the number of students is small and most of the difference is in teacher pay per child.
Re snap class sizes having an effect on outcomes. This is extremely surprising to me. The last I looked (admittedly quite some time ago) it was essentially the only factor that has significant weight and was reproducible.
Well, you will need teachers who have mastered algebra themselves. Other than that, I don't see why they need to be better or more experienced.
The profs I had in college were never trained as teachers, nor were they particularly experienced at it. But they knew the material to the point that it was trivial for them.
On the flipside this can make it harder for the teacher to relate to the students. In a university context of course, students have each other as equals.
I don't recall we even needed a lot of resources or personal attention or special student/teacher ratios in gifted class--they just set us loose with computers and told us to write logo programs (it was the early 90s), instead of being stuck in regular class trying to figure out how to cut myself so I could feel something other than bored.
I would've ended up getting a phd with or without gifted classes--I didn't need it to get a jump start on career success or something like that. I needed it to keep me sane.
You don't need any of that for a gifted program. You just need to teach more advanced material, and at a faster pace. There's no reason whatsoever it should cost more.
Heck, my freshman physics class in college had 150 students in it. It blew by high school honors physics in 3 or 4 lectures. I learned a crap ton in it. It was terrifying, but also exhilarating.
Edit: I can think of a situation where I attended a different grade's math class. That was completely separate from the g&t program at the school, and I simply haven't considered it as part of that.
I also doubt that it is even possible to reliably detect a gifted student before 3rd grade.
And lastly, a gifted program can be little more than just giving the 3rd grade gifted students the 4th grade curriculum. No extra money required. No magical teaching required.
The trade-off was worth it. But my teachers did care, they campaigned for some solution to what they saw as bad behavior from being bored and unchallenged. It did create authority problems to see the Teachers one was supposed to respect stutter on with easy problems and to see your peers having trouble spelling basic words, it was ok to be "other" from that. Early social life doesn't have to be tied to a classroom, I got that from neighborhood friends, athletics church and family. There is no excuse to having your young child wasting the opportunity of her headstart by following the same path as the other kids.
Once you are out of early ed, the honors and AP classes should provide enough challenges, it would be unusual for her to excel in every topic.
I didn't have any particular academic or career excellence other than the path I described there, turns out I just read fast and had tested out of standardized reading levels by the "third" grade but if someone hadn't intervened and noticed that I wasn't mean spirited, I just had read the whole book in the time the rest were reading three pages and now had nothing to do, I would have had a way different feeling about learning and likely would have ended up in alternative schools for being an authority issue.
Most kids in G&T programs even out with others academically over time, there is no reason to waste the younger years where she is showing advanced aptitude
And she may feel that way even in gifted classes, I know I did. There's only so much that teachers can do. If it's so easy then she can spend her time doing/studying other things that she likes.
I read all the feynman lectures in middle school classes (ymmv with teachers). Later I got into quantem mechanics and advanced math, all on my own and because I had a bunch of free time..
Those were some of my favorite years and shaped who I am today. There's plenty to learn beyond the school curriculum and your child can self direct it
Both of those things are objectively true, so this is a fine conclusion.
> Worst of all, she's realizing that her teachers and principal don't actually care whether she learns anything.
This is also true.
Perhaps you could look at getting her private tutoring and making peace with the fact that school is mostly for socialising. Modern schooling is primarily about beating you into the shape that bureaucratic life demands of you, so in essence the impression she is getting now is one she will probably have her entire life.
The idea that G&T programmes get inordinate resources doesn't bear any relationship to reality. Most school dsitricts don't have such programmes at all. Every single school district in the US has special needs teachers, assistants and ELL support. Most of them have no support of any kind for gifted students.
None at all other than anecdotal.
> Most school dsitricts don't have such programmes at all
This doesn't jive with my experience where literally every school I attended had some sort of program (and I attended quite a few schools growing up- more than grades). Often in single district areas too where it wasn't possible for my parents to have chosen the right school. A quick google search reveals 6% of schools are enrolled in the national gifted and talented program. Perhaps that is your definition? I imagine it is far too narrow a criteria and that plenty of schools offer special classes for a small minority of their students.
I doubt you even have anecdotal evidence.
Unless you count AP or honors programmes as G&T this isn't remotely close to being true.
Even as far as US College teams the team shouldn't just be composed of really good players. There should also be randomly selected college students in the team.
It's probably a good idea for music too. Too many bands are composed of just talented musicians and very attractive people. It should be blended.
> Even as far as US College teams the team shouldn't just be composed of really good players. There should also be randomly selected college students in the team.
This depends on your goals. Are you trying to build the best single team you can? Or are you trying to build the best repository of skill in that sport in the population at large? Or maybe something else? I bet you'd construct different team compositions depending on how you answer those questions. Ditto for the musicians.
How often do you think the weak player will receive a pass in the sports team?
How do you think it feels for the weaker members to be always holding up the others? What does that do for their self confidence, or their long term development of skills?
It's been well over two decades, and for almost all of that I've regretted the choice.
In addition to not getting the academic boost the gifted program might've given me, socialization with general-age peers didn't really help; I remained the odd one out for pretty much all of my school years, it was only come college that that really changed.
When I was a kid I was pretty far ahead in some areas, but behind socially, and participated in some programs and activities for gifted kids. The kids in those programs were some of the most socially and emotionally maladjusted people I've ever had the misfortune of meeting. Maybe I was just in those places because I was also maladjusted, and other gifted programs aren't like that.
Here's hoping.
But are you saying they don't even want to offer calculus in high school now? Holy crap, that is also horrifying.
No, wait. It's the other way around. Her peers are in the gifted and talented program, not outside it.
I'm not sure that's the fault of such programs, I had that label applied without needing a special program.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curric...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-20/californ...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-18/uc-slams...
On some level it’s positively shocking that gifted classes have lasted as long as they have. Looked at from a thousand mile out view a TON of the woke agenda is direct and indirect attacks on those that perform well on standardized tests.
Once you do that less "privileged" students also benefit, since the teaching resources being spent on that bored student will be freed up to focus on the smaller class of students that need more assistance.
I don't see why it's a given that this is guaranteed to result in worse outcomes by any measure, even "woke" ones that might consider it a loss if OP's daughter pulls ahead further from the median grade, even if the median also goes up as a result of better spent teaching resources.
Note that I am a fan of gifted classes, but to answer your question:
1. If you pull out gifted kids from classes with simply “above average” kids, you lower the ceiling of what it means to be “the best”. As a result, the above average kids may not push themselves as hard/far. This concept is common in sports as well — the competition yields higher results.
2. The class that is left, usually an honors class, ends up moving much more slowly. A dirty little secret of teaching is that the pace of a class is limited to roughly the ability level of the bottom third of the class. Any faster, and you have lost so many people that the class can’t self-correct via peer interaction. Any slower, and you cause so many of the high performers to lose interest that motivation becomes an issue. When you pull the gifted kids out of, for example, an honors class, the level of the bottom third of that class often drops precipitously.
I personally don’t think that these are good reasons to eliminate gifted classes. I think it points to the need for more effective/efficient differentiated instruction. But that would require good teachers and good administration, and imho those things are extremely difficult to have at scale.
What usually happens, due to student teacher ratios being a thing, is that the honors class is replenished with lower ability students from the “regular” (i.e., non-honors) class, so the average is brought down fairly substantially.
Note that all of this is a non-issue if you are only pulling a few kids out of a school to go to a magnet high school or something similar.
An example of this can be seen in Japan where the gifted and motivated students are moved into magnet schools for high school, but there is relatively little negative impact on the regular high school, while the magnet high school students get an eduction that pushes their intellectual boundaries.
The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers. Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.
You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job - somehow, it is a given that both students and teachers should always be left to "discover things by themselves".
I think you’re talking in theory and not practice.
In reality, one of two things (or both) happens.
1. They pull from the “slow” class. Different places call it different things, and it’s not special ed, but it’s distinctly low levels of education. The “slow” class doesn’t benefit due to it basically serving the role of child care rather than education.
2. The “regular” class is effectively a slow class, so same as above, there is very little educating happening, just child care.
Ah, but the people getting moved into the slowest actual education benefit because they go from no education to some education, right?
No again. The modal outcome is that these threshold folks are given passing grades while learning very little, all while making the experience frustrating for the student and the teacher.
> You could fix this by training teachers better on how to actually educate slower kids effectively (direct instructional methods work very well there) but that approach is not popular either because it's seen as trivializing the teacher's job
I have seen these teachers and its potential effectiveness, but only in special ed. The biggest pay offs seem to be in elementary school with basic/fundamental literacy and numeracy.
As grade level increases, the impact of this instruction decreases substantially in terms of impressiveness largely due to limited scope.
> The more meaningful argument against this kind of fine-grained tracking is that it creates pathological incentives among teachers.
I agree with this, but not for the reasons you give.
> Every teacher is going to want to teach the "easy" classes with more skilled kids, so the bottom level of students gets stuck with very low-quality teachers and they don't get anything near a fair chance to improve - they're basically stuck at that level.
First, classes with highly skilled students are not necessarily easier. They are only easier if the teacher makes few changes to the curriculum to adjust to the class (basically lack of time or teacher laziness). Gifted classes in particular can be challenging for teachers who think that they want to teach the smartest kids because often some of the students will know more (sometimes a lot more) than the teacher about the subject. This can create very awkward moments (note that this phenomenon can also be seen at universities with students and adjuncts, sometimes even at elite schools).
Second — this is another “secret” that I think covid made less of a secret — the main function of most lower level classes beyond basic literacy and numeracy in elementary school is state-supported child care.
In reality, especially in high school, there is very little learning going on in the lower end classes. The students don’t care about the content, the students’ parents don’t care about it, and their peer groups don’t care about it. The only people who care are the teachers and admins due to standards states have set and funding tied to testing to those standards. There is essentially no product-market fit to use terms that most HNers might understand. The important thing is that the kids have a place to go while the parents work. These are terrible classes to teach.
The actual way to fix this, imho, is to meet the students and their families where they are at. Specifically, introduce them to skill sets that they may actually find useful and/or interesting. It would be ideal to pair this up with co-op working opportunities. Note that this system largely exists in Japan (where they do tracking), so this is not all just theoretical conjecture.
There are a few problems with this system.
One issue is that this type of education can be difficult to create and maintain, because the content could vary widely from school to school — a school in rural Iowa would probably focus on different skills than a school in Brooklyn. This also would make it difficult to measure, so only the local community would really know if it was working (that’s ok, imho).
Another issue is that this type of education done properly is rife with socioeconomic and race issues. For example, if you are teaching a student sales in a coop environment where they actually do sales, it’s probably prudent to teach them something like register shifting so that they can adjust their language to their audience. I will leave it to the reader to figure out why that is a minefield in the US (but probably shouldn’t be).
Apologies for the wall of text, but I think that this is an interesting topic that is poorly understood by many/most highly educated Americans. This is especially true of a lot of HNers who seem to have largely experienced schooling from a middle/upper-middle class perspective (specifically, a largely college-bound school/community).
I view this as a function of teacher quality and training, basically. My intuitive understanding is that the slowest non-special ed classes are not places that the "best", most effective teachers want to be involved with. So the incentives I pointed to in my previous comment are fully at work, and all the more so if you make the tracking more fine grained. Special ed actually helps by bringing better-trained (and more highly-paid) teachers into the picture in a way that's institutionally provided for.
You're right that a more vocational curriculum would also help some students, but that's hard to implement for the reasons you point out, and still doesn't address the underlying issues wrt. more "academic" subjects, which tend to suffer.
I guess this is a chicken-and-egg problem. The best teachers don’t want to be there because there are few opportunities to teach, again mostly due to student and community ambivalence. There are positive examples like those seen in the movie Stand and Deliver, but those kinds of teachers are super rare, and often the powers-that-be stack the deck against them (administrators, community, peers, etc.).
Fwiw, one can see expert teaching in low-level non-special ed classes by looking at folks researching low SES education. Most of the outcomes are basically one level of classroom failure improving to a slightly different level of classroom failure (mostly due to relatively low time on task and general ambivalence in the student and community populations).
In general, the scope of what a good teacher can do is relatively limited unless a few conditions exist:
1. Students are relatively similar in terms of ability level — that is, no wide outliers. This is not an issue if each teacher has only 3-4 students, so basically each student will get tailored instruction.
2. The students and their communities value education.
3. Relatively low student-teacher ratios. Note that good teachers get better outcomes than bad teachers even when the student-teacher ratio is bad, but the overall impact is often significantly less.
Anyway, thanks for the comments. I haven’t stretched my mental legs on this topic in a while.
Of course the idea that this is a bad thing (as opposed to being exactly how a merit-based system is supposed to work) is based on presupposing that higher performance was the result of unfair discrimination in the first place.
It's clear that diversity programs lead to the intake of those who are worse test takers. Yet companies who hire more diverse people correlate to companies which have better financial outcomes for investors. Yet school systems systemically put certain students who cover lots of material and do well on tests into special classes, put them in the best schools, put them into the best jobs, in spite of this observation. These students, so the idea of merit goes, will be more productive and the benefits they have to society will trickle down to the rest, yet in practice what we see in society is a society stratified where those who are part of communities where there are fewer good test takers are disadvantaged.
My contention is more fundamental, it's an attack on the very validity of the testing itself, and testing determines who gets into programs like gifted classes. Testing in practice has the purpose of discrimination in favour of an elite few, is inherently contentious and ripe for political assault.
Fairness (in the sense of trying to create a level playing field and make sure nobody has unfair advantages) is important to the extent that something is a competition.
This means people who see education as competition will care about fairness - either they will want things to be truly fair or they will want any unfairness to be in their favor.
So from this point of view, special classes for kids who are already doing better can be seen as an unfair advantage (especially because there's plenty of real bias involved in determining which kids actually end up on those classes).
I think we need to fix the biased selection process and make it more possible for more kids to benefit from advanced learning opportunities, especially kids whose parents don't have the resources to take them out of public school to do something more individualized.
Meanwhile if you try to handicap parents who care, to bring their children to the level of parents who don't care, they just take their children out of the system and put them in private schools. Except of course for the poor gifted kids stuck in public school, ironically, who you wanted to help.
This is largely untrue unless one defines quality of life with a very narrow set of criteria and/or lives in a relatively small echo chamber.
I know tons of people with very high scores who have very low QoL, and I know many multiples of that with mediocre scores who have very high QoL.
The skill (or maybe luck) to find a way to use the abilities one does have in order to provide high utility seems to be the common thread in the high QoL folks.
If parents had a way of avoiding government schools, it would be far less enticing for those with an agenda to capture them.
Of course there are lots of layers of laws and bureaucracies above school districts that can apply curricula or regulations to temper this, but unlike state governments, where representatives are elected on a slate of issues and tied to political parties, school boards are elected on just 1 issue: how are they going to run the schools.
Who lives in a country where three white men can murder a black jogger, and it requires a international outcry for the police to prosecute?
As I understand "woke", it does mean trying to equalise "opportunity"; it just recognises that "opportunity" in the sense of "something offered" is not the same as "opportunity" in the sense of "the chance to do well", and tries to correct that.
In this particular case, does it make sense to take away gifted and talented programmes? There is clearly equality of opportunity offered. But a woke response might be to also identify individuals in disadvantaged groups who would be at that level were it not for their disadvantage and help them get there.
Much of this applies almost equally to Slav kids in America (when you account for what their origin countries were like) yet they seem to do pretty well compared to Blacks. So I think there's reason to be skeptical about your claim that "we've offered plenty enough to the Black community and it hasn't helped, so equality of opportunity itself must be the problem". We haven't done nearly enough for true equal opportunity to be achieved, and this goes equally for both mainstream society as a whole and the Black community itself which has often pushed in counterproductive directions.
Example of 'Woke', non race, non class issue: Relative Age Effect.
If you are born in November you have almost no chance of becoming a star athlete, if you are born in January your chances are triple.
Noone designed the system to be unjust, but noone throught about ensuring it's fair either, and for decades noone questioned it.
That's what 'Woke' people claim to 'detect'. Sometines it's right, sometimes it's wrong.
They had great propaganda, which is not the same thing.
Find 10 people opposed to “woke” and you’ll get 12 or 13 distinct explanations/criteria for the term.
If you substitute “poopyhead” for “woke” across the internet it won’t substantively change the meaning of anything you read.
You gave a different definition to upthread.
If you want a more detailed analysis of current usage, https://ctrlzmag.com/series-what-is-woke-4-the-decline/
It is used to elide facts and specifics, like measurable and persistent racial disparities in social outcomes including education. Instead we are invited to consider whether a given person or policy is “woke”, which is not objectively measurable in any way.
Woke policies have a societal/political agenda in terms of ethnic and other favored groups. That is by definition tribal thinking.
All policies represent agendas and have implications for groups within society, including policies implemented in the past that we live under today. To different perspectives, any given policy will have different upsides and downsides. Moving forward is about finding balance, consensus, or compromise among these perspectives.
Applying a simple label like “woke” is an invitation to ignore this complexity in favor of binary (“is this woke or not”) or linear (“how woke is this”) modes of thought. It’s also an invitation to prejudge the merit based on a sense of whether an idea comes from inside or outside the tribe.
It’s like trying to troubleshoot a space station by focusing on whether solutions seem “cool” or not.
The counter argument would go something like this:
Structural racism and sexism are so deeply embedded in society that it's hopeless to try to eliminate these tendencies directly. Not only are these tendencies complex, systematic, and often unconscious, they are also difficult to impossible to measure. Outcome on the other hand is easy to measure.
If you start with the hypothesis that at least a large chunk of differences in outcome are a result of differences in opportunity (including hidden ones), then addressing outcome directly is the most effective way to try to combat bias. One way to do this is to eliminate societal systems and programs that seem to lead to outcomes (either positive or negative) that differ statistically from the baseline race and sex distribution in society.
The root of this debate seems to be biological determinism. The "right" (loosely defined) side of this debate argues that once overt racism and sexism are removed most of the remaining differences in ability and outcome that manifest are biologically innate. The "left" (again loosely defined) argues that this is at best unproven and point to the reported subjective experiences of women and minorities in which they report continuous low-grade racism and sexism that remains even after racism and sexism of the overt codified variety are removed.
"Biological determinism" is a huge red herring here. There are lots of causally-relevant factors wrt. social outcomes that have nothing to do with either biology or perceived prejudice/discrimination (however defined). Biological differences might explain some of the different preferences across genders (the broad 'people vs. things' orientation that even seems to show up in experiments with infants), but they're realistically irrelevant to anything else that the "woke" actually care about.
> the left’s insecurity about genetics is partly why so many have fallen completely for the critical theory cult, leaving reality far behind, and sustaining this new (and false) consensus at this point solely by punishment of dissent
That's pretty much the summary of wokeness.
Source: Am leftist who is secure about genetics, though would prefer less methylation of my particular genes.
"Woke is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.[0,1]"
[1]https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
Unfortunately like most terms associated with progressivism, feminism or race, almost no one here ever uses the term in good faith, understanding either its history or taking its purpose at face value, and it's simply become another anti-leftist pejorative.
SAT similarly is a pretty bad indicator of intelligence because there’s a pipeline of gaming them.
A gifted and talented program generally just accelerates the core curriculum (i.e. teaches a grade ahead). Art of Problem Solving [2] has a compelling argument [3] against acceleration:
----
“For an avid student with great skill in mathematics, rushing through the standard curriculum is not the best answer. That student who breezed unchallenged through algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, will breeze through calculus, too. This is not to say that high school students should not learn calculus—they should. But more importantly, the gifted, interested student should be exposed to mathematics outside the core curriculum, because the standard curriculum is not designed for the top students. This is even, if not especially, true for the core calculus curriculum found at most high schools, community colleges, and universities.
Developing a broader understanding of mathematics and problem solving forms a foundation upon which knowledge of advanced mathematical and scientific concepts can be built. Curricular classes do not prepare students for the leap from the usual one-step-and-done problems to the multi-step, multi-discipline problems they will face later on. That transition is smoothed by exposing students to complex problems in simpler areas of study, such as basic number theory or geometry, rather than giving them their first taste of complicated arguments when they’re learning a more advanced subject like group -theory or the calculus of complex variables.”
----
[1] https://www.singaporemath.com/
[2] https://artofproblemsolving.com/
[3] https://artofproblemsolving.com/news/articles/avoid-the-calc...
In fact, even if you do not have a "gifted" youngster, learning to work on harder problems is so much better than learning to follow instructions by rote. Not to say all teaching is that way, but it seems like a majority.
Another resource is MOEMS, the Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools. They are totally reasonable and also fascinating problems. Get one of the books and check it out if you are working with someone in the late elementary.
But the excitement didn't die off. I had a great 8th grade math teacher who noticed that I did all of the exercises in the book during the first two weeks of class and diverted me into a more advanced class (algebra) and eventually got me into correspondence courses (trig and geometry) and late in the same year into the high school calculus class. By finishing calculus that year, I was able to branch into languages and other topics.
Branching out early is a great motivator for the right kids. More interesting material can lead to explosive levels of interest in kids.
The moment you introduce gifted program magic disappears and all “dumb” kids are in non gifted program with ambitious parents worrying about tests, everyone prepping for tests for 5 year old kids, etc.
District like Redwood City has much broader range of kids (from working class to rich techies) and gifted program is the only way to accommodate the range of abilities. In many districts gifted programs are very comparable to regular programs in good schools districts and is veiled attempt to keep white parents send kids to otherwise failing school.
And the 'common wisdom' that was passed to me by many other parents and district leaders is that advanced kids should maybe go to private schools. This is not the sign of a district that embraces a student body that skews advanced.
Shouldn't be too hard to find someone wanting to teach an advanced kid.
We'll find other ways to challenge him.
I think a good way to provide "gifted" education is through optional extra-curriculars like math clubs which teach higher-level concepts and function as ways to place-out of lower-level classes. Most students who aren't that smart won't even want to go to these clubs, and the ones that do shouldn't cause any issues, and the gifted students will want to go at minimum it's less work for them to place out of the "boring" classes.
If a particular student or small group is much more gifted than their peers, they should have access to a regional or state or even national club or classes. That way they don't feel like an outcast, in this day and age their are plenty of very talented people in all fields.
Some of my middleschool friends split off to go to local magnet schools instead and looking at the spread, they didn't actually fair any better than the rest of us. Meanwhile, they mostly describe highschool as a miserable experience that made them vomit with stress instead of the excellent time that I had in public school with access to all the "public school stuff" like marching band, large theatre program involvement from the local community, etc. Maybe some of those things have since died, but I'd be surprised if the difference was enough to justify it.
This is the key. Everybody constantly says you're great cause you are so smart. Your value and identity is build on that for half your life at that point. If you suddenly can't deal with something - it means you're a fraud. Better to fail because you haven't tried ("you're so smart but so lazy") than to fail after a solid try ("you are not special after all, you're just a regular kid").
And for a while it works - you put less effort not to risk being "found out", you get same effects (or even better effects because if you haven't tried and still got A it means you're that much smarter). Then it stops working and you're absolutely miserable never having learned to put in the work.
I don't know how to "fix" this problem, I think the first step is to stop showering gifted kids with praise.
That said, nothing could have changed the fact that during my entire childhood, I saw everyone around me struggling with (or not breezing through) things I found super easy, and I got very used to finding everything easy. I had extremely few opportunities to fail, relative to anyone else around me. If something was hard, I basically just wouldn't do it. That's nothing to do with praise, and unfortunately a much harder issue to even spot, let alone mitigate.
After thinking about what I've just written here, I feel like the praise issue is like the surface-level problem but the "only knows how to succeed" is a deeper and probably more-important issue to look out for.
see https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/14/science/praise-children-f...
Also children should be permitted to fail.
In the long run regardless of your talents you eventually reach a peak where your talents don’t work anymore. It started for me in Junior high and in Community college and University.
I eventually graduated by the grit that made my degree take longer than most and I really wish I had been given more challenges like that. My parents did the best they could. But the thing that really helped me was the constant flood of computers that were hand me downs from my uncle . I initially made twice what my mom made, tried to do a startup that failed after burn out , worked at three other jobs and some freelancing for distributed ledger technology and now I make four times my mom makes and I quadrupled my net worth in 3 years by living with my parents .
At college I did have a capstone project where I investigated lambda calculus with a self distributed operation and discovered a few cellular automata that had interesting features . So life has treated me well with grit I suppose.
I gave a talk at a hacking Confrence and pyOhio and to be honest last year was one of the best years of my life and I can’t wait to figure out what’s next.
Unfortunately the programme got cut. They tried running it as a private tutoring type service but that made a focus on sticking to the syllabus, and eventually it closed. Was a real shame. There were probably a couple of hundred students across a city with a population of ~700k in the urban area.
Dobbie and Fryer (2013) look at New York City, comparing kids whose test scores are just-above versus just-below the cut points, and find that “exposure to these higher-achieving and more homogeneous peers has little impact on college enrollment, college graduation, or college quality.”
Abdulkadriglu, Angrist, and Pathak (2014) look at Boston and find that “the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.”
Barrow, Sartain, and de la Torre (2020) look at an effort in Chicago to give a boost to lower-scoring kids who came from high-poverty neighborhoods and find that “for students from low-SES neighborhoods, we estimate negative effects on grades and the probability of attending a selective college.”
I wonder if the same is true for kids who are well above the cutoff, for whom there is not the same tradeoff. For example, either the kid is at the top of an advanced school or the top of a typical school. I can't imagine that doesn't affect college admissions.
> youth offered admission to the Promise Academy middle school score 0.283 standard deviations higher on a nationally-normed math achievement test and are 14.1 percentage points more likely to enroll in college. Admitted females are 12.1 percentage points less likely to be pregnant in their teens, and males are 4.3 percentage points less likely to be incarcerated
Fact is that students will respect information provided by their peers above that provided by teachers. This is well known. See Vygotsky for example.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifte...
I myself have worked at both trad and Sudbury, and could not in good conscience continue in trad education. Everything I leaned about pedagogy told me the trad format caused the worst outcomes, yet the school boards prevented me and other teachers from making any changes.
It's sad to realize how ineffective the trad methods are, and that many teachers know it yet follow along because they need the paycheck.
If I have children they will only attend Sudbury valley schools or be homeschooled in a similar format.
It actually prepares children to be self reliant, self teaching adults, vs the trad model that prepares for totalitarianism and simple memorization [2].
I know it's hard for many adults who went to a trad school model to accept that it's one of the worst formats possible when measured against other formats, but is it really so hard to believe? Consider everything you know about humans, and how we often fall into bad patterns even when when we know better. It's not so hard to realize how a bad model has been doubled down on for over a century, and the people in control of it have no interest in admitting they've been propagating a bad system this whole time.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
[1] https://circleschool.org/wp-content/uploads/Circle-School-Gr...
Every single child you know who sits and plays games is a product of a system that they hate, where even going to the bathroom is not guaranteed. Children (and adults) who sit mindlessly on games and TV are the product of a system built around oppression and total lack of autonomy. American adults often only have a few minutes a day of personal freedom, so why bother doing anything but sit and wait for the next command from the system.
However, yes, there are some people that when given the freedom to do whatever they want with literally unlimited time will only play video games. And the uncomfortable truth is they probably wouldn't get much out of a traditional school either. After all, something like 30% of American adults read at the 5th grade level. So why torture them in a traditional school? If you see the research from the Sudbury schools, you'll see a good third just go on to manual, service, manufacturing, and labor jobs. Considering that was basically all humanity did up until a hundred years ago, I'm surprised it's so low. We need to stop acting like those are lessor jobs. It's noble to work with one's hands, and I think forcing every child into a college degree path is cruel.
However for the majority of Sudbury graduates that go on to higher education, they do so despite never having taken a single test, single lecture, single math class, single spelling quiz. They are allowed to play unlimited video games at school, but choose not to, because video games are not as fun as learning and developing mastery.
Having grown up this way, I can attest, there's just so much more interesting things to do than play video games. Sure I'd play a few hours a day, but then it gets old and I'd build a trebuchet, get my student pilots licence, learn to program to make my own games, write a novel with my friends, write plays, join an acting troupe, become a lifeguard, learn to oil paint, learn classical guitar, play countless hours of futbol, get into computer networking to setup LAN parties, take gymnastics, read stacks of books every week, get a job at a rock climbing camp, start a coffeeshop at 16, discover history (starting with medieval combat tactics and siege warfare of course!). The list goes on and on. The joys of self learning barely got me through college, which I hated, with all the tests and stupid deadlines and arbitrary requirements.
Now as an adult I've been able to keep up that love and learn so much more on my own terms.
I understand maybe it's not for everyone, but the research seems clear it's better for the majority, so it really should be the default system. What sort of a population do we want, one of cowed automatons, or one of independent self learners who love developing mastery for it's own sake? Creative thinkers who know their own minds, or people who will turn in the report by Friday? Which set of skills do you think makes a better citizen who can navigate our complex world, and bring us into a better future?
This doesn't even talk about how Sudbury schools are significantly cheaper than trad schools. Often only three adults can run a school of 80+ kids. And they still get better outcomes than trad schools at less than a 1/3rd the price. And right there we see why educators (especially school administrators) keep it under wraps.
Once we came back a few minutes early to find our classroom was locked. Turned out the rest of the class was out on the playground having fun while we were doing busy work about some artist.
But the "dark side" is https://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources-parent... and notice how shorter it is but I would argue it is just as important to get help on the "left behind" areas than it is to get help on the areas which are "ahead". Wish I had.
Check https://www.hellomotherhood.com/the-effects-of-isolation-on-... as well.
Maybe meta: It's kinda too bad, in a lot of ways, that there's still this gifted/not dichotomy, this cultural meme we've labored under for multiple centuries now.
A few years back, for a while, I made hard-but-good money coaching parents in understanding the gifts of their children. Every single child has a set of gifts that are really valuable. One approach I used was designing a more theoretical gifted context around the child, tracking and tailoring it while observing them, and then relating those idea-space concepts back to the here and now.
The approach I preferred is way different from the traditional "gifted child" definition-based approach, by which data and professional levels of subjectivity are used for ranking. I still have a couple of friends from this world who are in their '40s and fighting over who has the higher IQ. Which is not to say it's all like that, but I do think the weaknesses of holding this weirdly polarizing view can and should be put behind us, even at this late point.
Even though my approach was different, I never realized until I started how hard parents will try to 1) discern just how _you_ view intellect and gifts, and 2) attempt from day zero to shoehorn their child into the extreme higher ends of that model. I had to develop a separate model for working with parents who had extreme views about gifted children. If you've ever worked in earnest to develop a very thoughtful model meant to help create the best outcomes possible, only to watch people try to game it over and over, you know what I mean.
One of the most important issues for most of the kids (IMO) was so much different though--it was definitely not this gifts/no gifts issue. It was closer to the perception of troubling relationship differentials among the people in their various life contexts. Kids and parents. The family at home. The kids and the teachers they don't like. And it's funny, it's not even a perception of hatred, anger, or abuse. It's more like the full spectrum. The person who can make you laugh and act in the now can be just as dangerous to your well-being as the person who pisses you off.
This stuff was causing so many of the kids pain, robbing them of sleep, and throwing them into a strangely irresistible open rebellion against family members, friends, and other people and school systems that were trying to help them. It could get so bad that there wasn't any room for learning anymore.
So in my view one of the easiest blockers that can prevent the "gifted effect" at all is really obvious--it's this troubling relationship differential issue. It will get in the way of everything, it will block powerful learning-stimulation signals and it will make psychological damage almost certain once it starts disturbing sleep.
Conversely when most of the contextual relations are at least pretty calming, or ideally even mutually-encouraging and open, _everybody_ starts looking gifted. Plus there's less of a reason to say, "I'm _more_ gifted," as a means of self-protection. This was always my favorite thing to see.
Let's take the current context. Here's a differential effect where you have politely asked me to clarify for you.
We can ask--"is that close to what we want? How does it benefit the parties involved? And if we call this information transfer with minimal emotional content, what if one expressed more emotional contents? Same effect or different somehow?"
So we start to use some basic transactional analysis to get at a higher level idea of the system of outcomes from the relationship.
We can also name the relationship by the type of effect. Over time the same groups of natural patterns will emerge in other relationships, so we can use the label as: A filter, a leverage point for teaching, etc.
That's what I'm referring to, the system of thinking about differentials in this way. It will naturally overlap somewhat with the existing concepts like "friendship" and "working relationship," etc. In fact, some people will cling to those terms because it's what they know--"well isn't this just a friendship?"
But by expressing the specifically new and unexplored contextual facets, we can bridge gaps in previous modes of thought about relating and solve problems that couldn't otherwise be solved under those more traditional concepts. So no, it's not just a friendship, any more than a computer running Photoshop is not just an adding machine; there are clear advantages for using additional terms as descriptors.
Also I should add that it's a high level system of perceptions, so I leave out lots of concrete details with intent. This is to help to fully claim the broader concept space as a "construction zone," because it's been my experience that getting into details too soon is a common mistake, and may even block in- and outflows- from areas of strategic leverage. For example I try to claim and use lots of metaphor. It's weird but it works.
In general, people are too concerned about detail at a cultural level and you can see this kind of "detail panic" (not referring to your comment, just in general) even at policymaking levels, which is the last place it should be a relevant concern. So culturally we clearly need more people who can sit in strategy, show how it can be interpreted as-is, and demonstrate how it naturally informs details over time. (Digression because of the details/example nature of your inquiry--anyway it's really fun stuff, thanks for asking)
Lots of weird but true facts leading into the ahem, streams of consciousness. It goes really deep and winds around for very good reason. Inventing words you and I can share here is brainutationally expensive, concision with existing words often requires mutual expertise, so path-forging with general wording is made rough and ready; get a heavy machete.
I spent time reading this link trying to understand what you mean: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/392979/different...
I wish I could really do it all justice here but HN comments probably just aren't the place, anyway.
Gifted children don't just benefit from instruction catered to them, they often need it and the absence of it can be actively damaging. Such children experience the world differently from normal people just by simple function of being less normal.
I attended an academically selective high school, yet I was the "nerd" at the nerd school, I went on to do a CS degree and again, I was the nerd in what could be considered the nerd course at arguably the nerdiest university. Both institutions are probably considered best of breed in my country. So I would say I'm probably pretty qualified to speak on what it's like being "gifted".
The sad reality is that gifted often isn't accompanied by success, at-least not in the outright sense that many think about it and that is because said gifts many times come with costs. Not always, some have social skills, athleticism and are highly functioning. However in most cases extreme intellect also comes with being a social outcast and not sharing in the same hobbies or worse yet not even relating on the same level with similarly aged peers. Turns out increased intellect also generally comes with accelerated maturity and differing interests to those less mature, who would have known!
So how does this factor into schooling? (prepare for gross generalisations). Well first of all a school is generally one of the worst places on the planet for a gifted child, especially for their favourite hobby - learning. It's full of kids that don't give a rats ass about learning anything, adults that are tasked with trying to make these other children do something they don't want to do/play babysitter and a ton of arbitrary rules. Teachers don't have time for gifted children, they are struggling to manage a classroom of clowns and/or try keep the laggards up to a passable standard. Which is another problem, as a society we seem to care much much more about ensuring special needs children aren't left behind than we are that our best and brightest are able to achieve their potential. Maybe we just think "hey they are smart, they will work it out" (oftentimes we do) but I really don't think people are seeing how "gifted" kids struggle.
I tend to quote "gifted" for this very reason. Everyone I know that falls into the category has emotional scars for one reason or another, most of which borne early in life during school and endure their entire life. So yeah, we are smart but we are also likely on the spectrum, even when social difficulties are mild our interests shoehorn us into isolation that further increases social development problems because of how cruel children are.
The best thing my parents/educators did for me was to realize the system isn't built for people like us and accelerate me 2 grades (at 2 different times, not a single massive jump) so I could at least get out of it as soon as possible. I didn't do as well in school as I should have, I was branded a trouble maker, suspended constantly and even expelled twice (well asked to leave). I didn't even do anything that bad - I just wasn't wanted there.
University was better but I was woefully in-equipped to actually do well. Not for intellectual reasons, just beaten down self-esteem, clinical depression, etc. I made life long friends however so it really doesn't matter in the end. If anything finally making it to university saved my life because there was finally a high enough concentration of people like me to make real friends.
These days I'm "very successful" by societies metrics. Well traveled, wealthy, own my own place, have a great relationship, healthy, all of that. So I guess there is some truth to the fact that "we will work it out".
But the experience has made it really hard to stomach the idea of having my own children. What if they turn out like me? What if they have to endure the depression and pain I did? (and still battle with) I don't know if I could do that. I'm not strong like my parents are, it would break me to see my child go through that knowing that the system is stacked against them.
So while everything in this article sounds helpful I think the most helpful thing would be to try address the actual dynamic of schools from a social and emotional perspective for gifted children. That alone would make the biggest difference in their outcomes.
Yes, as s private tutor (mostly for maths) I witnessed young people (1 of 10) who are not only exceptionally fast at grasping abstract concepts but in the same breath can actually use them to infer/deduce correctly (at times in new ways). In that case I have to switch gears to keep them excited but at the same time rebuild their formal foundation which is weathered through the school system (strechted in time beyond recognition and disintegrated in small "digestible" pieces i.e. uncomplete or no proofs at all) without hampering their great intuitions, a very difficult task.
That being said from a purely cognitive/neurological perspective the possibilities in "wiring the brain" are for all intents and purposes the same between healthy newborns. Our culture tends to overemphasize the little differences which has its upside in empowering the individual (very important!) but its downside in the indifference of the overwhelming similarities. Once I positively acknowledged the (nearly identical) neurophysiological start parameters in every human especially during the critical period from birth to adulthood, it changed my whole attitude. It is like realizing we all share the same very recent - in evolutionary terms - African origin, it puts relatedness into perspective. From that vantage point I feel much better equipped to appreciate the wonderful individual differences and discover the light and shadows of giftedness in every learner without the need for them in participating or winning math olympiads, international music competitions, chess tournaments, gymnastics championships ...
Being familiar with the empirical example (admittedly small in sample size but nevertheless what are the odds?) of Judith Polgár [0] the impressivness all nearly lies in the determination of her father's experiment without having to resort to some dubious concept of "giftedness". This of course does not imply we should all teach everyone the same, but - quite the opposite- to the needs of the young (hearing them out), that's were I agree in conclusion but without the needless distinction between some upper limit of gifted and not gifted.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
I'm always shocked to see how much the education system ignores cognitive science.
Environment surely does play some part. I grew up in a home that fostered intellect, learning, growth etc. I'm sure there are countless studies on "nature vs. nurture" and my subjective view is both are relevant, perhaps even fairly 50/50. But my life growing up I was the exception to the norm in all environments. I have some really stark examples that could really hit this home but I'm not going to post them on here, but... there's a lot of truth to the "differentness of giftedness".
Everyone is different, that is true. But taking that multifaceted existence and flattening it when really this discussion is only about one aspect of that existence (that effectively has already been flattened, but in some other way) is not nice. It tells folks who are quite simply better at some aspects of their life than other people that in fact they are not better, those other people are sometimes better too. But this is about learning. They are objectively better.
That means some folks are objectively worse - which doesn't mean they can't excel in some other area of life. That's not what's under discussion.
Can anyone share their educational experience in Canada?
The program is for 13-15 year olds to complete high school in 2 years.
[1] has more details about the program, comments from students, and a newsletter produced by the program.
[2] has some recent discussion on some limitations and issues with the program.
[1] https://universitytransition.ca/
[2] https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/university-transition-program-ca...
Point one: "Good curriculum and instruction for gifted learners begins with good curriculum and instruction"
Doesn't every child deserve good curriculum and instruction and can't good curriculum and instruction help elevate every child from whatever situation they are beginning with? Yes, the author acknowledges good curriculum is important. But why should students considered gifted be more entitled to this than others. And wouldn't good instruction help highlight hidden giftedness in those that are less advantaged.
Point Two: "Good teaching for gifted learners is paced in response to the student's individual needs." It's widely known in the education community that mastery learning (1-1 instruction and independent study where students learn at their own pace using curriculum that builds upon concepts) results in 2 sigma better achievement than learning that happens in a classroom setting where every child learns at the same rate. Children speed up sometimes, they slow down sometimes. Shouldn't every child have the possibility to learn at their own pace, go fast when they're learning quickly and slow when they are struggling more, much as when someone visiting a foreign country sometimes learns language at a fast clip and is other times processing, and then may have a big burst forward? Why is this better or important for just "gifted children?"
Point 3 makes sense "Good teaching for gifted learners happens at a higher "degree of difficulty". Even so, a good teacher understands that learning must be differentiated. It's great for students to be challenged, but students also need to be having fun while they're challenged. Way too often, students who are gifted, or who society deems are gifted are put under tremendous, horrible pressure to succeed. As a tutor, I've seen kids throw up from the stress and strain of homework and getting into Ivy League Schools. All this is so unnecessary. A good teacher helps children develop grit, by gently encouraging to push past obstacles, but ultimately challenges should be fun and engaging. And like points 2 and 3, EVERY student should be encouraged to do things that are a little difficult for them. Again, that is why mastery learning, which is completely accessible now with adaptive learning apps, books, khan academy and the plethora of free tutoring programs emerging, is a better way. Don't just put gifted kids in a more challenging class.
In my opinion point 4 is verging on sheer idiocy. "Good teaching for gifted learners requires an understanding of "supported risk." More often than not gifted learners have an imposter syndrome because they are so smart that they may do poorly on standardized tests or have a sense that they are not actually smart, but just faking it. If we really want to support gifted children, we'll praise their hard work and efforts, not they're results. That's what they have control over and where they can most excel.
All and all, the biggest takeaway from all this is that what gifted children and all children need to excel is mastery learning. And if parents want to encourage their gifted children to reach their full potential, they can cultivate a growth mindset by praising their hard work and curiosity.
If only it were that easy! You can’t “talk” a kid into a growth mindset. It comes from facing real challenges and overcoming them. If the school environment rarely provides a real intellectual challenge then a fixed mindset is simply the path of least resistance.