Comment by robonerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robonerd | Hacker News Reader

The gifted program helped me immensely in highschool, although the hour or two I actually spent in the gifted classroom was mostly wasted playing board games. However being in that program gave me the ability to switch classes/teachers whenever one wasn't working for me, usually because some teachers could maintain a civil classroom and other teachers let the students run wild and taught nothing. Because I was in the gifted program, the school permitted me to switch out of those classrooms into classes taught by competent/caring teachers.

This suggests to me that the advantage of the program could be conferred to students who score low on IQ tests but are nevertheless behaved in class. A better gifted program would be one that differentiates on the basis of civility, not IQ. Of course, deferring measurement of IQ to some licensed professionals is easier than objectively quantifying a student's civility, so I don't know how this would actually be implemented.

If you let students attend any classes they wanted, I bet they would sort themselves appropriately. The rowdy kids won't want to be in a classroom where everyone is quiet and the teacher is explaining the central limit theorem.

but then the rowdy kids get left behind. You could argue that the rowdy kids are getting left behind either way.

That sounds like a parenting problem to me.

I agree.

a lot of rowdy kids simply do not have the underlying personality to succeed in a classroom setting and thats perfectly fine. we need to do a better job of sorting kids earlier like they do in Germany for example.

And even if that didn't happen, teachers can easily score "civility" themselves. They all know who the troublemakers are.

The problem would become, though, that nobody really wants the rowdy crowd. Even the laziest teacher would nope out, and as much as self-sacrifice is probably more prevalent in the teaching class than in the general population, there are never enough willing to self-immolate for hopeless causes. Which, in turn, is why we get the Hollywood fantasies with exactly those heroic characters: because they're actually very rare.

I think this works well for college, but at the highschool level you have the complicating factor of parents being involved in the decision making. How would you account for the parents who think their little monster is a perfect angel and place their kid in the best classrooms, despite his desire and intention to misbehave?

College shares the same benefit/tool that private schools have - they can kick a student out for misbehavior.

That's basically what my high school did. Students had a lot of flexibility to choose the classes they wanted to take, and had a lot of leeway if they wanted to choose the advanced or standard version of a class. Combine this with a lot of optional classes, and students at my high school could tailor their class schedule to their own needs and wants.

I recognize that my experience was no means the norm. My high school was large, well funded, and had a lot of resources at its disposal. And even then, there were absolutely students that weren't served well by the school. But its overall a system that seems to work pretty well, and I think its a model that more schools look at.

I had a similar experience, not necessarily with being able to move around to different teachers. In general, the teachers for the gifted classes were leagues ahead of the normal teachers. By having access to better teachers, I for sure received a better education than non-gifted students. And honestly, I can see why that is a problem. Ideally all teachers would be competent and caring, but as a society we tend to treat the position as a glorified baby sitter

"Civility" sounds eerily close to a sort of social credit score. All it takes is one teacher to mark you down on civility and then you're ruined. This type of program sounds like it would lead to offering the best education and opportunities to the most docile and willing to accept authority.

Not great attributes to select for in a world where we desperately need independent thinking and problem solving.

As I said, I don't know how it should be implemented. I'm certainly not proposing the implementation of a social credit system. What I am saying is that I'm confident that the mechanism by which gifted programs help students is by allowing them to escape the poor classroom conditions of inadequate teachers and particularly, their misbehaving peers. Personally, I wasn't very good at learning when placed in classrooms with delinquient druggies who's idea of fun is to see how many times they can throw wadded paper at the back of my head.

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