Failing Our Geniuses

saintlupus writes "Time has an interesting article about the failure of the US educational system to properly deal with gifted students. For example, up to ten times as much money is spent nationwide on educating 'developmentally disabled' students as gifted ones. Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either?"

Comments

of course

[networkBoy]

Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either? Yes.

Re:of course

[netruner]

The problems happen in a couple of ways:
1.) "My kid should be in the smart class" (whether they belong there or not)
2.) Claims of discrimination / creation of a caste system being unacceptable.

Remember, school board officials are elected and must bow to political pressure.

One of my mentors used to always tell me: "Culture is the hardest thing to change". Parents want they perceive to be the best for their kids whether it really is or not. They also (typically - no matter how many sob stories you hear) have a greater stake in them than the teachers that only see them for a few hours a day.

Would you trust someone at the local public school to put your kid on a path that will determine what opportunities will be available to them? As one of my college professors said: too many Einsteins are passed over because the teacher was looking for that one Gauss.

Re:of course

[Usquebaugh]

Sounds like a fair system. To the best students go the best teachers. You want the best teachers for your child make sure the child understands the score. No way should a good teacher be forced to teach students who do not want to study.

Re:of course

[MurphyZero]

Having been one of those freaks you talk about as well as an introvert, going to classes with students 4-5 years older than me HELPED my social skills. It is very easy to socialize with people like you, it takes social skills to socialize with people NOT like you. I didn't take geometry class with 11 year old eggheads like myself, I took them with average and above average 15 and 16 year olds. That way builds social skills. If they can't deal with being a freak, how are they going to manage when they first get a job and their boss is extremely average, or their President is well below average?

Likewise, being able to impress someone your own age is NOT going to get you a job when starting out; your boss is probably going to be at least 10-20 years older than you. The high school cliques do NOT teach you social skills. Only someone who is willing to go outside their clique, even their age group, are the ones who will truly develop social skills, at least for those those for whom it does not come naturally. And if those skills are not inborn, then trying to advance yourself is one way of getting some practice.

Re:of course

[Loconut1389]

We have broken parents. Good teachers accept that and do their best to out parent the parents. If we don't fix what the parents broke, they too will become bad parents and repeat the process. Parents send their kids to school for more than facts, even if they don't realize it. It is the teachers job to do more than parrot facts.

Well, hang on.

[seebs]

Maybe the developmentally disabled kids need a lot more help to be functional (and if they don't get that help as kids, we end up feeding them their whole adult lives), and the genuises don't need as much help?

Honestly, I wish I'd gotten help for my actual limitations (mild autism, which has been moderately crippling at times), but frankly, for the genius stuff, it would have been sufficient for the schools to mostly get out of my way.

Nothing has really changed

[overshoot]

I was one of the "beneficiaries" of the 1950s-1960s "Sputnik" educational reforms.

Then, like today, it was much easier for schools to keep classes uniform by holding bright kids back so that more effort could be spent on the "slow" ones. Uniformity is the goal, and it's a lot easier to dumb down smart kids than the other way 'round.

Oh, and here's a clue: if you offer bonuses for teachers of math and science, the teachers with the most seniority (regardless of whether they can add) will teach those classes. My kids had a math PhD teaching music, but she couldn't get into the math program against the ed majors who ran the system.

Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[SatanicPuppy]

It's no surprise. Some cultures love their smart people. The Asian's love their smart people. They glorify them, they treat them with a lot of respect, and view them as a source of national pride.

We, on the other hand, do not. Culturally, Americans view intellectualism with suspicion. We love the captain of the football team; big, handsome, and dumb. You have only to look at the debates on science to understand that. There is societal pressure to not appear too smart, or you'll have a number of unflattering stereotypes applied to you. The last two losing presidential candidates both had their intelligence used against them in an unflattering way; they were know-it-alls, dorks, geeks, namby pamby sissy faggot intellectuals, whereas the guy everyone regards as the dumber candidate is trustworthy and strong.

A lot of it probably has its roots with Christianity. The Devil is smart, remember? When Dante was populating the Inferno, he dumped Odysseus in the 8th circle, 1 up from the bottom. Why? Because he's a smart, tricky bastard, just like the Devil is supposed to be. This country has a lot of radical Christian roots (Puritans, anyone?) so it's not all that surprising that our views on intellectualism are shaped around that.

Hold up, Dude!

[overshoot]

frankly, for the genius stuff, it would have been sufficient for the schools to mostly get out of my way.

That can't be allowed -- it would mean leaving the others behind.

More to the point, it would mean treating students as individuals and that would totally screw up the system.

It's still the parent's responsibility.

[geekd]

I was in grade school in the early 80's. I went to a good public school. My parents were both teachers and chose to live in that neighborhood because of the school district. Even then, the gifted program was just OK. My parents had me in several after-school classes and activities to bolster the schools shortcomings.

It still comes down to parents doing actual parenting. If you've got a gifted child, you have to know they are only going to get so much from their school.

I was lucky. My parents knew what they were doing. They let me explore my interests without pushing. They had me in a creative writing class. They got me into science competitions. The best thing they did was buy a computer for the house. This was a TRS-80 in 1982. It was a stretch for the household budget, but messing with that taught me more than anything else.

geekd

Obligitory "Incredibles" quote:

[SatanicPuppy]

"When everyone is special, then no one will be."

Re:Kids today

[VicarofCletus]

Oh trust me, they try. You should have seen the look on my high school principal's face when I asked to take physics as a sophomore (after all, it was a senior course). Eventually they settled on the excuse that I hadn't taken algebra II, but it was agreed that they would let me in if I dual enrolled at the local community college and took an equivalent level math course. After getting the highest grade in the class (and teaching it one more than one occasion), I was told that I would have to take algebra II the next year. Their stance was that, while I had already covered all of the material, algebra II was a graduation requirement which could not be met outside of the high school. I would not be allowed to graduate without retaking the class. Thankfully I got out.

In my experience (mine and people I know), it's not that gifted kids don't try to get ahead, it's that they are often actively prevented from doing so.

To flesh that out some

[homey of my owney]

What the educational system at large now represents, is a dumbing down to the least common denominator so that nobody feels bad.

No child should be left behind, and certainly school can be challenging for some. But by instituting a tenet that "There are no losers" so let's give everyone an award - we're raising a generation that thinks mediocrity is ok. It's not ok, and the failure to nurture gifted children is ensuring our future demise.

What ever happened to respecting and cherishing differences? ... like "This child is bright, this one... not so much"

Re:To flesh that out some

[yurnotsoeviltwin]

I absolutely agree. I went to a math and science charter school aimed at gifted students (our average SAT was by far the best in the state, and we were up in the top ten nationally in a lot of academic competitions), and the school district that we were affiliated with absolutely HATED giving us money. In fact, the governor even hated us until she realized she could make herself look better by including Charter schools as public schools in statistics, giving the state's average SAT a ten point boost (from a school of less than 1000 students). The claims made against us were that we were "stealing" all the good students from the public schools, meaning, apparently, that students are not in school to learn, but they are in school to make their schools look better. If the public schools could have given us as good an education, Charter wouldn't exist.

Re:To flesh that out some

[Lemmy Caution]

While there's some truth to what you say, a lot of people with mediocre achievements use excuses like the boredom of school as an excuse for their untapped potential, and geeks are among the worst of the lot. Success isn't about intelligence: it's also about discipline, energy, drive, and attitude. A surplus of the last four can even mitigate against weaknesses in brain power. Of course, if all you have is brain power (and a general absence of proportionate accomplishments) then you're like to elevate that above all other criteria.

If you are smart but otherwise ungifted, you'll probably find yourself surrounded by people you feel smarter than. If you're smart and living up to your potential, you should probably stop feeling smart, because you should be surrounded by people at least as smart as you are.

Re:To flesh that out some

[pclminion]

Now that's a pretty damn sour attitude. I was a gifted kid too -- a standout even among the other gifted kids. I was chronically bored in school. By my senior year of high school, I was probably skipping class 60% of the time. Would I describe all the "normal" people I was surrounded by all those years as "violent stupid monkeys?" Not in a million years.

The most important thing I learned in public school is how to interact with so-called "normal" people on the level of an equal, not a brainiac who comes to intellectually lord over them. You know, stuff like "respect," and "politeness," and the concept of giving everybody a fair shot to prove their abilities.

If you really look at the world and think, "What a bunch of complete turd brains!" You are going to have a very sad life.

Failing our teachers as well

[solar_blitz]

One of the reasons our nation's gifted children are suffering is because of a severe lack of skilled, qualified teachers to suit their needs. Let me elaborate with a personal story: my mom always talks about how my grandmother was a second grade teacher, and was well known for her ability to teach her second grade students well enough to read from the newspaper by the end of the school year. Parents went out of their way to get their children into her courses. The problem, though, was that she had a horrible salary. She was a single mother and had to take care of four kids. Life for my mother was hard.

Teachers like my grandmother aren't around anymore because other industries pay better. That's not to say people are greedy money grubbers, though, because in most of the United States it is difficult to support oneself on a teacher's salary. So when given the choice between taking a $40k teaching gig or a $60k software developing gig in a state like, say, California (where schools are nearly last place in the country and living costs are HIGH), the majority would go for the $60k gig. And without good teachers or resources, we end up taking the mindset of "How do we keep the less gifted students on track with the norm?"

We all see ads and propaganda for the Army, right? Recruiters at every school. But where the hell is the propaganda for teacher recruitment? If our public education system had the same budget as the military, none of these problems would've existed. We'd have had ads asking for teachers playing at the theaters before the previews came on. Superintendents of public school boards would be making speaches at universities about why you should get a job in teaching. Gifted students would have access to advanced courses and cirriculum in the same school as the normal kids. (I've got nothing against the nation's military, though, and I wasn't intending to give that message off. Sorry.)

On another note, I took an IQ test a while ago and found out that... well, my IQ wasn't as high as the girl in the beginning of the TIME article, but it was up there. I don't remember being able to talk as well as she did, but in my psychology research I found out I did a lot while I was a kid. Memorizing the names and locations of the United States, making large structures with building blocks, y'know? However when I was at school I was a complete bonehead! I'd find it hard to read a lot of the material they gave in class and outright hated writing and grammar lessons. And I was always imagining different things, I never really focused on the teacher's lessons or anything. I was told that some of my classmates didn't even think that I would get past high-school.

There's a lot in deciding who is smart and who is not. A lot of the issues that students have are simple barriers or developmental issues that they haven't grown out of. Things like dyslexia, attention deficity disorder, or even an early fear of math. And there are a lot of issues with standardized testing, because many students learn and study in different ways, and if teachers aren't aware or open to these different types of learning methods, how are students supposed to excel?

Add onto that a lot of immigrant children don't even know English, so how are they supposed to learn in a classroom? One of the issues with the "No Child Left Behind" Act is that it rewards schools that perform well in academic standardized testing, but when a lot of students from poor immigrant families perform poorly because of a lack of education or the language barrier, the school and the entire district suffer the consequences. Ultimately the children are being taught material from the SATs and standardized testing for the sake of passing the exams only!

Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?

[Daengbo]

No point still being bitter, yes?
I'm not the original poster, but I'll still answer your question: No. I'm bitter that I lost a lot of my childhood by sitting in a prison of the mind, wasting my time instead of doing something better with my life.

I'm not on Slashdot because of my time in school. I'm here because I value continuing education. Don't laugh.

Except for about four years of my schooling (one in primary, one in middle, and two in high) where I was given a chance to self-educate, I spent my time in school alternately at the top of the class or rebelling. Those times when I was self-paced, I completed a couple of years' coursework at a time. For anyone with an IQ above 130, public school is an undeniable waste of time. I'd even say that it's a waste of several hours a day for the average student. Not much goes on in school except crowd control, lunch, and socializing.

I have had a few teachers who pushed me to my limit and were educated enough to lead me, but most were just average and knew little about their subjects. The textbook was always a better source of information than the average teacher, and I didn't have to waste fifty hours of my life to get through it at a snail's pace. My time on Slashdot educates me better than my time in school did, though the signal/noise ratio has gone down in the last few years.

I understand you'll see this post as egotistical and smug, but I feel qulified to comment on this story (and your post) because

• My IQ was well above 145, just as TFA's chief subject was;
• I was not allowed to skip grades, either; and
• I stated the facts in my post as I remember them, without embellishment or hyperbole.

Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?

[glarbl_blarbl]

I too still feel bitter about the utter waste of my childhood at the hands of the state school system. I was identified as "gifted" early on, was reading at a sixth grade level in first grade and twelfth by the sixth. Of course, once I was identified as gifted nothing was done about it until Odyssey of the Mind in fifth grade (which was fun, but no substitute for a challenging curriculum). I remember learning about similes and metaphors on an annual basis. I remember "learning" long division four times (and of course I haven't used it in more than a decade).

After I took the SAT in seventh grade (and scored similarly to an average senior that year), I was allowed to skip eighth grade. There were upsides and downsides, and I'm fairly happy about where I am now -- but it's not for everyone. I lost a lot of friends and there seemed to be a higher asshole to polite person ratio in my graduating class.

I took a self-paced English course the summer after my freshman year. I finished a semester's worth of work in two weeks. I'm still pissed off about all of that wasted time. I could probably have learned a couple of languages, I would probably be better at math.. Hell, I could have become even more of a virtuoso guitarist if I had started music lessons a couple of years earlier ;) .

I've had this discussion with many of my genius friends, and this attitude is pretty much universal among them. Yes, the school system is nearly useless for all ends of the spectrum. In my cynical moments I imagine that it's a plot to keep the country stupid and docile while they turn the Republic into a fascist shadow of its original promise.