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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?"
The public education system has been failing gifted students since long before No Child Left Behind.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Anyone with half a brain would tune education for the average person, or very slightly above the average to encourage improvement and the stupid/disabled and smart kids would get special programs to help their development the best. Leaving no man behind is a stupid analogy to the problem, as the stupid kid who can't learn more drags down the kids who can.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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They do this in high school here in Canada. Only the advanced classes count towards university qualifications though, so you generally find strong students take all advanced classes, and weak students take general classes.
I was in a pilot fast-track program when I was a child... completed grades 1, 2 and 3 in 2 years while mingled in amongst the grade 1s the first year and the grade 3's the next. I have to say, it's a hard thing to put a kid through when it comes to socializing... I lost a lot of blood on that schoolyard. They didn't continue the program.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
... on whether or not the gifted student is smart enough to figure out how to use resources to direct their own learning.
:)
I'm one of the first people to admit there are problems with many public schools. I went through an education to be a secondary math teacher. I stopped after student teaching because I realized I didn't want to deal with a lot of the issues.
But when I look back over my public education -- in Utah, where per pupil spending traditionally lags pretty far behind many other places -- I have to admit it was pretty damn good overall. When they realized I was breezing through all the reading primers in first grade, they made sure I knew how to use the school library and pointed me at a few particular topics. I got after school access to some of the first computers the schools had. My parents helped, taking me to the local library and enrolling me in community classes, but the staff was helpful. That was elementary school. My high school had a full quiver of AP classes and the teachers were, by and large, good. And they had a program where advanced students could also take courses from the public community college. All in a small-government, relatively low income and not large tax-base state.
I daresay I didn't get near as much out of my public education as I could have if I were more focused and ambitious. One guy took all of the computer science classes, took advantage of after school lab time to learn everything he could about the unix minicomputer we had and C, and got a job not long out of high school working as a sysadmin for a salary that a lot of college grads don't get. Couple of people I knew used some pretty advanced language skills to work as au pairs or English teachers in foreign countries. Me, I learned to play nethack in the lab after school.
The point? I think most of the smart kids -- especially if they have any kind of decent direction from parents, or a counselor, or some kind of mentor -- can take advantage of the existing system just fine, and learn to find resources outside of it to further their own goals.
The ones with developmental disabilities, by contrast, are often the one with issues that are actually keeping them from getting even a fraction out of the system. That's why a disproportionate amount of resources are directed there.
None of this is to say there shouldn't be some changes in how things are done. I'm just a tad skeptical of sweeping statements like "no one can get ahead." My observation is that's simply false.
Tweet, tweet.
I see where you are coming from but I don't think you see how deep it goes.
I don't know if media (like MTV or just about every movie made in the past 10 years) was what started it, but it's definitely one of the major players in this.
Children are being brought up to believe that doing what is right is uncool.
They are being brought up to cherish the quick self satisfaction and to immediately fulfill any base desire or appetite they have without even questioning their thought process.
Yes, it's true. At least in the schools I went to, it was very uncool to do what was right and to have limits and keep yourself in check. The 'cool' kids are those that have no restrictions, the kids that won't warn you not to do something that will potentially cause you more problems than enjoyment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb saw it coming
When I used to go to middle school (grades 6 and 7), our classes were split into three groups, A B and C, based on how well we were doing (A=best, C=worst). There were separate classes based on the group (group A studied together with other group A students and separate from students from the other groups).
There were more than just raw grades that determined what group you were in. Behavioral problems (you are dealing with young kids, remember) were a very big factor, and overall, how willing you were to learn took precedence over your natural talent. That's why you saw good and bad grades even in the A group (where I was in), because many kids who did try hard and therefore were in A group still didn't manage to do well, especially in courses like math.
It also meant that even some group C students got As, based on things like improvements, behavior, etc.
And back then, nobody had a problem with this system. Yes, the grades were mixed (getting an A in group C was nowhere near as hard as getting an A in group A) but the final grades don't really mean anything in middle school, it's more about what you actually learn. The shift and focus was very different. Group A (the students of which were more disciplined and hardworking) actually focused on the academic curriculum, while group C students were working more on social and behavioral issues (which to them, at that point, was more important to learn than just the academics).
And it's not like these were two different schools. Only some academic-based classes (math, English) were separate, while classes like gym or arts, as well as other activities (breaks, field trips) were together, so it did not create a "segregationalist" impression. Most importantly, it provided each group with the study THAT GROUP needed most, the problematic kids got the attention they needed and the rest had a chance to actually learn the subject without having the problematic kids interfere.
P.S. Just because I see this question coming: Yes, most students in group A TENDED to be white and in C there were more minorities, but we still had quite a few minority kids in A, and the race itself was not a factor. (The minorities in group C were there because not because they are the minority, but because they were poorly performing or problematic students who happened to be the minority). Yes, due to social factors and whatnot there tended to be more minority "problem" students compared to the general population, but you know what? Back then the schools were designed to provide an education and teach students a set of skills (whichever skills the students needed the most), instead of playing politics and trying to fix (or pretend to be fixing) social problems that have nothing to do with the school's purpose.
Nowadays, of course, any school board member who THINKS about trying to introduce such a system would be labeled a Nazi racist elitist snobbish evil person who eats children for breakfast...
Although I'm not close to the level of the kids in the article, I was always in the advanced classes throughout my K-12 days. For example, I was three years ahead in math. Even being so advanced, I always had a very easy time, and I got excellent grades. And this was all at very good schools in the Bay Area, where I had plenty of classmates who went to Cal, Stanford, Ivy Leagues, etc.
But then it all changed when I got to college.
I went off to college, and I got my ass kicked. Royally. This was a concept that was totally foreign to me. I wasn't prepared to learn stuff that didn't come to me instantly. I had no work ethic. I ended up flunking multiple classes my first semester freshman year. While I had the intelligence to succeed in college, years of skating through classes had lowered my expectations and made me overconfident. I ended up graduating just fine and I've got a nice job, but throughout my time in college I didn't come close to my potential because I had gotten so accustomed to taking the easy way out.
Looking back on it, there came a point when I was no longer challenged in middle school and high school. As soon as I hit the farthest that the school would advance me, I stagnated. The problem was that I was always judge against my age group peers. If you're three years ahead and still at the top of the class, most people think that it's a great job. But it's not. You can learn a hell of a lot, both academically and socially, by being pushed beyond your comfort zone. Without a constant challenge, there is much less incentive to keep pushing yourself. Regardless of intelligence level, be it special ed to gifted, our focus on education needs to be identifying and providing difficult but attainable goals for all students. Having one standard for everyone is inevitably going to fail people at one or both ends of the curve.
I was always in the honors class. I had long hair and listened to heavy metal. I ate lunch with the R.O.T.C. guys because they were the most interesting to talk to. The teachers hated me because they thought I was a nuisance with my long hair and bad attitude. I aced every class and eventually told my vice principal in high school to go fuck himself. That went over well.
The day that the education system learns that children are individuals and start educating on that basis is the day that the US will have a better education system. I was always pissed off because they treated school like a factory and we were the workers. I guess I am just venting now........ sorry
Actually I was in a tracked school...I graduated in the early 90's, so that should give you a data point. I moved into the system in 9th grade, and was immediately shunted into the "standard" classes, where an "A" average was a 4.0 (As opposed to the Remedial classes where it was 3.0 and the Accelerated classes where it was 5.0). I stayed there until my junior year, when the first round of standardized tests swept through and I outscored almost the entire school. Got put into the accelerated track my senior year and my GPA literally doubled.
On the one hand, as someone who experienced both sides, I really appreciated being in the advanced classes. It was night and day; better people, better work, better pace. On the other hand, it sucked hard being stuck in the standard track (there was no provision for smart kids there, because if you were smart, you wouldn't be there), and no real effort was ever made to reevaluate students once they ended up in a track.
I think tracking is in many ways too rigid, but I don't know of a better way to do it. Lumping all kids together is awful.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If you really want to exceed follow this bit of wisdom from Mark Twain:
"I never let schooling get in the way of my education."
Schools are NOT the beginning and end of our education unless we choose to believe it (unfortunately many of us do nowadays.) Fortunately if you have a gifted person and just give them the opportunity to learn and explore and show them where resources are and how to use them (Library, searching Google, etc.) they will go running with their education themselves.
For many of us those opportunities were the home computers of the 80s and bunch of programming books and type-in game articles.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
...maybe because some of us were thrown into alternative school for being different? For having a way of looking at life?
Example: School elections were coming up. A neo-punk and myself were musing over the morons running when it occurred to us: Why not form an "Anarchist Party", and encourage people to NOT vote? Posters went up {"I'm anarchist, he's anarchist, she's anarchist, we're anarchist, wouldn't ya like to be anarchist, too?" and were quickly torn down. Fights erupted {seriously...} until the government teacher came on the intercom:
"Attention, students. I understand that some students have formed the Anarchist Party. I can't say I approve of their message..."{insert weak cheer here, mainly the friends of the candidates..}
"...HOWEVER, dissent IS part of the political process, and we're giving them the same right to put flyers up as those who are running."
The rest of the time you're thrown out for being disruptive. Eek.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
On a related topic, it's odd that if a student has an IQ of 70, that's like 2 standard deviations below the norm, and the student is identified as intellectually disabled. Failing to identify and serve this student's needs is going to get your school into an enormous amount of trouble.
Then you have another student with an IQ of 130. This student is no more normal than the other. He is intellectually gifted. Failing to identify or serve this student's needs will not even earn anyone a slap on the wrist.
This problem will get solved when a slashdotter decides he has enough money to take this comparison all the way to the Supreme Court.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
The best teachers should be able to make a kid -want- to study by making it interesting and teaching it in a way that they personally understand and grasp the relevance/importance. Kids think they know everything- not necessarily the material- but are -sure- they would never need what they're being taught- I was one of them. I still studied, but it was so hard for me, I never gave it my absolute best- the return was just too low. I wish I'd worked harder at math. I was given the choice of a more advanced class because of my performance, but I opted for the easy route. I ended up not being challenged enough and my math interest and skills went outh the window and I'm paying for it big time in my adult life. I spent high school programming and running my business (an ISP)- it was just more rewarding. Anyway- long story short- kids don't know anything and they need good teachers to show them it can be interesting and how important it really is. Parents have lost control of their children and we've gotten too PC- it's abuse if you yell at you kid for being a know it all slacker who hates authority. We all hated authority, but kids no longer respect it and it often gets abused by idiot administrators who impose their own idealism and crackpot beliefs on students. I don't think kids can or should be spanked, caned, or any of that crap, but you had better believe I think kids should be able to get yelled at (after diplomacy has failed) for some of the offenses I saw as a student without the teachers fearing for their jobs and a lawsuit. We need good teachers for everyone more than ever because what we lack in control must be made up for in interest/excitement/incentive.
I am officially a genius. I spent years in alternative classes, set aside to cater to my unique "gift". These classes occurred one day out of the week, in which we left the confines of the normal teachers' textbooks and sat around solving slightly more abstract problems. Some really fun projects took place as well, but they were few and far between. Afterwards we were still required to make up the work that we had "missed" in normal class that day and we received no special credit for our alternative work. It was akin to gym class, where the only way to get something other than "Satisfactory" on your report card was to not participate at all. This was up to the halfway point in junior highschool, afterwards I was traditionally home schooled and then attended an online academy.
Even for the regular kids, school is meant to be slow and plodding. You cannot get a head, but you can fall behind. The teacher is there to slowly explain things so that everyone can attempt to comprehend them. If that means boring 80% of the children that could manage fine without, then so be it! The public education system really isn't about learning though, is it? It's about molding youth into the form that civilization sees as beneficial. It is social conditioning with the intent of forcing you into being a productive member of society. You're made to memorize things while never truly understanding, and many of said subjects aren't nearly as valuable as others that aren't even taught at all. Of course, what is and isn't valuable is largely dependent upon what talents you have. I for one was never given the opportunity to indulge any of my interests in a school setting. Everything I know (save for some advanced mathematics and science) were self taught. My lifelong talents further guided me in the direction that I wanted to take my life and now contribute to a very satisfying lifestyle.
Not everyone can be successfully self employed, but anyone can find something that they like and make it their own if they only try. Too many of us get caught up in being or competing with the proverbially Joneses to live a happy life, and much of that is due to the social conditioning we encounter throughout youth. Many are not told or cannot see this when it is happening, only to be too far assimilated into the machine or much too beaten down by it to do anything once they do realize. Don't let that happen.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Without fail, intelligence is SPIT ON in American society.
In school, you have social pressure from peers not to appear too "nerdy" and the teachers actually feel threatened if you're too openly bright (they're afraid you're going to make them look dumb in front of the class).
In work, you would think the gifted have an advantage, but any business with more than two layers of management is based on pure politics. Too smart == "Holy crap! That one will go over my head and steal my job/ get promoted ahead of me/ outperform my team/ catch me embezzling! Better get rid of that person right now!"
Socially, intelligence in science equates to blasphemy against religion; intelligence in sexuality marks you as a pervert, intelligence in sociology makes you a bleeding-heart liberal. And of course, being smart with computers makes you a "dangerous hacker".
It isn't just the religious influence, however; while ESR is wrong about many other things, he pegged it when he said, "After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists -- thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such 'abnormal' people until they are properly docile and stupid and 'well-socialized'."
Speaking as one who would rather read a book than watch TV, I have "failed" in one career after another until I gave up, sat at home, and started my own freelancing career online. Finally, being my own boss allowed me to work to my full potential for the first time in my life, and my whole outlook has completely turned around - but of course, 90% of my business is from outside the U.S.! I'm derided as a creep in the United States and hailed as a genius in Canada and Europe. I'm pretty much saving up to bail as soon as I can. I advise anybody else with ambitions they can't seem to get fulfilled to do likewise.
The politics of other countries in history has caused a "brain drain" before; this time, it just happens to be the United States' turn. But since we're heading into Dark Age #2 with a side order of Spanish Inquisition, then this country doesn't deserve to enjoy the fruits of the labor of those it would burn at the stake. And the steady decline of United States scientific achievement in the last 50 years has affirmed this fact, with vigor.
CompleatGentleman already said it better than I could: those kids don't necessarily get a better education. 5 or 10 ESL students failing to pass an English test doesn't mean that the school is sub-par in any way, shape, or form. The institution they're being bussed off to isn't necessarily any better, and as an added incentive, thousands of dollars that could be used for GT/AP/IB programs or helping those ESL students is instead spent on school buses to ship kids around a district. You can watch a relatively minor problem snowball into a huge one because of the way this is implemented, and it happens a lot more often that you'd think.
When a school is bad, it isn't a single sub-population dragging it down; you see it across the board and in areas other than AYP (graduation and overall test success rates, for example.) I'm not opposed to shipping kids out in that kind of a situation; it means a school really has slipped into unacceptable territory. For a fraction of a percent of the school to allow such actions to take place, though, is pretty ridiculous.
You fail to take a few things into account:
1) If the kid isn't gifted, they won't WANT to be in a harder class.
2) If the kid isn't gifted, they will do extremely poorly in a harder class.
3) If the kid isn't gifted, his friends will tease him unmercifully for being in the harder class. (Gifted kids don't have friends. Everyone teases them anyhow.)
I was in the 'GIFTED' program in elementary school. I learned a lot of things there that I would never have had a chance to learn at that age otherwise, but the class itself wasn't that much harder. What -was- harder was that I also had to do all my regular schoolwork as well. The other teachers singled me out for being in GIFTED, too. For instance, 1 year ahead of everyone else, I had to make sentences from my spelling words. I eventually got so bored with it, I started to make stories from them. And then so bored I used the words -in order- to make stories.
In middle school, they had another program that wasn't nearly as good, and a year after I left elem. school, they cancelled the GIFTED program, and the middle school one right after I went to high school. Those schools have nothing of the sort now until High School, where their are Advance Placement (AP) classes that are harder, but not really any more interesting, and dual-enrollment (colleges classes at the high school).
Without those classes, I would not have gotten into computers in 4th grade (Apple IIe!) and definitely wouldn't be who I am today. I have to wonder if I'd have the same sense of purpose without it. My sister doesn't have that sense... She only had 1 year of GIFTED and none of the one in middle school, I think. She got straight A's the entire way through school, with the exception of a band teacher who said 'nobody should get all A's' and gave her a B solely for that reason. She duel-enrolled in high school early and completed 4 years of highschool and 2 years of college in only 3 years. (Yes, she graduated both in the same year.) She burnt out on that, but that's another story. She's in college for Pharmacy now and getting straight A's as always.
Without those classes, I'd have been bored stiff. I'd definitely have a lot of time on my hands to get in trouble with.
Yes, we are failing our geniuses. (I am not genius level IQ. Any geniuses in the same situation would be very poorly handled indeed.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Yes. I went to school (through high school) in India and I was lucky enough to be in such a system as you describe. That is one reason why the whole idea of "jocks" and "geeks" and "nerds" was so alien to me until I came to the US. In my day, the person we strived to compete with and get ahead of was the super-geek-jock :P - the guy/gal who did everything right. Kinda nice when you think about it. That gave me an edge that I have never regretted. My 3.5 years of college in the US (and I say this in a good way) were the most relaxing in my life, even with a physics major and I ended up learning a LOT of other stuff as well (I love liberal arts schools :D).
To give you an idea of what the system was:
Starting with the 3rd grade, the entire school (10 classes per grade level with about 50 students each = A CR**load of students :P), was put into the running. Classes were named from A through J and your initial class was determined by a criterion that no one seemed to know :P. However, after that, it was all merit-based. Your class (A - J) in the next grade was determined by how well you did in the current grade (exams, etc.) Upward mobility was the key and with it came the chance to be with the smart kids and learn from them. Oh it was farking beautiful :D. And it didn't really hurt anyone either - if you wanted to be a fuckup, you had full freedom to do so, without bothering the sincere kids and as a bonus you got to hang out with other fuckups like yourself :D. Win-win! Everyone's happy.
Of course, it couldn't last. The parents whose kids were in the loser classes saw this as a social stigma (albeit well-deserved). I heard that they discontinued this practice a few years ago so my hometown in India should be reaching full mediocrity right about now :P.
I don't think it really matters. In my maths C ("very hard" maths) class, it was about 50/50 bright lazy kids and hard-working slower kids. The slower kids might have slowed us down sometimes, but they always made sure we got a good explanation for everything we covered. But then again, we had a very good teacher and I doubt the class would have fared so well without him. In physics, the class ran the gamut from very bright hard-working to goofing-off I'll-pass-somehow. Yet thanks to a skilled teacher, I know I learnt a lot more in that class than many of my peers at uni did in theirs.
/Everyone/ needs better teachers, and crap like No Child Left Behind is disguising the problem.
In the two classes I didn't at uni that weren't considered "hard" or "academic" (read: mandatory) - English and Religious Education - the classes were full of students who didn't give a crap and/or had fundamental misunderstandings as to how the world worked. So the teachers didn't give a crap, and we learnt nothing. I literally spent more time in RE listening to my ipod than my teacher and yet only one student in the class did better than me.
In chemistry, the class was full of students who were trying hard to do well to get into uni, with a few bright-and-lazys who were there because it was a pre-req for their degree. Yet a useless teacher managed to confuse everyone to the point that ignoring him and reading the textbook was easier and set such poor exams that the major hurdle was understanding the questions rather than the chemistry.
So I think the teacher matters more than anything else. I know my maths teacher got good results out of one of the remedial maths classes as well. My physics teacher is now lecturing at the local university. My chemistry teacher... well, I think some poor boarding school has him now. But the problem is, all the metrics are geared towards measuring the students, rather than the teachers. And even if we could easily say Mr A is a much better teacher than Mr B, the unions are very much against any sort of performance bonuses or differential pay. A bad teacher hurts a weak student much more than they hurt a strong student, but a good teacher can take a strong student much further than a weak student.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
"exceptional people will be bored no matter what you put in front of them."
Not to boast any but I was in grade school in the 80s and I would finish classroom assignments much faster than all of my peers. After helping all the students immediately around me understand and complete their assignments I would get out of my seat and help other students.
Teachers labeled me hyperactive and moved my seat into the corner and used tape to create a box around my seat, telling me I'd be punished if I left the box. Later I was put on Ritalin, which was brand new in the 80s. That helped, but I wish instead of medicating me I would have been allowed see how far I could have gone.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
What most people don't understand is that all of the following are true:
a) Crappy brain + gifted drive = mediocre career
b) Mediocre brain + mediocre drive = mediocre career
c) Gifted brain + crappy drive = mediocre career
Being "gifted" doesn't mean shit without a lot of other good attributes. Even if you have a gifted brains AND drive, if you have really crappy anger management, your still screwed. Schooling is only 1 part of a much much much larger equation.
I would suggest visiting this page to see what some famous people have said about the subject.
http://creatingminds.org/quotes/effort.htm
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Yeah, I realize it's possible for smart kids to make friends. It didn't happen to me (or any of the smart kids I knew) until highschool.
I disagree about the mundane work, though. I think it's important for them to realize that not everything will be exciting, and that hard work is a necessary part of being in society, even when it seems rather stupid. Make them do everything the other students do and reward them with extra if they want it.
In fact, with the right program in place, you could do exactly that. All students have the minimum to do, but if they are bored or WANT to learn more, have the extra material available to them. The smart ones will think of it as play-time, the dumb ones will avoid it like the plague, and the average will think of it as a challenge. It would be tricky to implement, as there's no point in just giving them next year's work early, but rather to build on what they are learning that year and give them extra.
Using the spelling words in sentences a year early certainly did me no harm, and the logic puzzles we learned to do in elementary school are still fun to this day. We also did side projects like making a 'film strip' (with markers and blank strip) along with a recorded voiceover for the slides. And I see no reason that everyone couldn't have joined in the projects like the egg drop contest. (Well, except for my entry which got Jello banned from the contest ever after. It apparently stains concrete. The egg survived!)
In short: The answer isn't to offer the smart kids extra, but to offer it to EVERYONE and let them decide whether or not they want to do it. The extras receive no grades and no bonus points... They are merely there to challenge kids who are done with the rest of the stuff for class and want the extra. No parent could possibly argue with that, and you're not treating any child unfairly.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
My jHS and HS provided three tracks: one for the unmotivated, one for those either naturally attentive & quick or studious and one for everybody else.
:-) I'm immensely glad that I did - it meant that I had already taken calculus BC when it came time to take AP physics, and it also enabled me to take calc IV off campus.
It worked well when teachers made sensible placement recommendations; keeping students with similar motivations and interests together serves the same function as university selectivity. In those cases where teachers irrationally recommended toward lower tiers, slighted students who wished to migrate (back) to a higher tier in a subject enrolled in summer school. Occasionally, some teachers recommended that a student take a remedial summer class, automatically preventing advancement.
In my case, for example, a certain teacher recommended that I take remedial algebra the summer before entering highschool. The school sent an enrollment form to my parents' house, which I intercepted and destroyed, enabling me to request another enrollment form - this one blank. I submitted it, enrolling myself in summer honors geometry, placing myself one year ahead of the curve, one tier up
Neither my early education in manipulating bureaucracy nor my immersion in physics-as-Newton-intended-it would have been possible in the standard egalitarian gulag. I don't foresee sending my children to a public school; the opportunities and the quality of education are simply gone. Fortunately, they were strong enough in my day that I can afford to send my offspring to private school. TBQH, that's probably the goal of NCLB: to privatize quality elementary education, thereby further stratifying society and protecting the ignorance of the conservative voting block, who will, in bigotry and fear, will continue to vote consistently against their own interests.
I'm not talking about throwing away peoples lives. Education is not the be all and end all of success. In fact I want everybody at every station in life to have the chance for their academic ability to be measured. What I don't want is what we have now and what you propose to deprive gifted students of the chance for quick advancement and recognition.
To the best students should go the best teachers. It's a harsh idea in that 90% of the student body will never be taught by the best 10% of teachers. In fact I go a lot further in another post to this article, basically turning HS education 100% towards passing state set exams. Students can completely opt out etc etc. Radical idea that would open up the HS education system.
A middling student should have the opportunity to advance but not at the expense of an exceptional student. Good teachers for good students.
Or he had a 2.5 average due to boredom and frustration, and moving him to the advanced class gave him the motivation to get the A.
This isn't unheard of. In 1st grade I was considered "slow" and was at the bottom of my class. The teacher assumed I was stupid. I was bored and daydreamed constantly instead of doing the color, cut and paste dittos, which were assinine.
After maxing out a standardized IQ test (a fact that the school tried to hide from my parents) my parents thankfully realized what the problem was and sent me to a private school, where I excelled.
I'm so thankful that I went to grade school twenty years ago, instead of today. Today I would have been diagnosed with ADHD, put on drugs, and gone through life labelled a dunce.
Public schools really get my dander up, because this sort of thing is so common. There is so much blame to go around, and all of it is well-deserved. Bad teachers who don't give a crap, teachers unions, stupid politics, PTO moms who bulldoze the schoolboard into making ridiculously bad decisions...I could go on and on. There is hardly a punishment great enough for people responsible for ruining promising childrens' lives.
Home schooling used to seem like such a wacky idea, but my wife and I are seriously considering it instead of dealing with all this crap. That my tax money still goes to supporting a hopelessly broken system that does almost more harm than good pisses me off to no end.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
That's interesting. I went to a similar school, and when we took the ACT/SAT, they asked us to use the school code for our previous school in an attempt to avoid the other schools getting upset for losing their high-scoring students. I think they were still upset, though.
Snobbish, but true.
Exceptional people don't need to be spoon fed, they find repetition boring, and they find the necessity to waste their days proving to their intellectual inferiors that they can complete rudimentary tasks.
Hell, I knew how to read, print, add and subtract when I was 4 years old. You think there was a day of my life that I found school challenging? I used to finish all my classwork and all my homework homework and two paperback novels a day before school finished for the day, and I was still spending lots of time staring vacantly out the window.
I have no regard for the education system. All it ever did, throughout my life, was hold me back, slow me down, and force me to be surrounded by violent stupid monkeys.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Hear, hear. The analogy about drinking resonates. The bored student just stirs the water with the straw--the thirst for knowledge makes you want to pick up the bucket and chug. There's an ocean of difference between the student who just wants to please the teacher and the one who transcends the concept of the student/teacher relationship in favor of satisfying profound curiosity about the subject. Recall that Newton didn't even need a teacher; he was happy to sit in his room and poke himself in the eye with a blunt knitting needle to better understand how the human eye perceives and processes light.
It wasn't until I realized that I wanted to understand computers--after trying theater, music, flipping burgers, working in a warehouse, transcribing Russian, teaching mentally retarded adults--that I really got motivated. I had developed this irrational fear of math, and when I realized that the curriculum for CS was a based on a math major, I hesitated for about 45 seconds. Then I just gritted my teeth and drove to the university and got started. Two months later I was in my first programming course, fifteen months after that I was interning as a sysadmin, eight more months and I had a UNIX system to myself with an assignment that required me to learn C in order to use a database API to "mechanize" purchasing for a regional phone company. Between internships, I'd ask my professors for more and they'd work with me to develop independent studies. During my final semester, the campus recruiters were peeing their pants because I already had a resume. Twenty years later, it's still all about digging in to figure out what's in it for me. Work has only been boring when I've forgotten this and found myself fulfilling someone else's ambition. Many times, it's been these very forums that remind me of this. Past the frosty piss and trolls, some of you have reawakened the curiosity because it's obvious that you know more than I do.
It's not--it can't be about being led the whole way. At some point, you have to realize--as in make real for yourself--that you want something bad enough to stay focused, to stay interested. My favorite professor used to present new programming concepts and then say, "Now go and convince yourself that this works."
This is not unlike the difference between playing around with, say, Perl, and having the language be the vehicle to get something that you want. I couldn't ever get math for math's sake, but when I saw it as the way to get and keep accounts on the computers at school, I saw the teachers in a different light.
And, of course, they weren't public school teachers, which is the matter at hand. Also, they could tell that I was after something. There's a noticeable difference to any teacher in the student who is engaged, who asks questions that indicate that he or she is committed to going beyond the subject matter of the course.
It also helped that I was paying my own way that time around. Your mileage may vary.
It's an entirely different experience when you're somehow in it for yourself. Up until my second time in college, I'd just been filling squares, trying to do what someone else told me. I thought there was something wrong with me because I knew I was intelligent, but I couldn't seem to get anything done. Straight A's with no plan is not going to bring anyone happiness. I didn't grok grammar by passing English in elementary school. I got it in Discrete Math. That unlocked what had been only rote memorization.
Then again, I did meet the guys who formed the Butthole Surfers while pretending to study Drama, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. Sometimes the value of an experience isn't apparent without the benefit of hindsight. Come to think of it, none of it was a waste. Even the sloppy attempts at "enriched" and "advanced" courses in middle school were valuable exposure to the subject matter. I developed the distinctions after I got myself aligned with what I wanted.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
For anyone with an IQ above 130, public school is an undeniable waste of time. I have to disagree with you on that. For me it was not a waste of time. It was actively harmful. I got extremely good grades about the first six years of elementary, degrading after that, going into mediocrity and failure later on. You see, I never learned discipline because I wasn't given assignments that challenged me early on. This is also due to a lack of drive on my part, but the school system is also to blame as they never thought I might need a different kind of help. When I started getting mediocre grades, I was described as a "bright, promising student who needs to live up to his potential." I kept completing the occasional assignment which I happened to have an interest in in a competent manner, prompting more of that kind of comment. I've largely failed to live up to this supposed potential.
In Grade 3, I was skipped (they compressed 3 and 4 into one year for the five of us - four girls and me). The next year, I started Grade 5 - in a class with my older sister which continued until Grade 9, an affront for which she has never entirely forgiven me. I was also a year younger than all the other boys in the class, which meant that I was always the smallest and lightest kid in the class; since the iron code of the schoolyard prevented me from playing games with my age peers in Grade 4, I was always chosen in the last few for sports and games. Doubtless, this contributed to my smart mouth and my rep as "class rebel".
All this was endured within the public school system. In Grade 10, I was admitted to a boys' school in Toronto, modeled on the English schools such as Eton. No phony egalitarianism there! There were two types of classes (or "forms" as they were known) - A-forms, and B-forms. The A-forms were considered the brighter students, and we took seven academic subjects. The B-forms were the lesser lights, and they took 6 classes and a mandatory study hall. In addition, on every report card (of which there were five a year), my ranking in the class ("2 out of 22") was duly noted. Unlike Orwell, I mostly enjoyed my years there; I was still bored from time to time, but many of my classmates had also been skipped, and so I was generally surrounded by bright kids. It also helped that the school teams were Under-15's, Under-16's, etc., so my competition for sports teams was against kids my own age, which helped soothe some of the inferiority I had experienced in public school. (It's no fun always being the shrimp!)
Now I have two daughters, 10 and 13, who have both been accepted into the PACE program at our local school. (PACE is the "Program for Academic and Creative Extension") Now, instead of skipping kids, they are brought together with other bright kids of their own age, where they explore subjects in greater depth than the standard classes. Frankly, I think this works better than skipping them. While both girls admit they are bored from time to time, they also work on more projects and have developed a greater understanding of the material than the standard stream allows. And neither of them have suffered from the social problems that I felt; both have lots of friends and seem well integrated into their classes.
From my perspective, I think the girls' school is doing a good job of challenging them academically without short-changing them socially. As I noted, they are bored at times, but I think all good students will experience those moments; I'm sure there are times their classmates wish my girls were picking something up a little faster.
Of course, this is just one school board, and I don't know what's going on in other boards in Ontario, let alone in Canada. I won't even try to comment on any other country's system.
What was once true, is no longer so
I've spent the last twenty years teaching a "gifted" section in an Elementary school. Your comment (and also the rest of it, which I have not quoted) express exactly my point of view on the subject. When kids entered my class, they ceased to be the elite within their former classes, and instead became just another kid in the class, and, often for the first time, had to develop some discipline and drive.
Although I do have some egalitarian-inspired sympathy with the folks who want all students heterogeneously thrown into the same class (except they somehow still don't want the special ed kids and the out-of-control kids, of course), my experience is that "gifted" kids cannot be properly challenged in such a setting, if only because much of the challenge in a class comes, not from the teacher, but from the other young minds in the community.
Also, most teachers I know spend most of their time helping the kids on the bottom of the class. The idea of a teacher who only favors bright students with his attentions is, as far as I've seen, a myth. In thirty years of teaching I have yet to meet one. Of course, your mileage may vary, since I've only one lifetime of observations. This tendency of teachers to reach the bottom students at the expense of the top ones was true long before the No Child Left Behind Act, with it's disaggregation of students' test results, increased the pressure to focus on the bottom of the class. It's bound up with the reasons why most teachers become teachers in the first place.
Something else just occurred to me - you describe how teachers prefer to teach toward the bottom of the class. A lot of that is actually admirable and appropriate, I think: a society with a huge illiteracy rate would be a bigger problem than a society where some of the brightest and best are bored and have to find stimulation out of class. At the same time, I can't help but think of Matthew Broderick's character in "Election," who wanted very much to be a "good teacher" as long as his students didn't excel too much. The drive and ability shown by Reese Witherspoon's character, however, he couldn't stand - the kind of pleasure he got from his patronizing stance toward students whose accomplishments were unlikely to surpass his own significantly in scale was threatened by her character, who was clearly destined for grander things. Of course, all the resentment came out in the final scene in the movie, where the emotional logic of his character was stripped bare.
Is that what you mean about "why most teachers become teachers in the first place?"