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

[robgig1088]

Yeah that about sums it up. In our school district, they're pushing more regular students into our magnet schools (this is a Louisiana magnet school, mind you). Basically they're trying to level the playing field. Unfortunately, this means the AP students don't have as many higher-level classes to take because they have to cater to the regular-class students. If you ask me, High Schools should be like colleges, where they get to choose whether or not you're smart enough to attend. This sort of thing just annoys me to no end.

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

[UserChrisCanter4]

Your response is correct, but the Time article doesn't appear to address the reason. Most people are familiar with the phrase "No Child Left Behind," but don't actually understand how it works.

AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) is a factor in the ranking of school systems. Specifically, it was designed to expose the fact that many school had masked the few poor performers with the majority of successful students.

What it effectively means is that all "sub-populations" (broken by ethnic groups, ESL/Limited English Proficiency, "at-risk," and low-income, among others) must demonstrate "adequate yearly progress." It's designed to even be a bit forgiving - the low-income group doesn't necessarily have to pass, they just have to have improved a reasonable amount from the year before. A subpopulation counts if it is 1% of the school population or 30 kids (IIRC).

If a school fails to meet AYP for two years in a row, they become a "school of choice." Parents may now choose to pull their students from that school and send them to another one, and the failing school will pay for transportation. I'm not sure how it works out in small, rural districts where a given high school is the only one in the district.

Once a school fails in AYP, kids start getting pulled. The kids who get pulled are the ones who have parents who care about education; that usually translates to the kids who do well in a school being pulled from it. You can see how much this would impact a school.

If a school fails to meet AYP for five years in a row, a radical restructuring is due; this generally means that large amounts of the staff need to be fired, or the school should be converted to a charter school or something similar. In practice, though, the actual actions at this stage usually aren't as substantial.

With the background out of the way, it's fairly easy to see why geniuses don't matter: they'll pass the test. Five or ten ESL students (or low-income, or at-risk, or whatever) can make or break a school of 3000. With the way the NCLB program has structured AYP, it should be obvious where a principal/district would focus resources.

I'm not arguing that schools don't need monitoring; they do, no doubt. But if this system sounds ridiculous to you, please do all of us a favor and let your elected officials know.

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

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

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

[Usquebaugh]

A teachers job is not sell the value of an education, that is a parents job. Too bad if the parent weren't up to it.

If a child does not want to learn it's not the teachers job to convince him otherwise. Instead the teacher should cut him loose and accept another student who wishes to learn.

A teacher is there to impart knowledge of the subject. He's not some motivational speaker but rather an aid to study.

School should be focused on turning out students who can pass the prescribed exams not used as some form of entertainment or punishment.

Make no mistake what I want is radical, it's flushing the idea of equality away and letting merit stand on it's own. To the winners the spoils. It's a harsh system but not an unfair one.

Re:of course

[Aladrin]

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.)

Re:of course

[thrawn_aj]

anyone know if they've ever tried splitting the smarter/average/dumb kids up into their own classes permanently from 5th or so through 12th, as in they hardly ever see the other groups anymore except between classes and at lunch?

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.

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.

Re:of course

[hxnwix]

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.

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 :-) 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.

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.

Re:of course

[Bluesman]

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.

Re:of course

[hankwang]

it is an oft-repeated story that Einstein underperformed in school,

From Wikipedia:

he was a top student in elementary school (Rosenkranz 2005, p. 29). ...
...introduced the ten-year-old Albert to key science and philosophy texts, including Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid's Elements (Einstein called it the "holy little geometry book").[7] From Euclid, Albert began to understand deductive reasoning (integral to theoretical physics), and by the age of twelve, he learned Euclidean geometry from a school booklet. Soon thereafter he began to investigate calculus.
... when Einstein was fifteen [...] Albert wrote his first scientific work, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields".[8]

But then you say:

It does somewhat dent the conclusion when one notes that the stories are certainly exaggerated, if not outright untrue

I don't see how this conclusion is at all possible based on Einstein's youth.

Yes.

[oskay]

>Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either? Of course it does. If *any* child gets ahead, *millions* of children are left behind that one. I have always referred to this program as "no child gets ahead"-- it's turned out to be remarkably accurate.

No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[faloi]

The public education system has been failing gifted students since long before No Child Left Behind.

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.

Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[MightyMartian]

I think you might overstate your point a bit, but I do think you have one never the less. The rise of intellectualism during the Enlightenment was also a period when it was permissive to view religion with suspicion, where the human mind was something to be glorified as much if not more than some fuzzy sky deity for which Europe had been battered bloody for a couple of hundred years before. Heck, men like Madison and Jefferson, who didn't bother to hide their own contempt for Christianity, were not only accepted in society, but became major politicians and statesmen, and were major architects of the United States itself. By Lincoln's time, we were already heading into the post-Enlightenment era, where politicians had to make all the right religious sounds.

Now we have powerful lobbies seeking to undermine science education in the United States, trying to find ways to sneak past that great product of the Enlightenment Age; the Bill of Rights, so that there superstitious worldview can be promulgated in public schools.

If the US wants to know why its surrendering the production of scientists to other parts of the world, they only need to look at all those small-minded, anti-intellectual twerps that manage to get on school boards and state Boards of Education, with their Bible in one hand and hatred of knowledge in the other.

Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[clragon]

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.

I lived in China for the first 10 years of my life, so I know the Chinese culture well.

You said Asians love their smart people, it's true, but only under certain perimeters. The first problem is how do you define "smart"? Are smart kids the ones with the highest IQ test scores? Are they the ones that get the highest marks in class? Or are they the ones that can sell the most cookies to neighbors?

In China, IQ Scores are redundant and are not paid any attention to by the education system. Here however (In Canada), it is used to determine if a child is able to enter the gifted program in elementary school.

What the Chinese actually value is someone who can learn fast, think fast with flexibility and without making many mistakes. Although one might argue those people can be called "smart", but smart is too general a word in English and could be referring to a wide rage of characteristics. See, the Chinese does not value IQ or "gifted-ness" because it doesn't reflect what a person could accomplish. Instead, to get into the fast-track classes in China a child has to be placed in the top 40 in his or her grade (this is according to the middle school I was going to go to, there were 60 kids per class and 8 classes per grade.) So instead of getting the kids to take a IQ test of which they have no control over the results, getting into the fast-track classes becomes a competition between students so the winners are respected. In Canada, the gifted kids doesn't "beat" others to get into gifted classes, so there is much less of a reason for other kids to respect them.

One type of smart person the Chinese frown upon are people who stay home and study the textbooks all day, but can't carry the knowledge over and apply it to the real life. It wouldn't matter if the person has the highest mark in the class, if he or she can't solve simple social problems then they will receive little respect.

This is very similar to the definition of a Nerd in the western culture. However, one key difference is the clear line drawn between a "nerd" and a smart person in China, while here in Canada it is assumed anyone who has the highest mark in the class must be a nerd.

as a genius...

[bit trollent]

I feel like the education system totally failed me.

Err actually I went to a gifted & talented middle school (100 smartest kids in Houston). Then I went to a private Jesuit high school. Then I went to a relatively small public college in Dallas.

And now I make fat cash. I guess I really don't have anything to complain about.

Answering the hypothetical question

[A beautiful mind]

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

Yes. "Not leaving a child behind", in educational context means lowering the level of the education for the average and the smart students.

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.

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.

Intelligence reaps mockery in the US.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in a society that regularly ridicules people because they are smart, what do yo expect?

It doesn't take a genius to figure it out !!!

[trolltalk.com]

"For example, up to ten times as much money is spent nationwide on educating 'developmentally disabled' students as gifted ones."

Duh! Smart kids learn faster than 'tards. Whodathunkit? Was this article written by Captain Obvious? So you've got a choice - either invest more in educating those who are slower learners, or pay to support them. Which is cheaper in the long run (hint - you don't have to be a genius to figure that one out either).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Fail!

[uberjoe]

Failing our Geniuses?

Well my school sure failed me!

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.

Re:Hold up, Dude!

[seebs]

"behind" is not defined in relative terms, but in absolute terms; it's about keeping students up to the minimum for their grade. You can go past it.

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

First Hand Experience

[Token_Internet_Girl]

I am 25 years old. I spent 1st grade through 8th grade in the ALPHA program in Florida, which required an IQ testing of 135 or above to attend. I would say that on the whole, I felt like I was constantly dealing with uninteresting and repetitive work. I know being gifted isnt "a handicap" but there was always an air of "ok well, you're smart enough, there are plenty of other people who actually need our attention." The only time I was being truly challenged was in my 2 hours of ALPHA a day, in which times we would do brain teasers, read Shakespeare, do simple physics projects, etc. Looking back I know our budget for that class sucked royal asshole. Our class was in the most broken down portable room on campus. The teacher often brough her own materials and made up stuff for us to do on hand-written photocopies. So yeah, I can see how this article would have some weight in truth.

Obligitory "Incredibles" quote:

[SatanicPuppy]

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

Home/Private school

[iamacat]

It's hopeless to make talented students go to schools where even the most violent and the most stupid can not be denied admission. Gifted students will be bullied (sometimes literally) to death because of their different personality, tendency not to hang around in peer groups that can not understand them and plain jealousy. Besides, how exactly can a teacher lecture in a single class where some students are having trouble with multiplication tables and others have questions about derivatives?

Ideally, we need a system of student competitions that identifies talent and sponsors the winners for tuition in private, more challenging schools - as much for their protection as for accelerated education. This is unlikely to happen though because of both lack of money and current attitude of political correctness that allows "special needs" students to beat up gifted ones at will. In the meantime parents should step up to the plate, do home schooling the best they can and organize study groups where students can help each other get more information from books and Internet.

No Child Left Behind

[ArchAngelQ]

Just to be clear, the 'No Child Left Behind' nonsense has no additional funding for schools, and just additional requirements. Specifically, testing, testing, and more testing. That's it. Really. It requires a great deal more testing of students than ever before, and a certain pass rate for a school to get existing federal funding.

The end result is that children who are just below the pass rate on the 'pre-tests' (really, just more tests, but the results only get examined by the teacher or the school faculty) get the most attention. Those above it, especially well above it and those well below it, are more or less shafted by the way it's designed.

Alternately, several school districts have simply changed the rules for what constitutes a pass, and what a failure, on their tests, so that they have a high enough pass rate to continue to get full federal funding.

Re:Kids today

[SatanicPuppy]

Doesn't make it any easier when the system is designed to hold you back. Yea, sure, you're in history class, and the teacher is lecturing out of the book, so you just start reading the book. You think when you finish the book they let you move up a class? Or do you think the teacher will start ragging on you for not paying attention because you've read the damn book two or three times, and you're bored out of your fricking mind?

And do you think when the teacher hears your assertion that you've read the book that that teacher will react with anything but scorn? And do you think that teacher will be surprised and pleased that you actually appear to have mastered the material, after he's stopped class to flip ahead and bombard you with study questions from the later chapters of the book?

Or do you think that he will be so enraged at your showing him up in front of the class that he will go out of his way to pick on you for the rest of the year? You'll end up with a reputation as a "discipline problem," and spend the rest of high school magically ending up in classes with other "discipline problems" which is the nail in the coffin as far as ever giving a damn about school.

And those grades are critical for getting you into the sort of college that you'll really need to be in to get the most out of it. Mediocre grades and phenomenal test scores will only take you so far.

It depends...

[weston]

... 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.

Re:As it happens...

[DragonWriter]

For all the hysteria about the failure of the US educational system, going back at least to Sputnik and probably long before, it continues to generate the most creative, innovative people in the world.

I'd like to see the evidence that people educated in the US system are, per capita, more "creative" and "innovative" than those produced in every other educational system in the world. Really, this sounds to me more like nationalist mythology than anything resembling a fact, and contrasting it with "hysteria" is somewhat ironic.

Learning logarithms when you're 10 instead of 14 isn't going to make you significantly more likely to "cure leukemia or stop global warming".

I don't think the difference between "gifted" and "average" students is learning logarithms at 10 instead of 14. Its more like the difference between learning logarithms at 10 and having a vague idea as an adult that they are somehow connected to the Taco Bell chihuahua.

Look at those "geniuses" who get packed off to college in their early teens. Have any of them ever accomplished anything noteworthy?

Even assuming the answer is no, wouldn't that demonstrate that, indeed, the US educational system is, contrary to your argument, failing the gifted? I mean, if they weren't being failed, you'd expect them to acheive noteworthy things at the same proportion as the rest of the population.

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

[smittyoneeach]

No, the proper quote here is from Caddyshack:
Judge Smails: Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.

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

[netsavior]

Aparently last time we raised a generation that mistakenly thinks school is important.
School is only important to the mediocre.

The truely notable, exceptional people will be bored no matter what you put in front of them. School is a waste of time for everyone but those who would be left behind without this program. Nothing worthwile (acedemically) happens before college anyway, and even then real learning doesn't really start untill you break free of "those who can't do" and start getting some real world experience. And by then those that would be left behind are long gone.

Re:To flesh that out some

[DeadChobi]

You've got it wrong. The truly notable will make the best out of any situation they're in. Even school. The mediocre will be bored by every situation they're in. Why not take the time to find out why your teachers got into teaching in the first place? Do it. Ask them. Don't just brush this off by saying that they couldn't do anything else, because you would be wrong about most of them.

Re:To flesh that out some

[iamhassi]

"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.

Re:To flesh that out some

[adamruck]

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

Re:To flesh that out some

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

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

[zacronos]

From "The Dispossessed", by Ursula LeGuin:

They were superbly trained these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren't working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares.

What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.

"Well, of course," Shevek said, troubled. "If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it."

It's a very interesting fiction book which explores several "what if we did things *that* way instead?" ideas with regard to society; education is one of those touched on. I highly recommend it. From your comments, you in particular may find some ideas that resonate with you.

Re:To flesh that out some

[Brad Eleven]

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.

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.

Re:To flesh that out some

[Toddlerbob]

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.

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.

Tracking

[Descalzo]

As another responder already said, it has been called 'tracking,' though I don't know if it's illegal. My school district frowns most heavily upon it, and prefers to deal with it in-class. But what if a student is 'mis-tracked?' If it's a track in which the student is re-evaluated annually then that kid is going to be really messed up for a year. I have been toying with the idea of regrouping on a weekly basis. The problem with a weekly basis is that it's hard to make a week as meaningful as a year. It's a hard question, one teachers and administrators are trying to solve.

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.

Um, No... Not Necessarily...

[morari]

Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either? The school system has always been set up to cater to the lowest common denominator.

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.

Best vs. brightest

[benhocking]

"Bright" does not correspond to best.

Absolutely. There is obviously a correlation between the two, but there are plenty of lazy bright kids in the advanced classes and plenty of hard-working not-so-bright kids in the general/remedial level classes.

As a former public high school teacher, I speak from experience. I taught physics and AP chemistry (both classes composed of advanced 11th and 12th graders) and physical science (composed of general/remedial 9th graders). I felt really bad for the few really hard working kids in my physical science class who had to put up with the disruptions of their fellow students. (Yes, I disciplined those kids, but you can only do so much in certain school systems.) I fought to put one student who I thought was of average intelligence but very hard-working in an advanced class for the following year. Unfortunately, that didn't work out as the advanced class was too far ahead of her. I had another student who was mildly mentally retarded, but was such a hard-worker that he outperformed almost everyone else in that class.

Re:of course (from a teacher)

[Ying Hu]

Yes.

The answer that immediately came to my mind as well.

I'm a science teacher, and the focus of my school is exactly as described - it is to raise the test scores of marginally achieving populations. There are advanced courses in most subjects, but other than that no extra attention is paid to gifted kids, except at the most minimal level (i.e. the extra efforts of one sponsoring teacher) in some extracurricular clubs. Even the training provided to districts by national consultants such as those of Professional Learning Communities make virtually no mention of gifted kids (I listened very carefully for this at the conference I took part in). They advocate standardizing and homogenizing instruction, to a) increase the teaching skills of poor teachers, and to b) allow all kids to be graded by standardized tests. The implicit and explicit assumption is that a rising tide will raise all boats. Unfortunately, this whole process completely excludes the programs of truly gifted teachers (and they are admittedly too rare), and gifted kids find normal schooling to be incredibly boring a lot of the time.

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.

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

[Inverted Intellect]

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.

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

[Brickwall]

I have to echo your comments, and would like to add some perspective of my own. I too was a gifted child, who could read before I started kindergarten. I remember getting our first "Dick and Jane" type reader in Grade 1 (that would be in 1961; yes, I'm a geezer). The first page was a picture of a young boy with the single word "Sandy" underneath. (IIRC, the entire book introduced some 50+ words.) The teacher took five minutes to go over that page, during which time I read the entire book. When she asked me what I thought of Sandy, I babbled on for thirty seconds about the boy, his sister, his dog, his teacher, etc. The teacher hauled me out of my seat, pulled me onto her lap, and gave me a few smacks on the ass - not at all painful, just a little humiliating. "That'll teach you to read ahead!" she said. In fact, it didn't, but it did teach me that school was not all concerned that I progress as quickly as possible.

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.