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Should gifted students go to a separate school?

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Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#161

Post by morgante »

dijit wrote: post #2

Absolutely. I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school. This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the…

I agree. This is going to sound conceited, but I really blame the public school system for never giving me a challenge.

Until I eventually got into private school for the last 2 years of high school, I had never had to work to get straight As. I could often complete homework assignments before class was even over.

Unfortunately, this conditioned me to be incredibly lazy. As I never developed a strong work ethic, in college I continued to put in a minimum of effort though that wasn't enough for straight As.

I've never really had the experience of consistently trying to do something hard. Even though I'm trying to force myself to do it now (setting ambitious fitness goals and taking advanced online classes), I can't help but feel that it would've been a lot easier to develop this grit when motivation didn't entirely depend on me.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#162

Post by FussyZeus »

zepto wrote: post #126
FussyZeus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the second especially. The whole point of School is to prepare you for the world we live in (it's effectiveness in many aspects is highly up for debate, but that's another discussion) and you will frequently find yourself in Real Life having to deal with people not necessarily like you. Further isolating people into given groups is only going to increase the social fracturing we already see taking place.…

Except not. You do have to deal with people not like you in 'real life', but the conditions are nothing like school, wherein you are forced to do so under disadvantageous conditions. Maybe it's worth experiencing this once or twice, but to be put through it for years is nothing more than abuse.

On any given software team of more than 10 people, I can promise you at least 1 of them is regarded by the others as less skilled. The truth of that isn't relevant, the fact is even competent or highly skilled people may have a hard time presenting that skill verbally and/or in writing.

And even if you do somehow manage to go through an entire career without encountering someone like that or dealing with another person who happens to be a little your inferior, I fail to see the downside of learning social and communication skills for people not like yourself. That just sounds like a recipe for a well rounded individual.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#163

Post by kodablah »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #4
dijit wrote: post #2

Absolutely. I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school. This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the…

Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing. I remember literally spending weeks of schooling in primary school learning how…

I had an opposite experience in Texas (semi-rural Texas no less). The gifted and talented programs (i.e. things sometimes referred to in other districts as "Quest", "Omega", etc...not AP as occurs in later grades) did the exact opposite of focusing on standardized testing. The vast majority of time was spent on "above and beyond" and critical thinking. Granted you tested into it and all of your time was not spent there, but even times in standard classes were not heavily focused on standardized testing.

This goes to show that the problem is more localized than state level, it is a municipal and district-level choice so long as you meet minimum testing requirements. Now when students don't meet minimum testing requirements, most districts unfortunately fall into the trap of teaching to test as opposed to teach.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#164

Post by _m8fo »

cousin_it wrote: post #160
_m8fo wrote: post #84

I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question. In practice, separating gifted students does two things: 1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) 2. Remove equality of opportunity. What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular s…

Gifted kids flourish when other kids have interesting conversations with them instead of beating them up. If you know how to make that happen in a regular school, I'm all ears. But in my experience that's impossible and segregation is the only answer.

That's a completely different discussion and problem.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#165

Post by _m8fo »

ehsankia wrote: post #119
_m8fo wrote: post #84

I'm shocked, yet paradoxically unsurprised that so many of the comments here are saying "yes" to the question. In practice, separating gifted students does two things: 1. Accelerates income inequality (there's no way the gifted students on average will do poorer than the 'regular' students) 2. Remove equality of opportunity. What exactly is a gifted school going to do that would help gifted students and not regular s…

I don't think complete segregation is the answer, but within a given school, I believe there can be more malleability. In general, the idea of which class you end up in being more skill based than age based. And not everyone is better at every subject. Having it per subject allows someone to go further in math even if they struggle with some other subject.

I agree with you. See my comment from earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472276

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#166

Post by timemachiner »

zeteo wrote: post #151
habosa wrote: post #85

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever…

> What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. > What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for…

You ignore the fact most "gifted" students come from higher income families. There are "gifted" children from lower income families that would be misidentified due to underexposure of educational resources.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#167

Post by morgante »

stinky613 wrote: post #5
dijit wrote: post #2

Absolutely. I'm going to sound very self-centered and certainly not humble but when I was enrolled in mandatory education I was doing so under Tony Blair's Labour government. This government was elected under premises such as nationalisation and additionally "Education, Education, Education"[0]. As such no child was allowed to fail school. This had the opposite affect in my primary school, instead of segregating the…

But, on the flip side, faster-learning kids need to learn how to live/work/deal with slower-learning kids and vice versa. The purpose of schooling goes beyond the accumulation of facts.

Why? Everyone always trots this out as though it's unequivocally true.

I ended up teaching my AP Statistics course. It was ludicrous: as a junior I somehow understood the material better than the teacher and was expected to teach a class full of seniors.

Yes, it was more educational than the alternative (sitting in a corner reading a book while totally phoning it in) but I also have no doubt that I would've learned far more in a course which actually challenged me.

---

Also, this notion that our real world experiences are anywhere near as heterogeneous as public schools is downright ludicrous. It's not like we hire random people off the street to be software engineers. The average IQ of everyone I interact with is well the national average.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#168

Post by llsf »

justin_vanw wrote: post #95
habosa wrote: post #85

A lot of comments here sound something like this: "I am smart and when I was in high school the classes bored me because they were taught to the lowest common denominator". This is not an argument for intellectual segregation of schools. While I could put forth a hundred arguments against this, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. When do we decide who is "gifted"? What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever…

1. This is a Harrison Bergeron argument. "We can't let people move quickly, because it might be unfair to other people." Effectively this means denying the people you can identify because there are going to be other 'deserving' people you don't identify. Replace 'education' with 'food' and see if this logic holds up: "We shouldn't feed the people we know are hungry, because other people might be hungry and now they w…

RE 1. It has already been mentioned that food analogy is not a good one, since we are not talking of not providing education to smarter kids. And, this is not a binary issue, there is a whole spectrum of intelligence.

RE 2. The previous post does not say "every kind of diversity is automatically good". But I certainly agree that social and intellectual diversity has benefits for all parties.

RE 3. "Smart people do well and often have smart children", well it is not genetic though. While often "smart" parents have "smart" kids because they value education and know what to push. It is an oversimplification to say that education is equal to "smart". And sending a smart kid in the worst school would not affect his smartness. Especially now with Internet, if he is that smart and gets bored, then he can learn what he wants on Internet. Being a free country does not mean necessarily you can act freely against the collective good. I believe that the whole intellectual spectrum of kids can learn from each other and together. I believe that smarter kids should be able to learn more if they want to, but I strongly believe in the benefits of having all kids together in the same school, from kindergarten to university. Some kids might need more time, some could learn more and/or go faster, but they will still benefit from each other.

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#169

Post by Afton »

magicalist wrote: post #158
zeteo wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity? It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. > What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level? Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for…

> It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track. The problem is if they've missed the first eight years of the gifted track, they can't just transfer in and be expected to know what's going on.

"gifted track" is rarely a set program. It's usually a mechanism for providing individually paced opportunities and resources [edit: added this phrase] _at a different/specific school_.

Where I live, you get tested whenever your parents want you to be tested, and if they pass the advanced learning at the point, they can choose to elect for the 'advanced school(s)'.

_edited for clarity_

Re: Should gifted students go to a separate school?

#170

Post by dkarapetyan »

No. There is something one learns by going to public schools and seeing all his fellow human beings held to the same standards.

I grew up in Armenia in the post soviet union era. The one thing they got right was the education part. There were no distinctions. We all learned the same material, gifted or not. Those that lagged got extra attention and help. When I first got here the segregation of "gifted" vs "non-gifted" always felt viscerally incorrect to me.

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