301–310 of 389 posts
My school system was a mess when it came to their gifted and talented (GAT) program. In my case, I was identified as a candidate, subjected to an absolutely insane battery of cognitive, aptitude and other tests, and then pulled from class once a week to go to another school with other GAT kids. Once there I was put into a room and basically told to go do smart things with no other primer, driver, or material to work…
I was in the gifted program. So is my daughter. It's a nice break from the monotony of regular school but it's not challenging in any way. It's not really clear to me what the purpose of the program is, but it doesn't appear to even try to challenge the students or introduce them to more interesting/meaningful curriculum.
Its purpose is to maintain the deception that the education system is designed to educate, rather than the daycare-disguised-as-education function it actually serves.
Fortunately for educators and parents, even gifted kids are still easy targets for the "we can't do anything else, so give them a token raise, a fancy title, and stick them in a room [maybe with others like them] so everyone else can get back to work" thing that quite a few organizations currently do. It's one thing to accept this when you have some idea of how much you as a person are worth; it's quite another to accept this when you're a child and have no idea that this is merely a token gesture (even though you may have your suspicions, you'll generally lack the opportunity to do something about it even if you're capable of acknowledging it).
And every adult that interacts with these kids all know (on a subconscious level) but will refuse to remedy this knowledge gap when they see it for pragmatic reasons- teachers and administrators don't want their job to become harder and/or don't have time, and parents desire obedience and subordination from their kids and/or don't have time/money to allow limit-pushing.
You may be in a unique position to remedy this; if you are I highly recommend you take advantage of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is not to pull out a handful of high performers, it’s to kick out the even smaller number of disrupters.
The “disrupters” are usually “pulled out” disproportionately if they are poor or minorities while kids who do the same thing but have more influential families get a “counseling”. https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/4/5/17199810/school-disc...
1) Sometimes I wish I had the opportunity to get special education, but it seems that most people complain about bullying and liked gifted education to be protected from bullying - thank God bullying was not a big problem for me.
2) Looking in retrospect, I can remember that many colleagues and friends were also gifted in some way or another. They just didn't care as much to get high grades.
There was one guy that learnt English just from watching VHS movies, he could listen to a music and understand it, something I can't do even today. Another guy slacked the whole year and bet everything on the final exam (and passed every time), he played guitar and keyboard (other 2 things I can't do).
I actually wonder what's up with bullying in US schools. I grew up in Moscow, Russia in the 90ies (many people were not well off to say the least) and I was both super nerdy and extremely eh, daring (I would talk back to other kids who were much stronger/more popular than me all the time etc.). Sure, I was not popular, yet I was bullied lightly and almost never physically, mostly by a couple classmates who were just…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This pseudo caste system was probably beneficial to you in the upper caste, but I don't think students in tier 3 and below saw their lives improve.
Keeping them together would not improve tier 3 lives a bit (besides providing more targets for bullying), but would hurt tiers 1 and 2.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bullies aren't living healthy, productive lives either. More than likely, their home life is awful if not horrific.
Sharing the misery to rest of the kids however is hardly a solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But would bring other problems. The cure is likely worse than the disease.
Most of history? I'd argue three Rs is the basics everyone needs, and then they can find their own way.
Industrialization was raising pollution and standards of living and making it clear that a lack of education wasn't a healthy option - although partially driven by wrong reasons - paranoid anticatholicism that ignores basically all of European history of how much influence the church /actually/ has over secular power.
Even post WW2 industrialization the population was still at a high school diploma as an actual advantage but "optional".
We need more informed not less. Problematically the populace also needs more critical thinking and self guidance while there are many unhealthy attitudes towards learning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The “disrupters” are usually “pulled out” disproportionately if they are poor or minorities while kids who do the same thing but have more influential families get a “counseling”. https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/4/5/17199810/school-disc...
Yes, some demographics have it worse than others but that's a totally separate variable of the equation though. A rising tide lifts all boats. Not bettering the system because a particular group/groups will not do better relative to some other group even though both groups do better relative to their past position is foolish. This is true for systemic improvements in general, not specific to education.
When I was in middle school in the 90s, I think around 7th grade (~12yo), the school district experimented with a new way of organizing the student body where they separated us into six distinct, equally sized cohorts based on some evaluation of each student's performance and capability. From what I could tell it was rougly: 1. Gifted / clearly university-bound 2. Potential college prep 3. Community college 4. Normal…
And what are the chances that influential, well connected parents will be sure that their kid ends up in the highest level whether they deserve it or not? I saw this all of the time in school. On a related metric, if you look at the top 10 students in my public low rated high school in the south, the top 10 students (which I was one) were made up of kids whose parents were in the school system, one kid of a prominent…
Probably even if we went to dystopian radical equality measures like mandating all kids be kept in government creches which would play hell with mammilian bonds and rightfully piss many people off.