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Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

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Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#81

Post by TomMarius »

Xelbair wrote: post #78
emteycz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only not sleeping well and boredom were the only issues. Being born in a post communist country, teachers here have a really powerful position, work used to be scarce, parenting is... Different, and thus my parents placed way too big importance on school. School has ruined my childhood, robbed me of all joy for more than a decade, made it very hard to have (and trust) normal human relationships, made me seriously…

Oh yes, teachers in post communist countries can be separated into two groups: * majority that's absolutely horrible at their job, whose only goal is to average all the children. Hammer down nails that stick out, and artificially inflate grades of struggling children without helping them at all. * few great motivated teachers, who are genuinely great. Usually the latter ones were part of protests, or some anti commun…

The gifted program here was simply about doing more homework and more, harder tests. I was terrible at that. I need to learn by my ways - based on curiosity, with different explanations and methods like spaced repetition.

I am very sure that I would do something really bad to the school and teachers if I didn't meet the school's IT teacher, who pulled me out of some of the really bad lessons to work on computers with him, and was the only person who viewed me positively and treated me like a human. I am still coming back to visit him.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#82

Post by noir_lord »

colechristensen wrote: post #46
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing. From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do th…

Somewhat different for me, I was slow to read, at 8 school wanted to put me in remedial class until I got a teacher who realised it wasn't me it was the source material - she started feeding me books that were far beyond what we should have been reading.

In 6mths of her giving up her lunch hour to teach me I'd caught up, In a year I'd passed everyone else, once I realised I could teach myself the things I was interested in (computers and science) there was no stopping me, I lived in the local library and read 2-3 fiction books and at least one factual book a week for the next couple of decades.

School after that was easy, I'd just go get a book and teach myself because the pace at school was too slow.

It's a habit that served me well, the first thing I do when approaching anything new is track down the perceived best book and devour it.

I came from a pretty shitty background (poor and parents with mental health issues) but I ended up with a good career because of Mrs Speck and the thousands of books.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#83

Post by pistachiopro »

apsec112 wrote: post #36
dang wrote: post #28

I wonder if they lack good ways of measuring this. I skipped a few grades and started university at 15. It took years to catch up socially and in many ways I never did. I wouldn't recommend it. In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at. Nobody's good at everything. However, that would have required individual attention of a…

I was forced to not skip grades, and it took me years to catch up socially afterwards, because everyone was so hostile and school was such an oppressive, totalitarian environment that it made me unable to trust anyone.

Looking back at my regular American public high school, I'm really impressed how they handled students who didn't fit the standard pace. One thing, they were very flexible about credit replacements, so if you didn't want to take an English class, you could work on the literary magazine, or you could replace social studies with working on the newspaper. Furthermore, the librarian "taught" a few periods a day where small groups of students could just quietly independently study a subject of their own choosing. Now that I think about it, there was also an option for students to take half their classes at the local community college, which a couple dozen people did. This way, even though we had a wide range of academic abilities amongst the students, we all got to move through school as a cohort, and no one had to truncate their adolescence just to avoid going insane with boredom.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#84

Post by dgellow »

lordnacho wrote: post #75
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace. For instance my kid is starting to read about stuff they normally only introduce in high school, but there's no way he will ever be examined on it until then (he's turning 8 in a few weeks). If someone wants to learn something, luckily these says we have the likes of Khan Academy and other internet resour…

> I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace.

Just a guess: as far as I understood US parents are very good at lobbying schools administration, and a lot of them would hate to see that some kids are smarter or more advanced than theirs.

Now regarding your ladder idea, in some cantons in Switzerland and some Bundesländer in Germany the school system is split in 3 lanes:

- a "gymnasium" lane that prepares you for university, mostly focused on theory and go further into technical topics

- a "general" lane that prepares you for white collar apprenticeships, more general knowledge courses

- a "labour" lane that prepares you for blue collar apprenticeships, provide more practical courses and learning support

Lane names don't really matter as they are different from place to place, but that's the general idea. Also apprenticeships opportunities are not locked based on the lane you went to, that's just the general idea. And you have multiple ways to move from one lane to another at any point during your school life if you don't fit for some reasons, with some conditions (for example you need quite good grades to move from "general" to "gymnasium").

The difference I've seen between the Swiss and German approach is how early kids are split. In my swiss canton that was after our 6th grade, so roughly at around 13 year old. In Germany that's around 10 year old.

PS: keep in mind that both Switzerland and Germany have high level of autonomy for cantons/Bundesländers, so things can be drastically different from place to place.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#85

Post by Xelbair »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #7
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

Counterpoint: the general level of maturity of an individual, and in particular their emotional maturity and their social maturity, do not strongly correlate with their intellectual maturity. Someone may be advanced enough to graduate at 18 with a bachelor's degree in a technically challenging field, but lack enough self-discipline, sense of responsibilities, or basic social graces and knowledge of social codes to re…

And another counterpoint:

Maybe let parents decide?

Will they take upon themselves to supplement their child soft-skill learning?

Right now we are forcing everyone into the same, horrible and inefficient route - which isn't correlated to real world at all.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#86

Post by Xelbair »

dang wrote: post #53
apsec112 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was forced to not skip grades, and it took me years to catch up socially afterwards, because everyone was so hostile and school was such an oppressive, totalitarian environment that it made me unable to trust anyone.

I hear you. That's why I added the grass-is-greener skepticism. It may just be that it sucks either way—or that we simply needed different things. It's important not to overgeneralize from personal experiences with this stuff. When I look back on it, I think what I needed most was for some teacher, mentor, or older/wiser person to spend time with me. That's what would have made the biggest difference. But I was compl…

Then maybe instead of accelerating children down the same horrible route.. we could create separate tracks?

I know that 'negative' (special needs) tracks are basically a disaster, but maybe positive (group gifted children together) one would work?

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#88

Post by ido »

adrianN wrote: post #67
black_puppydog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everyone I knew who started in my grade finished in it Couldn't be further from the truth in Germany at least. While in my school days (primary, middle, high) this carried a huge stigma, nowadays there are some regions (think "states") that have a system where primary school "takes as long as it takes" for every child. Basically, for i in range(3): school_year(kid) if kid.is_ready(): break

I went to school in Germany met exactly one person who had to repeat a year. School in Germany is different in every state, you can't really generalize, but I don't think many children have to repeat a year

I know several kids of friends of mine in Berlin and Vienna who repeat or have repeated classes. And these were not dumb kids, if anything I'd have guessed they are at or above average intelligence.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#89

Post by zozbot234 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #2

There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and…

> There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality

"It's harder to manage" is an argument against it. The gold standard is mastery learning (everyone learning at their own pace, separately for every subject; and true mastery is expected before you move on to something that builds on previous learning), which includes acceleration as a special case but also allows proper "deceleration" for those who need some thorough catch up.

Re: Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study

#90

Post by boublepop »

dang wrote: post #51
boublepop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Took years to catch up” seems a loaded sentence. So yes maybe someone wouldn’t act like a 20 year old until they actually turn 20. But that is’t a great argument for keeping back their education for 5 years. If academic acceleration was more widely accepted you would just have been starting at 15 with other 15 year olds and there would have been no social context pressuring you to act 5 years older just because you…

I was good at acting older. The problem was that I forfeited peer relationships. In fact, I forfeited adolescence. That was a high price to pay. And in hindsight, what did it matter that I worked through undergraduate math at 16 instead of 19. By the way: my experience does not negate your experience. It's hard to talk about these things in general. If you'd share how it worked for you, I think that would be interest…

My point is that having to act older and missing out on adolescence has nothing to do with academic acceleration. If you are 15, spending your schools time going to an educational Institution, it doesn’t matter what the level of the material is. The only reason you where in a situation where you felt the need to act older and felt you missed you adolescence was because academic acceleration isn’t accepted, so kids who do well end up being put into the social context of much older students in order to get education at an appropriate level.

Think of it this way, when adults go and take primary Spanish because they want to learn the language late in life, we don’t put them together with Spanish preschoolers, and why would we?

Yet it seems kids being a bit brighter is perceived as such an extreme oddity in our society that the only way to get access to college level education is to literally go to college. Doesn’t that just seem odd to you, even having gone through it?

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