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Gifted children are special needs children

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Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#71

Post by PaulKeeble »

mobilene wrote: post #54

I entered middle school in 1979, at which time I was slotted into available "advanced" classes. This was as close to a G&T program as we had. It changed my game. Not because of the knowledge imparted, but because (a) I was with other kids who wanted to learn and were willing to work, and (b) I was largely removed from the disruptions I had increasingly experienced from kids who didn't want to be there. At last, I cou…

A lesson runs at the pace of the slowest students, and those slowest students don't want to learn and actively disrupt the class and everyone else. We tolerate this far too much its damaging to the other 20-30 children in the same lessons and moving them to their own classes would have a much bigger average impact than picking the brightest for special lessons. Ideally we would do both so people could go closer to their pace.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#72

Post by dugmartin »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #13

Greetings fellow travelers [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional ---- In response to OP's link, my suggestion to primary schools would be to scrap the G/T programs, and instead focus on reducing class-sizes. You should also remove any students from classrooms whom routinely distract from others' learning. Give those timesinks a broom, instead.

> You should also remove any students from classrooms whom routinely distract from others' learning.

You can't do this without getting sued (at least in Massachusetts). Source: my wife is a long-time elementary school teacher and my daughter works as a one-on-one aide while she is getting her teaching degree.

I don't want to start of flamewar but the current "push in" model created by educational bureaucrats creates a classroom environment that caters to the "timesinks". When you have a good chunk of the class on IEPs (individual education plans) that must be followed by law the "high flyers" (gifted kids) mostly get ignored due to time pressure.

Add socialization problems caused by COVID and reduced attention spans due to devices and chaos is always eminent. The stories I hear about daily classroom behavior would have blown my mind as a kid growing up in the 70s/80s.

I just wish that gifted kids could get the same access to IEPs that the other tail of the curve gets. However, when you base your educational outcomes on high stakes testing it is just natural to ignore the outliers above the mean and focus on the ones below it.

Again, I don't want to start a flamewar. Everyone has the right to an education.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#73

Post by thebigspacefuck »

I am so against this. I taught myself to read at 4 and taught myself up to 5th grade math in the first grade. They basically let us do whatever we wanted in that class and it was great. Then second grade onward was structured and so incredibly boring as I waited years to finally get back to the math I knew how to do in grade 1. Then I got into algebra and it was another snooze fest going at the pace of everyone else. I was deep into drugs before I got to something interesting like multi dimensional Calculus and it was only due to my severe misbehavior and my parents catching me before I OD’ed on benzos that I became lucid in the last couple of months of class to pick it up. Finally got my shit together in college and got a masters in EE, but man I feel like I wasted so much potential if I could have only gone my speed. And to be clear, I was in a G&T program after 6th grade but it was too little too late. In first grade my best friend was Asian and we worked on math together and geeked out about cool science shit, that’s what I wish I could have done the whole time. I was in a small town where there were few of us, but I imagine NYC could be an amazing place to create a space for gifted learning.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#74

Post by sickofparadox »

danaris wrote: post #67
liveoneggs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it comes from valuing "Equity"

....no, pretty much by definition, "equity" means giving everyone what they need to do well. You may be confusing it with "equality of outcomes"?

In education, the effects of striving for equity in the US have amounted to a ridiculous level of Harrison Bergeroning within the public school system, which is partially responsible for the collapse in trust in schools.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#75

Post by OnionBlender »

My brother was identified as "gifted" and I was identified as having a "learning disability". He got pulled out of class to work with other gifted kids on special projects (like computer programming in the 90s). I got pulled out of science class to be taught remedial grammar and receive one-on-one help with math. This made me feel like I was dumber than the other kids and that I had to study hard to compensate. Meanwhile, my brother had everyone telling him how smart and gifted he is.

We both went to university, but he barely got accepted and nearly dropped out. I think I did a lot better at university because I was already accustomed to needing to study.

Many years later I learned that there have been studies about this "praise for effort versus praise for intelligence" dynamic.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#76

Post by bccdee »

The primary reason I was admitted into my local gifted program was because my parents and teachers pushed to get me into it. At age 6, I scored a high enough IQ to get in, but my family had to pay to have the test administered privately. The makeup of my cohort was mostly white and Asian, but they were also distinctly middle-to-upper-middle-class, with a high density of stay-at-home mothers (like my own) who were active in the school board and knew how to push the right buttons to get their kids into special programs.

> I’ve never seen a satisfying explanation for why a supposedly unjust system, one assumed to disadvantage certain groups, would “accidentally” advantage Asians, often above native-born white students.

Many immigrant groups have, on average, a higher socioeconomic status than native-born Americans. Even Black African immigrants tend to be more affluent than the mean of the white American population, because immigrating is expensive and it selects for wealth. My family are middle-class in North American, but they immigrated from South America, where were distinctly better-off than the average.

Affluence has much more explanatory power than merit, especially in the absence of any mechanism for the supposed racial merit which the author of this newsletter seems to be ascribing to the Asian population.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#77

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Zigurd wrote: post #70
munchler wrote: post #15

> the G&T system selects, however imperfectly, for merit and effort. This is true but doesn't answer the fundamental question of whether meritocracy results in a fair, healthy society. I think this is a nuanced issue with reasonable arguments on both sides, but the author simply assumes the answer is yes without actually addressing the question.

The hint is in the name. "Meritocracy" was coined to lampoon the concept.

Well, but you're going to have an "ocracy" no matter what you do. So what kind of "ocracy" do you want?

Incompetentocracy?

Randomocracy?

Celebritocracy?

Nepotocracy?

We're not going back to aristocracy (which essentially was nepotocracy). So what do you have that's better than meritocracy? What's wrong with letting the more talented be the ones who run things?

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#78

Post by b3kart »

yunyu wrote: post #11
Y_Y wrote: post #3

But that's a different meaning of "need" to what's normally used. Gifted kids don't need special attention to get through school and life the same way the intellectually impaired do. It's much better in the sense, that if they will survive and probably not even cause a fuss if you treat them like the lowest common denominator. It's worse in the sense that you're unlikely to get a strong signal, but without special tr…

It is better to empower 1 Noam Shazeer or Terence Tao than to prop up 10 million burger flippers.

Better for whom?

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#79

Post by liveoneggs »

danaris wrote: post #67
liveoneggs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it comes from valuing "Equity"

....no, pretty much by definition, "equity" means giving everyone what they need to do well. You may be confusing it with "equality of outcomes"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantive_equality

it's the 'E' in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity,_equity,_and_inclusi...

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#80

Post by Zigurd »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #77
Zigurd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hint is in the name. "Meritocracy" was coined to lampoon the concept.

Well, but you're going to have an "ocracy" no matter what you do. So what kind of "ocracy" do you want? Incompetentocracy? Randomocracy? Celebritocracy? Nepotocracy? We're not going back to aristocracy (which essentially was nepotocracy). So what do you have that's better than meritocracy? What's wrong with letting the more talented be the ones who run things?

You seem to assume that "randomocracy" is a ridiculous idea. Google "sortition." it is difficult to buy outcomes in sortition. Post Citizens United I wouldn't bet against it performing better.
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