Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gifted children are special needs children

mleverything.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 145 posts

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#91

Post by JohnBooty »

cardanome wrote: post #39
austin-cheney wrote: post #2

This talk about high performers and low performers needing focused environments to perform gets me thinking about the scenario of putting them together. I know this is not what the article is suggesting, but the thought is still there. This reminds me of conversations between the two ends of the Dunning-Kruger spectrum. In DK low performing people tend to vastly over-estimate their capabilities because their frame of…

Do you consider yourself one of those people for those " the negative space in a conversation is just words in a different form"? Where is that take even coming from? Communication styles are very cultural. Japanese is very subtext-heavy while German is very direct. Are Japanese people more intelligent than German people? Furthermore it depends on how your brain is wired. Autistic people prefer direct communication w…

I'm pretty... neurodivergence-aware as well. I favor kind but literal communication if we are trying to achieve some kind of goal.

Still, there are a lot of things that can go unsaid when people have a shared, high, expertise level.

For example, if I'm onboarding a junior engineer, I'm going to have to literally explain a lot of things. From basic compsci concepts to setting up a text editor and local development environment to getting them up to speed on the language we use.

These are things that largely would not need to be communicated to a more senior developer.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#92

Post by kragen »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #81
kragen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck you. What about having our lives ruined by being imprisoned in a fucking kindergarten, full of violent screaming children? Have you ever tried to read a fucking book while surrounded by screaming children who keep hitting you? How about building a toothpick model or writing a computer program? Now imagine that those children are bigger than you, and you have the emotional maturity of a 5-year-old. Forcing childr…

Kids shouldn't have to be surrounded by "violent screaming children" period. I fail to see what giftedness has to do at all with whether or not you deserve to not have this as a learning environment.

Some kids have more difficulty with it than others, and in particular it interferes a great deal more with reading a book than with running around screaming.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#93

Post by jlawson »

teiferer wrote: post #63
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #51

For some reason, radical egalitarianism seems to have taken hold across the West and separating children by ability is frowned upon. Here in Spain one of the far-left politicians was found to be sending both of his children to private school while preaching this enforced equality for the rest of us.

> radical Really? Why is everything called "radical" nowadays? The "radical left" who want healthcare for everybody, the "radical right" who oppose immigration. Radical egalitarianism? Really? Because they don't want to fund programs for gifted kids? You may not like it (I myself am ambivalent and the best solution is likely in the middle), but it's not "radical".

The belief that every child has the same natural ability is as radical.

It's radical because goes against all evidence, experience, and common sense - it is ideology taken to a puritanical extreme. There is no more extreme position one can take.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#95

Post by JohnBooty »

Y_Y wrote: post #57
JohnBooty wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gifted kids don't need special attention to get through school and life the same way the intellectually impaired do. This is very false in my experience. I sometimes struggled in regular classes as a young kid, because it was so painfully boring to move at the same, slower speed as the other kids. It was like trying to watch a movie at 0.25x speed. I wasn't just "not reaching my potential", I was missing out on chunk…

For what it's worth, I think my experience was similar to yours. That's why I'm drilling down on the definition of "need". I agree qwth what you say, my only point was that gifted students have a different, less urgent, kind of "need". Hence, as a mayter of institutional dynamics, we have the inadequate systems we have (for the gifted at least).

    That's why I'm drilling down on the definition of "need"
I like this train of thought. It leads to another great question or drilldown. If we're going to talk about needs we need to talk about it in relation to a goal. Is the goal...

1. To raise all childrens' education to some sort of minimally acceptable bar? (like the equivalent of a GED here in the USA)

2. To get as many kids as possible as close to their individual educational potential as possible, for humanistic and/or societal reasons?

3. Something else?

If it's the first option, then gifted children probably do not have a "need" as urgent as developmentally-challenged kids. If it's the second option, I think that gifted children do have an equally urgent need.

The second option is admittedly loftier, and to be frank, the first option aligns more closely with the way most laws function. But god damn, I think we really should be aiming for the second option.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#96

Post by teiferer »

jlawson wrote: post #93
teiferer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> radical Really? Why is everything called "radical" nowadays? The "radical left" who want healthcare for everybody, the "radical right" who oppose immigration. Radical egalitarianism? Really? Because they don't want to fund programs for gifted kids? You may not like it (I myself am ambivalent and the best solution is likely in the middle), but it's not "radical".

The belief that every child has the same natural ability is as radical. It's radical because goes against all evidence, experience, and common sense - it is ideology taken to a puritanical extreme. There is no more extreme position one can take.

Though I don't think that's the argument. Even those advocating for the end of the program for gifted kids don't believe that all children have the same natural ability. Maybe some of them do, but the main arguments are different and are not actually that "radical".

And even if that was the argument, the term was used in the context of "radical egalitarianism". So, the argument doesn't automatically transfer to such a radical variety of "egalitarianism" in society as a whole if it focuses on a single aspect.

There are two levels of quite extreme exaggeration here, calling the end of a particular school program "radical egalitarianism". Which words should we use if an actual radical proposal comes along?

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#97

Post by teiferer »

JohnBooty wrote: post #85
teiferer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need kindergarten to teach reading. Mine didn't and I did fine. (Obtained a Ph.D. degree later in life.)

What was your kindergarten like? Was there no reading because it was academically poor or was it kind of an "alternative" learning environment ala Montessori? (I don't know Montessori's specific ways of teaching reading)

There wasn't much directed learning. We played all day. Indoors building stuff, outdoors in the woods. All that academic material with reading and writing and maths and all that, that's what primary school was for. Which started at age 6/7.

I'd say let kids be kids and have them explore the world through curiosity, not through a planned curiculum from age 3.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#98

Post by teiferer »

JohnBooty wrote: post #86
teiferer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because I'm old and things are different now, but back in the day, first year of primary school was when everybody learned to read. Some kids already knew some (incl. me), and that didn't necessarily make life easier for them since some parts of class they were then bored. Well, you learn to deal with it. It's not like such situations never occur in adult life. I often find myself in work meetings where co…

since some parts of class they were then bored. Well, you learn to deal with it It's a crucial life skill. I'm highly doubtful that forcing young kids to be bored (by making them progress/learn slowly, when they could be learning more) is the best way to do it.

Oh I'm not disagreeing. Forcing boredom is not the way. But preventing it at all costs may not be either.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#99

Post by munchler »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #87
Zigurd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sortition is (perhaps) fine for things like Congress. For running, say, the FDA? No, I want people who actually know medicine and biology there. For running the Pentagon? I want people with actual military experience there. For running the State Department? I want people who actually know diplomacy and international relations.

No one seriously disagrees with that. The question is whether the State Department should be run by people who showed diplomatic aptitude in kindergarten due to nature/nurture advantages and were thus subsequently groomed for those roles to the exclusion of others.

Re: Gifted children are special needs children

#100

Post by jjj123 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #71
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 th…

> and those slowest students don't want to learn

This is not a fair assumption and is what leads to kids in remedial classes not getting a decent education.

Kids can be genuinely disruptive or not care, or they can care but struggle with the material, those are orthogonal traits.

I don’t disagree that the lesson goes at the pace of the slowest students, but those slow students deserve a disruption-free classroom too, even if it moves slower than the advanced class.

Post reply on HN