In addition to many wise things stated, such as school choice and accepting some kids aren't as smart as others, teachers unions (and any public worker union, esp police) need to be abolished asap.
California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
321–330 of 553 posts
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society? The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself. Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
Completely incorrect.
We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years and yet innovation across almost all fields has slowed to a crawl.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#323How are other countries handling the availability of ChatGPT for use by pre-college students?
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#324As a father with a son with IQ over 160, I can tell you unequivocally that California thinks gifted kids are the enemy. Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are special needs. He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we w…
> He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored
My solution was to read books and draw comics in class. I had some teachers that understood, some that didn't.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully I'm not seeing how your point is surprising at all. Are you just saying that when we do spend money on disadvantaged (whatever word is correct for "opposite of gifted") it isn't effective?
I'm just saying that when the institutional schooling system seems to "spend money on the disadvantaged" it's merely pretending to help the disadvantaged and marginalized, while actively rejecting the approaches that, at least as judged by readily available evidence, would likely help these students the most, and probably close at least some of the gap in outcomes.
This is very true
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not. All I want is that students get trained rigorously. The last thing I want is as what NYT used to report: a straight-A student who dreamed to be a scientist couldn't even pass the placement test of a city college. That shows how irresponsible our school systems became.
citation needed
I wish I could find it, but unfortunately it was likely ten years ago. The article left a lasting impression on me, though, so I repeated it once in a while in different context, at the risk of totally rewriting what actually happened.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society? The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself. Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
@WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW
You are correct but I think it has mostly to do with the way academia is organized. Scientific study is only really funded or respected if it quotes enough other works. However this is a dead-end way of working, bad research that quotes bad research will become the norm. Real talent feels this, leaves academia, the problem gets worse.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't imagine interpreting the parent comment for its clear face value -- that supporting outlier high achievers helps everyone in society? The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself. Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies.
These inventions are inevitable and don’t take talented and gifted people to do. It takes people undistracted by poverty and suffering.
[deleted]
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#329As a father with a son with IQ over 160, I can tell you unequivocally that California thinks gifted kids are the enemy. Gifted children, especially profoundly gifted kids like mine are special needs. He can’t function in a regular class because he would become bored and would act out and constantly get in trouble. Since my kid was a toddler we have had to completely rely on ourselves to figure everything out and we w…
In Seattle there is a strong movement to ban gifted education. The prospect of that becoming fully implemented has caused many politically progressive parents I know to move out to suburbs in some cases and red states in others. Even without bans there has been a tangible dumbing down of the rigor of schooling. And the forced introduction of weird political curriculums like ethnic studies in math ( https://www.king5.…
Even Bellevue doesn't seem to be doing the optimal thing. They're losing students and having to close schools as well. Meanwhile, their Chinese immersion school has a huge waitlist. Every Chinese parent and many others wants to send their kids there. It's free, their kids will learn Chinese, and they'll be surrounded by other well-behaved kids with academically-focused parents.
I'm going to try to get my kids into that school, but if they don't get in, it may be private school for us as well.
Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones
#330As an alum of gifted programs with many friends who were also alums, I think most of us would say, "good riddance". In fact, I'm pretty sure the strongest haters of gifted programs I know are people who used to be in them. For most of us, the reality was that our status as relatively studious kids created a situation where our area of greatest need was social-emotional development, not intellectual development. Gifte…
> a situation where our area of greatest need was social-emotional development, not intellectual development Not an educator, but it seems like "supporting gifted kids" is one of those phrases where everyone acts as if its meaning were clearly defined and agreed-upon, while avoiding looking too hard at how it is neither. What should the goal be for institutions or parents? For example, to accelerate these kids to the…
For me, the more troubling thing about those sorts of goals are that they treat the fact that a kid is good at academics as an excuse to lose track of the fact that they're still just a kid in one's haste to project adults' ideas around economic success onto them.