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

California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 553 posts

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#341

Post by mcdeltat »

niemandhier wrote: post #309

My personal observation: It’s not gifted programs, it’s the environment. I work on a pretty good science campus in a smallish university town, lots of smart people and so on. There are a few products of gifted programs, but most people just meandered in. What stands out though is that almost everybody has a story of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool. The chess club, post soviet backyard hacker pad…

This surely has a good amount of truth. Students won't engage with striving for excellence if they are socially/environmentally discouraged from it. How do parents/teachers/peers/school react to a student being very good at something?

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#342

Post by aspenmayer »

exe34 wrote: post #205
lern_too_spel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people who use the term "virtue signalling" don't understand the problems that the supposed virtue signalers are trying to solve and simply use the term as a cheap dismissal of their policies. If the policies are bad, explain why they're bad. Don't just say that people putting the 10 Commandments in schools are virtue signalling.

Or indeed, it's possible that neither you nor the virtue signallers understand why they're doing it.

Regardless of whether or not either interlocutor understands the term, using the term virtue signaling itself is self-defeating for both parties for different reasons.

For the one hearing it, it’s a red herring, and for the one saying it, it’s a dog whistle. For the third party person reading the interaction without or with lesser context, it’s a thought-terminating cliche.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#343

Post by sangnoir »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #242
sangnoir wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The inventor of a vaccine or a microchip or a sculpture doesn't hoard the invention for themself The built-in assumption is that those outlier high achievers & inventors were gifted students. Is there any evidence for this prior? As a devil's advocate, my counterpoint is that "grit" was more important than raw intelligence, if so, should society then prioritize grittiness over giftedness? A few months ago, there wa…

Yes, there is a high correlation between intelligence (no matter how you measure it throughout childhood) and achievement in adulthood. A huge, massive difference. Obviously there are exceptions. Somebody seeming like a bad student is not one. Do you really need a citation for that?

My question was specifically about the outliers: has any research been done if outlying achievements go hand in hand with outlier IQs? Without any research or evidence, it's an area prone to a Just World fallacy where extraordinary achievements "ought" to be achieved by extraordinary talent.

Rephrasing my doubts in perhaps an oversimplified manner: given the correlation you mentioned: is it reasonable to expect the top 100 wealthiest individuals (outliers) to also be 100 most intelligent people on earth?

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#344

Post by lykahb »

gowld wrote: post #133
cogman10 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. What does this even mean? To me, the measure of a healthy society is how that society treats those that are "unlikely to pay it back". The most unhealthy societies treat unwanted humans as disposable refuse. For example, I don't think we'd call the culture/society of the…

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.

Even at the most blood-thirsty periods USSR had programs for gifted youth, math clubs at school, and even dedicated highly selective schools. They also had cheap entertaining pop-sci books. The schools would fail the students who don't pass the tests.

However, the scientists and engineers had a rather low salary, often lower than blue-collar workers'.

The equality of outcome can take many forms.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#345

Post by thimkerbell »

niemandhier wrote: post #309

My personal observation: It’s not gifted programs, it’s the environment. I work on a pretty good science campus in a smallish university town, lots of smart people and so on. There are a few products of gifted programs, but most people just meandered in. What stands out though is that almost everybody has a story of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool. The chess club, post soviet backyard hacker pad…

"almost everybody has a story (from previously) of slipping into a subculture where being smart was cool"

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#346

Post by didibus »

Wasn't there something about gifted students not necessarily translating into gifted adults? And that it's just that they are faster to reach a level of development, but doesn't mean they will go beyond the normal limit.

Like the rate of development and learning just follows a different curve, but ends up near the same point once an adult.

I think it was only some gifted student retain an advantage in adulthood, and it is normally when they are gifted in a specific discipline for which they maintain a consistent and continued practice through to their adulthood.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#347

Post by torginus »

bobfromsf wrote: post #90

As 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…

I'm not this super smart or anything, but I was allowed to skip a grade and the result was hell for me - I was a scrawny kid even in my age group and a year of physical development means a lot at young ages. I was taken out from the environnment of my peers and placed with total strangers who were all told that 'I was special', which didn't put me in a favorable light. I basically had no friends and quite a few enemies for a year before my parents wizened up and took me to a different school.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#348

Post by pessimizer »

thrance wrote: post #264
Animats wrote: post #191

> But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program. Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory. Because these are the numbers: Ave…

I'd argue the parent's socioeconomic status is a much better predictor of IQ than "race".

The main predictor is early childhood reading for pleasure. A suspicion is that the early start gives a lead that is almost impossible to make up, as life gets more busy, not less, when people get older.

Early childhood pleasure reading requires parents that have enough reading skill themselves and the free time to teach you how to read, and childhood access to a wide variety of interesting books at a range of levels. Those are things that are going to be correlated with your parents' wealth. And your grandparents' wealth. As a slave descendant, my parents were the first people in the history of my family who were able to read easily. One still had to pick cotton as a child to get spending money.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#349

Post by suzzer99 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #196
Animats wrote: post #191

> But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program. Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory. Because these are the numbers: Ave…

You are not supposed to talk about this.

There are ways to talk about it without dividing human beings into tranches by race. Once you do that, you give ignorant people fodder to see out-groups as inferior and even subhuman, which opens the door to all kinds of horrible outcomes. See: history.

Re: California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones

#350

Post by mlyle »

zozbot234 wrote: post #195
phil21 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Killing truly progressive programs for the purpose of virtue signaling is a loss for society It's not just a loss for society. It's society-killing. Taking resources away from those who move society forward and spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" is a way your culture dies. Conquerers in the past used this strategy to win massive empires for themselves. It's a ridiculous self-own. This is perha…

> spending them on those who are unlikely to "pay it back" If only. The school system is actually terrible at helping the most disadvantaged and marginalized students. These students would benefit the most from highly structured and directed instructional approaches that often have the pupils memorizing their "lesson" essentially word-for-word and getting prompt, immediate feedback on every question they answer[0] -…

Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?

I've only seen pretty limited, pretty confounded evidence for it. A lot of studies I've seen are studies of students in charter programs, but these studies tend to ignore pretty big selection effects (e.g. comparing students to the general student population, when studies have found that students entered into charter lotteries who are not selected do about as well as those who get to go to the charter school).

I definitely use recitation in my classroom where there's a body of knowledge, but I typically reserve it for situations where it's clear that there's less need for deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.

As we look forward, it seems like there's a lot less value in having a broad body of knowledge and much more usefulness in being able to fluidly apply concepts in comparison to 19th century practice. Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span and cooperation and relied pretty heavily on corporal punishment to make them work.

I have pretty limited, indirect tools to get students to put in high effort. There's the gradebook and their general desire to do well, which isn't a terribly effective mechanism even though I am teaching an affluent, motivated group... and there's whatever social pressures I can foster in the classroom to encourage students to value performance.

Post reply on HN