No, I cannot because that is fundamentally not what the parent comment said or the framing that they used. > Meanwhile, societies like USSR and Communist China, that persecuted their geniuses, collapsed their previously great societies. I'm sorry, but that is not how either the USSR or China have operated. If anything, they hyper applied the notion cultivating geniuses. Education in both China and formerly the USSR i…
The cultural revolution began by lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities. Stalin did much of the same. It was a horrible strategy which is why they came up with the new ones.
I can think of many nasty things that Stalin did, but I don't recall anything even remotely similar to "lynching all the teachers and kicking the bureaucrats out of the cities". In fact, teacher was probably one of the most respected occupations throughout the Soviet period.
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.
Massachusetts is the state rated #1 in pre-K to 12 education, and they have about 100% of teachers in unions. This seems to destroy your argument that teachers unions need to be "abolished" in the name of helping students.
That's interesting. My parents were told, in SC and FL, to have me skip a grade or two (not six!), but refused due to the social burden they expected it to put on me. I'm not entirely happy with where I am at 26. I wonder if I'd be further ahead - or behind - if I had skipped forward.
I skipped forward a year at Uni. Being academically proficient (≈IQ) and socially proficient (≈EQ) are very different things and I was not wise enough to make good decisions. I am regularly blown away by the deep social capabilities of some of my smarter friends. For a few years I have been dedicating a lot of thought to social interactions. I waste virtually zero time on past academic interests. Too many people equa…
Agreed. I lean towards thinking I would've wound up further behind if I skipped one or more grades, due to the social aspect. Especially given how often I moved.
Keeping the regular pace also allowed me to do a lot more extracurriculars. I started helping with quantum computing research in my freshman year of college and joined a bunch of clubs.
> 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] -…
As an adult, I've taught myself five programming languages, I read 20+ books a year, and while in school I was reading at a college level by the fourth or fifth grade. However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math. I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a l…
The instructional approaches I mentioned in the parent comment are not based on pointless 'busywork'. In fact, quick feedback to the pupil is considered an essential feature, which helps cope with the all-too-easily distracted "monkey mind" that's typically associated with ADHD.
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…
The right peer group makes all the difference.
I currently live in a rural environment with tiny schools and wonder how I would’ve turned out if that’s where I did high school. I think you need a critical mass of other gifted kids to really set the bar and drive some aspirational goals. If your class has a single gifted kid, they’ll just see that they exceed their peers and coast; if there’s a whole group they’ll push each other once they know more about where the ceiling is.
> Equity my ass I don't understand this statement. You say you were offered access to good teachers, that didn't give up on you because you were poor, or because you had broken English, that's a great example of equity, so like why do you dismiss it at the end?
All those are about equality, namely equal access. I'm totally for that. What I'm not for is manufactured equity, namely equal outcome by force. You probably know a typical situation in many families: one kid is years ahead of math program without even trying, and another struggles with math no matter hard the parents try but is good at reading and writing. According to the progressive government, the parents should…
That's not the definition of equity. Equality and equity are close but different, and both are positive concepts.
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…
You can just as easily measure the second derivative, i.e. see how fast they are improving at improving.
The best school I ever attended divided classes between academic (attended at one's grade level) and social (attended at one's age level) --- some teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and once one had finished a subject through 12th grade, one could begin taking college courses --- many students were awarded 4-year college degrees along with their high school diploma when graduating. The Mississip…
What case might that be?
I don't know --- it was in the late '70s, early '80s, and I just heard about it from letters my parents received about it from folks who were still living there.
IMO students should be take the class that maximizes the probability of getting a c * the probability of engagement. Note that this isn't "at least a c" but a just a c. There should also be weekly surveys the directly question the students engagement. No matter how important the topic, if the student isn't engaged then they aren't learning it and are better served learning literally anything else. Even if that means not learning to read past a 1st grade level for 5 or 10 years. Transferring classes should become the norm, once you lose engagement it is too difficult to get it back (and if half the class leaves then that teacher now knows what NOT to do)
> 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] -…
As an adult, I've taught myself five programming languages, I read 20+ books a year, and while in school I was reading at a college level by the fourth or fifth grade. However, because I have ADD/ADHD, I was shunted into the special education program, and told point blank in high school that I was not 'college material', I was not allowed to take advanced math. I did in fairness have a great deal of trouble doing a l…
ADHD is not at all well accommodated in public schools. I could never finish most homework as a child, because it was too boring and repetitive(I got it in 1-2 repetitions, but they made us do 20). My ADHD was severe, but I still got put in G&T classes because of my IQ tests, but that didn’t help much. GT classes were an hour or two in a different classroom doing silly “creative” projects, but then it was right back to normal classes where we were in the same room as students that had to sound out words in their paragraph of the class reading in the same amount of time many of us had read ahead a dozen pages. I never completed most homework and had poor grades putting me almost in the bottom half of my class. Everything changed when I got to AP and other advanced classes. They were more interesting and I easily rose to the top of them while nearly failing the boring standard classes. If it weren’t for AP classes followed by more interesting college classes I’d be a janitor or something. Us neurodivergent smart folks can be absolutely crippled by being stuck in boring regular classes. Having a mental difference/disability makes us hard to understand and accommodate. We can be both special needs and gifted/talented at the same time.