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

latimes.com

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

#531

Post by aspenmayer »

exe34 wrote: post #497
aspenmayer wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For the third party person reading the interaction without or with lesser context, it’s a thought-terminating cliche. if one's thought is so easily terminated, maybe there wasn't as much thought as one might think to begin with.

If good faith weren't a prerequisite for reasoned debate, perhaps.

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

#532

Post by lazyeye »

phil21 wrote: post #32
csa wrote: post #10

It’s not just California, but California may be one of the more egregious state neglecters. The push at the state level for policies that focus on equality of outcomes over equality of opportunities will not end well for the gifted and talented communities. Whenever I hear these people talk about their policies, I can’t help but recall Harrison Bergeron. Focusing on equality of outcomes in a society that structurally…

> 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…

They want the culture to die. Then from the rubble they will build their brave new socialist utopia. Except as any student of history knows, what we actually get is Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot...

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

#533

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

zozbot234 wrote: post #448
TexanFeller wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students There are many kinds of marginalized and disadvantaged people and many require the opposite approach. I was very smart but had severe ADHD, was noticeably autistic, and my parents were poor at the time. Most of my normal public s…

> Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it t…

I actually can't learn from rote memorization, as I cannot commit something to memory that I don't sufficiently understand. I just can't get those things to stick. I need to comprehend it and be able to employ its utility.

I also have a very poor working memory that hinders my ability to solve certain problems that most would find to be trivial. I think I would have done quite badly in the environment you're describing.

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

#534

Post by philwelch »

shiroiushi wrote: post #465
philwelch wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a selection bias in that the USSR and China both actually turned into barely functioning societies afterwards, often because they implemented their ideals in inconsistent or hypocritical ways. If you take the same ideology and actually apply it consistently you’re the Khmer Rouge.

Sounds similar to religions. If a religious group sticks strongly to its religion's founding principles and teachings, it's "fundamentalist" and is basically a cult or something like The Handmaid's Tale. The groups that water everything down and are hypocritical and inconsistent are much more successful long-term, with far more members and lots of money.

The main difference is that unlike Marxism, most traditional religions can be the basis of a long-term successful society even if you apply their ideas consistently.

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

#535

Post by exe34 »

aspenmayer wrote: post #531
exe34 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the third party person reading the interaction without or with lesser context, it’s a thought-terminating cliche. if one's thought is so easily terminated, maybe there wasn't as much thought as one might think to begin with.

If good faith weren't a prerequisite for reasoned debate, perhaps.

remember, we're talking about somebody getting triggered by the words "virtue-signalling", so I think good faith left the conversation a few stops back.

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

#536

Post by zozbot234 »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #533
zozbot234 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it t…

I actually can't learn from rote memorization, as I cannot commit something to memory that I don't sufficiently understand. I just can't get those things to stick. I need to comprehend it and be able to employ its utility. I also have a very poor working memory that hinders my ability to solve certain problems that most would find to be trivial. I think I would have done quite badly in the environment you're describi…

> I actually can't learn from rote memorization, as I cannot commit something to memory that I don't sufficiently understand.

I apologize but I don't believe these things to be literally true. You can clearly speak at least one natural language with native-speaker fluency, and that inherently involves committing a large amount of raw data to memory that may never be "fully understood" in a complete sense. More generally, memorizing stuff effectively that one does not clearly understand happens all the time in all sorts of education, and my view is that genuinely effective methods can indeed make this roughly as easy as memorizing the lexicon of one's native language.

(The success of spaced-repetition software is at least an existence proof that such methods are in fact possible, though the context is not exactly the same as classroom instruction.)

Of course whenever "sufficient understanding" happens to be feasible it should be included; I have never said otherwise. What "Progressive" education means when it pushes "open inquiry" and "students learning by themselves" is something radically different, that in practice amounts to letting the students 'sink or swim' with no effective support whatsoever.

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

#537

Post by phatskat »

mlyle wrote: post #459
zozbot234 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat offtopic, but I'm surprised that "device misuse" is that big of an issue. I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device. Aside from that, I do in fact agree wrt. on the potential of Khan Academy and similar systems - they seem to have t…

> I suppose that these are most likely school-provided and school-administered devices, so they should arguably allow for some sort of time-based kiosk mode where the student is restricted in what they can do on the device. In our case, schools purchase and bring their own devices past elementary school. But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around. > they seem to have…

> But even with technical measures, there are a nearly infinite number of ways to screw around.

Indeed there are! I was in high school around 20 years ago, and our computers were “locked down”. You couldn’t install anything (or really run any unapproved binary), access to system tools was disabled, and every time a computer rebooted, it would wipe a clean image to the HD so no changes would be saved to disk.

My friend and I figured out how to bypass the lockdown before boot, and made a floppy that did so. Removing evidence of tampering was as simple as shutting down the PC. From there, we added a menu to the bootloader, put it on a CD, wrote a simple Visual Basic app launcher on the CD, and included Quake 2/3, GTA, Worms, and a handful of other games that could all install or run from the launcher, and then sold the CDs for idk $10 a pop?

We also learned that every computer in our district (that we had access to test on) used the same admin password for all the remote VNC access, which was fun. And the same password (different from the VNC password at least?) for all of the networked printers in the district - on football game day, we printed hundreds of our school’s logo on a rival school’s printers, with the logo being just barely off-white.

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

#540

Post by Spivak »

1024core wrote: post #155

Forget catering to "gifted students". San Francisco's school district (SFUSD) wanted to take algebra out of 8th grade, simply because poor kids and POCs were failing it at disproportionate levels. Here's a relevant article: https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-... So the solution to bad grades in some communities was to take away the opportunity for ALL communities. Thankfully, a vocal group of…

I think you're taking the wrong read on the situation, if you have a cross-section of your students that are failing a class that doesn't match with the roughly normal distribution you would expect then it means that it's a failing of the class. You have a bunch of affluent involved parents who are looking to advantage their child in any way possible teaching their kids algebra outside school hours. It's not a bad thing, it's actually great that parents are involved, but it means the class isn't doing anything one way or the other so why even have it?

You only see this kind of behavior in math where there's an on-paper advantage to be conferred by letting kids jump ahead, you don't see it with social studies or english.

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