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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

#541

Post by Terretta »

euroderf wrote: post #140
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…

> We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age. Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th. I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.

> Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell

No it didn't.

Not debating whether bullying happened, but your skip isn't what resulted in a bullying prone and bullying tolerating hellscape.

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

#542

Post by Terretta »

yieldcrv wrote: post #386
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…

The article goes over that. specifically how it wasn't the grade that was the issue, it was the speed of the course material. so once your son catches up, the problems will resurface because of the slow people. just now compounded by the social isolation and lack of physical development in comparison to peers.

Recess isn't socially isolated, class instruction time isn't particularly social, and a variety of classes are not IQ based.

One needs to select a learning environment that can provide skill developing challenge in both IQ-appropriate and socially-appropriate milieus. Note I didn't say "age appropriate", as that's not a real thing, it's a responsibility-abdicating proxy.

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

#543

Post by K0balt »

cogman10 wrote: post #512
leoedin wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear to everyone that teaching basic literacy - reading, writing, practical maths etc - is a huge societal benefit. Nobody is advocating for not doing that. What is maybe less clear is the benefit of extending formal academic education to 18 and beyond for everyone. If someone is not academically gifted, why make them waste years of their life struggling through an academic education. What's the…

> What is maybe less clear is the benefit of extending formal academic education to 18 and beyond for everyone. For a democratic society, I think there's a pretty big benefit in making the general population fairly well educated beyond just what it takes to make them proficient at a job. The point would be to make sure they could reasonably reason about the policies and politicians they are voting for or against. Now…

Reasoning and rational consideration of things is not easily introduced after about age 7. People brought up in a reactive environment will struggle and rebel against logical analysis, preferring “common sense” or emotion based decision making.

Reactive thinking is often pretty accurate, and people used to reactive thought think that their conclusions are “obvious”, so the idea that they need to also stand up to a first principles analysis undermines a fundamental aspect of their worldview.

If they haven’t been taught to see themselves and their environment in the third person by the time they are in kindergarten, it’s basically too late. It can be fixed, but it won’t likely be in school.

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

#544

Post by euroderf »

Terretta wrote: post #541
euroderf wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have had to go to private school because California does not skip grades even though it’s obvious the child doesn’t belong in the grade level for his age. Be careful what you wish for. Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell until I stayed for a second year of 6th. I think what you want for your kid is to skip N grades ahead in select subjects but otherwise stay in age peer group.

> Skipping 2nd grade led to bullying hell No it didn't. Not debating whether bullying happened, but your skip isn't what resulted in a bullying prone and bullying tolerating hellscape.

But it IS what put me into it. Duh.

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

#545

Post by mlyle »

phatskat wrote: post #537
mlyle wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 frien…

There's definitely technical/fancy tomfoolery. But I'm also just surprised in very low-tech ways.

I once had someone draw a very elaborate stick figure fight in CAD for an entire 74 minute period instead of the high priority project his teammates were waiting on.

It's tricky for me in the engineering project classes, because I'll often be very deeply involved with one group teaching a new task or skill. 90% of the time the other groups will make good progress, but the other 10% yields interesting surprises. I definitely am more careful to show up unexpectedly more and to carefully look at screens, not just to shrug when they look OK-ish from 15' away.

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

#546

Post by teachrdan »

Eumenes wrote: post #519
teachrdan wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are literally choosing to dismiss data that destroys your argument while providing none which supports it. Your opposition to teachers unions is clearly based on your emotions and ideology rather than any facts. Please do better when posting on HN.

correlation does not equal causation homie. a US news listicle with a method of ranking doesn't mean anything. i can find a list that has mass towards the middle or bottom depending on the bias of the ranking i share.

I’d love to see such a list! In the meantime your argument is convincing in direct proportion to the quantity of data you have provided :)

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

#547

Post by hydrolox »

jessepasley wrote: post #58
bilbo0s wrote: post #11

My unpopular take is that people, and definitely the government, would take gifted options more seriously if there weren’t so many kids who did nothing more than learn the multiplication table early being classified as gifted. You limit enrollment to only the extreme outliers and at that point there would be national security benefits to identifying these children. (Heck, I'd bet the federal government might even try…

Is that how gifted students are identified these days? When I went through the gifted program as a kid/teen, we had to take what was considered to be an IQ test at the time. Being far ahead in some skills in schools might be have been indicator but not sufficient to being admitted.

It's still IQ test, at least when I was in the program ~5-10 years ago. To be honest, though, there was still a clique of nerdy kids and "the rest" even within the program (which for me was 2 separate classes of kids, so for each grade in the whole school there were 2 classes worth of gifted kids.)

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

#548

Post by tstrimple »

hintymad wrote: post #111

Did anyone check the course material of the gifted programs? My honest assessment is that even students in a gifted class are not necessarily challenged. For instance, the math problems of 6th-grade gifted class on negative integers are something like "calculate -1 - (-2)". In contrast, an easiest problem when I was in the same grade would be something like "N is a negative even number, and K is a non-negative odd nu…

In my experiences with them, prior to high school they just amount to a few additional worksheets on top of existing assigned work. In elementary school, my girls were pulled out for about an hour a day to go to another room for their "advanced" classes. There was no advanced instruction. Just more math worksheets. It's not really until high school where you have real AP classes that involve actual teaching and not just isolation from the rest of the kids. My experience was much the same, but I actively didn't have friends so enjoyed the isolation at the cost of a few worksheets. They did nothing to actually help us "advance" though.

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

#549

Post by MarkusQ »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #145
MarkusQ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because somebody needs to keep things running for the rest of us? Seriously, we need all the bright people we can get, working on the tough problems and solving them. And we need even more basically competent people educated to keep what we have got figured out running smoothly. Life isn't some role playing game where everyone who wants to should get a turn being a surgeon or flying the jumbo jet. Competence actually…

The people that designed jumbo jets were people that went to Washington State University and UDub in the 60s. John Aaron saved Apollo 12 and 13 with a degree from Southwestern Oklahoma State. These are not people that were in “gifted programs” and they don’t fit what you perceive to be “gifted” (aka - able to get into one of 10 elite undergrad schools).

Sure they were. College has changed a lot, as has college enrollment; instead of the top 10%, colleges now take the top 40% or so, close to the fraction that graduated high school in the 1960s. Courses that used to be taught in high school are now taught in undergrad, and what used to be covered in undergrad is put off until grad school.

What we call "gifted" today was what we called "college bound" back then.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...

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

#550

Post by laidoffamazon »

MarkusQ wrote: post #549
laidoffamazon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that designed jumbo jets were people that went to Washington State University and UDub in the 60s. John Aaron saved Apollo 12 and 13 with a degree from Southwestern Oklahoma State. These are not people that were in “gifted programs” and they don’t fit what you perceive to be “gifted” (aka - able to get into one of 10 elite undergrad schools).

Sure they were. College has changed a lot, as has college enrollment; instead of the top 10%, colleges now take the top 40% or so, close to the fraction that graduated high school in the 1960s. Courses that used to be taught in high school are now taught in undergrad, and what used to be covered in undergrad is put off until grad school. What we call "gifted" today was what we called "college bound" back then. https:…

I went to a state school in the 2010s - which menial job do you think I should be doing due to my obvious lack of “giftedness”?
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