Main Paineframe posted:

I'm not saying that gifted classes should be eliminated (though I think they're another symptom of the broken system). I'm saying that people disproportionately focus on them. When I said "privileged minority", you discarded "minority" completely - along with the entire rest of my post - and spent your entire reply asserting that the <25% of people who can do 12th-grade level reading and math when they graduate from high school are the real victims of our educational system, and that making sure they're not bored is way more important than the fact that three-quarters of high school grads can't do math and half of them only have "basic" reading comprehension abilities. For some reason, any educational reform discussion gets swarmed by people who are way more concerned about the 9% of American students in gifted programs than the 14% of American high school grads who are functionally illiterate. Just look at the opening of this thread. Algebra I was being moved to high school because the vast majority of kids were failing it or barely scraping by with terrible grades in it, but the debate about it is dominated by "but what about the few students who didn't fail ", like it's not even a problem to have a weed-out class in loving middle school.


What do you think is the unique property of calculus that, unlike all other knowledge taught in the 13+ years of American schooling, causes kids to not give a poo poo about it?

There isn't one. It's up to the school, the curriculum, the teacher, and the teaching style to get students motivated. You weren't motivated because the educational system failed to get you motivated, which is just one aspect of the large structural problems with math education that Common Core is trying to fix (spoiler alert: it's going to fail, because the system is far too broken for incremental improvement).

If you're clever, you might notice that this applies to gifted students too! Just as the educational system is failing to keep the students that it's not suited to interested and motivated, it's also failing to keep the ones that it is suited to interested and motivated. Do you people really think the smart kids were the only ones who were ever bored or unmotivated in class, and that the only reason you weren't interested in school was because you were too smart to be entertained by the same things as the struggling plebes who were just having so much fun drowning under a morass of poorly-taught math?