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Obdicut posted:They might. Why not look into it and see? If you do, you'll see the pedagogy does indeed claim, as I have been saying, that teaching fellow students, as an advanced students, leads to good educational outcomes for those advanced students. As I look into it more, though, it turns out that common core encourages grouping advanced students together within the class more than it does having them teach other students. I think there's a right way and a wrong way to handle this concept, having seen it done very well and very poorly both. Without proper instruction in pedagogical techniques, there's some things amateur tutors just won't be able to get across to lower-performing students, especially if those students are missing certain fundamental concepts already, and it's an exercise in frustration for everyone to try. On the other hand, getting more advanced students to walk through their problem-solving process on certain questions in front of the class, for example, makes a lot of sense and I think it's helpful for everyone. Doing so certainly solidified my understanding of a lot of concepts, though this was typically in classes where everyone had a fairly consistent level of baseline knowledge.
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Sep 11, 2015 21:33
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Obdicut posted:I think you're vastly, vastly overestimating the benefit of having calculus 1 under your belt. It's one class. It's one class, it will probably be taught in a more competent fashion at the university level anyway, and, at least in my university, they offered the option to condense Calc I-III into two courses anyway if you felt like you could handle the workload, so assuming you were going to take all those courses anyway, you wouldn't be any further ahead having taken Calc I in high school (which I did, and it wouldn't have counted for university credit anyway). I am curious, though: how is having separate AP classes not an example of tracking? AP wasn't a big thing in Canada, so I'm not quite certain how it works, but it seems to fit the definition of tracking to a tee from what I've heard about it. I've also noticed, in this thread and others, that gifted, high-achieving and ambitious are used as synonyms for one another. That doesn't seem at all right from my experience in a gifted program; you better believe there were a bunch of people there that weren't high-achieving or ambitious, and many that were coded learning-disabled as well as gifted. If gifted classes are being used as a receptacle for all high-achieving students, I think it's disadvantageous to everyone involved.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:09
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computer parts posted:It's not a track because you can belong to some AP courses but not others. I have a friend who was big into AP Bio and Chem (and is now in med school) but had a more or less regular History and Physics class (and was in Pre-Cal her senior year). So, when people express opposition to tracking, it's only an all-or-nothing system that they have a problem with? That's good to know. I haven't seen a program at the high school level that was all-or-nothing, for whatever that's worth, and I think it would probably be a bad idea. What's considered the best practice for levels below high school, where classes will typically stick together (even if they have different teachers for different classes) for most or all of their classes? That's where I typically saw the most benefits for having a gifted program, versus one where classes are more or less composed of people with similar achievement levels, because at a younger age, you don't really know anything so the more important trait would seem to be a student's ability to absorb new material quickly.
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Sep 12, 2015 00:29
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Bast Relief posted:Tracking is bad for gifted kids too. Learning to interact with a diversity of other people is good for you. School isn't just about academics, it's also about socialization in an academic setting. Again: are you sure you've actually seen a gifted class operate before? All the ones I was in had roughly the same amount of disruptive students as normal classes, and some of them were far worse than normal classes in that regard. Many of the kids originally got tested precisely because they were the disruptive little shits in normal classes (sometimes being in GATE helped, often it did not). The people that worked hard, got good grades and never caused problems eventually ended up in IB; there was some overlap, but a lot less than you'd think. Saying that gifted programs are where high achievers should end up is like saying that low achievers, regardless of reason, should be put into special ed classes. It makes no sense. Honestly, it sounds like the administration of these programs is fundamentally flawed in most places, from the stories I hear, and if that's the case, that's the issue that should be fixed.
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Sep 13, 2015 14:16
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Solkanar512 posted:This is really loving lovely. All kids deserve access to an education broadly suited to their needs, and if it's "too much trouble" then its the adults running the system we should be looking at, not the students themselves. Not to mention, making gifted kids show up and be bored all day, with the tacit admission that they don't need to be there are aren't going to learn much, seems downright cruel.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:11
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Panzeh posted:Learning to show up at boring rear end places is actually an important life skill because you have to do that for most of your life. School doesn't need to be like an amusement park, don't get me wrong, but it seems insane to combine that with the admission that the boredom won't even be the least bit productive. Why not at least keep teaching kids new things at whatever pace they can comfortably handle, regardless of their specific level of ability? They're still going to have to learn to deal with boredom, but at least it will be productive boredom. If this is the attitude of the public school system, I can see why private schools are so popular (which only serves to further impoverish and destroy the public education system, of course).
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Sep 15, 2015 15:56
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Ernie Muppari posted:some people are just inherently intellectually inferior and Well, yes. Not everyone has equal ability with everything. Some people are physically inferior, some people are intellectually inferior, some people are shorter, etc. We might wish it were otherwise, but wishing doesn't make it so. We need to talk about how we can best accommodate people of all ability levels in all things, instead of just going "oh, well, he'll be alright no matter what, so let's just teach to the lowest common denominator." Why do people like you get so bitter about the idea of gifted classes, anyway? Is it based in some sort of childhood trauma where you felt excluded, or what?
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Sep 15, 2015 19:19
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Main Paineframe posted:Right now, only 25 percent of high school seniors are proficient in math; the question at hand should be "how should we improve the learning experience for that large majority of students", not "how can we use this data to further privilege the minority that is performing well". Are gifted classes really privileging those kids that much, though? They often cause "issues" in normal classes because they're bored, and a lot of the people who can coast through high school with no effort are hosed as soon as they encounter an actual challenge because they have no work ethic or study skills. Inasmuch as school is just as much about teaching "intangibles" as well as academics, gifted kids would be deprived of those important skills if there were no option for gifted classes available. I've seen someone go down that route, flunk out of university, and try to kill themselves while drunk and high on crack cocaine. I know other people who've faced the similar problem (completely crumbling at their first actual challenge) and gone on to commit suicide because of it. So, when you say that gifted classes are simply privileging an already-privileged minority, I'm going to say you don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. It's obvious that the current pedagogy is not working for the vast majority of students, but it's a complete non-sequitur to suggest that eliminating gifted classes would do even the tiniest bit to help. Those kids are still going to need to be in some class somewhere, after all.
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Sep 16, 2015 00:11
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Bast Relief posted:Holy poo poo what a lot of hot garbage. It doesn't "trump" what hopeless students do, it's almost the exact same thing. Fighting/bullying, skipping school, making the classroom environment nearly impossible to teach in effectively, getting drunk and high (often during class!), etc. The fact that the education system is badly failing students on the lower end should not be justification for letting them fail another group of students instead. Regardless of why kids aren't engaged with their education, they do some really destructive (and often self-destructive) poo poo. Since the curriculum is the same anyway, just accelerated, there's not even a good argument that it's a form of tracking (and, indeed, as a result, our gifted program had people entering and leaving every year), and since those children would take up space in another classroom anyway, it makes no sense to say it's an unfair use of resources. This opposition to gifted programs seems to come either from gifted programs that are being administered improperly and used as an exclusionary setting for high achievers, or out of pure spite, and neither of those seem to me to be a good reason to be against what is, in essence, a special education program. Surely everyone would be (very rightly) enraged if schools said, "gently caress it, anyone more than two standard deviations below the mean cannot be helped, we need to focus on the majority." Why does this all of a sudden change when you switch "below" with "above", especially considering that giftedness often presents with some form of learning disability? The education system has an obligation to meet the diverse needs of all students.
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Sep 16, 2015 15:02
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Main Paineframe posted: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? Is the bolded section referring to your conception of gifted students? Because, if so, you're incorrect. The school system is not geared towards gifted students in the slightest, which is why it's important to have specialized educational programming for them. At most, you can say that the school system is suited to high achievers, but you have yet to so much as acknowledge that there is far from a one-to-one correspondence between high academic achievement and giftedness. A lot of the people who ended up in my gifted program weren't tested because their teachers figured they were really smart; they were tested because they were causing significant problems, and often showed tremendous academic under-achievement. It's, I suppose, a happy accident that it turned out they were actually gifted instead of developmentally delayed and/or emotionally disturbed. Your assumption seems to be that gifted kids are already ahead of their peers, and that gifted programs exist only to put them further ahead, when this is far from the truth. You express a desire to help the students who feel hopeless and are under-achieving, and at risk of dropping out, without realizing that these two groups have a significant intersection. Consider, too, that just because gifted kids are able to learn faster, does not mean they do not require instruction. They don't pop out of the womb already knowing everything they need to know, and life is not some sort of RPG where they level up every year and automatically learn new things. The difference is the speed at which the curriculum can and should be presented, not the material itself -- this is why it's so important to ensure that these children remain engaged. If they do not, they will not learn the things they should know, and there's a risk that they will be one of the under-prepared, under-achieving high school graduates (or drop-outs) that you indeed profess to be more concerned with. This is a separate issue, too, from what grade level Algebra I is taught it; it's just that, in the course of this discussion, lots of people repeatedly talk about dismantling gifted programs as well, which is counter-productive.
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Sep 16, 2015 16:40
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Main Paineframe posted:You're working from a common, but fundamentally flawed assumption here: that the only reason "high-achieving" students perform well in school is because they're just plain smarter. The prevailing idea behind many modern educational reform movements, such as Common Core, is that this deceptively simple assumption is basically wrong, and originates from a flawed, incomplete understanding of education. Stop right there; this is precisely the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that gifted children are very often not high achieving, and high-achieving students are frequently not gifted -- this is precisely why I feel that gifted education programs are so important. High-achieving students, gifted or otherwise, are the group of students that we can afford to be the least concerned about; this is no way should mean that gifted children in general do not deserve the same level of instructional support as any other group. No matter how often and vehemently I state that my fundamental premise is based on the fact that "gifted" and "high-achieving" are not even close to synonymous, it seems your arguments are still based on the premise that they are. Surely, many children who are high-achieving have a very high work ethic and are merely of average intelligence, and some may be below average but particularly suited to the way information is currently presented. This has absolutely nothing to do with gifted programs, and I don't know why you continue to insist that it does. As for this: WhiskeyJuvenile posted:gifted kids can learn on their loving own jesus stop loving being a god damned baby and worry about how do we teach kids how to loving read by the time they're 18 This is not even close to correct. Like I said, a lot of the kids in the gifted program I was a part of were identified because of their abnormally low achievement, including (in some cases) sub-par literacy skills.
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Sep 16, 2015 18:35
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Main Paineframe posted:Well, sure, but were those kids actually gifted? Did they actually belong in the gifted program? Other people in this thread have already complained that the way students are selected for gifted programs are complete bullshit, and suggested that any sufficiently motivated white parent can get their child into one eventually if there's even the slightest oddity in their in-class behavior. So let's first answer the question "What is 'gifted'?" It's not my place to judge. If they were professionally assessed and they made the cut, I assume they deserved to be there. Given that there was no actual advantage to being in that program apart from receiving a different pedagogical approach, I can't see why parents or students would want to be in that program if it were not more appropriate for their learning. Indeed, many people ended up leaving the program in high school to take advantage of the lower standards in normal classes. The gifted classes were not actually differentiated on high school transcripts since it was not a provincially recognized distinction, so apart from benefitting from the instructional environment, there's really only disadvantages to be had from being in the gifted program. Could you fake your way in? Yes, probably. But the question remains: why would you?
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Sep 16, 2015 23:07
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Trabisnikof posted:On the other hand, if the response to a child completing a reading assignment early is to tell them "put your head down for the next 30 minutes" you're quickly turn a "gifted student" into a "troublemaker". This is so true. I attended class and even wrote exams drunk off my rear end, in high school and university, because "why the hell not?" I graduated high school with good enough grades to get into the university I was aiming for, and I then graduated from that university with about a 3.9 GPA. That's not a good thing. I was basically a loving alcoholic for the last 6-8 years of my schooling, out of pure boredom. The fact that I finally realized I should stop causing major poo poo around 10th grade in immaterial, the damage was already done. The thing everyone has to understand about gifted kids is that it's not all good; we are/were hosed in the head in a lot of ways, and I'm thankful I had a program where teachers, administrators, and other kids understood a good part of what was going on inside my head. There were times I considered self-harm (even if you don't consider my prodigious intake of liquor and tobacco to qualify in its own right), and, thank gently caress I made it through, but I might not have without the support of many excellent educators, some of whom have already passed on, but all of whom I owe my life. Now, do y'all understand why I'm so loving passionate about this? These educators literally saved my life, as far as I'm concerned. No one deserves to be deprived of that support. Thank god they were there for me, or I might well be nothing more than a stain being scrubbed off the pavement. It seriously pisses me off to see these programs being treated as some sort of frivolous afterthought. This "she'll be right" attitude about gifted students is loving sickening, knowing how close I've come to self-harm, and how some others who weren't lucky enough have literally killed themselves as a result. When you (not the post I've quoted; others in the thread) say that "gifted kids don't need support," I hope you know that blood is on your hands. This is not to say, of course, that other students aren't very poorly served by the education system. Many, if not most, students suffer, equally or more. This is far from an excuse to make one group suffer when it could be so easily fixed.
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Sep 17, 2015 06:09
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Why do you think that gifted programs are filled with middle class white kids? Mine wasn't. There were kids from poor families, kids with single parents, and kids that most definitely weren't white. It sounds like you were in a really lovely gifted program that was less about gifted education and more about the very thing you criticize -- giving a leg up to students who were already advantaged and performing well. That's a valid criticism, but what it means is that gifted programs need to be reformed to work properly, instead of ditching the idea altogether. Perhaps I was a little overdramatic in my last post -- I never actually considered suicide, but I suspect that if I had not had the support that I did, I would have. In high school and university, I did show up to class and exams drunk because otherwise it would just be "too easy." That was more a problem in university because of the easy access to alcohol (the drinking age being 18 up here); in high school I'd just ditch class more often than not. In my last year of university, I would routinely drink anywhere from 2-4 pints at lunch, just so I could get through my afternoon classes without soul-crushing boredom. The gifted classes were different. They weren't an unending torrent of pleasure by any means, but they weren't actively unpleasant either. I think it made a big, big difference. I don't think letting kids gently caress around aimlessly on Wikipedia is a valid substitute for that. This is why I get very upset when gifted programs are treated like some kind of useless frivolity, or some kind of handout to rich white folks. It made a big difference to me, and I hate to think that such an option is being taken away from kids who would benefit from it out of some bizarre notion of fairness. No kid deserves to feel like school is unrelentingly boring and hopeless for any reason. Whether it's because they're bored, or because they're struggling, or because they're being bullied, the results can all be the same. (EDIT: This is why I actually support the move which was the original topic of this thread; I simply disagree with the common assertion that we shouldn't consider gifted education until all other issues are fixed. Gifted education is important for exactly the same reason why the curriculum reform originally under discussion is important) I appreciate your concerns about the very imprecise definition of gifted at a legislative level, and the way in which the system can be gamed by parents who are interested in doing so. Those problems should be fixed by actually fixing those problems, instead of taking a flawed system and disposing of it entirely. PT6A fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 16:06
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Main Paineframe posted:In the US, "giving a leg up to students who are already advantaged and performing well" is the purpose of gifted programs; as I pointed out, while the definition of "gifted" varies tremendously, it's usually accepted to mean "high-performing or with a high aptitude for learning", a definition shared by the National Association for Gifted Students. That's part of why I'm making such a big point of the vagueness of the word "gifted" - because I have no idea what your definition of "gifted" means, it clearly doesn't match the most widely accepted meaning in the US (where the full term is "gifted and talented"), and you have yet to actually tell us what you think "gifted" means. I don't know what it's like up in Canada or whatever you are, but I'm talking the US only, and plenty of terms mean different things in Canadian than they do in I think the most productive definition is the one I bolded, and I think the "high-performing" bit is irrelevant and actually harmful to the concept of gifted education. That's what's allowing for gifted programs to be used as a segregationist run-around, and it's both morally wrong and detrimental to gifted children themselves. In a properly-administered gifted program, one would see children who got in merely for being high-performing eventually become average, before ultimately falling behind the children who got in for having a high aptitude for learning. That's how a gifted program ought to work, and indeed in the program I was in, exactly that sort of attrition could actually be observed. Further, a gifted education program should not require advanced knowledge in the first place. A proper gifted program should be able to cater to a student who lacks fundamental skills or knowledge, but does have the high aptitude for learning, and the entrance process should be able to identify those students. This is one of the reasons why testing based on things like vocabulary is nonsense. I'm not arguing that the system as it exists doesn't have severe problems, I'm saying that those problems are in no way related to the fundamental mission of gifted education, and it is better to work on fixing those problems than throwing the baby out with the bathwater and gutting gifted programs entirely.
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Sep 17, 2015 17:49
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Obdicut posted:You are not going to be able to escape structural inequality. This argument can be applied to anything ever. Just because it's impossible to avoid structural inequality entirely shouldn't mean that you simply eliminate gifted classes entirely. Why not just act to minimize inequality, and administer the program in such a way that it's as good as possible even if it's not perfect? The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. It's clear that improvements can and should be made, even if it's not possible to create the ideal gifted program. The program I described was the one that I was in, so it can be done, in a public school no less! Is this going to be another "this can't possibly work in America because reasons" even as it's actually being done elsewhere in the world?
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Sep 17, 2015 19:43
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Effectronica posted:Gifted programs reinforce structural inequality, however, because getting admitted is correlated with status more than anything and they are about establishing status. See, for example, the argument earlier in the thread that you need to have completed Calc 1 before your freshman year of college begins to be able to get a high-quality engineering or physics degree. If this was the case, then gifted programs would create this hierarchy where only people in them can gain those degrees. They definitely create a weaker hierarchy where people in these programs are much more successful in those degrees. Except a properly administered gifted program shouldn't have that problem, because there's no particular reason to teach a different curriculum that's otherwise inaccessible to "normal" students. That just creates more work for very little benefit. In my program, we followed the same curriculum as everyone else, and received the same credits; the only difference was the demands of the coursework and the rate at which new material was presented. If anything, taking the GATE version of those courses was a disadvantage for admissions, because the class was more challenging. I agree 100% that giving students in the gifted program some kind of "advantage" as a result is foolish policy. The only advantage I remember was not being bored out of my goddamn skull all day. The very point of it is to make things more difficult, in a sense, so that the kids remain engaged and actually learn study skills that they will eventually need. Apart from counterproductive egotism, I don't see what would be the gain of having a non-gifted child in a gifted program. It really sounds like most, if not all, gifted programs in the US are horribly, horribly run, and it seems like most of what's being described here isn't really about how best to teach gifted kids. I guess I got very lucky that my program was well-run and not just some political poo poo-show. PT6A fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 20:51
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Main Paineframe posted:Actually, you've got it exactly backwards. "Aptitude for learning", being literally impossible to measure reliably and objectively, is the condition that turns gifted programs into a segregationist's dream. School performance, while still tilted incredibly unfavorably against minority students, is at least a basically objective standard. Aptitude, being essentially unmeasurable, is the subjective element that transforms gifted programs from a simple magnification of the education system's problems into a beast all their own. For that to work, the person or organization doing the testing would have to be complicit in using the program to achieve those ends, though. This would probably count as some variety of professional ethics violation, so I find it difficult to believe that it would be achievable on a large scale. quote:If new material is presented faster, and the coursework is demanding and more in-depth, then how do you not end up learning more than the kids in the normal classes? The basic range of material may be the same, but you're covering more information, one way or another. No, you don't get extra credits for it, but that's not the point - there's potential to learn more, for years and years (in the US, many kids are shunted into gifted programs as early as kindergarden), and the difference in teaching coverage over the course of their schooling will make itself felt ten years down the road in the form of higher standardized test grades and more recommendations for honors classes and other such programs. So, the alternative should be that kids who learn faster should simply sit there and be bored, forbidden from learning things that might give them an advantage somewhere down the line? That's loving ridiculous, you know that, right? You're talking about making kids suffer, when it would be easy to prevent that suffering, just to maintain some notion of equality. That's reprehensible, and I'm glad the people in my school district had no such ridiculous notions.
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Sep 17, 2015 21:25
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computer parts posted:I think he's wondering why the only people getting a customized education are the ones that already excel in the current system. And you're quite correct that that's a bad thing. Removing that from the children currently receiving it would be a bad thing; instead, we should be discussing how we can provide a better, more appropriate education for all children. This is like when people complain about unionized employees getting high salaries and benefits and whatnot like it's a bad thing. No, those are things that all workers should have, not something to be stripped away from the few who have it.
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Sep 17, 2015 22:12
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Solkanar512 posted:Indeed, this issue keeps being treated like a zero-sum game when instead we should be looking towards proper funding, property tax equalization, not insisting that schools be responsible for solving poverty, systemic racism and so on. The thing is, it doesn't even necessarily take that much in the way of extra resources. These students would be entitled to receive a public education regardless of how it's delivered. You needn't hire extra teachers, or build extra facilities or anything of that nature -- you only need to have a teacher who is willing to present the same information in a slightly different way. It seems like a large part of the objections are just that they don't want anyone to get "further ahead," despite the fact that gifted students often struggle when they aren't in gifted programs. Main Paineframe posted:No it wouldn't. The lack of any large scale conspiracy is exactly what makes institutional racism so difficult to combat - everybody at every level of the system insists that they're not racist in the slightest, but when you gather the statistics and add everything up, it emerges that a large percentage of subjective decisions made by the many individuals in the system were biased against minorities! I would use a comprehensive IQ test designed and administered by a professional, ideally one not employed directly by the school in question. I would try to design such a test around a variety of "puzzles" instead of knowledge. These tests aren't perfect, but they're a drat sight better than basing decisions on prior academic achievement or standardized test results, which are deeply flawed and have their own biases, as has already been discussed.
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Sep 17, 2015 23:08
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Ytlaya posted:Um, the status quo of separating gifted kids from the rest of the student population also causes harm. You (and a number of other posters in this thread) seem to only be looking at things from the perspective of a gifted child; probably because that's the only experience you personally have. Non-gifted (for lack of a better term) students benefit greatly from being placed in classes with more gifted students and suffer from being relegated to inferior classes. I agree with your premise to a certain point. Lower-achieving students clearly benefit, in certain situations, from being in classes with higher-achieving students; however, this is only the case with gifted students if those gifted students are high achievers, and it doesn't stop being true when the high achievers are simply students with an average aptitude but a great work ethic. Secondly, this is only the case when there's actual interaction between the students. When the same basic concept is being covered for the umpteenth time by the teacher, the students who learn faster are sitting there bored off their asses, and the other students are deriving no benefit either at that point. quote:Ideally it would be possible to provide a high quality education to all students in a way that doesn't result in schools where all the gifted classes mostly consist of well off white/asian kids (which absolutely is currently the case; children in well off families generally perform better in school for a number of reasons*). Maybe this is possible, and I don't feel equipped to argue that it isn't possible. I just find that a number of posters in this thread seem to be concerned only with gifted children, despite them only making up a tiny portion of students (again, this is likely because you were a gifted child yourself and, like most people, sympathize more with people like yourself). I can empathize with students who struggle with school, and do not learn as quickly as I did/do, but I have no idea what that's like and I don't know what can or should be done to alleviate that problem. Certainly something should be done, but I don't know what. Treating gifted children as beasts of burden who ought to suffer in order that the other students do better, I don't think is a workable solution. If I have to put up with misery in order to do something for other people, that's basically a job, and I should be getting paid (or some other form of benefit). A big problem, I think, is that students are compelled to attend school, and compelled to attend every class.
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Sep 18, 2015 03:03
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wiregrind posted:Removing them would only pass the hierarchy to private schools, making a deeper cut in structural inequality. The other issue is that private schools really do very little to address the need for gifted education. They may have a better instructional environment in some regards, but they also have a vested interest in making sure their students get the highest possible grades. Ultimately, that's not compatible with providing gifted students the challenge that will make them better students and keep them engaged. Also, as I've pointed out several times, giftedness in one area is surprisingly often correlated with some form of learning disability, and private schools are often not equipped or willing to handle those special needs either. I ended up going to a gifted program in a public school after my parents investigated any number of private schools, even after I'd written entrance exams for some of them, because it offered the best education. Public education can be a wonderful thing when it's done right, and we really owe it to students of all abilities to make sure that public school really does offer the best available education. It's not some sort of fever dream that it could happen, either; public schools can and do offer a great education in a lot of cases. What we need to do is to figure out how to improve it even further, and make sure that all students are well-served by it. Private schools are, in my view, fundamentally incompatible with that mission, and that's one of the reasons I remain very opposed to the concept of private education, and beyond that, the expansion of private education and charter schools.
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Sep 18, 2015 05:32
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Higsian posted:In enforcing equality you'd push down on the higher performing students. Except the gifted classes, as I've said several times, are not just about giving further advantages to high-achieving kids, but just as often about providing an appropriate educational environment for under-achieving kids, some of whom may have some form of learning disability in addition to being coded as gifted. Honestly, it seems like most of the arguments being presented against gifted education would be better applied against honours programs or AP-style programs. Main Paineframe posted:Fix the classes. The reason most kids aren't learning fast isn't because they're less capable of learning, it's because the school is presenting lessons in a way that is difficult for people to quickly learn. I want to make sure I understand you correctly: is it your claim that, given some ideal, perfect instruction, all students would be able to learn at the same rate as the most intelligent person in any given group of people? That seems like nonsense. That's like saying, given enough time, I could train myself to be a competitive sprinter. I can certainly improve, but I'm always going to be poo poo because, guess what, that's how I was born. Yeah, it loving sucks that people don't all have the same natural abilities; having been born with cerebral palsy, I know that really, really well. That doesn't mean we can change that basic fact by trying extremely hard to ignore it.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:05
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twodot posted:How does someone read "most" and interpret that as any sort of claim about all? I don't even care who is right, this is absurd. Gifted education is hardly about "most," though. It's explicitly about fairly extreme outliers. The program I was in required results on a comprehensive and professionally-administered test of two standard deviations above the mean or higher; roughly, the top 5%. What applies to "most" kids is already completely irrelevant, because we're talking about approximately 1-2 kids per average class (this is why not every school has or should have a gifted program; it's simply not feasible). Do you think it's feasible, even with ideal instruction, to get even a majority of people performing at that level? I don't think it is, but if someone can find a way to do so, it would be an huge boon for society and humanity itself.
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Sep 20, 2015 18:59
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JeffersonClay posted:Education isn't about equality, it's about equity. Meaning everybody gets what they need to allow them to grow as much as possible in the educational environment. For kids with severe disabilities, that might mean an alternate curriculum, smaller classes and additional supports like highly structured behavior management. Kids with less severe disabilities might get a range of services to allow them to succeed in a traditional classroom environment, like testing accommodations or additional adult support. For gifted kids it might look like enrichment activities or classes. Very nicely put!
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Sep 20, 2015 22:36
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Higsian posted:You mean curving on a school basis? I'm not morally opposed to it, though I'd want to see some analysis and experimentation before I'd be cool with it being implemented. Yes. At-risk students should be identified and provided appropriate educational programming regardless of why they might be at-risk or need counselling. I'm merely saying that being gifted should not itself be used as a reason to deny this support. I agree very strongly with your point about self-teaching: it's an unbelievably important skill. Still, this should be part of a gifted program. Leaving gifted students to gently caress around on Wikipedia is not the same as insisting that they go above and beyond, in a structured but still self-taught fashion, and evaluating the results. One of the criteria of courses in the gifted program I was a part of was that students were required to do exactly that. In most courses, we would be required to propose a topic for further study, within certain constraints (that it had to be related to the existing curriculum), and then we would be evaluated on the results. In that sense, we had impressive leeway, but it was by no means optional. I think I learned a lot from those projects. On the other hand, simply covering more material at the same level of detail would have been minimally beneficial. There's a right way and a wrong way to administer these gifted programs, and it's clear that many programs are very committed to going with the wrong way (which is ultimately easier on instructors). It is crucial that existing bad programs be reformed, as well as ensuring that gifted education continues to be supported.
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Sep 20, 2015 23:57
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Effectronica posted:The thing that "gifted" students most need to learn is not compatible with pedagogy as it is traditionally practiced, and there are some major, major ethical issues with implementing it institutionally. But for a lot of people, this is a cultural issue rather than a policy issue, so the limitations of education don't matter. And what is it that you think gifted students most need to learn? It's difficult to respond to your post unless you tell us, as I am unable to read your mind, and I assume others are as well.
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Sep 21, 2015 00:41
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Shakugan posted:One needs to be careful with this; intelligence or ability isn't the same thing as knowledge. A gifted student can't know what they don't know. It's very easy for students to self-learn terrible habits, or miss out on critical fundamentals, or allocate their time poorly etc etc. Absolutely. The support must be there, and that's exactly what a gifted program should provide. This is also why treating gifted students as being uniformly high-achieving is a bad thing. Also, you absolutely must have teachers that understand the role of gifted education and the needs of gifted students; using teachers that are used to teaching AP and honors programs can be incredibly counter-productive.
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Sep 21, 2015 01:10
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Main Paineframe posted:I don't know why you're still having trouble with this since I've described it to you specifically at least three times, but sure, I'll explain it again to you. Only a quickie this time, though. I agree that there's a big problem with the way the system currently works, regarding methods of instruction being particularly unsuited to a large number of learners. That's not something I've argued with. I think those improvements absolutely need to be made, and it would help a lot of students learn a lot more. It's very obvious that the levels of under-performance currently seen in most, if not all, school districts cannot be explained away as "the kids are stupid." I agree 100% with this. As I've pointed out several times, one group that is being failed is gifted children who are underperforming in standard classes, but we can ignore that at this point as it's not particularly germane to the point I'm trying to make right now. Let's presume we fix this problem, and instructional methods are changed to eliminate the problems you mention with regard to instructional style (something I think very much should happen) and everyone's suddenly performing up to 100% of their natural ability. I'm not sure exactly how this should be accomplished, but again that's not important to the point I'm trying to make. You're still going to have the top 5% of students, and the bottom 5% of students, and they're still going to benefit (and they deserve to have) some form of alternative educational programming that addresses their specific needs. What do you do then? I think that gifted education can and should be a part of the wide-reaching educational reforms you're proposing, and I see no reason why it can't be. Why do you think that gifted education is incompatible with the changes you would like to see in the educational system?
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Sep 22, 2015 14:42
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silence_kit posted:I don't know, in my experience, the AP exam is much easier than the college class. I got a 5 on the AP Calc test, and was recommended by my advisor to retake the class in college, and I learned a lot when retaking the college class. You can get a 5 on the AP Calc test without having any sort of intuition about calculus, and only having memorized the derivative and anti-derivative formulas. I took calculus in high school, but not as part of AP as it wasn't offered at my high school, and I would agree with this entirely. The coverage of the same material at the university level was sufficiently more in-depth that I couldn't, for example, simply skip class and expect to still do well. Trying to replace university-level courses with high school approximations seems like a very counter-productive idea, although I understand why it's so popular with tuitions being right out of control in the US.
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Sep 22, 2015 20:55
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blah_blah posted:The continuum of difficulty is something like: Makes sense. All I know is that there's no way I would've been able to handle the material in my later courses that actually required calculus, without the extra stuff I learned in university, and CompSci is not particularly calculus-heavy compared to some other majors.
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Sep 22, 2015 21:35
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Effectronica posted:They need to learn how to deal with failure, without being able to shrug it off as them "not being good at something". Since a large part of teaching is about establishing trust between teacher and student, it's hard to see how this can be ethically systematized, no matter the practical issues with doing it. Okay, I completely agree with this. This is exactly why I think gifted children need to be pushed to their limits, and, in some cases, beyond them. I don't think everything needs to be completely systematic in education, I think it's up to the teachers to do their job properly and figure out how to push the child in question toward, but also through, struggles. Standardized systems, even ones like IB and AP, are not particularly effective in that, and I think it can done with equal effectiveness with a lesser degree of curriculum differentiation. Out of curiosity, what do you feel the ethical issues are with such a system?
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Sep 23, 2015 01:39
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Effectronica posted:It breaches trust between teacher and student, not to mention the more general ethical ambiguity of tailoring it to involve the kid's self-image so that they can't shake it off as just being something they don't like. Granted, it's towards a good end, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to do that to a kid. How does it breach trust between teacher and student (unless you're talking about arbitrarily telling a student they've failed when they haven't, or setting them an impossible task)? Some of my best learning experiences were basically getting my rear end handed to me, in subjects I liked and was decent in, by other people; some were my age, some were older. The teachers that really pushed me were the ones I respected. Kids, even gifted ones, are still only kids; they can be pushed to the edge of their intellect fairly easily, and it's not wrong to do so.
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Sep 23, 2015 01:59
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A big flaming stink posted:not sure gifted students have laws like IDEA mandating certain standards. I've certainly never heard of an IEP for a "gifted" student I'm not sure about whether it's mandated as such, least of all in the US, but all the students in my gifted program had an IEP. Why wouldn't they? I'm starting to think that 99% of the opposition to gifted programs is stemming from the fact that 99% of them appear to be pure, unadulterated poo poo.
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Sep 23, 2015 14:57
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A big flaming stink posted:oh cool, where do you teach again? i'm still in school for teaching, but it does seem like IEP is gonna be a huge focus for us even if we don't concentrate as special educators My only experience is as a student, but this was in Calgary (the public board, to be precise; I'm not sure if the separate board has a gifted program or not). They really outdid themselves, apparently. Before that, the usual solution to dealing with me in every other school I attended was "bump him up a grade, and maybe two or three in math" which was really not a good idea. I'm surprised and dismayed to see that gifted education is being done so shoddily in other systems.
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Sep 26, 2015 00:13
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