My Dad was all for doing what he could to enrich my education, since he grew up in a very non-intellectual household. Grandpa was a businessman with no college education. One of the things he liked about my Mom's family was that Granddad was an historian.
He was always very proud of having a bright daughter, and he liked ot call me brainy, though I've always hated that term. I did a coupel of summers doing homestays in France, but I never went to any of these programs. Dad thought that the term "gifted and talented" was kind of offensive. I also think that tehre was a kind of weird snobbery involved. He thought that they reflected a weird sort of middle-class striving, and he wasn't interested in that.
Also, my childhood was aggressively unprogrammed, because my father hated all of the people who over-scheduled their children. I understood his point, but I would have liked to have someone sign me up for piano lessons. I think that part of his criticism was that there seemto be a whole lot of people who never listen to music who sign their kids up for music lessons, because that's what middle-class people do. He didn't want to push me to do things that I didn't want to do. I kind of resented having to be so self-directed. I sort of felt that since nobody was pushing me to do things that I could never relax and slack off. Being self-directed meant that I had to be teh grown-up, because nobody else was going to make sure that I did my best etc. Weird, I know.
I did go to a very good girls school which was selective and very academically oriented. Extra academic enrichment probably wasn't necessary.
I really felt there was nothing but benefit from it, but that's probably because I went to schools where the entire place is supposedly selected for intelligence (at least since middle school).
When you're around a bunch of other kids like that, there's no real stigma of being a nerd just for being smart. To be ostracized as a nerd, you have to be really nerdy, not just really smart. And even then, you'll meet other people with the same interests because you're at a big nerd jamboree.
They didn't go in for any singling out of the 'gifted and talented' at my school. And there was no possibility of skipping a grade even where the work was absurdly easy (and for me that was pretty much always the case right through until university).
Which was, in retrospect, cool. I am skeptical about the value of singling kids out for special attention in that way, mostly.
Here in North Carolina, they keep changing the name of the program. It was GT when I went through grade school, then it was IG (intellectually gifted), on the idea that everybody has some sort of gift or talent. But then I guess that seemed too hoity-toity or something, because now it's AG (academically gifted). I think there was another one in there somewhere as well.
He thought that they reflected a weird sort of middle-class striving, and he wasn't interested in that.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my parents shared that attitude.
Also, as I mentioned in the other thread, my Dad has always thought that being smart/clever is nothing to be particularly proud of and that singling the smart out for special treatment is stupid. I have quite a bit of sympathy with his view.
singling the smart out for special treatment is stupid
I think you're missing the point, McGrattan. It isn't so much special treatment as it is a class that moves faster, so that the kids who can absorb the material easily don't have to move at the same speed as the median student. That isn't stupid, it's the only way to keep your top students at all interested.
McGrattan, it's not that you single them out because being smart is something to be proud of. You single them out because they can't possibly be expected to move at the same pace as the rest of the class, or they'll be bored out of their minds and start acting up (which I did until they started giving me harder stuff to do).
There's no reason that the smartest kids, the ones who should enjoy school the most, should have to enjoy it the least because they're painfully disinterested.
9: But shouldn't the smart people recieve more advanced education? Saying they don't deserve special education just because they're smart is like saying that there should be no selection for school sports teams. I like the idea of specializing education to try get more out of everyone's intellects.
Plus, a big thing for me is the ability of really good publicly-funded magnet schools to help the poor. Since it seems like a complete impossibility to get schools in poor districts properly funded through redistribution, we should at least give the intelligent kids from everywhere the chance to attend a top-quality school.
Typically, in the Scottish system a given class will have a range of ability levels and they will be given different work depending on ability.
At high-school, at the end of the 2nd year, classes are usually split by rough ability level but on a subject-by-subject basis.
It's not that there's no streaming or differential allocation of work, it's that one group of kids doesn't get a special label and singled out as 'gifted'. It's the latter that's a problem. Not the basic concept of giving different kids different work.
10 actually gets at my issue with the whole thing really. It wasn't the moving-faster part that I had a problem with -- that was fine and even insufficient -- it was the "special treatment" part of it, which I'm not sure was as much the school system as society -- I got treated well by the school system because I was a good student, don't really have a problem with that, but there was this perception around being a "gifted student" that was bogus.
I'm just calling it "the Gifted and Talented phenomenon" because it manifested itself by my being put in gifted programs and such like.
9: Yes, but from opposite ends. My Mom's family was upper-middle class. I think that Dad valued the kind of upper-class sense of security--not mere economic security, but being secure in who you were. It's the Yankees who drive their Volvo into the ground and don't worry whether their shirt has some designer label on it. Old money Bostonians didn't have white silk scarves; they were yellow-ish, because they were so old. My father was aggressively anti-label. Clothes belong to the wearer, not the designer. Your own monogram was okay, but a Polo label was just tacky.
It's the difference between David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher. If they're not utterly careless people, toff do have certain virtues. People who aren't too worried about impressing other people, because they know that they're position is secure, can be much kinder and more considerate. They're often not, but sometimes they are.
And yet, in Dad's case, this was a kind of striving, because that's not how he grew up. He chose it when he married my mother.
In California in the 70s the program was called MGM - Mentally Gifted minors. The assumption was that we were creative, so we spent an hour a day in art class. Huge waste of time.
17: Ouch, you should've gone to U of I, since that's where like half the people from my school went. No pariahhood there, from what I heard. Admittedly, being a big engineering and comp. sci. school could have something to do with that.
And Matt, aren't the smarter kids in the Scottish system being singled out by being given different work? What did you think of the old grammar school system?
Yes, that was my point too. Giving kids academic work tailored to their abilities is one thing. To single them out, label them as 'special or gifted' and seperate them from their less 'talented' peers is another.
I think the basic dispute here of not one of concept, but of nomenclature. And that makes sense. Perhaps just calling it the "accelerated track" or some such would be preferable.
The grammar school system never existed in Scotland. Scotland 's state education sector has always been comprehensive. And, funnily enough, Scotland has one of the highest levels of university graduation per capita, in the world.
The key thing about streaming in the latter stages of secondary school education was that it was done on a subject by subject basis. It was quite possible for someone to be in a 'top' class for maths but a lower class for English, and so on. There wasn't a group of kids singled out as different from the rest.
I only went to publci school for two years, and then I went to a selective girls school. Pretty much everyone there was pretty smart. I don't think you could get away with having a gifted and talented program in Brookline public schools. Too many of the parents have Ph.d.'s; they'd all object if their kids weren't included.
In the Ontario of the early sixties, underachiever was the term. But the program was terrific, and was located in a small, underutilized school, so we were more-or-less off by ourselves. We emmigrated towards the end of my 6th grade — Canadians say Grade 6 — but I found on visits that the class was still mostly together at least through middle school. I bet that was great for them, not least socially.
My daughter is now in a selective high school, where she is very happy and successful, but she did her middle school at our local. My son has gone to a very selective middle school program and is now entering 8th. The difference in the fondness and trust the kids, both boys and girls, have for one another in the program, being with others like themselves, able to be themselves, is nothing short of a revelation.
In my county, there was only a real "GT" program for the two years of middle school, and even then it wasn't a whole separate program. It was the equivalent of honors classes in high school, and was specific to each subject--you could be in GT english and regular math at the same time.
In elementary school, there wasn't any separation of students, or even much in the way of differentiated work. In math class during 5th and 6th grade, 2 other kids and myself got different homework and were mostly left on our own in the corner to learn it ourselves, with the teacher helping out if we had specific questions. But this was an ad-hoc sort of thing run by the individual teachers, not some overall program.
In high school we had regular/honors/AP, and you could move levels if you did well (or poorly). There wasn't really a formal tracking program that you needed to get on in third grade or anything.
When I was in grade school all of the gifted kids from across the district attended a special school one day a week, called GATE. It was kind of stigmatizing but super-fun so I didn't mind. The rest of my classes were really boring so I spent all week looking forward to Wednesdays. When I was in sixth grade, the school levy failed and the district cut all special programs like gifted education. Without that class to look forward to, sixth grade was painfully boring.
In junior high, gifted education was a separate one-period class. I was the only girl in the program in my grade - it was me and like 20 guys. (A foreshadowing of things to come, I suppose.) I'm surprised the selection criteria went by unchallenged by the parents given that disparity.
I went through several variations of these programs, as I was in a grade school they experimented on. I can't say it really helped; it was a bit less boring but had other problems, as noted above. It certainly didn't `fix' school for me, as I dropped out after the 10th grade. I don't expect that had too much to do with the gifted/challenge/whatever programs
BG, it seems really weird that Brookline doesn't have a gifted program to me. The professor's kids seems like a perfect reason to have one. There's a big magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia and that's full of diplomats and high-level goverment types who are also pretty brilliant. Hell, NYC has Stuyvesant and you can't really argue that town is full of mediocrity. Gifted programs in those sorts of places are actually the most amazing ones, because you can actually get a really top group of kids together by the high school years, not just some "top 5%" bullshit.
In the Scottish system, certainly at primary school level, there was a systematic attempt to provide differentiated work.
Maths books -- produced by the Scottish Primary Mathematics Group -- were colour coded and kids would start on one and then work through them moving through the colours to harder stuff as and when they were ready. Kids who were quick would shoot through them quickly, other kids would move at their own pace.
Attached to the system were various additional books of extra work to fill gaps when some kids were way ahead, work-cards and projects, and so on.
It wasn't perfect but there was a systematic attempt to combine work that suited the level of individual kids while keeping kids of all ability levels integrated in the same classroom.
I have to admit, I'm still sceptical about the separation aspect of these programs. Why would having kids educated apart from the majority of their peers be a desirable thing?
These days it seems like enrollment in gifted or upper track courses is less a function of the kid's ability and more a function of how pushy the parents are.
I suspect an actual program of accelerated classes - whatever it's called - is better than skipping a grade individually and ending up in normal paced classes one grade up.
not sure if it's good for society, but it's good for those able to take advantage, or was for me. so if you're considering whether the mini-breaths ought to do so, I think yes.
31: Yes, but Brookline is liberal in a way that Fairfax County, Virginia simply isn't. They would probably object on the grounds that it wasn't egalitarian enough or equitable. (No, that's probably not really fair.) It is, however, a very liberal place, and I think that that changes teh dynamic somewhat.
32: Well, it's good that they're at least trying to keep things flexible for those who are faster or slower, but it still seems kind of misguided to me to keep all the kids in the same class. What about the kid who could do algebra easily in 6th grade? The one who is learning rigorous biology in middle school? There's no real way to accomodate people who are working at entirely different levels in the same classroom without some kids struggling and others stagnating.
Plus, I really liked the social dynamic of a completely academically selected school. As I said, there was no real stigma to being a nerd and it was almost cool to be smarter than everyone else. Everything was just more relaxed without the jocks/brains/popular kids tension.
Well, it's a compromise, I suppose. I can't say it bothers me a great deal if some kids are moving a bit slower than they'd like. Unless they're going to head off to University at 13 there's always going to be a period of stagnation for kids who are that bright.
I think the benefits of a fully comprehensive system with no selection and with, as much as possible, fully integrated classes far outweigh the benefits of selection and seperated programs to the minority of kids who can benefit from them.
I genuinely don't think it's healthy for the smart kids to be off in their smart-ghetto away from their 'inferiors'.
Well, I can tell you that the benefits for the smarter kids who get sent off are definitely worth it. There's the social benefits I mentioned earlier, plus you really get to be pushed by meeting other kids as smart or smarter than you. It helps get rid of the super-annoying "big fish in a small pond" syndrome as early as possible, and you really do think better when you have that many people to push you and bounce ideas off of. It really is the same principle as in think tanks or research universities, only on a lower level.
However, if there are benefits for the rest of the kids to keep the occasional smart person in the standard classroom, I can see that changing matters. I've just yet to see what the real benefits of a very mixed skill-level classroom are.
This wasn't my experience at all. I saw a bit of it at high school but the people picked on weren't picked on for being smart. They were picked on for being either i) socially awkard and geeky or ii) arrogant little shits. Being picked on for being socially awkward and geeky is tragic, of course, but it wasn't my experience that simply being smart was enough to make you a particular target.
Separating a smart kid out from a normally-paced classroom - which happened to me occasionally - means that one's excess intellectual energy can go toward legitimate subjects, rather than, say, blowing shit up in a really cool way, or exploring that interesting world of pharmaceuticals.
The bit about "smart ghettoes" is actually pretty on the nose, as far as it goes. But I think it misses the larger context of high school as not only an educational experience but a social one as well. Extracurricular activities can be a very powerful mechanism for bringing different types of people together -- service clubs, social clubs, sports, band, etc. -- and help break down the walls of the "smart ghettoes" about which the original commenter was concerned.
And since we're all telling a bit of our personal stories, I spent the first six years in parochial schools with no concept that anything like these programs existed. My first year in public schools was in the seventh grade, and the school administrators spent the first few weeks trying to figure where I needed to be. Eventually, I got sorted into the GT/AG classes, where I stayed until Advanced Placement became available.
My own personal experience was almost uniformly positive, and that experience clearly colors my opinion of the wisdom of such classes from a public policy perspective. Simply put, junior high and high school can be very scary places for bright children, and GT/AG classes are places which offer such kids a place where it's safe to be smart. That kind of safe harbor has immense value. Counterbalanced against that value is, of course, the cost associated with designating certain children in a school system as "gifted" or "advanced," but I think that the positives of such classes clearly outweigh the negatives.
But like I said, my opinion is obviously colored by my own experience, so take it for what it's worth.
Matt, I see your point, and the arguments your making definitely were being made when I was an Education major (during my first attempt at college). It's a debate that's being had amongst the education professionals, to be sure. That said, I think the benefits outweigh the negatives, and I think it's also worth noting that in none of the programs I was in, whether as student, observer or teacher, were the kids wholly separated, unless it was a magnet school. Most programs arrange accelerated core classes (lit, math, sometimes history, sometimes science) and all electives, foreign language, etc., are integrated. There were no accelerated band or drama or phys. ed. or foreign language courses in my school, so only a minority portion of my day was spent separated out.
I was already sick of being resented by my fellow-monsters, so when they decided to send me home with the sign-up papers for what they called TAG, I "forgot" to give them to my parents. They found them eventually and put the kibosh on my attempt at avoiding that extra little bit of ostracism.
In the end, I don't think that it would have mattered at all, though. I was weird no matter what cabinet the school district put my file into.
How big are the classes in a typical Scottish school, Matt? I have trouble imagining a teacher doing a good job of teaching at different levels in a large class like the ones in my grade school.
The nuns at my grade school were more concerned with making sure my freakishly high test scores didn't give me a swelled head than with creating academic challenges. Of course, we weren't given our test results, so I couldn't figure out why they were being so mean to me. I decided not to take notes anymore but instead spend the school day drawing horses and getting Bs. And that's how I became an artist.
From 2nd through 8th grade I was in the GATE program in AZ, and it was an actual full-time separate classroom for the smarties located inside a regular school. We were bussed in. In the younger grades I encountered quite a bit of hostility from the kids not in our classroom, say on the playground, but within our class it was mostly a good experience. My gifted high school worked much the same way, sharing a campus with a regular high school, though it was less of an issue at that point. Whatever drawbacks there were, I was pretty grateful to get a top-notch education for free.
mc: as you suggested way up in the other thread, I think we've found what we all have in common. But I wonder if anybody feels left out of this discussion, and is being alienated by it. In principle, there should be people here who didn't show quite so early.
I often feel left out here by what everybody commenting seems to share — good example would be serial novels and dramas; just never did 'em — but is there anybody reading who just had no experience with this stuff growing up?
Becks - My program was called GATE, too, and was held one day a week on Wednesday. Did you grow up in SoCal, or is that a common name?
About gifted programs, McGrattan's argument seems to me like the "Everyone should get a trophy!" ravings of the middle-class parents whose kid can't play basketball. I don't see any problem with awarding people or putting them in a special class if they excel in some area. What's really the point of working hard at anything if everyone gets the same prize?
Putting kids in special programs not only, like everyone is saying, gives them work that actually challenges them, but can also make them *feel* like they're supposed to pursue more challenging things in life in general. If I had sat in a median classroom my whole educational career I would have been bored and probably not thought myself deserving to be one of those "special" people going to a great college/becoming a lawyer/doctor/astronaut/whatever. Maybe some kids have that natural drive, but I think many would languish if the educational system didn't give them that boost. In fact, many of my very intelligent friends who went to the high school across town - where they did the catch-all median classes, are bank tellers and housewives who never left their hometown.
They were picked on for being either i) socially awkard and geeky or ii) arrogant little shits.
The nuns at my grade school were more concerned with making sure my freakishly high test scores didn't give me a swelled head than with creating academic challenges.
This is one of the great things about tracked schooling though. Kids tend to drop the arrogance pretty fast once they're faced with people who can kick their butts up and down the classroom. Sure, some get that incredibly annoying "untermensch" mentality regarding people who aren't smart enough to be at the school, but they're usually just unreformable pricks.
As for the social weirdness and awkwardness aspect, well, weirdness is relative and IME is excaberated by a really mixed school. A lot of kids at my high school were more or less rejects at their old high schools or middle schools, but became pretty cool and confident people once they weren't kicked around just for being nerdy or smart.
My dad was the smartest kid in a one-room schoolhouse in the Yukon. I don't think he had any real trouble (he was freakishly good at hockey), but I know that 1) he became very good at billiards during the year he was supposed to be studying for his baclauriate (sp), and that 2) his transition to college in a big town was very, very difficult.
This is one of the great things about tracked schooling though. Kids tend to drop the arrogance pretty fast once they're faced with people who can kick their butts up and down the classroom.
I had to learn how to study once I escaped to the public magnet high school, where the people in the arts program were totally looked down on by the people in the science program. but we didn't care because we were all weird together.
As someone who has a bit of a stake in this (I'm a former high school teacher, current museum educator working with elementary school kids) I actually don't know where I come down. There was no such thing as GATE where I went to school, so I have no firstand experience, but I've worked with lots of GATE kids in my years of working at museums. In a perfect world a teacher would have the time and resources to tailor to all her kids' needs, and things like GATE wouldn't need to exist. Reality being as it is, we have GATE. I don't like to segregate kids. What worries me as well is (and maybe I haven't seen a representative sample) that GATE kids tend to lack humility and social graces, which are valuable attributes. Then again, an opportunity to be unabashedly nerdy is invaluable. So I'm conflicted. But it's probably the best interim solution until there's some sort of awesomly radical education revolution.
What worries me as well is (and maybe I haven't seen a representative sample) that GATE kids tend to lack humility and social graces, which are valuable attributes.
The lack of social graces is a bad thing, though it seems somewhat weird. Why would smart kids actually have worse manners or less socialization when they're around other smart kids? As for the humility, how are they going to become more humble when they're surrounded by stupider people in a fully mixed classroom?
Overall, I really don't think these are problems caused by the segregation. They're more the problems caused by radically different ability levels (just look at the arrogance of many shit-hot sports players).
some sort of awesomly radical education revolution.
In some random conversation in high school I advocated breaking down all the barriers in education: why separate us by grade? why separate us by subject? why separate us into classrooms with walls and desks? why all these restrictions?
I'm not sure why we should be so worried about kids losing all their humility through gifted education. First, most kids with whom I went to school remained perfectly humble (in fact, continually worried that we would eventually fail, was a more common concern). Second, how is that any different than kids who make Varisty football or get elected Student Body President? Again, not everyone can be good at everything, so it seems strange to me we should be so concerned that the kids themselves might eventually think they're good at something.
When I was at primary school, pretty big; somewhere between 35 and 40 kids per class.
Class sizes are smaller these days. The numbers are around 25 per class these days.
re: 57
About gifted programs, McGrattan's argument seems to me like the "Everyone should get a trophy!" ravings of the middle-class parents whose kid can't play basketball.
Is that satire?
The big problem with these streaming programs is that they can be deeply anti-egalitarian.
If smart kids benefit from being around other smart kids it seems like a strange choice to deny that benefit to other, less-smart, kids. It splits kids early and perpetuates those splits. In a world in which entry to university is competitive and scholarships hard to come by it can end up widening rather than narrowing the gap between high-achievers and the rest.
These classes aren't separate but equal. The very nature of the system means that extra resources are spent on kids who need them the least.
Furthermore, there's a strong class element in this. Kids from supportive middle-class homes that value education are massively more likely to enter these programs and reap the benefits than those from less well-off homes with a low educational background.
At their worst, these kind of programs can serve to undermine any attempt at creating a more just society.
[Note: I don't want to sound too hyperbolic. There's a big difference between the programs described in 50 and 55 for example]
What's really the point of working hard at anything if everyone gets the same prize?
Being smart is emphatically not the same thing as working hard. There's no moral dimension to being smart and it makes no sense to talk of 'desert' in these cases. Smart kids don't deserve more than anyone else.
Especially when the 'prize' in this case is greater access to educational opportunity and improved employment prospects in the future.
What's really the point of working hard at anything if everyone gets the same prize?
It shouldn't be seen as a prize, though. Nothing wrong with having advanced classes or even separate schools, but there is a purely practical purpose to doing things that way. Kids are put in accelerated programs because some of them learn better that way, not because they're being rewarded (except in an internal intellectual-fulfillment sort of way, but that's not the same thing).
is there anybody reading who just had no experience with this stuff growing up?
This stuff just did not exist in small-town South Dakota in 70s and 80s. I think I could have skipped a grade if my parents pushed for it (I'm glad they didn't, I was socially awkward as it was), but that would have been the only thing like an accelerated program. I spent my entire pre-college career bored out of my gourd and getting crappy grades because I couldn't be arsed to to the minimal effort to get decent grades (I actually graduated in the bottom half of my call in HS).
All I can say is that I'm very, very grateful for Macalester College's "high risk, high gain" and need-blind admission policy, and very, very glad that I do very, very well on standardized tests.
Did I mention that I never learned how to do second drafts, so reviewing what I've just typed, no matter how good an idea it might be, isn't second nature to me at all?
It's been weird reading these comments, as they've brought back a lot of memories. In the college town I grew up in, there was naturally a large number of smart kids. I was generally considered one of them, except by the school system. It wasn't just that I wasn't selected for the gifted program (I don't recall what they called it), but in that in junior and senior high, I was tracked into the lower level classes. This was even true in the one area they couldn't really deny I was ahead: having done algebra in 5th and 6th grade, I coasted through junior high math and was assigned to the 10th grade math class as a freshman in high school. Unfortunately, they didn't put me in with the upper tracked class, which would have had my brother, his friends, and friends of mine, but rather in the lower one. It consisted of what (to me then) was a very intimidating group of kids who didn't like being in class and weren't exactly welcoming to a 9th grader who seemed like he might. Thanks to them, I didn't.
It was weird being with the kids I hung out with and who were my peers before and after school, and then going through the doors to different classes for the rest of the day. My father, perhaps because he came from an impoverished background and wound up a PhD., had a large streak of anti-elitism that came through in these matters--I think some of what Bostoniangirl has described of her dad applies to mine as well. By the time the school decided that, gee, maybe that kid should be in the Honors classes after all, I didn't care so much. While my friends were making plans to apply to Ivy League schools and the like, I was smoking dope and getting ready for the local state school.
Later on, after much academic misadventure, I eventually landed in top graduate programs. So one could say no harm done, and once high school was over, an awful lot of good times before I got serious about anything. Still, when in grad school, I always felt a little different from the other students who had experienced the whole track of elite education, from gifted classes as a child, to AP programs, to private (or seriously good public) universities. The nagging sense that I didn't belong rarely left. On the other hand, feeling like that was probably far better than being the sort of person who had gone the elite path all the way to the same point, and then found out that they didn't belong for real. I saw that happen, and it seemed pretty crushing.
Okay, "prize" was the wrong word to use. And sure there is a difference between working hard and "being" smart, but I'm not sure how you separate that. And, yes, there is a class element, but that's another argument altogether (I'm all for early-education programs; parents teaching their children to read before they get to school, etc.).
Maybe I come at this from a different perspective, because I was very poor growing up, and the opportunity to be in a gifted class, thus channeling me into honors and AP classes later on, meant that I could get a scholarship to go to college, whereas otherwise I would be flipping burgers and still living with my mom. So actually, I tend to think of these as just the opposite, when it comes to the "class" argument, because they're phenomenal opportunties for kids who can't afford the American Dream.
And McGrattan - I didn't mean to imply you were "raving," if it came off that way, I just really hate those parents.
In the past few years I've worked with hundreds of classrooms of children--public, private, and home schoolers, 1st grade-12th, and I find that humility and social graces, as I put them, are a product of what we in the education field call "classroom culture." When a classroom full of kids comes to my workplace, they bring their culture with them, and I get the fun of observing it and noticing patterns. In my experience, classroom culture depends a lot on the vibe the teacher puts out, or possibly a vibe that filters down from the administration and is the general school culture. I don't think classroom culture correlates with socioeconomics or collective smarts of the group. And of course I want all kids to know/feel that they're good at something. What I don't want them to feel is superior or inferior to other kids (or their teachers). So I can foresee GATE classrooms with fantastic teachers and fantastic culture; I just haven't met one yet.
70: I'm the exact same way. My high school teachers were always confused as to why I would do so well on in-class essays and the writing sections of standardized tests, and then get so-so grades on papers I wrote at home. There was effectively no difference between them for me.
I've since learned to slow down when I write so that I can revise as I go along, which is almost like writing a second draft, but actually going back and changing something that I've "finished" is still hard to do.
My parents kept me out of GATE programs (and didn't agree to let the school put me up a grade). In high school I did take honors and AP classes, though (except when they conflicted with band or Spanish). I'm glad for it: sure, I might have learned a little more in elementary school, but I wouldn't have learned to hang out with the poor kids and the Spanish speakers. In 8th grade they finally gave in, and I found out the the honors kids were appalling snobs, and appallingly lazy and self-centered. They resented me for not having been part of the club before, and they had a "strike" when the English teacher assigned a long book the same week that the social studies teacher had us doing a big project. I and a Filipino boy were the only ones that didn't walk out of class. Which earned us more opprobium. The English teacher was an idiot and praised the lazy sods for their "courage" in walking out of his classroom, which I resented; it was a lot harder not to.
But I'm not at all bitter or prejudiced against educational elitism. No, not me.
I'll bet that, while all of us appear to have the standardized test knack, a fair portion remember baffling and frustrating teachers. I'm similar to Matt in 74. I'll say this much for you Matt, reviewing your blog the last couple of days, I'm continually impressed by how much you think for yourself. Polishing and revising certainly help, but insightfulness and spontaneity are more valuable.
When I was really young we didn't live in the US [my father is an archaeologist, so we lived where he was digging, and I had tutors and home-schooling and such.]
I had learnt to read by age three or so, and when we came back to the States, I was very very bored, and had to be bribed to sit quietly in class whilst my brain atrophied. I was always the smartest kid in the class - something the teachers would inevitably make clear to my fellow classmates, who would then take out their frustrations by beating me up on the playground - and spent most of my non-school time curled up in a chair reading science fiction and the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, hoping that my real parents would come and take me back to Mars where I belonged. By fifth grade, I was in a school system that had "enrichment" classes for bright kids, which made academic life somewhat more interesting.
I pre-date the nomenclature era: In my middle school and first high school, we were simply tracked - one being the highest. We knew we were smart, we knew we were expected to go to the best universities, but we didn't have a label, per se. [A couple of years after I left, track one sophmores were prohibited from taking the SATs by ETS; it seems they were skewing the curve.]
In my second high school - supposedly one of the nation's top 10 [so not] - athletics were far more important than academics, and I wasn't allowed into "honours" classes because my transcript didn't say "honours", it said "track one". This school system didn't start foreign languages until 10th grade, so my third-year Russian class consisted of 3 transfer students, and my senior French class consisted of me and five people who couldn't speak French beyond "la plume de ma tante est sur la table de mon oncle."
I left mid-year as an early admit to college [which, amusingly, the high school took credit for in their monthly newsletter to parents]. Had I not been allowed to do so, I would have run off to Haight- Ashbury or Greenwich Village or someplace with a library large enough to hide in. There is, in my experience, nothing worse than being bored in a classroom day after day.
OTOH, being 15-going-on-16 as a college freshman ain't no picnic. Being not quite 16, cute, blonde and socially naive is even worse. Based on experience, I'm far more in favour of having accelerated and advanced classes within one's age group. [My first high school would have sent students over to the local Ivy League university for high-level math and science classes; calculus was on the HS curriculum; quantum mechanics wasn't. The students would still have attended the high school for other subjects.]
However, early college experiences aside, I'm not at all in favour of tossing all students into one class regardless of their abilities - it does no one any favours. Just as one wouldn't use a race horse in a carnival pony ride - it's a waste of potential - placing a student who is going to be bored because s/he already knows the lessons in a classroom with students who are struggling to learn those lessons is a waste. Better to have smaller classes of comparable ability so that the teacher isn't torn between those who need attention and those who seem not to, but sometimes fail to learn some basics. [An example: My brother can't spell. He was bright and his papers read well, so his high school teachers didn't bother to correct him. When he got to university and wrote his first papers, his English prof glanced at the first page and turned it back to him unread and his philosophy prof asked if English was his second language. An argument for teaching phonetics or at least having a roommate who can proofread. Nowadays, at least, there is spellcheck...]
Golly, thanks. Yeah, the spontaneity certainly comes in handy when I need to churn something out quickly. Only thing is that it seems like I hit a ceiling with the first draft-style writing, and even though going back and re-writing would make things better, I haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet. Still feels like I'm "wasting" what I already wrote, or something.
The forms of GT programs (as they were known where I was) seems to vary a lot. In elementary school, for 4th and 5th grade the GT kids spent one day every other week (I think) bused to a different school, where they had a full day of different activites with kids from various schools around the county. We did (formal) debate there, and lots of interesting puzzles and experiments - things like breaking the class into two groups who had certain rules for exchanging tokens and had to figure out the other group's rules without speaking at all. Strange board games I haven't seen before or since. However, this was all kind of orthogonal to the main classroom material, and there wasn't really any tracking or streaming there.
Junior high school was about the same ratio, a half-day a week (but alternating so that we didn't always miss the same things, in the seven-classes-a-day schedule). Similarly, it was orthogonal material - a lot more creative and more intellectual than the junk that composed most of junior high. There, however, it contrasted with regular classes that were themselves tracked, at least into regular and honors, and in the case of math, an entire branching sequence: "math 6" could be followed by "math 7" and "math 8" (and all the way up to "math 12" in the high school), just doing arithmetic-related things. Or you could hop on the fast track after math 6 (or before, if you were really bored and had pushy parents), and go to pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry (making those classes grade-mixed; my geometry class had students from grades 8-12).
For high school I went to the aforementioned magnet school in Fairfax County. Since it was its own entire (fairly large) school, it had its own internal divisions, but the culture shift from middle school was really important. The kids who were there all tended to agree that schooling was valuable, and that gave a culture of respect to the atmosphere. Having a classroom that's not half-full of people who don't care to be there, and will let you know, was great.It was also quite useful to experience getting your butt kicked up and down, academically, before college.
Within the school - supposedly science&tech focused, and not generally admitting to being all-purpose GT - there wasn't internal tracking, with the exception of a couple of classes that had AP versions as replacements for the "regular" versions (US government, english lit), instead of successors to them (physics, chemistry, computer science) or just as total electives (european history, AP languages).
In elementary school, our gifted program meant that one day a week, I was pulled out of reading or English to go and do logic puzzles or train for some of the interscholastic nerd competitions.
In sixth-eighth, 'gifted' meant a special homeroom class and an occasional special program that met after school. By eighth grade, math had been tracked so the top kids learned algebra.
Ninth-twelfth was three tracks: AP, honors, 'regular' by which they really meant 'remedial/troublemaker/shop.'
I was an awkward, lonely little girl. It seems to be a trade-off in public schools; you can excel, or you can have friends. On balance it's a trade-off I'll take, but I was very sad as a pre-teen.
Like most of you, I have mixed feelings, and I agree with gswift's latest that being smart isn't what gets you picked on. My daughter went through the regular school, my son's in "pre-IB," because it feeds our IB program, although I doubt he'll go there. Their abilities are similar, with a shade of difference.
My daughter benefited enormously from enrichment programs, like the Art Institute course she took her 8th grade year. Once a week, she checked herself out at noon, caught a bus and connected to a train, went downtown, and took a class taught on a very high level that studied not merely plastic arts but also drama and literature. She shone, and made friends.
Both my kids most innovative learning experiences were at our local, where several teachers were very good at "differentiation." Giving the bright kids something challenging to do, bringing the slower ones along, keeping everybody moving, is an art that some teachers have. By contrast, with the material my son's class has, they don't do much besides "speedup." Why should they? When the top 10k or so of Chicago 6th graders were given the SAT, 6 of the top 50 were in his class of thirty. And all the system could offer us, besides some of the most disgusting fawning you ever saw, such that several parents could hardly contain laughter, was the same programs my daughter had used. He has great music , art and French instruction, though.
Nathan, you went to TJ? When was that? I thought there was effective internal tracking at that school simply because the really good kids were the only ones taking high level electives in the various subjects. At least, that's how it worked out at IMSA.
Re separating--#77 hinted at this, but I'd like to emphasize--tracking students is not just about giving smart kids special treatment. Middling smart kids, I think, will get much more attention and get challenged more in classrooms where there isn't a quick-thinker laying claim to "smartest kid in the class." Teachers can give struggling kids more attention if kicking out the GATE kids lets them teach to a narrower range. I think tracking gets *all* the students a better education.
I think it's the ones who think otherwise who are kidding themselves. This coming from a kid who wasn't picked on very much. see, e.g., 47.
And see McGrattan's #46. It's just not that simple. Funny how smart kids who also happen to play a varsity sport aren't picked on. Funny how smart kids who are willing to punch another kid in the face aren't picked on. Thinking you, or your kid is getting picked on solelly because they have some innate brain power is delusional.
I can understand that these programs may benefit the children receiving them. And some of the less divisive programs -- the hour or two here and there every now and again -- don't seem especially problematic.
However, I'd still want to resist segregation by ability as much as possible on egalitarian grounds and I feel that those egalitarian values really matter.
Heather makes the point in 72 that these programs may actually benefit some of the worst off and I think that's probably true. The grammar school system in England, for example, really did offer a chance for the very brightest among the poor to do well. This is a live debate in the UK at the moment because de facto segregation via house prices has effectively meant that for the very brightest among the poor it's now harder rather than easier to achieve in education.
However, what's missed is that under the grammar school system the vast majority of kids -- the ones who didn't pass the hurdles to get into selective schools -- were deeply let down by that selection process and condemned to a life as educational second-class citizens.
We solve these problems, I think, by making education more egalitarian and less divise rather than more so and it seems to me that we ought to be concentrating on tailoring our systems for the majority and for the worst off -- the old Rawlsian 'maximin' thing again -- rather than worrying overly much about the 'elites' who are probably going to manage under more or less any system. If that means some kids go through high school less fulfilled than they might have been then that's unfortunate but I don't think the answer is a high degree of streaming and segregation.
The Scottish system,* to take the example with which I am most familiar, seems to do quite well as a fully comprehensive non-selective system.
Also, BitchPhd's point in 75 -- that not being segregated has value in terms of socialising with a broad peer group and not with an elite, all of whom are much like oneself -- seems an important one.
My own experience of high school was that, while it was obvious I was smart, I mostly didn't get picked on was because, largely, the people who'd otherwise have done the 'picking' were my friends.
I'd grown up with them, been in school with them since I was 4, I sounded like them, played football with them at breaktimes, etc.
That's not a trivial point. To the extent that the potential bullies perceive you as different or alien that's only likely to exacerbate the bullying. I'm not so naïve as to believe that everyone mixing together is likely to eliminate all bullying, but it can't hurt.
My private school didn't have any such programs, at least for elementary students. A month into 4th grade, my mom yanked me out and homeschooled me through 12th. I actually quite liked it.
My only beef with homeschooling is that if you are socially awkward, you might not know it until it matters. I also wonder if it isn't to blame for my hatred of college. Any other homeschoolers here?
But isn't it a more efficient education to keep every kid working at a their potential? If you want to get as much bang for the education dollar/pound as you can, you need to keep each child working throughout their school time. It seems a lot easier to do that using streaming systems, since a class of 7th graders learning algebra probably doesn't cost any more than a class of 7th graders learning arithmatic. Plus, streaming helps avoid skipping grades, which I've seen screw up a fair amount of people socially.
I agree that the streaming system needs to be more fluid so that you don't create a second-tier education that's too rigid. Perhaps there should be some sort of relegation system to allow new people to enter the magnet schools if they could keep up, replacing those who drop out? The only problem in some cases is that (especially in the US) a magnet school will have a unique, accelerated curriculum, making it especially hard to jump in.
And I don't really understand why everyone is insisting on the socialization at school with people of all school abilities. There's not that sort of socialization at colleges and people seem fine with it. It's also a rare workplace that's got the full range of intellects. What's so bad about a magnet high school? After all, there's the other 130 hours of the week and the other 15 weeks of the year when you're going to be around everyone else. Why not segregate by scholastic ability when it could really help everyone?
I was smart. The only kids that ever picked on me were the snots in the 8th grade honors class. The regular kids from the wrong side of the track got along with me fine, and vice-versa.
After all, there's the other 130 hours of the week and the other 15 weeks of the year when you're going to be around everyone else.
Because you're not with everyone else most of the time. You're with kids in your neighborhood and the children of your parents' friends--i.e., other kids who are probably from the same ethnic, income, educational, and social bracket as yourself more or less.
One of the nice things about public school is that it gives you a chance to learn how to get along with the rest of the world. Including people who aren't necessarily academically gifted, but who are good at other things.
There's not that sort of socialization at colleges and people seem fine with it. It's also a rare workplace that's got the full range of intellects.
This is precisely WHY desegregating public schools (which doesn't necessarily mean not having magnet schools or honors programs--but let's be very honest about which kids are most likely to get into those) matters. Because children who grow up with friends outside their own social class are the ones who will be comfortable working and living with people outside their own social class.
I'm going to guess that the normal Scottish pre-university education would be closer to an accelerated US program than it would be to a normal mainstream US curriculum. I could be completely wrong.
The kids who got picked on most frequently in my experience were the ones who, for whatever reason, got labeled as gay. After that, it was whoever was significantly different and/or awkward (not that being so wasn't sufficient to get one called gay, but not everyone was.) There was a really rather socially inept Orthodox Jewish kid with a unibrow in my class. He was viciously tormented from elementary school through high school, I'm sorry to say (not be me, mostly though I tried not to be associated with him.)
I was in the pull-out gifted program in elementary school; I didn't test high enough for the magnet school, but I doubt I would have liked it anyway. At my school they called it HEP (High Educational Potential) rather than gifted because they didn't want to piss off all the obnoxious middle-class parents whose kids weren't in the program (the ones whose kids were were bad enough). It was fun but I'm not sure how much I really learned or how much difference it made in the long run.
In middle school I stayed in the gifted program (just called Gifted), which was one or two classes out of seven. Again, fun, but probably not too helpful. In high school I was in the vestigial gifted class freshman year, but after that just honors classes.
I'm kind of ambivalent about these programs, for the reasons others have given. I don't think the ones like those I was in are really harmful, since they're only part-time, but neither am I sure that they're necessary.
My sister either had better teachers or a better capacity for dealing with boredom than I had, even though I had the benefit of 'Enrichment' (fourth grade), 'Gifted/Talented' (fifth/sixth grade), 'Honors English' (seventh/eighth grade), and AP English (senior year). She got all the great grades in high school, went to Rice, and finally felt like she was surrounded by people like her. I started underachieving, quit doing homework, graduated 52nd in my class (with the highest SAT scores, natch), went to a state school, and took five years to figure out that I honestly didn't have the patience for college after all and maybe I should just lie to my parents and tell them I was graduating.
I don't really know what the best answer is, but I never felt challenged and never saw the importance of homework or routine. I failed a college class with a 94 on the final 'cause I had more than three tardies (mornings and I don't get along). But my best examples of how mainstreaming doesn't work come from college.
The first week of my calculus class, we had a fantastic professor on Monday and Wednesday. On Friday, a nebbish in orthopedic shoes walked in and said our section had been chosen for an experimental lesson plan, and he'd been assigned to teach it. We were broken up into study groups of five (IIRC) and then had to work the rest of the semester in those groups. All homework assignments were to be turned in as group assignments, etc. The stronger students were supposed to help the weaker students in the group to master the material. Test scores would be averaged for each group and each member of the group would score his group's average score. There wasn't a single other calc section I could transfer into because of my schedule, so I was stuck. I was also miserable. I couldn't teach, didn't want to teach, and didn't have the patience for it, and the weaker students in my group resented me for understanding everything so easily and didn't really let me try to help anyway. Luckily the group test score thing was dropped, but I think I quit doing any group homework assignments at all and swung a B in the class on test scores alone.
And when I became a music major we had to break up into "practice partners" for sight singing. We were to meet at least once a week for some percentage of our grades. I was paired with a guy who was, well, tone-deaf (how a tone-deaf guy managed to play violin at all, much less get the idea into his head that he should major in music was - and still is - beyond me). How the hell was I supposed to help him? There was nothing I could do. No mnemonic interval helped (think 'here comes the bride' - although I don't think mnemonic intervals really help in general anyway when sight reading. Things move too fast, and the mnemonics are usually too far out of context to be helpful), there was no hope of any sort of absolute or relative pitch memory, and the simplest motion would go wildly off with him in the first couple notes. Again, I quit. A couple girls in my class found out, took pity on him and invited him to their practice sessions (which they didn't need either) and I got in trouble for giving up on him. Huzzah.
The noble, egalitarian goal of keeping everybody together and letting the weaker students get the benefit of the stronger students' presence (read: touch the hems of their garments) is optimistic but, I feel, misplaced. Students are happier when allowed to go at their own pace, whether slow or fast. Less gifted students who are resentful of their more gifted peers are going to be resentful no matter what - regardless of whether they're all streamed together or split up by ability. I agree that socialization is important, but let's not confuse it with socialism.
Less gifted students who are resentful of their more gifted peers are going to be resentful no matter what - regardless of whether they're all streamed together or split up by ability.
I don't think I've ever had the sense that that is true, actually. I don't really remember ever hearing anything like that, other than the odd rueful, 'I wish I found this as easy as you'-type comment.
re: 100
I have no idea if that's true or not as I'm not familiar enough with the details of US syllabi. Some of the stages at which people have described doing certain things -- on their accelerated or gifted programs -- sound earlier than we did similar things but I can't be clear. I don't think we did calculus until around 14 or 15, for example. Although basic algebra would have been introduced around age 11 or 12.
We start school quite early though -- 4 isn't uncommon. I had already been at school 6 months before I had my 5th birthday. You achieve university entry level qualifications at 16 or 17, although a lot of people won't actually go straight to university at that point and will spend another year at school studying subjects to a higher level or acquiring more qualifications in order to gain entry to a more competitive university place.
I actually went to university at 16 -- without any acceleration or grade-skipping -- but chose completely the wrong subjects for me and hated it. Left and worked for 3 or 4 years and then went back aged 20.
I don't think we did calculus until around 14 or 15, for example. Although basic algebra would have been introduced around age 11 or 12.
I think eb might be on to something. We generally start algebra around 15 or 16, although people in accelerated programs (like many of us here) get it at 13 or 14; calculus, if you get to it in high school (most don't), would be at 17 or 18.
I don't think I've ever had the sense that that is true, actually. I don't really remember ever hearing anything like that, other than the odd rueful, 'I wish I found this as easy as you'-type comment.
You missed my point. I wasn't saying that every non-gifted student would be resentful, I was saying that the ones who would resent the split track would, in the absence of a split track, resent having the gifted kids skewing the curve / getting all the answers / being teachers' pets. The ones who look at the disparity and say "I wish I found this as easy as you" aren't the same group as the resentful ones, except maybe to the extent that they all wish the curve weren't being skewed by the really smart kids.
To put 106 in perspective for the non-Americans out there, US schools generally run from age 5 to 18; one year of Kindergarten, then elementary school, the length of which varies from district to district but is usually five or six years, then three years of middle school/junior high, then four years of high school. Elementary school is basic early-childhood education with one teacher all day, middle school is structured differently, with different class periods for different subjects, taught by different teachers. High school is structured like middle school but involves actual learning. Most people start college at 18.
"If smart kids benefit from being around other smart kids it seems like a strange choice to deny that benefit to other, less-smart, kids. It splits kids early and perpetuates those splits."
What makes you think less-smart kids benefit from being around smart kids?
"These classes aren't separate but equal. The very nature of the system means that extra resources are spent on kids who need them the least."
You might argue that the higher track would tend to draw more funding whatever the original intentions, but you don't think that both tracks would do better even with equal funding?
I'd still want to resist segregation by ability as much as possible on egalitarian grounds and I feel that those egalitarian values really matter.
I come to the opposite conclusion on egalitarian grounds--the middle and upper-middle class kids are going to have enrichment opportunities as a matter of course that poorer kids will only have through special programs. But I think placement by subject is a good way to handle the academically talented.
The magnet school I went to in Detroit had special programs in arts and science, but also in trades, and musicians and the painters and the car repair guys generally went to the same science class, for example. Presumably the science kids did English comp with the HVAC kids. And the school was about 50/50 black/white.
In between the hell of Catholic school and the paradise of Magnet High was the purgatory of public junior high. There were a couple of other very gifted girls there, who were ostracized. It's sad in retrospect that we avoided each other as though we might be less outcast if we didn't hang with the other outcasts.
I don't know why I feel this is worth fighting over. I wasn't picked on, I played a varsity sport, and I don't have any kids to be picked on. But do you know what, the kids who all were picked on--especially in elementary school and junior high--they were all smart. Not all of the smart kids were picked on, but the ones where were picked on, they were all both very odd and very smart. Those two attributes, they often correlate in youngsters.
I didn't pay much attention to the kids who were picked on once I ceased to be one of them (which I suppose reflects poorly on me), but my impression was that non-athleticism was a more important factor than intelligence (although the two were often correlated). That's just in elementary school, though; I don't know how it worked later on.
certainly there are other important attributes: poorer kids got picked on, and kids who were probably gay, they got picked on.
But my original point was that intelligence is one quality that attracts bullies. All I've got is what I remember observing during my education for that one. Certainly people find lots of excuses to be cruel to each other, but one excuse is to imagine that the smart kid is really obnixious about her smartness.
In my experience, it wasn't the smart kids that got picked on; it was the socially awkward ones. Especially if the social awkwardness was paired with any hint of being effeminate.
What makes you think less-smart kids benefit from being around smart kids?
A good teacher knows how to structure classroom assignments so that the students have time to work together. It gives them a chance to explain things to each other and learn from one another. Often kids can explain concepts in ways that are easier for other kids to grasp than grownups can.
It's also beneficial for the smart kids to do this: as all of us who teach know, you learn things better when you have to explain them to others.
I've been thinking about this thread for a few hours, and maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but I'm seeing the move to refrain from supporting a gifted program as very privileged and not egalitarian at all.
Consider the bored child who is quite bright whose parents wish him to stay in the mainstream class all the time so he gets to know kids of different ethnicities and backgrounds.
First off, this seems to me to be a ridiculously privileged assumption, and I don't mean that because of the assumption that the 'normal' kids will be the 'poor' kids. It's this. The bored bright wealthy child in the normal stream will probably have lots of parental attention. Grades start to slip? Extra help and tutors. Trips to the museum to nurture Junior's chemistry skills. Moving in a social millieu where everyone his parents know move onto the Ivies or other great schools and then onto graduate and professional schools. Maybe some college courses on the side to beef up the resume. Great expectations. Bored and acting up? Therapy. Parents worried about the future? Lots of outside the classroom opportunities. Oh, and sports.
The poorer kid who needs to compete with the prep schools kids to get into college on scholarship? Needs the AP courses to prove his schooling has been good. If he acts up and does badly one year? No Kaplan program to up his SAT score. No enrichment program to take him to the local university for a couple weeks? Mum & dad aren't going to be dragging him off to it. They're busy. They don't know it's out there.
Oh, and if bored poor kid acts up, he'll just be a problem. Bored rich kid is from a good family. He's going places.
It's kind of like not needing to dress up for the opera because you know you're important enough to be there.
And realistically, if my mostly-decent public high school hadn't offered AP courses, I wouldn't be anywhere. It wouldn't matter how bright I was. College applications meant competing with academy kids who had every advantage in math and science. The regular stream in my high school? Terminates with pre-calc. That stacks up well against the kids coming out with calc II.
Or in other words: I come to the opposite conclusion on egalitarian grounds--the middle and upper-middle class kids are going to have enrichment opportunities as a matter of course that poorer kids will only have through special programs.
What she said. It's hardly egalitarian if it all it means that when Junior trots off to Harvard he can tell sympathetic stories of having had a poor friend in elementary school.
---
The best magnet program I know of was one in Houston, where a magnet program of 90 kids per year (30 Asian, 30 black, 30 white) all were in an urban school. Yes, the kids took classes with their bright classmates. But all other activities -- football, music, etc -- was with the general school population. It seemed to work pretty well.
I don't think anyone's arguing that AP classes are the problem; even McG acknowledges that stuff like that is helpful (and they apparently have it in Scotland). I think what people are concerned about is stuff like special magnet schools where all the kids are gifted, and I think these concerns are valid. Magnet programs like the one you mention, which are part of ordinary schools, don't sound so bad.
People were talking about fully mixed classrooms; in a standard tracking system, while in theory one could be gifted in math and be in the remedial English class, it doesn't often happen. My high school wasn't big, but I knew mostly the other track 3 kids.
And if we're talking about having the smart kids teach the slower ones, well, that doesn't to me say magnet school. They tried that in sixth grade science. All it meant was the other kids fucked off, didn't do their work, I got a poor grade and my dad yelled at me for working in a group. Fuck teaching the other kids. That shouldn't be the job of an eleven-year old.
And I'm saying it doesn't work. (And btw, 'teaching the slower ones' means 'no AP classes for you.')
Maybe in theory, with well-trained teachers, and students who are all friends, and nine-year-olds who are natural instructors, and no kids who are ever bullies or mean-spirited or impatient with others, yeah. But in my experience, it meant the teacher got to relax by pairing up the bright girl with the sleazy group of boys so the girl could either do their homework for them or get a bad grade herself.
In junior high I remember telling other group members who clearly expected me to do the work that I was fine with a bad grade because I could make up for it with individual work on other assignments. Everyone in the group ended up working and we did ok.
In college I was part of a group project in one class where I ended up doing most of the work including most of the writing. But in that case I took the work on voluntarily.
Fuck teaching the other kids. That shouldn't be the job of an eleven-year old.
I tried to come up with another way to express that thought earlier, but this pretty much nails how I feel about it. It also shouldn't have been the job of a 19-year-old in college calculus.
125: It worked for me. I had some frustrations with badly-organized groups, and I don't really like the idea of group grades, at least not without some individualized component. But generally it's just a matter of assigning different roles to different members of the group, and monitoring what's going on (from the teacher's point of view).
Another reason it worked for me was that while I could explain long division to the pot smoker, he could explain to me what the stoners got up to, which helped me not be a total geek. Or I could help the ESL student with vocabulary, but then she could also help me with my Spanish. Or I'd help my best girlfriend with her social studies assignment, and she'd tell me which boys to avoid in the hallways.
It seems like people's opinions on this issue are shaped almost entirely by personal experience, which probably explains why this discussion has been so heated.
I assumed the "teaching the slower ones" stuff was about much lower grade levels.
I assumed that if we were against tracking because it wasn't egalitarian, it was teaching at all levels. Kids aren't generally tracked in elementary schools where I grew up. But I wasn't expected to teach my classmates, either, which is good, because I would have been a shitty reading teacher when I was eight and it just would have made life more hellish for me. According to gswift it must have been due to some distasteful personal trait in addition to intelligence, but whatever it was, school was hellish enough without me having to teach other kids. I had enough crap to deal with.
I dunno. I sorta think that maybe some of my later success in high school had to do with some of the extra exposure to science in the lower grades. Or learning logic games when I was seven. I probably could have done without Oregon Trail on the Apple IIGS.
128: But the point isn't that it's the kid's "job"; the point is that it's beneficial to explain things to others, and often one can use different metaphors or analogies that will help peers get it. And it breaks up the class time so it's not all teacher-driven lecture, and it helps students learn to rely on peers and that not all learning has to be from "authority figures," and that teaching doesn't require a special genius. It creates a more student-centered classroom and gets kids to be less dependent on passive learning.
I wouldn't advocate doing it all the time, but the point is different kids learn in different ways, and teachers have to take that into account. The shy kid who won't raise her hand in class might be great in a smaller group, the smart talker who dominates the big group has to learn to hold back and listen to what others have to say, and so on.
The shy kid who won't raise her hand in class might be great in a smaller group
Or might be doing just fine academically, thank you, and doesn't appreciate being forced on the spot in some group situation where it's no longer okay to be quiet and do well.
I am slightly more heated than usual. Elementary school and middle school were pretty much torment for me.
B, I can see if it was a straight give-and-take, well-moderated. The thing is, until maybe.... calc II as a college freshman... I wasn't in the position to be a 'taker' academically. School was ridiculously easy for me and so it wasn't help-Susie-with-math she-reads-your-essay and you-talk-to-her-in-German; group work where everybody copied Cala's homework because she never misses anything. And then maybe throws tape in her hair later for being the know-it-all.
It didn't lead to friendships because they didn't get to be in charge. It lead to... 10 year old girls hating me because the fact I could wire circuits around the little lightbulbs meant the cute boy liked me better than the ditzes.
Now, at age 27, I know how to navigate social situations politically. Plus, now I'm not the smart one in the room anymore. But I wasn't that socially skilled at age 10 and all the groupwork in the world didn't mean I learned it faster.
Yeah, I know that my opinions are certainly shaped by my experience. Without magnet schools, I wouldn't even exist. The old English grammar school system was what allowed my family to go from a bastard Lancastershire mill worker without all his fingers to a Cambridge graduate in one generation. Even my father could only get a good education because the state paid his way through magnet schools, since my grandfather took a pretty low-paying job after graduation.
As for myself, I got to go to a state-sponsored magnet school with a really diverse set of fellow students (far more diverse than most district-bound public schools, since it covered the whole state instead of one rich/middle-class/poor neighborhood). Not only that, but I was able to take classes which would not have been available anywhere apart from a couple other magnet schools and some super-exclusive private schools on the east coast even at the top private schools. Until you get the concentration of talent from a whole state, you can't fill classrooms with high schoolers taking Genetics, Number Theory, Calc-based Physics, Abstract Algebra, Multi-variable Calculus... Even our arts faculties were great, with a number of teachers holding PhDs from top schools (all in their field, no Ed degrees). After all, how cool would it be to just teach a big intelligent set of kids without the pressure of a top research university?
And that is why I love magnet schools so much. Basically, no where else would have been as nice, and I certainly would've killed some spoiled rich kid if I'd ended up at a private school capable of delivering nearly as good of an education.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my ambivalence about and essential indifference to the issue is the result of my experience with gifted programs: they were okay, but I don't feel like they were essential to my development. I actually enjoyed high school, without such programs, much more than lower grades. That might just be because elementary and middle school suck, though. Also, my high school was super-ghetto and awesome.
JAC (in 91): yeah, TJ, 1990-1994. Math was the only regular subject where you could "get ahead" - if you came in to TJ with an algebra background, you could be doing calculus in grade 10, and then a few post-calculus semesters after that (multivariable, differential equations, linear algebra), while the slowest math track had you doing calculus in grade 12. But for the sciences (bio, chemistry, physics, geoscience) there was only one option for each grade level, and the same was true for 2 of 3 years each of english (ap lit being the exception) and social studies (AP US Government was effectively the default for seniors - I was one of the slacking 10% who took "regular" US government). It is true that electives could be considered a bit of a filter based on ambition - take AP Physics, or Drama I? Philosophy and Religion, or another tech lab? But I'm resistant to calling it "tracking", since one wasn't sorted by percieved/measured ability into one of several possibilites, with different levels of material in each. It was nothing like the social stratification of the honors/regular tracking in junior high, where gym and shop classes were the only ones I had with non-honors students.
Group projects in high school were always a little tricky; there was less of the explicit "person X is smart, make them do it" but there were plenty of other problematic dynamics. I feel like most of what I got out of it was the ability to recognize such situations early, rather than any particular skill in accomplishing things in groups. In the classroom setting, the give-and-take that B seems to describe is an ideal, and many of us seem wary to risk the gains of that ideal against the experienced liklihood of being tormented/dragged down/embedded in politics. Teenage years are already full of interpersonal drama; making it easier for that drama to directly affect your academic performance doesn't seem like a great idea.
My girlfriend is currently in grad school, and she's encountering some of the same problems - but higher-stakes, of course. The general issue seems to be that the groups are set adrift to do a project and have to entirely self-manage. If there's no natural leader, then it's hard to cause things to happen, and even if there is, the leader-role person doesn't have the authority to make things happen (groups with at least one total slacker seem to be the norm).
137: Sure. But learning is sometimes uncomfortable, and being able to communicate verbally is a valuable skill. Plus, if the shy but brilliant student who is doing fine academically has good ideas, why shouldn't her classmates benefit from them?
I look at it this way. What is the benefit of the physical classroom? What do you have there that you can't deliver through a book, or online? One of the main things is the other students: instead of two brains (you and the teacher, you and the book, whatever), you have twenty, or thirty, or a hundred. That's a lot of opportunity for different thoughts and different ideas and different approaches, and it's something of a waste not to use them.
One of the things I remember learning in a teaching workshop was that there are three major points of contact with a new idea. The first is just the raw contact, e.g., first reading of something. The second is thinking about it, which includes notetaking or whatever. The third is testing your ideas or questions with other people, and that's the thing that you want students doing in the classroom--it pushes them along faster and helps them develop more complex understandings of things.
the groups are set adrift to do a project and have to entirely self-manage. If there's no natural leader, then it's hard to cause things to happen, and even if there is, the leader-role person doesn't have the authority to make things happen (groups with at least one total slacker seem to be the norm).
Yeah, you can't set them adrift that way. You need to give them fairly explicit directions about what they're supposed to accomplish in X amount of time. And you need to assign roles. E.g., one student takes notes. One student makes sure everyone says something. One student reports the group's findings back to the class. That sort of thing. And you have to circulate around the room and make sure that that's what's happening.
You need to give them fairly explicit directions about what they're supposed to accomplish in X amount of time. And you need to assign roles. E.g., one student takes notes. One student makes sure everyone says something. One student reports the group's findings back to the class. That sort of thing. And you have to circulate around the room and make sure that that's what's happening.
But doesn't this undermine the whole point of working in groups, which is to take advantage of the individual skills of each student and use them to teach the others? I mean, I guess if you knew what those skills were you could assign roles accordingly, but that doesn't seem too likely to me.
I don't think I've ever seen that kind of explicit role-assignment. More generally, it really doesn't sound like our (the collective complainers here) group experiences had very much in common with what you're describing as the way they should work. I don't know why this is; perhaps this is an area where doing it in a half-assed way is substantially worse than not doing it at all.
As for setting them adrift... that was as much about my girlfriend's grad school experience as it was about anything I did. Recently, she had two semester-long projects with semi-randomly assigned groups, which were left to self-organize, and report back/get instructor feedback perhaps monthly. Even in classes with shorter projects, the default mode for group assignments seemed to be "you three [creating a new group] - write a report on X using the techniques we discussed. It's due in two weeks."
The odd thing about my experience as a college student is that I've always been one of the people who talked the most. But I'd pretty much never talk for the first 2 or 3 weeks. Then I'd make a few comments and by the end of the term would be consciously not responding to some questions/comments that I wanted to talk about in order to avoid being one of those people who talks all the time.
I always knew I'd participate when ready and it really annoyed me when an instructor would call on me before then, unless it was one of those instructors who always calls on people regardless of whether they're trying to participate.
FWIW, I never mentioned kids teaching other kids. To the extent it happens, it ought to happen organically and wouldn't, if I was dictator of the world, be a formal or preplanned thing.
Instead, when you have a mixed ability class -- particularly at elementary and 'junior high' level -- you maintain a class culture in which there are enough smart kids that being smart isn't wierd or stigmatised; where the less-smart kids needn't feel awkward about doing well or answering questions, and so on. And yes, where the less-able kid sitting next to his or her more-able peer can ask the occasional question.
Others have talked off the benefits of learning in a pro-learning culture once separated off with their intellectual peers. However, there's exactly the same loss for the people not separated. They are condemned to a learning environment which becomes increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-learning.
Again, everyone here who has positive experience of these types of programs has concentrated on the benefits of these programs for the smart kids and I wouldn't want to deny that those benefits can be present. I'd want to argue though that there are costs -- for the less able -- from those sorts of programs.
re: the scottish system
Primary School:
4/5 - 11/12: there are 7 years of primary education. All in one class with one teacher. The teacher will usually change each year. Primary school teachers often tend to specialise in teaching a particular age group.
High School:
11/12 - 16/18:
there are a minimum of 4 years of high school education and a maximum of 6. The first 2 years are taught in subject-specific classes but there is no streaming by ability and all classes are mixed ability.
At age 14 or so the kids begin Standard Grades which take 2 years. Depending on ability the kids will do a greater or fewer number. I think the maximum is 7 or 8 these days.
Some standard grade classes will be split by ability -- maths and english -- while all of the others will remain mixed ability.
At age 15 or 16 the kids will sit their standard grade exams.
Depending on results they will then do the Higher exams which take one year. They can do Higher study in pretty much any subject if they passed the preceeding Standard Grade in that subject. Some kids will leave at this point, aged 16. These days most stay on for 5th or 6th year.
Kids will do anywhere up to 5 Highers -- it's just not possible for reasons of time to do more than that in 1 year -- but some kids may only do one or two.
Higher maths for example, involves calculus, trigonometry, simultaneous equations and so on and sounds, from some comments above, like it's at a somewhat higher level than standard high-school maths in the US.
At the end of the higher exams -- aged 16 or 17 -- kids can theoretically get into University. However, most will stay on and acquire more Highers or do advanced study. The advanced maths courses at this stage, for example, are genuinely pretty advanced stuff corresponding to much of what would be taught in freshman or even sophomore maths in college, I believe.
Under the current Scottish system over 50% of kids leave school and attend University and more than 50% leave school with qualifications sufficient for University entry, even if they don't actually choose to go.
Note: this sytem has problems -- there's still a bottom 10-15% or so who are failed by that system. I'm not advocating it as perfect! However, streaming is minimised and only really takes place with respect to Maths and English from age 14 - 16.
When you're around a bunch of other kids like that, there's no real stigma of being a nerd just for being smart.
{mad chuckling}
Ah, yes. TAG. I got TAG in the mornings in 4th-6th grades. The rest of the time was regular. But I was in a very racially-mixed school. I was the poor child.
Then, they (my social studies teacher) got me into the full-tilt TAG downtown for 8th & 9th grades. So we got bused for an hour there & and hour back. The worked it the same way as in elementary school, so the afternoons we were mixed with the general population, and this school was in Little Mexico. Much resentment ensued. Unpleasant.
So I got to be resented by the hispanic kids for being white(ish) and in TAG, and by the preppy white TAG kids for being too poor, and resented by the nerds for being too cool (or not whiny enough), and resented by everybody for passing all my tests without studying, particularly in 'social studies'. And then I went home at the end of a given day and got random bones broken. And then spent the wee hours reading, since that was eh, 'my time'.
The teachers complained I knew everything but wouldn't write it down. Jeez, ladies, I was kinda preoccupied.
I opted for a regular high school after that. Stoners are much more pleasant to hang out with, even if you don't smoke dope.
I lean toward bitch and McGrattan on this, that pullling out and isolating the smart kids is a bad idea. I get to that on straight economic justice: middle/uppermiddle class parents will get their kids into these programs regardless of innate ability, and poor or less involved kids are screwed. There are counterexamples (Cala) but overall that's how it (IME) ends up working.
Watching professional-class white people figure out how to send their kids to the NYC public schools is kind of revolting. There are programs upon programs for special or gifted kids, and if you apply to enough, you can be pretty certain that your kids aren't going to have to sit in a classroom with anyone who isn't middle class, regardless of whether your kids are particularly bright or not. (I'm not guiltless on this one -- the local public school does suck pretty bad. Mine are going to a program a few blocks away which is better run. But it's still very integrated, economically and ethnically.)
The real issue is that it's not reasonable to say that pull-out programs for smart kids are necessary because otherwise they'll have to stultify in the nightmare of mediocrity we're condemning the regular kids to. There's got to be a way to make all the schools decent: that doesn't mean every kid is going to be academically successful or intellectually engaged, but it has to be possible to make every classroom a case where they could be.
Socially, on the other hand, programs that pull out the brighter kids are wonderful for them (or at least for me.) Gswift -- generally you're a lovely person, so when I tell you that the fact that I have no idea where you're physically located is helping me restrain my strong impulse to hit you with a brick, please don't take it personally.
Yes, kids aren't social pariahs only because they're bright -- I was a pariah, and my sister wasn't, and we're pretty similar brains-wise. But you have to be pretty fucking charming to get away with being visibly much smarter than the kids around you. (My grade school didn't give me any help there -- I got skipped a grade, which identified me as the brainy freak, and every goddamn teacher in the school spent six years cooing over how adorably intelligent I was. They can all rot in hell.) I wasn't ostracised for being anti-social or unpleasant, I was ostracised for being smarter than my peers, and wasn't charming enough to overcome the stigma.
Getting to a school for 'gifted' kids in seventh grade was the only thing that allowed me to become remotely socially functional -- a social environment where I wasn't starting from a position of being a contemptible freak changed my life.
Now, there's got to be some way of keeping what happened to me, and sounds like Cala, and probably other people, from happening to bright children generally (shooting all the teachers in my grade school would be a good way to start) without segregating them educationally. But saying that it's not a problem at all -- that the only reason smart kids get picked on is because there's something else wrong with them -- is crap.
My intuitions on this may vary because we didn't have magnet schools or the competitions for public schools where I grew up. Smaller town with a decent public high school. We had six elementary schools, but you went to the one you lived nearest.
And while the community overall was relatively affluent (my hometown seems to have taken off in the ten years since I've left), within the community there wasn't a rich kids school and poor kids school.
The real issue is that it's not reasonable to say that pull-out programs for smart kids are necessary because otherwise they'll have to stultify in the nightmare of mediocrity we're condemning the regular kids to.
See, I don't see that as the rationale at all. It's not like learning the times tables or how to read is mediocre in third grade; but if you already know how to read, there's little the teacher can do with you that doesn't involve ignoring the other kids.
I guess NYC is different and maybe deeply fucked up, but I'm certainly not seeing the gifted program as "ugh, so glad I'm here, otherwise I might have to talk to a mediocre poor kid who might have a different skin color."
But the point isn't that it's the kid's "job"; the point is that it's beneficial to explain things to others, and often one can use different metaphors or analogies that will help peers get it.
This works great in a university classroom. I'm uncertain how telling an elementary schooler that it's beneficial to help others is going to lead to much but resentment, and I'm also not sure what metaphors and analogies teach someone to spell or to memorize their times tables and what nine-year-old is going to think those up on the fly. (Am I the only one here whose schooling consisted of rote memorization for the first five years or so? There just wasn't critical thinking in third grade.)
We were still doing 'reading' classes where we read books designed to teach about reading. Volumes of easy short stories, that sort of thing. We still had spelling classes, too.
I figure Cala meant improving their reading. You're supposed to be literate in first grade, but not necessarily fluently literate for a while afterward.
158: God, I hated phonics. Years of goddamned punitive pointless little worksheets. I'll accept that it's the best way for kids to learn to read, but for Christ's sake let them stop when they're literate already.
I swear that's part of the reason I never liked school much.
Ah OK, that makes sense. Same here, then. Kids start reading in Primary 1 but continue on for a few years with work designed to develop their reading skills.*
* Arguably, when we give undergraduates bits of, say, Descartes to read we are still doing the same!
Why would they do that? Make you do stuff you can already do, iyswim?
I don't remember doing anything like that after Primary 1. The little boxes with word-cards in them and so on were gone for most kids by the end of that year.
This comes back to a point I wanted to make earlier but didn't. A lot of the problems people describe above don't seem to come from their being smart or from being in mixed ability classes but from bloody terrible teaching methods and teachers.
It isn't that hard for competent elementary level teachers to structure work for different abilities.
Unlike some others, I couldn't read when I started school at 4, although I could recognise my name and a few simple words.
However, by the time I was 6 -- like a lot of other commentators here, I'd imagine -- I was reading Tolkein and works of similar difficulty.
The teachers didn't make me sit and read Janet and John type stuff all day. Our classroom reading schemes had a wide range worksheets and reading materials geared at all different levels and while some of my friends were working on the rudimentary stuff, I'd be working next to them on the harder stuff. Same with reading books. When we had periods to read in class, I wouldn't be reading the same thing as all of the others.
Doing anything else -- i.e. deliberately making kids do work completely unsuitable for them -- seems nuts.
This comes back to a point I wanted to make earlier but didn't. A lot of the problems people describe above don't seem to come from their being smart or from being in mixed ability classes but from bloody terrible teaching methods and teachers.
It isn't that hard for competent elementary level teachers to structure work for different abilities.
Somehow it seems to be that hard here. I really don't understand why. It's not the usual bullshit about how it's impossible to teach poor kids anything: the grade school I'm bitching about was in a middle class neighborhood -- no significant portion of underprivileged kids.
Second grade we had the Dick and Jane books (really!) and in third grade the school got brand new reading anthologies and then we had two tracks of reading: kids still struggling and kids who weren't. And that wasn't much better. After third grade I got to skip reading and learn other things.
I nearly got held back because after doing the phonics workbook, I'd run around the classroom, seeing no point to sit in my chair if I'd done all the work.
Doing anything else -- i.e. deliberately making kids do work completely unsuitable for them -- seems nuts.
But that's what any reading class at that level meant for me, and that's what it would have meant if I had to stay in the class, even if it was my 'job' to help other kids. The teacher had 25 other kids; she wasn't going to have time to design a separate reading curriculum for me.
And when you were fluently literate before starting kindergarten, that's four years that reading class is wasting your time.
My elementary school experience in a nutshell. The two schools I attended for elementary had no GT or similar program, but we had reading "groups." I was in a group by myself. And the material still wasn't challenging.
I haven't read everything on this thread, but one of the things that really annoys me is the notion that just because a child is particularly intelligent, that they should be perfect in every way. Thus, "gifted" children should be particularly humble and giving or whatever. That's bullshit; there's no reason to think that because someone is mentally advanced that they should have advanced social skills. In general, I hated the way that I was treated by teachers in school; they acted as if the fact that I was smarter than most of the other kids meant that I had to do the best in every subject, behave better, and be held to higher standards. So, I got unfairly punished for my misbehaviors (seriously—teachers sought to make an example of me—"see, we even punish the smart girl") and sent home with report cards saying my handwriting was terrible when it was merely just average, and unfairly bad marks in art class (of course, the fact that my dad is a relatively well-known artist in Egypt may have had something to do with that).
This was the way that they compromised for not having any special programs. If it seemed like I was acting up, I couldn't possibly be ready for harder shit.
I was in a part-time "gifted" program, and had a similar experience to Teofilo's. It was fun and novel, but didn't really do that much for me. Even at the time I thought it was kind of bogus since I didn't really see why I merited extra attention (and it was "extra attention" -- and extra resources -- because on "gifted" days I was in a class of only eight students while the "ungifted" back at my regular school were sitting in their class of 25 students).
Elementary school (with the exception of the gifted program) was unstreamed, but high school was streamed: courses were either "Advanced", "General", or "Basic." Fortunately, some classes, like Art, Drama, and Music, weren't streamed, and being around "Basic" students (who were, by the way, ususally poor) cut against the contempt that "Advanced" students otherwise found it easy to slip into. That experience teaches you that "lack of educational aptitude" does not necessarily mean "stupid". It makes me really angry when people equate the two, as one commenter did upthread.
I can't get too exercised about the problem of the bored, gifted child. Looking back, I think I was bored by classes, but I just learned to look elsewhere for intellectual stimulation. Finish my work early and read a book or write a story.
And with respect to bullying: In a school that's homogeneous in terms of social class, it's quite possible that it's the smart that tend to get picked on. In my school, it was the poor who got picked on. My sister got expelled from her elementary school for lashing back violently at girls who had been taunting her all year for being poor.
The teacher had 25 other kids; she wasn't going to have time to design a separate reading curriculum for me.
See, I just don't buy that. Why not? Why shouldn't she have time? It's not as if there aren't resources alreayd in the school that could be drawn upon. Largely, t's going to involve allocating different books or simply letting the kid read something they want to read if they've finished all the other work early.
Why shouldn't the curriculum be designed in a way that accepts that kids will be of differing ability? Again, it's a surprise to me that it wouldn't be.
It comes back to the teaching. I don't buy, for example, the thesis that all the people who are pro- seperate classes were so stellar and brilliant that they simply couldn't be accomodated.
I genuinely don't intend that to be snarky, btw.
Further, it does sound like we're expecting something unrealistic out of school -- like it'd be this super-challenging system perfectly tailored to their abilities. Something adequately tailored to their abilities seems perfectly satisfactory to me and not that hard to achieve.
Largely, t's going to involve allocating different books or simply letting the kid read something they want to read if they've finished all the other work early.
Why shouldn't the curriculum be designed in a way that accepts that kids will be of differing ability?
That's all the gifted program did. Twice a week I was pulled out of reading for an hour and did some other things. This wasn't some ridiculously complicated or expensive program. It was one teacher for the district who spent his time travelling to six different elementary schools.
I genuinely don't intend that to be snarky, btw.
And I don't mean to sound like I'm the most brilliant thing ever or stellar or whatever the hell conceit I'm supposed to be suffering from. I was reading at a high level very early. But that didn't translate into the emotional maturity to seek out knowledge or to move onto high-school level books or begin teaching myself algebra. It just meant I was bored and a potential discipline problem.
I don't buy, for example, the thesis that all the people who are pro- seperate classes were so stellar and brilliant that they simply couldn't be accomodated.
This may just be an attitude problem among American teachers. I was treated as a discipline problem for reading under my desk when I was done with other stuff -- while I was singled out as adorably brilliant, I was also in trouble all of the time. I don't think it would have been terribly hard to accomodate me at all -- I'm reasonably clever, but not frightening or anything -- but I got the strong impression in grade school that allowing me to do more advanced work while I was in the classes I was in would have been viewed as inappropriate.
It was disobedient. I wasn't focusing on what the rest of the class was focusing on. My whole grade schol experience was ostracism from the other kids, and alternating fawning from teachers because of my wonderfulness, and being sharply cracked down on because I had to learn to do what everyone else was doing. (I wasn't making trouble or anything, just reading quietly. But that was a problem. I had more books confiscated in grade school.)
This may just be an attitude problem among American teachers.
I'm curious. What are the qualifications required to be an elementary teacher in the US?
Here it'd be either a university degree in some mainstream subject like Maths or English + a seperate teaching certificate which usually takes a year to acquire or a 4 year specialist primary education degree.*
* There are, I believe, some other things that go on in England but they conform to that broad model. 4 year degree specialising in teaching or general degree plus teaching diploma.
Similar here. If there's a difference, I have the impression that grade-school teaching is unusually poorly paid for professions that require that much education, and that for that reason it tends (with many exceptions and I do apologize to anyone I'm insulting) to attract unserious people or those with few other options.
I don't know about other gifted programs, but the ones that I got into certainly didn't have a bias toward upper- and middle-class kids. Admittedly, my middle school was private, so that was really only rich kids, but it was too early for anyone to really identify themselves as rich. My high school was, if anything, skewed toward the poor and lower middle-class, and the same with Whitney Young (the magnet school for Chicago school district). In both cases, the rich and upper-middle-class kids went off to elite private schools like Lab or Latin or St. Ignatius, leaving the lower-class schmos to use the state magnet schools. Also, rich kids were typically in rich districts, which could afford decent teaching, so those parents didn't see the extra boost of my high school as being worth the boarding school part.
Still, no one has really addressed the top kids that I'm talking about. What about the kids who are ready and able to do sophomore- and junior-level math before they graduate high school? The kids who are doing advanced scientific research? The kids who are already writing high literature and/or plays? The kids who are already acknowledged artists, with sales and critical acclaim? Sure, these people may only be the top one percent at most, but they are worth special attention. If they were athletes, they'd have scholarships to top schools and special attention all through high school to work on their talents, why not extend that to academics? Once high school hits, I just think there's been enough of a spread in ability showing that the top kids are really wasted in a normal curriculum. Most high school teachers wouldn't have the university background necessary to teach them, and unless they live near a top university, they'd still be going to class with people a lot slower than them (just older and slower) which is equally infuriating and a lot more socially awkward.
What is the huge problem with creating these opportunities, which cut across all socioeconomic classes, for the very few kids who could really use them? It's not like every classroom is going to be stripped of its smartass, they'll still mostly be back at their home school doing the accelerated track. But those kids who feel nothing but frustration at the pace and level of even an accelerated classroom would get to be around others with the same interests and abilities.
Bleh, I obviously feel very very strongly about this.
Yeah, I'm with dagger aleph on this. That's totally ass backwards. It sounds like you, LB, had really shitty teachers.
I was positively encouraged at school just go and quietly read once I was done.
I only remember getting in the sort of trouble you talk about once: when I did a whole term's maths worksheets in a morning. Which did piss my teacher off and, to be fair to her, she had told me to stop once I'd done the first couple and come and have her check them over.
It varies by the state, but it's usually a four-year ed degree. Problem is, the pay sucks. There are many fine teachers, but there's problem more people who squeaked through high school themselves and got an ed degree because it would go well with their husband's career.
If I relive my childhood I want to go to Scottish schools.
I knew how to read when I started elementry school. This wasn't much of a problem in half-day kindergarten (no pre-K back then) where it seemed we just played. That was OK, since I was a year younger than them anyway. But in 1st grade I was not teacher's pet. She had a bunch of other kids who didn't know how to read and me who had flipped through the textbook the first day. She was teaching "C-A-T spells?" and I was shouting out the answers (not good behavior and boredom was just part of the reason).
Her solution: she taped my mouth shut and told me to keep my hands off & not to peel it off. So I had great fun obeying her and used my tongue to slowly destick the tape. This really annoyed her. Ah, 1st grade. I wasn't the easiest student. 2nd grade got better as the teacher was more creative (reading period meant I went back to 1st garde and tutored). 3rd grade I did a bunch of classes with the 5th and 6th graders. They had learned to read by then. After 3rd grade my chaotic home environment meant I went to state-sponsored sleepaway camp & school for the next five years.
Oh, context: inner-city Boston schools in the mid- late-60s. The school and neighborhood was nearly all white working class.
The people I know who are teachers in the US seem to have gotten into it out of idealism. God knows it wasn't for the pay.
In my Canadian hometown, teaching is considered a very good job. It pays quite well, with good benefits and vacation time. Also, it's more respected as a profession there than it is here. M. Ed programs are very competitive, and getting a job after graduation isn't easy.
An ex g/friend of mine was a primary school teacher and she, and a few other teachers I know, used to be very resentful of the "got an ed degree because it would go well with their husband's career" types as they'd always be the ones opposing industrial action by the teacher's union and be the one's most likely to cross a picket line, i.e. because they didn't see it as really their career but more a nice wee job to have to supplement their husbands income.
So that stereotype exists on this side of the big pond as well. Unfortunately.
181: Right. Good teachers in the US basically think of themselves as volunteers -- they're being self-sacrificing by teaching. Anyone who's doing it as a job rather than as a cause is likely to have questionable other options.
What about the kids who are ready and able to do sophomore- and junior-level math before they graduate high school? The kids who are doing advanced scientific research?
I've got nothing to say about education policy, a topic about which I know nothing, but: at the risk of providing a link that I may have learned about in these comments (don't remember, too many to check), you may find this Globe article of interest. Or maybe not.
That article looks interesting, I'm just starting it now. But yeah, those are some of the kids who really could use a top-notch magnet school system. One that brings together many of the genetic freaks in one place and provides them with lessons that (might be) a challenge.
When the article mentions the kid who's hailed as a "messiah", I have to laugh though. I remember there was a kid, Reid Barton, a couple years above me who kicked international ass at the International Math Olympiad and the Informatics Olympiad (comp. sci.) through all four years he was in high school. His final year, he got a perfect score on the IMO then flew to the IIO and got the highest score in the world (he had 580 out of 600, next highest was 540). Apparently the kid knew 7 languages as well. My final year of doing the USAMO (the olympiad-style final round competition to choose the 12 representatives at the IMO), all the qualifiers were flown out to Cambridge, Mass. for the competition, and Reid was being cited jokingly as a messiah figure. I can still remember walking off to the exam rooms with random people among us yelling out "All hail Reid!".
But certainly those kids will have trouble almost no matter where they go. There is a level of kids below them, however, who would benefit greatly from an advanced magnet school (the kids who are around the 1 in a thousand, 1 in a million, not 1 in 100 million).
184: the bonus link in 104 takes you to our previous discussion of the article. I note this not to be like a certain commenter who I'll refrain from naming, but because someone might be interested in that discussion.
I'm not totally caught up, but I agree with something McGratten said above: there really is no reason why even a half-decent teacher can't accomodate, say, a kindergartener who already knows how to read (to use Cala's example). My teachers pretty much accomodated me from kindergarten through middle school by just letting me quietly open a book and read at my desk once I'd finished whatever the worksheet was, or by excusing me to go to the library. And in lower grades, don't teachers regularly divide kids into different level groups? Mine always did, so the kids who were better readers would be working on one set of things, and the kids who were struggling would be working on another.
Re. JAC's 177, I suspect that most schools are going to have only one, if any, prodigies with the level of talent suggested. That kind of kid is the one who you allow to skip prereqs that he/she already has demonstrated mastery of and you set him/her up with some kind of independent study or taking classes at the local CC for credit, or the parents put the kid in a private school that's designed for such kids (or the school provides the kid with a scholarship).
My point is that I'm not against GATE programs, really. But I think that they too often pull bright kids out of academic contact with everyone else (quite aside from the class/race problems), which is to no one's benefit. It's almost an admission that, "oh, *these* kids we can really teach, so let's get them away from the bullshit time-keeping we're doing with everyone else." It also stems, I think, from the idea that the *sole* purpose of public education is to teach academic skills. People who are academically gifted are obviously going to see this as a given, and where it's not true, we're going to see the schools as completely wasting our time. But I don't think that that *is* all that public education can or should do: I think the public part is really important, and one of the things I value most about my own education is that while sometimes the academics were a little dull (which wasn't a big deal, since--being bright and having bright parents, it's not like I wasn't learning anyway), not being in the gifted program gave me a chance to see and learn a lot of things that weren't necessarily "academic" in nature but that did, I think, contribute greatly to making me a better teacher and a better academic myself, as I grew older. I learned to think about things in other ways, and to appreciate that academic skill is great, but not all there is to life.
I do think that academics are the primary mission of education, obviously. But I don't think we can treat them as if they exist in a vacuum, outside of the social context. And I think that teaching children to have a broader social context is a really important thing.
The other thing I want to point out is that we all tend to think that whatever frustrated us in school was bad, e.g., social awkwardness or being bored. But at the same time, we all teach, and we know that sometimes students' frustration isn't because the thing that frustrates them shouldn't be there, but because they have some resistance built in because of their own lack of preparation or whatever. Too much frustration or boredom is bad, inasmuch as it interferes with learning, for sure. But some frustration or boredom isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The kids who are doing advanced scientific research? The kids who are already writing high literature and/or plays? The kids who are already acknowledged artists, with sales and critical acclaim? Sure, these people may only be the top one percent at most, but they are worth special attention.
The top one percent? Are you nuts? More like, the top 0.001%.
I think this thread has made me realize that I have some issues with the my educational experience that I still haven't come to terms with. Makes it hard for me to really participate in this thread. LB's descriptions of her experience made me realize that the same thing happened to me. I hadn't ever really thought about my experience in terms of hostility from teachers before, but it really is the case. Many of my teachers were even intimidated of me, and resentful because I was smarter and more knowledgable than they were. I didn't ever correct them in class or anything (well, not often, anyway, and politely) but a lot of my homework probably had that effect.
I think American schools give way too much homework.
"there really is no reason why even a half-decent teacher can't accomodate, say, a kindergartener who already knows how to read"
And another thing LB said that is awesome. In my experience, and I think many others' experience, I didn't have any "half-decent" teachers by these standards. When I tried to keep myself occupied, I was reprimanded. At best, I had teachers who left me to do my own thing. I never had a single teacher who assigned me work above and beyond what the rest of the class was doing.
I spent my entire time in public school carrying around books and reading them at every opportunity. I would read them in the halls, at lunch, after I finished worksheets. We had a "reading rewards" program called Accelerated Reader or something. A hundred page novel would net you 6-7 points, depending on the reading level. In the fourth grade, I had over four hundred points. In the fifth, over 600. It's true that much of this was reading at home.
I had good teachers in elementary school, which may explain why I don't have any of the issues with the education system that others seem to have. Middle school was a different story.
Yes, my reading class was tracked, even in second grade. But I was beyond the top track. (So were a couple other kids.) We were assigned stories in the reader. I read the whole reader. There wasn't anything more for me to be assigned to read; I was just supposed to sit quietly. When I got out of reading class in fifth grade we went to another room where we read articles on nuclear war prevention. I'm thinking that was probably more valuable than pretending I was interested in the reader.
I'm not saying above-average kids should be segregated from the rest of the class or shipped off to mini-ivory towers. On the other hand, the solemn life lessons we learn aren't always about how wonderful other kids are and an appreciation of the nuances of other cultures and ethnicities. First off, my public school was very homogenous. So was the greater metropolitan area. Second off, for me, quite a lot of it went like this:
If girls are friendly and want to put makeup on you, they're lying and are going to try to make you look ugly.
If you do well in math, a boy will grope you in the hallway because you beat his test score.
If you help someone in group work, they'll throw tape in your hair. If you do well in languages, they'll go through your hair with a flea comb in class. It's probably because you're not dressed properly, too, since no one ever gets made fun of for being smart unless they're also a freak.
If you try to slack off in group work, you'll have the teacher and your parents upset at you.
Yeah. What I learned from public school (which I did all 12 years) is mostly that kids are cruel little bastards.
I wish I knew something about what elementary schoolteachers are taught (or were taught when I was in grade school) about what to do with kids who are academically ahead of the class. I had the strong impression at the time that I was being disciplined on some principle -- that giving me more advanced work to do, or allowing me to quietly amuse myself, would have been wrong. Not too much trouble, but actively wrong. (This is exaggerated. There were a couple of teachers who let me read a stack of teen romance novels in the back of the room, and in fifth grade I got sent across the street to take 7th grade english, which was fun. But most of the classes were the way I've described them.)
I'm not sure if the thinking was that it would make other students feel bad, or that it would in some way be academically bad for me (that is, other children were in school to learn to multiply. I already knew how to multiply, so I was in school to learn that life is hard and no one cares that I'd rather not sit with my hands folded until everyone else finishes.)
I'm kind of bitter and hostile about it, because I never really pulled out of hating school. Grade school sucked so much that I stayed cranky and resistant all through high school, after it had stopped making any sense to be. I did fine, academically, but I didn't learn nearly as much as I might have if the first thing I learned in school wasn't that it was hateful and unpleasant and I was doing it wrong.
There's all sorts of crazy pedagogy out there, and the fashions are always changing. I think it's highly probable that LB's teachers were trained in a particular theory that led them to treat her the way they did.
I may have told some version of this story before, but going to a private elementary school where my grade was always combined with the grade above gave me a different experience. I also forced the school's hands.
Instead of sitting quietly and reading I used my spare time to do what I enjoyed most: working through the math book. It was clear that we were going to do all the problems by the end of the year so I figured I'd get started early. When my family went to visit relatives or took a vacation, I'd work on my math in the car or on the plane instead of reading.
I came back from winter vacation in 1st grade and handed the teacher the completed 1st grade math book. The school didn't have much choice but to give me the second grade math book, which was ok because the second graders were in the same classroom. It's not like I could just sit there for six months. This started the process that led to me skipping third grade. It wasn't a question of potential; by the time I skipped I'd already done the work.
By fifth grade it was clear that I wasn't going to skip again and I went into the public schools so I adopted a new policy during the school year: being quiet and doing the minimum possible to get a good grade. I did a bit of computer science and math a couple of summers but only the math was serious.
I'm ambivalent about all of this because of the way college turned out, as I said in the first thread I linked in 104. High school was fine, though. Not great, but not at all a bad experience.
re: Many of my teachers were even intimidated of me, and resentful because I was smarter and more knowledgable than they were. I didn't ever correct them in class or anything
It was a matter of school legend, and also true, that I once stood up, aged about 8, in a religious assembly with the whole school and most of the parents and corrected our fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian minister on a biblical quote. Apparently he took it with quite good grace.
I wasn't a bible nut, was always an atheist, but I had an impressive memory for facts and had just studied whatever passage it was in school.
I left public school after my first semester of high school. For a while, I thought I wouldn't even finish the first semester, so when a teacher asked us to choose subjects for a project due in two months, I came up with some bullshit subject. When plans changed, I decided not to switch the subject to a real subject. So my presentation ended up being about the effects of the Mohorovichic discontinuity and its effects on anatidaephobia in the midwest and coitus taboos in central Africa. I made a 96. I managed to even fool a few people in the class. That certainly gained me a bit of notoriety.
Yeah, I think that one of the sad realities (and for me, this is an argument against gifted programs, though not everyone may agree) is that what actually happens with gifted programs or AP classes is that the good teachers get rewarded with good students. And everyone else gets left with mediocre or downright bad teachers. I mean, a teacher who punishes a kid for being smart is a teacher who is not going to know how to get good work out of the kids who aren't already motivated. It's a terrible situation, and arguably one of the things gifted programs do is bandaid it. Obviously *all* kids ought to get creative, motivated teachers who come up with interesting stuff to do (beyond just workbooks).
The whole thing makes me sad. I'd love to go into public education, but I'm so afraid of being in a siutation where the only freedom I'd have to really do innovative teaching would be if I were "freed" from the mandatory testing and state-mandated curriculum and all the rest of it by being able to teach AP classes. At least teaching college or cc students you can design your own syllabi.
In my experience most AP teachers also teach non-AP classes, so I don't think the problem b mentions (which is quite real) applies so much in this case. It's a bigger concern for gifted programs.
Which is to say, although pay is a huge issue, I think it's not so much just pay as it is the sense in the US, at least, that teachers are not professionals, and that they are to be constantly overseen and second-guessed about how to do their jobs. Which pretty much breeds passivity. I don't see why people who go into teaching without any particular idealism, but just b/c it's a good, steady job can't become good teachers if they get continuing education and are rewarded for initiative and given good work conditions; the problem is that a lot of the things designed to make education better actually just treat teachers like service workers, which destroys morale.
202: I was pretty much always in the gifted programs. Although the teacher in the class I mention in 201 wasn't such a teacher, almost all the other teachers I've ever had were top track teachers, and they were the ones that I had bad experiences with. A large part of that, I guess, was because the top track in the small school district I went to was more like the top 30% than the top 10% or 5%, so I and one or two other students were still a head and shoulders above the rest.
I spent four weeks going to a much larger district at the end of a semester, right after moving. (The first day, I took the state assesment exams.) I got an exception made for me and put into the GT program for two classes, Math and English, beacause the people admitting me saw my exceptional grades. The other students in the GT classes in the new district were amazingly more like me than I'd ever experienced up to that point--probably closer to the top 5%. But the math teacher was probably the worst I'd ever had about me reading after finishing worksheets.
And my other classes were such a bad experience (and the layout of the school was so terrible--a huge building, five minutes between classes, and a locker that was ten minutes out of my way) that I left the school to homeschool.
I think a very large part of the different experiences people have had are the different sizes of the school system they were in. Small districts don't have the amount of talent to justify grouping them into classes. Very large districts would be stupid not to do some grouping.
202: I felt much the same way, recently, when I was simultaneously teaching the same class to a huge class (35) of "regular" public-school undergrads and to a tiny class (9) of public-school honors students. I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the work done by the top third of the "regular" class and that done by honors students. Howeve, the honors kids were 75% white, almost all from wealthy families, and the "regular" students were 10% white, and almost none from wealthy families.
I kept trying to find ways to integrate the two classes, because I felt that it was so obvious that they'd benefit from dialogue with one another. The best-performing "regular" kids far outstripped the honors kids in creativity and willingness to make risky, brilliant arguments, while the honors kids were better at keeping up with the reading, having confidence in class, and knowing how to construct a paper. Surely, if they were together, we'd all have benefitted.
But this is why wealthy NYC parents send their kids to private schools--so that, unlike other brilliant, creative youths, they don't have to share class space with bored morons. My non-honors kids wrote on all their evals that class would have been better if the five or six slugs masquerading as college students had pulled their weight.
I don't know how to deal with either situation appropriately in the classroom, but it does strike me that the "we're getting held back!" meme is destructive for everyone, gifted students included.
I'm not following you -- were you teaching high school or college classes? (Because if college, I don't understand how the tracking was working.) And who were the 'slugs masquerading as college students', the slowest kids in the regular class?
I'd like to add that, in my neighborhood, most families choose to send their kids to the local "public" elementary school, PS 321, with the understanding that anyone who would have been able, financially, to send the kids to private school will donate a few thousand per kid to the school for resources--more teachers, computers, trips, etc. It's controversial, in that the school is now flooded, since parents find any excuse possible to get their kid into the 321 district so they don't have to send her to some other elem where the parents are not sending money in, and it gives the parent association an absurd amount of power over what the teachers do. That is, rich parents are "buying" the right to influence the elementary school program not only for their own kids, but for other kids (whose parents have not bought this power) as well.
In the meanwhile, Bloomberg continues to starve out public schools in Brooklyn. By the time I get them in public college, they are severely malnourished intellectually and starving to be taught. The first class I had, the evals said, "AWB really cares about her students. She knew my name at the end of the first week! I'll never forget her!"
208: Yup, it's a college where there's a separate honors track in which "high achieving" students get free tuition, board, laptops, and completely separate classes in every discipline.
The slugs are a local thing, I'm finding out, and it's a really sad part of teaching public college here. In the regular classes, there is always a small number of kids who come in late every day, leave early, do not respond when you call their names, sleep through class, never do the reading, often plagiarize papers and then say the assignment was "impossible." Basically, I'm figuring out these are students whose academic confidence has been beaten out of them through 12 years of academic neglect, hostility from uneducated parents who fear they're trying to be "better" than they deserve, and ended up in college only because they thought it would be more of the same. Some of these kids can snap out of it. Others, I don't know. I email them. I call them. I teach really interesting texts, and still, they blink lethargically like they can't make up their mind whether being alive is worth much at all.
210: That's really crazy -- college students who are capable of more demanding work can't take the more demanding classes? I can see requiring an instructor's permission for the honors track classes, but not allowing non 'honors' students in at all seems bizarre.
Penn State has an honors college. Requires a 1350 SAT score. It's intended, I think, to attract kids who would otherwise seek out private schools. The classes aren't so much more demanding as they are smaller; but you have to be in the honors college to get into them.
211: I ended up gaming the "honors" system to get a couple of my favorite students from the previous semester's "regular" class into the honors section. Honestly, though, I ended up feeling like the split between honors/non-honors was more of a socioeconomic one than anything related to smarts.
The main reason the college is doing it, I think, is to attract more of the traditional "competitive school" seekers by (ironically) throwing a lot of money and resources at them. This way, more of the white private-school types will find this public college attractive enough that they'll turn down MIT (a commonly-cited option) and be able to say, "Well, it's not like I'm going to X College exactly; I'm going to X Honors College." This, in turn, attracts donors, and, presumably, raises the profile of the school.
In my opinion, the profile of this school should already be quite high. I have been truly amazed by the abilities of most of my non-honors students there and deeply moved by their commitment to learning. But even they diss the school because it doesn't have a reputation for being ... whatever. One of my students from that semester, not the best in his class, but not the worst either, became obsessed with applying to transfer to Ivy League U. He'd write to me and say, "X College is so beneath me!" and I couldn't help but say, "Then why are you struggling so much with the material in my class?"
Hrmphf. I'll have you know that my father dropped out of your school (among several other of the finest institutions of higher learning in the New York metropolitan area) many decades ago. If it's good enough for Dad to flunk out of, it's good enough for your students.
What do you do with a class of 35 students, 25 of whom think they're too good to be trapped in a room with any of the others? This is also part of the disease known as Freshmanism, I think.
It was very funny at the University of Chicago. When I transferred in, I was a junior, but had to take core classes (quite good ones) with the freshmen. I'd had most of the ego beaten out of me at MIT, and had a lovely time watching most of my classmates stride into class like colossi, about to show the U of C what the smartest kid to ever come out of Springfield High looked like. The giant egos mostly subsided by halfway through the first quarter when they realized that everyone else in sight was as bright as they were.
(wiiiiissshhhht. The representative from California has the floor...) This dissertation will be written to Green Day.
At Penn State, the honors college was a nice option for kids smart enough to jump to the Ivy League from public school who couldn't afford the ridiculous tuition. Because, basically, 35,000 people at a state school sucks. And for some, it was very nice to have. Certainly better than 'woo, you worked your ass off in high school and you're going where everyone else is! shoulda been drinking instead of studying for all the good that 1500 did for you!'
That said, it's pretty goddamn ridiculous that freshman biology has 900 kids a class to begin with.
I am ashamed to say that I had exactly the opposite experience. I remember thinking that going from Midwestern Public High to Highly-Competitive Private U would be really great, that instead of being 7th in my class, I might get to be 500th in my class. This wasn't the case. I was really shocked by the rampant laziness and irresponsibility of my new peers, who claimed they were "naturally smart" but had spent most of HS drunk or stoned. In my HS, there wasn't much patience for the idea of "naturally smart." We all worked our asses off.
Things, of course, evened out as we approached senior year. I got drunk and stoned, while my peers started reading the material.
Funny how smart kids who also happen to play a varsity sport aren't picked on. Funny how smart kids who are willing to punch another kid in the face aren't picked on.
gswift -
I don't know where you went to school, but my third grade didn't have varsity sports. Nor, as a small female, would it have been wise to try to 'punch another kid in the face'. Physical bullies seldom pick on those who can defend themselves by fighting back.
I got picked on because the freaking idiot who taught third grade would post the best and the worst test/homework papers up on the chalkboard. The "best" would have a large "A" made up of those little stick-on gold stars, the "worst" would have a "D" or an "F" in heavy black crayon. Then she would say things like 'If you all weren't so lazy, you could get all "A"s like D.' I was also the new kid in a small Massachusetts town, with a funny [fading Brit] accent and no television.
Oddly enough, the boy who used to grab my book bag and use it to pummel me, push me into mud puddles and kick me, wasn't the kid who usually got the worst grade; it was a kid from the low-middle end of the group. Apparently, it had been OK when it was a boy who always got the "A"s, but it wasn't OK for a girl. [The idiot teacher also posted everyone's quarterly grades, by name, so the whole class knew how one was doing.]
I cannot imagine the humiliation felt by the kid who usually got the worst grade - he'd been held back twice, today would probably be recognised as someone in need of special ed, and bore the label of "retard". In retrospect, his emotional damage was probably far worse than my physical wounds, but spending a school year in terror and pain isn't good for anyone.
Why couldn't I get it to stop? After I told my parents and they had complained to the principal, all that happened was that he stopped pushing me into mud puddles - that would be clear evidence - and started kicking me more. As we lived in the same area, it was impossible to avoid him.
Green monkeys are frequently the target of the other monkeys - people fear what they don't understand. A lot of folk can live on the fantasy that all they have to do is work out a little more, diet and use more make-up, practice those guitar riffs to be that sports star, supermodel, rock musician. But they know, deep down, that nothing they do will make them smarter. Combine that with our societal suspicions of intellectuals, scientists, etc., and the resentment builds.
There are also other lunacies out there - my baby sister - who is by far the most economically successful child in our family - was recently told by our mother that her MBA and stellar career meant nothing compared to my brother's PhD and my JD. [I should point out that my sister and I put ourselves through college/grad school; my brother got a free financial ride to Yale because he was The Boy.] My brother also believes this - FTM, he thinks a PhD trumps a JD - but somehow he never was picked on in school, despite the fact that he was pretty full of himself. Oh, yeah, I forgot - he was 5'9" by 3rd grade, 6'4" by 9th. That may have had something to do with it...
As I said, bullies don't pick on those who are able to fight back or those whose team members will fight for them. It's much easier to beat up someone much smaller or someone who's afraid his/her glasses will break, or someone whose bookbag is heavy with books. After all, it's the best way to feel superior.
That's really crazy -- college students who are capable of more demanding work can't take the more demanding classes?
LB - also crazy in HS. I had to fight tooth and claw to get into "senior honours" French [I was a junior], even tho' I'd spoken French since I was a small child and had the blessing of the French teacher.
When I started college, I was too young to understand that one could also argue one's way into a higher-level class - and equally too young to grasp that being placed by the school into a higher-level class didn't mean I had to take it. I took far more upper-level math classes than I might have done, had this been explained to me.
FWIW, DE, I got picked on the same way, for months, by another little girl in my 4th grade class. Finally, after talking to the principal, her mom, blah blah everyone, my mom decided to teach me to fight back. Being a big know-it-all, my mom, who is completely physically untalented, decided to teach me how to do judo.
Needless to say, I made an ass of myself. However, the fact that I at least tried to fight somehow made the bully stop bullying me. The only read I can come up with now, in retrospect, is that somehow refusing to fight made her think I thought I was better than her, whereas fighting back sort of implied a kind of equality. Anyway, after that she wanted to be friends. Oddly, I didn't.
All that said, your third grade teacher was a moron.
I had to argue my way into BC Calculus -- I had been tracked into regular rather than accelerated math in seventh grade, after some conflict with my seventh grade math teacher (who was also the department head. And who was probably justified in tracking me into regular math -- despite the fact that I'd killed the placement exam, my record of turning in homework as I was supposed to was poor.) Five years later, she was still cross at me, and didn't want to let me into BC rather than AB Calculus.
I had to spend about half an hour in her office listening to her saying that she just didn't think it would be a good idea for me, and repeating "If I'm allowed to, I'm signing up for BC Calculus. If I'm not allowed to, please give me some good times for my parents to come in and discuss this with you." She folded before I had to bring my folks in, which is good because I'm not dead sure they would have backed me up.
In middle school I almost had to deal with a bully when a guy went from being generally unpleasant to trying to push people around (no beatings though). In retrospect, I'm guessing that his change in behavior - I didn't remember him being someone who pushed people before - was related to something going on with his personal life. Not long - maybe a week or two - after he started becoming a problem he left the school. I assume his family moved.
Yeah, fighting back generally worked. A couple of times kids tried to bully me -- not for being smart but just bigger kids trying to throw their weight around, or because I was small for my age, or, one memorable occasion at high school, because I was wearing the wrong coloured socks.
With the sock kid, who weighed about 30lbs more than me, I was pulled off his prone body by a PE teacher.
It, bullying, wasn't a big deal, though. I can count the number of times it was tried on the fingers of one hand. Our school was a moderately rough school, although by no means as bad as the worst urban schools, but I don't think bullying was a particularly big problem.
The really tough kids were more interesting in building a reputation as a hard case by fighting each other.
It's weird. I got my face split open a bunch of times, and fighting back only made them gang up on me more. I just got really stoic about my injuries, never cried or responded like they'd happened.
Oh, I'm sure the question of whether to fight back, ignore, act superior, beg, run away, whatever depends a lot on the specific bully and the specific bully-ee. I only introduced my story as a different angle, rather than the definitive answer.
The most serious beating I took after leaving school -- I have a 1 inch scar on face still -- was an instance where I didn't make much of an effort to fight back. I still regret it to this day. On the plus side, the guy had to leave our part of town afterwards.
In my experience, fighting back almost never led to a worse outcome. Admittedly, since reaching adulthood, I'd be more reluctant these days. The consequences could be a lot worse.
Looking back on it, I was quite a little shit. Ugly, fat, four-eyed lesbian, yes, but also nasty, elitist, and dismissive. A lot of the blows I thought I was taking for the former were probably for the latter.
i remember being called gifted and talented. yet, i was put in a "special" class because i didnt speak the language. and then, the following year i was entered into a midwest talent search coz i apparently score 99% on my ISTEP. anyways, i think it's just a name. i mean sure i guess i'm smart, but there's nothing special about that. a lot of people are intelligent in their own ways. gifted and talented... another way to be labeled.
I was never small, except during that brief time around 12-13 when people grow rapidly, leaving some behind, but I was bullied some. I associated it with being different. The big deal teachers make about scores, etc. upthread is so nasty in its effects I almost wonder if it isn't deliberate. I got good results against bullies fighting back but got beaten up in some essentially random violence, and that hurt more. I too had glasses to protect, but could find situations where I could put them away before the fight. I saw myself as Michael Caine in The Ipcress File, who does just that.
I don't think if you were a bored kid who could think well ahead of the subject matter you should feel too much regret about having felt superior and showing it.
We all had to learn. But it doesn't sound like AWB bears any lasting resentments, and realizes that the other kids were acting naturally too.
168 et al: one teacher can't really accomodate all kids at different levels well. i went to an international school run on the british system in elementary school (because i didn't speak the language of the country i was living in) and got treated à la scottish system. i ended up being on a totally different textbook and grade level from everybody else and teaching myself math for grades 1-3. the teacher spent her time on the other 10 kids and figured i could just work things out on my own. it was sad and pretty boring - i missed the social part of learning, felt isolated from all my friends in the class, and missed instruction and stimulation from the teacher. being sent off to tutor kindergarteners who couldn't master the alphabet in 3rd grade didn't help either -- boring and i spent all my time keeping one girl, who probably had a mental illness, from biting everyone else and making them bleed...
in middle school i was in one of those full-time gt schools in public school...classes were much more interesting but i read under my desk in english constantly and got punished constantly for it like LB, and hated school. it used to drive my english teacher crazy that she couldn't send me to the principal's office more, because the nonGT sections of out middle school was pretty tough and had its own police officer assigned by the county who would sometimes take students away in handcuffs to the local precint for various pretty serious reasons, so she would have looked silly sending someone like me, shy and quiet and non-disruptive. i also read under the table constantly the one summer i went to CTY, which was really not as interesting as some commenters might make you think, perhaps esp. for the humanities. it wasn't any different from my normal middle school classes (in the US in Fairfax Cty, which had a good school system - pretty much all of my class went on to TJ, and i would have too if i didn't move). the CTY teachers didn't punish me like my middle-school teachers, they just got disappointed, which was kind of awful too.
high school on the other hand i loved. it was tracked but everybody chose freely what track they wanted to be on, depending on what their goals were, and then dealt with the results accordingly. probably what i loved most was being treated like an adult and allowed to make my own decisions. in that environment it was also much, much easier to get on with the other students, all of them, and find ones you liked.
in general, in that society (because i had moved out of the US again) we were treated in adults in many, many ways: the drinking age was 16, when we went on school field trips we had to show up for group activities but otherwise were unsupervised and left to explore the town we were visiting on our own, no complicated parental permission system, and we could come and go between school periods as we pleased. also the teachers were honest about teaching us things that mattered within a particular field, as opposed to useless hoop-jumping. we got the feeling that our education was up to us, if we screwed up we would take the consequences, but if we were interested and engaged, we could take the consequences of that too. responsibility. it was so much better for me than the long-term forced infantilization of the US public school system.
really i think the US public school system is designed to teach you to be obedient and follow rules and not much else.
Woowie! Recognition!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:10 AM
I had the opposite experience. The G&T designation gave me a huge foundation of confidence.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:20 AM
The grade-skipping thread had some discussion of this, but I'm not sure where that thread is.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:21 AM
My Dad was all for doing what he could to enrich my education, since he grew up in a very non-intellectual household. Grandpa was a businessman with no college education. One of the things he liked about my Mom's family was that Granddad was an historian.
He was always very proud of having a bright daughter, and he liked ot call me brainy, though I've always hated that term. I did a coupel of summers doing homestays in France, but I never went to any of these programs. Dad thought that the term "gifted and talented" was kind of offensive. I also think that tehre was a kind of weird snobbery involved. He thought that they reflected a weird sort of middle-class striving, and he wasn't interested in that.
Also, my childhood was aggressively unprogrammed, because my father hated all of the people who over-scheduled their children. I understood his point, but I would have liked to have someone sign me up for piano lessons. I think that part of his criticism was that there seemto be a whole lot of people who never listen to music who sign their kids up for music lessons, because that's what middle-class people do. He didn't want to push me to do things that I didn't want to do. I kind of resented having to be so self-directed. I sort of felt that since nobody was pushing me to do things that I could never relax and slack off. Being self-directed meant that I had to be teh grown-up, because nobody else was going to make sure that I did my best etc. Weird, I know.
I did go to a very good girls school which was selective and very academically oriented. Extra academic enrichment probably wasn't necessary.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:23 AM
2: Yeah, I can't say that it had any negative repercussions for me.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:24 AM
I really felt there was nothing but benefit from it, but that's probably because I went to schools where the entire place is supposedly selected for intelligence (at least since middle school).
When you're around a bunch of other kids like that, there's no real stigma of being a nerd just for being smart. To be ostracized as a nerd, you have to be really nerdy, not just really smart. And even then, you'll meet other people with the same interests because you're at a big nerd jamboree.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:25 AM
They didn't go in for any singling out of the 'gifted and talented' at my school. And there was no possibility of skipping a grade even where the work was absurdly easy (and for me that was pretty much always the case right through until university).
Which was, in retrospect, cool. I am skeptical about the value of singling kids out for special attention in that way, mostly.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:25 AM
Here in North Carolina, they keep changing the name of the program. It was GT when I went through grade school, then it was IG (intellectually gifted), on the idea that everybody has some sort of gift or talent. But then I guess that seemed too hoity-toity or something, because now it's AG (academically gifted). I think there was another one in there somewhere as well.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:27 AM
re: 4
He thought that they reflected a weird sort of middle-class striving, and he wasn't interested in that.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my parents shared that attitude.
Also, as I mentioned in the other thread, my Dad has always thought that being smart/clever is nothing to be particularly proud of and that singling the smart out for special treatment is stupid. I have quite a bit of sympathy with his view.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:28 AM
singling the smart out for special treatment is stupid
I think you're missing the point, McGrattan. It isn't so much special treatment as it is a class that moves faster, so that the kids who can absorb the material easily don't have to move at the same speed as the median student. That isn't stupid, it's the only way to keep your top students at all interested.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:31 AM
McGrattan, it's not that you single them out because being smart is something to be proud of. You single them out because they can't possibly be expected to move at the same pace as the rest of the class, or they'll be bored out of their minds and start acting up (which I did until they started giving me harder stuff to do).
There's no reason that the smartest kids, the ones who should enjoy school the most, should have to enjoy it the least because they're painfully disinterested.
(on, on preview, what apo said).
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:34 AM
9: But shouldn't the smart people recieve more advanced education? Saying they don't deserve special education just because they're smart is like saying that there should be no selection for school sports teams. I like the idea of specializing education to try get more out of everyone's intellects.
Plus, a big thing for me is the ability of really good publicly-funded magnet schools to help the poor. Since it seems like a complete impossibility to get schools in poor districts properly funded through redistribution, we should at least give the intelligent kids from everywhere the chance to attend a top-quality school.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:36 AM
Typically, in the Scottish system a given class will have a range of ability levels and they will be given different work depending on ability.
At high-school, at the end of the 2nd year, classes are usually split by rough ability level but on a subject-by-subject basis.
It's not that there's no streaming or differential allocation of work, it's that one group of kids doesn't get a special label and singled out as 'gifted'. It's the latter that's a problem. Not the basic concept of giving different kids different work.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:38 AM
Where's the thread about how tough it is to grow up beautiful?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:42 AM
10 actually gets at my issue with the whole thing really. It wasn't the moving-faster part that I had a problem with -- that was fine and even insufficient -- it was the "special treatment" part of it, which I'm not sure was as much the school system as society -- I got treated well by the school system because I was a good student, don't really have a problem with that, but there was this perception around being a "gifted student" that was bogus.
I'm just calling it "the Gifted and Talented phenomenon" because it manifested itself by my being put in gifted programs and such like.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:43 AM
9: Yes, but from opposite ends. My Mom's family was upper-middle class. I think that Dad valued the kind of upper-class sense of security--not mere economic security, but being secure in who you were. It's the Yankees who drive their Volvo into the ground and don't worry whether their shirt has some designer label on it. Old money Bostonians didn't have white silk scarves; they were yellow-ish, because they were so old. My father was aggressively anti-label. Clothes belong to the wearer, not the designer. Your own monogram was okay, but a Polo label was just tacky.
It's the difference between David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher. If they're not utterly careless people, toff do have certain virtues. People who aren't too worried about impressing other people, because they know that they're position is secure, can be much kinder and more considerate. They're often not, but sometimes they are.
And yet, in Dad's case, this was a kind of striving, because that's not how he grew up. He chose it when he married my mother.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:45 AM
I went to a high school like the one JAC describes in 6. Then I went to a big public college and was socially ostracized for a good long while.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:46 AM
Being put into the GT/IG/AG program was very, very good for me. Loved it.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:46 AM
In California in the 70s the program was called MGM - Mentally Gifted minors. The assumption was that we were creative, so we spent an hour a day in art class. Huge waste of time.
Posted by Goofyfoot | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:47 AM
17: Ouch, you should've gone to U of I, since that's where like half the people from my school went. No pariahhood there, from what I heard. Admittedly, being a big engineering and comp. sci. school could have something to do with that.
And Matt, aren't the smarter kids in the Scottish system being singled out by being given different work? What did you think of the old grammar school system?
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:51 AM
re: 15
Yes, that was my point too. Giving kids academic work tailored to their abilities is one thing. To single them out, label them as 'special or gifted' and seperate them from their less 'talented' peers is another.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:52 AM
Yeah that's right! They switched from MGM to GATE when I was in Jr. High I think, and subsequently (and bizarrely) to G/T.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:53 AM
I think the basic dispute here of not one of concept, but of nomenclature. And that makes sense. Perhaps just calling it the "accelerated track" or some such would be preferable.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:54 AM
re: 20
The grammar school system never existed in Scotland. Scotland 's state education sector has always been comprehensive. And, funnily enough, Scotland has one of the highest levels of university graduation per capita, in the world.
The key thing about streaming in the latter stages of secondary school education was that it was done on a subject by subject basis. It was quite possible for someone to be in a 'top' class for maths but a lower class for English, and so on. There wasn't a group of kids singled out as different from the rest.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:55 AM
I only went to publci school for two years, and then I went to a selective girls school. Pretty much everyone there was pretty smart. I don't think you could get away with having a gifted and talented program in Brookline public schools. Too many of the parents have Ph.d.'s; they'd all object if their kids weren't included.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:56 AM
In the Ontario of the early sixties, underachiever was the term. But the program was terrific, and was located in a small, underutilized school, so we were more-or-less off by ourselves. We emmigrated towards the end of my 6th grade — Canadians say Grade 6 — but I found on visits that the class was still mostly together at least through middle school. I bet that was great for them, not least socially.
My daughter is now in a selective high school, where she is very happy and successful, but she did her middle school at our local. My son has gone to a very selective middle school program and is now entering 8th. The difference in the fondness and trust the kids, both boys and girls, have for one another in the program, being with others like themselves, able to be themselves, is nothing short of a revelation.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:00 AM
In my county, there was only a real "GT" program for the two years of middle school, and even then it wasn't a whole separate program. It was the equivalent of honors classes in high school, and was specific to each subject--you could be in GT english and regular math at the same time.
In elementary school, there wasn't any separation of students, or even much in the way of differentiated work. In math class during 5th and 6th grade, 2 other kids and myself got different homework and were mostly left on our own in the corner to learn it ourselves, with the teacher helping out if we had specific questions. But this was an ad-hoc sort of thing run by the individual teachers, not some overall program.
In high school we had regular/honors/AP, and you could move levels if you did well (or poorly). There wasn't really a formal tracking program that you needed to get on in third grade or anything.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:01 AM
I often wish I had gone to one of those Math/Science high school. I wonder sometimes how different my life might have turned out.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:02 AM
When I was in grade school all of the gifted kids from across the district attended a special school one day a week, called GATE. It was kind of stigmatizing but super-fun so I didn't mind. The rest of my classes were really boring so I spent all week looking forward to Wednesdays. When I was in sixth grade, the school levy failed and the district cut all special programs like gifted education. Without that class to look forward to, sixth grade was painfully boring.
In junior high, gifted education was a separate one-period class. I was the only girl in the program in my grade - it was me and like 20 guys. (A foreshadowing of things to come, I suppose.) I'm surprised the selection criteria went by unchallenged by the parents given that disparity.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:03 AM
I went through several variations of these programs, as I was in a grade school they experimented on. I can't say it really helped; it was a bit less boring but had other problems, as noted above. It certainly didn't `fix' school for me, as I dropped out after the 10th grade. I don't expect that had too much to do with the gifted/challenge/whatever programs
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:03 AM
BG, it seems really weird that Brookline doesn't have a gifted program to me. The professor's kids seems like a perfect reason to have one. There's a big magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia and that's full of diplomats and high-level goverment types who are also pretty brilliant. Hell, NYC has Stuyvesant and you can't really argue that town is full of mediocrity. Gifted programs in those sorts of places are actually the most amazing ones, because you can actually get a really top group of kids together by the high school years, not just some "top 5%" bullshit.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:09 AM
re: 27
In the Scottish system, certainly at primary school level, there was a systematic attempt to provide differentiated work.
Maths books -- produced by the Scottish Primary Mathematics Group -- were colour coded and kids would start on one and then work through them moving through the colours to harder stuff as and when they were ready. Kids who were quick would shoot through them quickly, other kids would move at their own pace.
Attached to the system were various additional books of extra work to fill gaps when some kids were way ahead, work-cards and projects, and so on.
It wasn't perfect but there was a systematic attempt to combine work that suited the level of individual kids while keeping kids of all ability levels integrated in the same classroom.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:10 AM
28: "I wonder sometimes how different my life might have turned out."
If it had been like mine, you'd have gotten expelled before the first semester was finished.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:12 AM
I have to admit, I'm still sceptical about the separation aspect of these programs. Why would having kids educated apart from the majority of their peers be a desirable thing?
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:14 AM
These days it seems like enrollment in gifted or upper track courses is less a function of the kid's ability and more a function of how pushy the parents are.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:15 AM
I suspect an actual program of accelerated classes - whatever it's called - is better than skipping a grade individually and ending up in normal paced classes one grade up.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:16 AM
not sure if it's good for society, but it's good for those able to take advantage, or was for me. so if you're considering whether the mini-breaths ought to do so, I think yes.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:16 AM
31: Yes, but Brookline is liberal in a way that Fairfax County, Virginia simply isn't. They would probably object on the grounds that it wasn't egalitarian enough or equitable. (No, that's probably not really fair.) It is, however, a very liberal place, and I think that that changes teh dynamic somewhat.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:17 AM
32: Well, it's good that they're at least trying to keep things flexible for those who are faster or slower, but it still seems kind of misguided to me to keep all the kids in the same class. What about the kid who could do algebra easily in 6th grade? The one who is learning rigorous biology in middle school? There's no real way to accomodate people who are working at entirely different levels in the same classroom without some kids struggling and others stagnating.
Plus, I really liked the social dynamic of a completely academically selected school. As I said, there was no real stigma to being a nerd and it was almost cool to be smarter than everyone else. Everything was just more relaxed without the jocks/brains/popular kids tension.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:19 AM
38: That's really unfortunate. The real commies in China and Russia knew to stream their schools, for the good of the fatherland, etc.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:22 AM
re: 39
Well, it's a compromise, I suppose. I can't say it bothers me a great deal if some kids are moving a bit slower than they'd like. Unless they're going to head off to University at 13 there's always going to be a period of stagnation for kids who are that bright.
I think the benefits of a fully comprehensive system with no selection and with, as much as possible, fully integrated classes far outweigh the benefits of selection and seperated programs to the minority of kids who can benefit from them.
I genuinely don't think it's healthy for the smart kids to be off in their smart-ghetto away from their 'inferiors'.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:24 AM
I genuinely don't think it's healthy for the smart kids to be off in their smart-ghetto away from their 'inferiors'.
Like select colleges in college towns?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:26 AM
re: 42
Heh, fair point.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:27 AM
dumb kids pick on smart kids. bullies can identify the smart kids better if sectioned off, but can't get to them as easily.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:33 AM
Well, I can tell you that the benefits for the smarter kids who get sent off are definitely worth it. There's the social benefits I mentioned earlier, plus you really get to be pushed by meeting other kids as smart or smarter than you. It helps get rid of the super-annoying "big fish in a small pond" syndrome as early as possible, and you really do think better when you have that many people to push you and bounce ideas off of. It really is the same principle as in think tanks or research universities, only on a lower level.
However, if there are benefits for the rest of the kids to keep the occasional smart person in the standard classroom, I can see that changing matters. I've just yet to see what the real benefits of a very mixed skill-level classroom are.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:34 AM
re: 44
re: 44
dumb kids pick on smart kids.
This wasn't my experience at all. I saw a bit of it at high school but the people picked on weren't picked on for being smart. They were picked on for being either i) socially awkard and geeky or ii) arrogant little shits. Being picked on for being socially awkward and geeky is tragic, of course, but it wasn't my experience that simply being smart was enough to make you a particular target.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:38 AM
Matt, the reason why you weren't picked is that they knew you were dumb too. Not your social skills.
You forced us to explain this to you.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:46 AM
Separating a smart kid out from a normally-paced classroom - which happened to me occasionally - means that one's excess intellectual energy can go toward legitimate subjects, rather than, say, blowing shit up in a really cool way, or exploring that interesting world of pharmaceuticals.
Posted by Goofyfoot | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:47 AM
The bit about "smart ghettoes" is actually pretty on the nose, as far as it goes. But I think it misses the larger context of high school as not only an educational experience but a social one as well. Extracurricular activities can be a very powerful mechanism for bringing different types of people together -- service clubs, social clubs, sports, band, etc. -- and help break down the walls of the "smart ghettoes" about which the original commenter was concerned.
And since we're all telling a bit of our personal stories, I spent the first six years in parochial schools with no concept that anything like these programs existed. My first year in public schools was in the seventh grade, and the school administrators spent the first few weeks trying to figure where I needed to be. Eventually, I got sorted into the GT/AG classes, where I stayed until Advanced Placement became available.
My own personal experience was almost uniformly positive, and that experience clearly colors my opinion of the wisdom of such classes from a public policy perspective. Simply put, junior high and high school can be very scary places for bright children, and GT/AG classes are places which offer such kids a place where it's safe to be smart. That kind of safe harbor has immense value. Counterbalanced against that value is, of course, the cost associated with designating certain children in a school system as "gifted" or "advanced," but I think that the positives of such classes clearly outweigh the negatives.
But like I said, my opinion is obviously colored by my own experience, so take it for what it's worth.
Posted by NCProsecutor | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:57 AM
Matt, I see your point, and the arguments your making definitely were being made when I was an Education major (during my first attempt at college). It's a debate that's being had amongst the education professionals, to be sure. That said, I think the benefits outweigh the negatives, and I think it's also worth noting that in none of the programs I was in, whether as student, observer or teacher, were the kids wholly separated, unless it was a magnet school. Most programs arrange accelerated core classes (lit, math, sometimes history, sometimes science) and all electives, foreign language, etc., are integrated. There were no accelerated band or drama or phys. ed. or foreign language courses in my school, so only a minority portion of my day was spent separated out.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:09 PM
"Your" s/b "you're," GAH. So much for the benefits of AP English.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:10 PM
I was already sick of being resented by my fellow-monsters, so when they decided to send me home with the sign-up papers for what they called TAG, I "forgot" to give them to my parents. They found them eventually and put the kibosh on my attempt at avoiding that extra little bit of ostracism.
In the end, I don't think that it would have mattered at all, though. I was weird no matter what cabinet the school district put my file into.
Posted by TJ | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:18 PM
How big are the classes in a typical Scottish school, Matt? I have trouble imagining a teacher doing a good job of teaching at different levels in a large class like the ones in my grade school.
The nuns at my grade school were more concerned with making sure my freakishly high test scores didn't give me a swelled head than with creating academic challenges. Of course, we weren't given our test results, so I couldn't figure out why they were being so mean to me. I decided not to take notes anymore but instead spend the school day drawing horses and getting Bs. And that's how I became an artist.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:22 PM
An anti-clerical artist.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:26 PM
From 2nd through 8th grade I was in the GATE program in AZ, and it was an actual full-time separate classroom for the smarties located inside a regular school. We were bussed in. In the younger grades I encountered quite a bit of hostility from the kids not in our classroom, say on the playground, but within our class it was mostly a good experience. My gifted high school worked much the same way, sharing a campus with a regular high school, though it was less of an issue at that point. Whatever drawbacks there were, I was pretty grateful to get a top-notch education for free.
Posted by Sommer | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:27 PM
mc: as you suggested way up in the other thread, I think we've found what we all have in common. But I wonder if anybody feels left out of this discussion, and is being alienated by it. In principle, there should be people here who didn't show quite so early.
I often feel left out here by what everybody commenting seems to share — good example would be serial novels and dramas; just never did 'em — but is there anybody reading who just had no experience with this stuff growing up?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:31 PM
Becks - My program was called GATE, too, and was held one day a week on Wednesday. Did you grow up in SoCal, or is that a common name?
About gifted programs, McGrattan's argument seems to me like the "Everyone should get a trophy!" ravings of the middle-class parents whose kid can't play basketball. I don't see any problem with awarding people or putting them in a special class if they excel in some area. What's really the point of working hard at anything if everyone gets the same prize?
Putting kids in special programs not only, like everyone is saying, gives them work that actually challenges them, but can also make them *feel* like they're supposed to pursue more challenging things in life in general. If I had sat in a median classroom my whole educational career I would have been bored and probably not thought myself deserving to be one of those "special" people going to a great college/becoming a lawyer/doctor/astronaut/whatever. Maybe some kids have that natural drive, but I think many would languish if the educational system didn't give them that boost. In fact, many of my very intelligent friends who went to the high school across town - where they did the catch-all median classes, are bank tellers and housewives who never left their hometown.
Posted by Heather | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:31 PM
They were picked on for being either i) socially awkard and geeky or ii) arrogant little shits.
The nuns at my grade school were more concerned with making sure my freakishly high test scores didn't give me a swelled head than with creating academic challenges.
This is one of the great things about tracked schooling though. Kids tend to drop the arrogance pretty fast once they're faced with people who can kick their butts up and down the classroom. Sure, some get that incredibly annoying "untermensch" mentality regarding people who aren't smart enough to be at the school, but they're usually just unreformable pricks.
As for the social weirdness and awkwardness aspect, well, weirdness is relative and IME is excaberated by a really mixed school. A lot of kids at my high school were more or less rejects at their old high schools or middle schools, but became pretty cool and confident people once they weren't kicked around just for being nerdy or smart.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:32 PM
My dad was the smartest kid in a one-room schoolhouse in the Yukon. I don't think he had any real trouble (he was freakishly good at hockey), but I know that 1) he became very good at billiards during the year he was supposed to be studying for his baclauriate (sp), and that 2) his transition to college in a big town was very, very difficult.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:32 PM
This is one of the great things about tracked schooling though. Kids tend to drop the arrogance pretty fast once they're faced with people who can kick their butts up and down the classroom.
I had to learn how to study once I escaped to the public magnet high school, where the people in the arts program were totally looked down on by the people in the science program. but we didn't care because we were all weird together.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:39 PM
57 - GATE must be a common name. I went to school in the Midwest.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:42 PM
As someone who has a bit of a stake in this (I'm a former high school teacher, current museum educator working with elementary school kids) I actually don't know where I come down. There was no such thing as GATE where I went to school, so I have no firstand experience, but I've worked with lots of GATE kids in my years of working at museums. In a perfect world a teacher would have the time and resources to tailor to all her kids' needs, and things like GATE wouldn't need to exist. Reality being as it is, we have GATE. I don't like to segregate kids. What worries me as well is (and maybe I haven't seen a representative sample) that GATE kids tend to lack humility and social graces, which are valuable attributes. Then again, an opportunity to be unabashedly nerdy is invaluable. So I'm conflicted. But it's probably the best interim solution until there's some sort of awesomly radical education revolution.
Posted by rhymeswithmaria | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:42 PM
What worries me as well is (and maybe I haven't seen a representative sample) that GATE kids tend to lack humility and social graces, which are valuable attributes.
The lack of social graces is a bad thing, though it seems somewhat weird. Why would smart kids actually have worse manners or less socialization when they're around other smart kids? As for the humility, how are they going to become more humble when they're surrounded by stupider people in a fully mixed classroom?
Overall, I really don't think these are problems caused by the segregation. They're more the problems caused by radically different ability levels (just look at the arrogance of many shit-hot sports players).
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:47 PM
Do non-GATE kids in your experience possess humility and social graces?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:47 PM
some sort of awesomly radical education revolution.
In some random conversation in high school I advocated breaking down all the barriers in education: why separate us by grade? why separate us by subject? why separate us into classrooms with walls and desks? why all these restrictions?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:50 PM
I'm not sure why we should be so worried about kids losing all their humility through gifted education. First, most kids with whom I went to school remained perfectly humble (in fact, continually worried that we would eventually fail, was a more common concern). Second, how is that any different than kids who make Varisty football or get elected Student Body President? Again, not everyone can be good at everything, so it seems strange to me we should be so concerned that the kids themselves might eventually think they're good at something.
Posted by Heather | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:51 PM
re: 53
When I was at primary school, pretty big; somewhere between 35 and 40 kids per class.
Class sizes are smaller these days. The numbers are around 25 per class these days.
re: 57
About gifted programs, McGrattan's argument seems to me like the "Everyone should get a trophy!" ravings of the middle-class parents whose kid can't play basketball.
Is that satire?
The big problem with these streaming programs is that they can be deeply anti-egalitarian.
If smart kids benefit from being around other smart kids it seems like a strange choice to deny that benefit to other, less-smart, kids. It splits kids early and perpetuates those splits. In a world in which entry to university is competitive and scholarships hard to come by it can end up widening rather than narrowing the gap between high-achievers and the rest.
These classes aren't separate but equal. The very nature of the system means that extra resources are spent on kids who need them the least.
Furthermore, there's a strong class element in this. Kids from supportive middle-class homes that value education are massively more likely to enter these programs and reap the benefits than those from less well-off homes with a low educational background.
At their worst, these kind of programs can serve to undermine any attempt at creating a more just society.
[Note: I don't want to sound too hyperbolic. There's a big difference between the programs described in 50 and 55 for example]
What's really the point of working hard at anything if everyone gets the same prize?
Being smart is emphatically not the same thing as working hard. There's no moral dimension to being smart and it makes no sense to talk of 'desert' in these cases. Smart kids don't deserve more than anyone else.
Especially when the 'prize' in this case is greater access to educational opportunity and improved employment prospects in the future.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:51 PM
What's really the point of working hard at anything if everyone gets the same prize?
It shouldn't be seen as a prize, though. Nothing wrong with having advanced classes or even separate schools, but there is a purely practical purpose to doing things that way. Kids are put in accelerated programs because some of them learn better that way, not because they're being rewarded (except in an internal intellectual-fulfillment sort of way, but that's not the same thing).
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:51 PM
is there anybody reading who just had no experience with this stuff growing up?
This stuff just did not exist in small-town South Dakota in 70s and 80s. I think I could have skipped a grade if my parents pushed for it (I'm glad they didn't, I was socially awkward as it was), but that would have been the only thing like an accelerated program. I spent my entire pre-college career bored out of my gourd and getting crappy grades because I couldn't be arsed to to the minimal effort to get decent grades (I actually graduated in the bottom half of my call in HS).
All I can say is that I'm very, very grateful for Macalester College's "high risk, high gain" and need-blind admission policy, and very, very glad that I do very, very well on standardized tests.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:53 PM
Did I mention that I never learned how to do second drafts, so reviewing what I've just typed, no matter how good an idea it might be, isn't second nature to me at all?
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:55 PM
It's been weird reading these comments, as they've brought back a lot of memories. In the college town I grew up in, there was naturally a large number of smart kids. I was generally considered one of them, except by the school system. It wasn't just that I wasn't selected for the gifted program (I don't recall what they called it), but in that in junior and senior high, I was tracked into the lower level classes. This was even true in the one area they couldn't really deny I was ahead: having done algebra in 5th and 6th grade, I coasted through junior high math and was assigned to the 10th grade math class as a freshman in high school. Unfortunately, they didn't put me in with the upper tracked class, which would have had my brother, his friends, and friends of mine, but rather in the lower one. It consisted of what (to me then) was a very intimidating group of kids who didn't like being in class and weren't exactly welcoming to a 9th grader who seemed like he might. Thanks to them, I didn't.
It was weird being with the kids I hung out with and who were my peers before and after school, and then going through the doors to different classes for the rest of the day. My father, perhaps because he came from an impoverished background and wound up a PhD., had a large streak of anti-elitism that came through in these matters--I think some of what Bostoniangirl has described of her dad applies to mine as well. By the time the school decided that, gee, maybe that kid should be in the Honors classes after all, I didn't care so much. While my friends were making plans to apply to Ivy League schools and the like, I was smoking dope and getting ready for the local state school.
Later on, after much academic misadventure, I eventually landed in top graduate programs. So one could say no harm done, and once high school was over, an awful lot of good times before I got serious about anything. Still, when in grad school, I always felt a little different from the other students who had experienced the whole track of elite education, from gifted classes as a child, to AP programs, to private (or seriously good public) universities. The nagging sense that I didn't belong rarely left. On the other hand, feeling like that was probably far better than being the sort of person who had gone the elite path all the way to the same point, and then found out that they didn't belong for real. I saw that happen, and it seemed pretty crushing.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 12:59 PM
Okay, "prize" was the wrong word to use. And sure there is a difference between working hard and "being" smart, but I'm not sure how you separate that. And, yes, there is a class element, but that's another argument altogether (I'm all for early-education programs; parents teaching their children to read before they get to school, etc.).
Maybe I come at this from a different perspective, because I was very poor growing up, and the opportunity to be in a gifted class, thus channeling me into honors and AP classes later on, meant that I could get a scholarship to go to college, whereas otherwise I would be flipping burgers and still living with my mom. So actually, I tend to think of these as just the opposite, when it comes to the "class" argument, because they're phenomenal opportunties for kids who can't afford the American Dream.
And McGrattan - I didn't mean to imply you were "raving," if it came off that way, I just really hate those parents.
Posted by Heather | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:02 PM
In the past few years I've worked with hundreds of classrooms of children--public, private, and home schoolers, 1st grade-12th, and I find that humility and social graces, as I put them, are a product of what we in the education field call "classroom culture." When a classroom full of kids comes to my workplace, they bring their culture with them, and I get the fun of observing it and noticing patterns. In my experience, classroom culture depends a lot on the vibe the teacher puts out, or possibly a vibe that filters down from the administration and is the general school culture. I don't think classroom culture correlates with socioeconomics or collective smarts of the group. And of course I want all kids to know/feel that they're good at something. What I don't want them to feel is superior or inferior to other kids (or their teachers). So I can foresee GATE classrooms with fantastic teachers and fantastic culture; I just haven't met one yet.
Posted by rhymeswithmaria | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:04 PM
70: I'm the exact same way. My high school teachers were always confused as to why I would do so well on in-class essays and the writing sections of standardized tests, and then get so-so grades on papers I wrote at home. There was effectively no difference between them for me.
I've since learned to slow down when I write so that I can revise as I go along, which is almost like writing a second draft, but actually going back and changing something that I've "finished" is still hard to do.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:05 PM
My parents kept me out of GATE programs (and didn't agree to let the school put me up a grade). In high school I did take honors and AP classes, though (except when they conflicted with band or Spanish). I'm glad for it: sure, I might have learned a little more in elementary school, but I wouldn't have learned to hang out with the poor kids and the Spanish speakers. In 8th grade they finally gave in, and I found out the the honors kids were appalling snobs, and appallingly lazy and self-centered. They resented me for not having been part of the club before, and they had a "strike" when the English teacher assigned a long book the same week that the social studies teacher had us doing a big project. I and a Filipino boy were the only ones that didn't walk out of class. Which earned us more opprobium. The English teacher was an idiot and praised the lazy sods for their "courage" in walking out of his classroom, which I resented; it was a lot harder not to.
But I'm not at all bitter or prejudiced against educational elitism. No, not me.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:23 PM
I'll bet that, while all of us appear to have the standardized test knack, a fair portion remember baffling and frustrating teachers. I'm similar to Matt in 74. I'll say this much for you Matt, reviewing your blog the last couple of days, I'm continually impressed by how much you think for yourself. Polishing and revising certainly help, but insightfulness and spontaneity are more valuable.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:23 PM
When I was really young we didn't live in the US [my father is an archaeologist, so we lived where he was digging, and I had tutors and home-schooling and such.]
I had learnt to read by age three or so, and when we came back to the States, I was very very bored, and had to be bribed to sit quietly in class whilst my brain atrophied. I was always the smartest kid in the class - something the teachers would inevitably make clear to my fellow classmates, who would then take out their frustrations by beating me up on the playground - and spent most of my non-school time curled up in a chair reading science fiction and the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, hoping that my real parents would come and take me back to Mars where I belonged. By fifth grade, I was in a school system that had "enrichment" classes for bright kids, which made academic life somewhat more interesting.
I pre-date the nomenclature era: In my middle school and first high school, we were simply tracked - one being the highest. We knew we were smart, we knew we were expected to go to the best universities, but we didn't have a label, per se. [A couple of years after I left, track one sophmores were prohibited from taking the SATs by ETS; it seems they were skewing the curve.]
In my second high school - supposedly one of the nation's top 10 [so not] - athletics were far more important than academics, and I wasn't allowed into "honours" classes because my transcript didn't say "honours", it said "track one". This school system didn't start foreign languages until 10th grade, so my third-year Russian class consisted of 3 transfer students, and my senior French class consisted of me and five people who couldn't speak French beyond "la plume de ma tante est sur la table de mon oncle."
I left mid-year as an early admit to college [which, amusingly, the high school took credit for in their monthly newsletter to parents]. Had I not been allowed to do so, I would have run off to Haight- Ashbury or Greenwich Village or someplace with a library large enough to hide in. There is, in my experience, nothing worse than being bored in a classroom day after day.
OTOH, being 15-going-on-16 as a college freshman ain't no picnic. Being not quite 16, cute, blonde and socially naive is even worse. Based on experience, I'm far more in favour of having accelerated and advanced classes within one's age group. [My first high school would have sent students over to the local Ivy League university for high-level math and science classes; calculus was on the HS curriculum; quantum mechanics wasn't. The students would still have attended the high school for other subjects.]
However, early college experiences aside, I'm not at all in favour of tossing all students into one class regardless of their abilities - it does no one any favours. Just as one wouldn't use a race horse in a carnival pony ride - it's a waste of potential - placing a student who is going to be bored because s/he already knows the lessons in a classroom with students who are struggling to learn those lessons is a waste. Better to have smaller classes of comparable ability so that the teacher isn't torn between those who need attention and those who seem not to, but sometimes fail to learn some basics. [An example: My brother can't spell. He was bright and his papers read well, so his high school teachers didn't bother to correct him. When he got to university and wrote his first papers, his English prof glanced at the first page and turned it back to him unread and his philosophy prof asked if English was his second language. An argument for teaching phonetics or at least having a roommate who can proofread. Nowadays, at least, there is spellcheck...]
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:28 PM
DE! Long time!
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:32 PM
Wowie guys! DominEditrix is here! Hey everyone!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:32 PM
She wants chocolate, guys.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:35 PM
Then chocolate she shall have!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:38 PM
Golly, thanks. Yeah, the spontaneity certainly comes in handy when I need to churn something out quickly. Only thing is that it seems like I hit a ceiling with the first draft-style writing, and even though going back and re-writing would make things better, I haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet. Still feels like I'm "wasting" what I already wrote, or something.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:39 PM
82-->76
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:39 PM
Fascinating discussion.
The forms of GT programs (as they were known where I was) seems to vary a lot. In elementary school, for 4th and 5th grade the GT kids spent one day every other week (I think) bused to a different school, where they had a full day of different activites with kids from various schools around the county. We did (formal) debate there, and lots of interesting puzzles and experiments - things like breaking the class into two groups who had certain rules for exchanging tokens and had to figure out the other group's rules without speaking at all. Strange board games I haven't seen before or since. However, this was all kind of orthogonal to the main classroom material, and there wasn't really any tracking or streaming there.
Junior high school was about the same ratio, a half-day a week (but alternating so that we didn't always miss the same things, in the seven-classes-a-day schedule). Similarly, it was orthogonal material - a lot more creative and more intellectual than the junk that composed most of junior high. There, however, it contrasted with regular classes that were themselves tracked, at least into regular and honors, and in the case of math, an entire branching sequence: "math 6" could be followed by "math 7" and "math 8" (and all the way up to "math 12" in the high school), just doing arithmetic-related things. Or you could hop on the fast track after math 6 (or before, if you were really bored and had pushy parents), and go to pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry (making those classes grade-mixed; my geometry class had students from grades 8-12).
For high school I went to the aforementioned magnet school in Fairfax County. Since it was its own entire (fairly large) school, it had its own internal divisions, but the culture shift from middle school was really important. The kids who were there all tended to agree that schooling was valuable, and that gave a culture of respect to the atmosphere. Having a classroom that's not half-full of people who don't care to be there, and will let you know, was great.It was also quite useful to experience getting your butt kicked up and down, academically, before college.
Within the school - supposedly science&tech focused, and not generally admitting to being all-purpose GT - there wasn't internal tracking, with the exception of a couple of classes that had AP versions as replacements for the "regular" versions (US government, english lit), instead of successors to them (physics, chemistry, computer science) or just as total electives (european history, AP languages).
Posted by Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:42 PM
Welcome back, DE! Please accept this fruit basket. And I'm sure you have a good "Fuck you, clown" poem for us in the top thread....
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 1:52 PM
In elementary school, our gifted program meant that one day a week, I was pulled out of reading or English to go and do logic puzzles or train for some of the interscholastic nerd competitions.
In sixth-eighth, 'gifted' meant a special homeroom class and an occasional special program that met after school. By eighth grade, math had been tracked so the top kids learned algebra.
Ninth-twelfth was three tracks: AP, honors, 'regular' by which they really meant 'remedial/troublemaker/shop.'
I was an awkward, lonely little girl. It seems to be a trade-off in public schools; you can excel, or you can have friends. On balance it's a trade-off I'll take, but I was very sad as a pre-teen.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:01 PM
Good to see you, DE.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 3:15 PM
My opinions on these things are pretty much in line with McGrattan and bitchphd.
And you people thinking that kids get picked on just for being smart are kdding yourselves.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:12 PM
I think it's the ones who think otherwise who are kidding themselves. This coming from a kid who wasn't picked on very much. see, e.g., 47.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:24 PM
Like most of you, I have mixed feelings, and I agree with gswift's latest that being smart isn't what gets you picked on. My daughter went through the regular school, my son's in "pre-IB," because it feeds our IB program, although I doubt he'll go there. Their abilities are similar, with a shade of difference.
My daughter benefited enormously from enrichment programs, like the Art Institute course she took her 8th grade year. Once a week, she checked herself out at noon, caught a bus and connected to a train, went downtown, and took a class taught on a very high level that studied not merely plastic arts but also drama and literature. She shone, and made friends.
Both my kids most innovative learning experiences were at our local, where several teachers were very good at "differentiation." Giving the bright kids something challenging to do, bringing the slower ones along, keeping everybody moving, is an art that some teachers have. By contrast, with the material my son's class has, they don't do much besides "speedup." Why should they? When the top 10k or so of Chicago 6th graders were given the SAT, 6 of the top 50 were in his class of thirty. And all the system could offer us, besides some of the most disgusting fawning you ever saw, such that several parents could hardly contain laughter, was the same programs my daughter had used. He has great music , art and French instruction, though.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:26 PM
Nathan, you went to TJ? When was that? I thought there was effective internal tracking at that school simply because the really good kids were the only ones taking high level electives in the various subjects. At least, that's how it worked out at IMSA.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:27 PM
Re separating--#77 hinted at this, but I'd like to emphasize--tracking students is not just about giving smart kids special treatment. Middling smart kids, I think, will get much more attention and get challenged more in classrooms where there isn't a quick-thinker laying claim to "smartest kid in the class." Teachers can give struggling kids more attention if kicking out the GATE kids lets them teach to a narrower range. I think tracking gets *all* the students a better education.
Posted by Dee | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 4:48 PM
I think it's the ones who think otherwise who are kidding themselves. This coming from a kid who wasn't picked on very much. see, e.g., 47.
And see McGrattan's #46. It's just not that simple. Funny how smart kids who also happen to play a varsity sport aren't picked on. Funny how smart kids who are willing to punch another kid in the face aren't picked on. Thinking you, or your kid is getting picked on solelly because they have some innate brain power is delusional.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:00 PM
I can understand that these programs may benefit the children receiving them. And some of the less divisive programs -- the hour or two here and there every now and again -- don't seem especially problematic.
However, I'd still want to resist segregation by ability as much as possible on egalitarian grounds and I feel that those egalitarian values really matter.
Heather makes the point in 72 that these programs may actually benefit some of the worst off and I think that's probably true. The grammar school system in England, for example, really did offer a chance for the very brightest among the poor to do well. This is a live debate in the UK at the moment because de facto segregation via house prices has effectively meant that for the very brightest among the poor it's now harder rather than easier to achieve in education.
However, what's missed is that under the grammar school system the vast majority of kids -- the ones who didn't pass the hurdles to get into selective schools -- were deeply let down by that selection process and condemned to a life as educational second-class citizens.
We solve these problems, I think, by making education more egalitarian and less divise rather than more so and it seems to me that we ought to be concentrating on tailoring our systems for the majority and for the worst off -- the old Rawlsian 'maximin' thing again -- rather than worrying overly much about the 'elites' who are probably going to manage under more or less any system. If that means some kids go through high school less fulfilled than they might have been then that's unfortunate but I don't think the answer is a high degree of streaming and segregation.
The Scottish system,* to take the example with which I am most familiar, seems to do quite well as a fully comprehensive non-selective system.
Also, BitchPhd's point in 75 -- that not being segregated has value in terms of socialising with a broad peer group and not with an elite, all of whom are much like oneself -- seems an important one.
* which is definitely not without it's flaws.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:02 PM
re: 93
My own experience of high school was that, while it was obvious I was smart, I mostly didn't get picked on was because, largely, the people who'd otherwise have done the 'picking' were my friends.
I'd grown up with them, been in school with them since I was 4, I sounded like them, played football with them at breaktimes, etc.
That's not a trivial point. To the extent that the potential bullies perceive you as different or alien that's only likely to exacerbate the bullying. I'm not so naïve as to believe that everyone mixing together is likely to eliminate all bullying, but it can't hurt.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:06 PM
My private school didn't have any such programs, at least for elementary students. A month into 4th grade, my mom yanked me out and homeschooled me through 12th. I actually quite liked it.
My only beef with homeschooling is that if you are socially awkward, you might not know it until it matters. I also wonder if it isn't to blame for my hatred of college. Any other homeschoolers here?
Posted by sam k | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:08 PM
But isn't it a more efficient education to keep every kid working at a their potential? If you want to get as much bang for the education dollar/pound as you can, you need to keep each child working throughout their school time. It seems a lot easier to do that using streaming systems, since a class of 7th graders learning algebra probably doesn't cost any more than a class of 7th graders learning arithmatic. Plus, streaming helps avoid skipping grades, which I've seen screw up a fair amount of people socially.
I agree that the streaming system needs to be more fluid so that you don't create a second-tier education that's too rigid. Perhaps there should be some sort of relegation system to allow new people to enter the magnet schools if they could keep up, replacing those who drop out? The only problem in some cases is that (especially in the US) a magnet school will have a unique, accelerated curriculum, making it especially hard to jump in.
And I don't really understand why everyone is insisting on the socialization at school with people of all school abilities. There's not that sort of socialization at colleges and people seem fine with it. It's also a rare workplace that's got the full range of intellects. What's so bad about a magnet high school? After all, there's the other 130 hours of the week and the other 15 weeks of the year when you're going to be around everyone else. Why not segregate by scholastic ability when it could really help everyone?
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:22 PM
I was smart. The only kids that ever picked on me were the snots in the 8th grade honors class. The regular kids from the wrong side of the track got along with me fine, and vice-versa.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:24 PM
After all, there's the other 130 hours of the week and the other 15 weeks of the year when you're going to be around everyone else.
Because you're not with everyone else most of the time. You're with kids in your neighborhood and the children of your parents' friends--i.e., other kids who are probably from the same ethnic, income, educational, and social bracket as yourself more or less.
One of the nice things about public school is that it gives you a chance to learn how to get along with the rest of the world. Including people who aren't necessarily academically gifted, but who are good at other things.
There's not that sort of socialization at colleges and people seem fine with it. It's also a rare workplace that's got the full range of intellects.
This is precisely WHY desegregating public schools (which doesn't necessarily mean not having magnet schools or honors programs--but let's be very honest about which kids are most likely to get into those) matters. Because children who grow up with friends outside their own social class are the ones who will be comfortable working and living with people outside their own social class.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:28 PM
I'm going to guess that the normal Scottish pre-university education would be closer to an accelerated US program than it would be to a normal mainstream US curriculum. I could be completely wrong.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:31 PM
The kids who got picked on most frequently in my experience were the ones who, for whatever reason, got labeled as gay. After that, it was whoever was significantly different and/or awkward (not that being so wasn't sufficient to get one called gay, but not everyone was.) There was a really rather socially inept Orthodox Jewish kid with a unibrow in my class. He was viciously tormented from elementary school through high school, I'm sorry to say (not be me, mostly though I tried not to be associated with him.)
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:33 PM
I was in the pull-out gifted program in elementary school; I didn't test high enough for the magnet school, but I doubt I would have liked it anyway. At my school they called it HEP (High Educational Potential) rather than gifted because they didn't want to piss off all the obnoxious middle-class parents whose kids weren't in the program (the ones whose kids were were bad enough). It was fun but I'm not sure how much I really learned or how much difference it made in the long run.
In middle school I stayed in the gifted program (just called Gifted), which was one or two classes out of seven. Again, fun, but probably not too helpful. In high school I was in the vestigial gifted class freshman year, but after that just honors classes.
I'm kind of ambivalent about these programs, for the reasons others have given. I don't think the ones like those I was in are really harmful, since they're only part-time, but neither am I sure that they're necessary.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:58 PM
My sister either had better teachers or a better capacity for dealing with boredom than I had, even though I had the benefit of 'Enrichment' (fourth grade), 'Gifted/Talented' (fifth/sixth grade), 'Honors English' (seventh/eighth grade), and AP English (senior year). She got all the great grades in high school, went to Rice, and finally felt like she was surrounded by people like her. I started underachieving, quit doing homework, graduated 52nd in my class (with the highest SAT scores, natch), went to a state school, and took five years to figure out that I honestly didn't have the patience for college after all and maybe I should just lie to my parents and tell them I was graduating.
I don't really know what the best answer is, but I never felt challenged and never saw the importance of homework or routine. I failed a college class with a 94 on the final 'cause I had more than three tardies (mornings and I don't get along). But my best examples of how mainstreaming doesn't work come from college.
The first week of my calculus class, we had a fantastic professor on Monday and Wednesday. On Friday, a nebbish in orthopedic shoes walked in and said our section had been chosen for an experimental lesson plan, and he'd been assigned to teach it. We were broken up into study groups of five (IIRC) and then had to work the rest of the semester in those groups. All homework assignments were to be turned in as group assignments, etc. The stronger students were supposed to help the weaker students in the group to master the material. Test scores would be averaged for each group and each member of the group would score his group's average score. There wasn't a single other calc section I could transfer into because of my schedule, so I was stuck. I was also miserable. I couldn't teach, didn't want to teach, and didn't have the patience for it, and the weaker students in my group resented me for understanding everything so easily and didn't really let me try to help anyway. Luckily the group test score thing was dropped, but I think I quit doing any group homework assignments at all and swung a B in the class on test scores alone.
And when I became a music major we had to break up into "practice partners" for sight singing. We were to meet at least once a week for some percentage of our grades. I was paired with a guy who was, well, tone-deaf (how a tone-deaf guy managed to play violin at all, much less get the idea into his head that he should major in music was - and still is - beyond me). How the hell was I supposed to help him? There was nothing I could do. No mnemonic interval helped (think 'here comes the bride' - although I don't think mnemonic intervals really help in general anyway when sight reading. Things move too fast, and the mnemonics are usually too far out of context to be helpful), there was no hope of any sort of absolute or relative pitch memory, and the simplest motion would go wildly off with him in the first couple notes. Again, I quit. A couple girls in my class found out, took pity on him and invited him to their practice sessions (which they didn't need either) and I got in trouble for giving up on him. Huzzah.
The noble, egalitarian goal of keeping everybody together and letting the weaker students get the benefit of the stronger students' presence (read: touch the hems of their garments) is optimistic but, I feel, misplaced. Students are happier when allowed to go at their own pace, whether slow or fast. Less gifted students who are resentful of their more gifted peers are going to be resentful no matter what - regardless of whether they're all streamed together or split up by ability. I agree that socialization is important, but let's not confuse it with socialism.
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 5:59 PM
This thread includes the earlier grade-skipping/early college discussion.
Bonus link.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:17 PM
Less gifted students who are resentful of their more gifted peers are going to be resentful no matter what - regardless of whether they're all streamed together or split up by ability.
I don't think I've ever had the sense that that is true, actually. I don't really remember ever hearing anything like that, other than the odd rueful, 'I wish I found this as easy as you'-type comment.
re: 100
I have no idea if that's true or not as I'm not familiar enough with the details of US syllabi. Some of the stages at which people have described doing certain things -- on their accelerated or gifted programs -- sound earlier than we did similar things but I can't be clear. I don't think we did calculus until around 14 or 15, for example. Although basic algebra would have been introduced around age 11 or 12.
We start school quite early though -- 4 isn't uncommon. I had already been at school 6 months before I had my 5th birthday. You achieve university entry level qualifications at 16 or 17, although a lot of people won't actually go straight to university at that point and will spend another year at school studying subjects to a higher level or acquiring more qualifications in order to gain entry to a more competitive university place.
I actually went to university at 16 -- without any acceleration or grade-skipping -- but chose completely the wrong subjects for me and hated it. Left and worked for 3 or 4 years and then went back aged 20.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 6:52 PM
I don't think we did calculus until around 14 or 15, for example. Although basic algebra would have been introduced around age 11 or 12.
I think eb might be on to something. We generally start algebra around 15 or 16, although people in accelerated programs (like many of us here) get it at 13 or 14; calculus, if you get to it in high school (most don't), would be at 17 or 18.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:02 PM
I don't think I've ever had the sense that that is true, actually. I don't really remember ever hearing anything like that, other than the odd rueful, 'I wish I found this as easy as you'-type comment.
You missed my point. I wasn't saying that every non-gifted student would be resentful, I was saying that the ones who would resent the split track would, in the absence of a split track, resent having the gifted kids skewing the curve / getting all the answers / being teachers' pets. The ones who look at the disparity and say "I wish I found this as easy as you" aren't the same group as the resentful ones, except maybe to the extent that they all wish the curve weren't being skewed by the really smart kids.
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:04 PM
To put 106 in perspective for the non-Americans out there, US schools generally run from age 5 to 18; one year of Kindergarten, then elementary school, the length of which varies from district to district but is usually five or six years, then three years of middle school/junior high, then four years of high school. Elementary school is basic early-childhood education with one teacher all day, middle school is structured differently, with different class periods for different subjects, taught by different teachers. High school is structured like middle school but involves actual learning. Most people start college at 18.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:33 PM
That might be a little confusing. Here are the ages kids generally are in the different schools:
Kindergarten: 5-6
Elementary: 6-11
Middle: 11-14
High: 14-18
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 7:35 PM
"If smart kids benefit from being around other smart kids it seems like a strange choice to deny that benefit to other, less-smart, kids. It splits kids early and perpetuates those splits."
What makes you think less-smart kids benefit from being around smart kids?
"These classes aren't separate but equal. The very nature of the system means that extra resources are spent on kids who need them the least."
You might argue that the higher track would tend to draw more funding whatever the original intentions, but you don't think that both tracks would do better even with equal funding?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:06 PM
I'd still want to resist segregation by ability as much as possible on egalitarian grounds and I feel that those egalitarian values really matter.
I come to the opposite conclusion on egalitarian grounds--the middle and upper-middle class kids are going to have enrichment opportunities as a matter of course that poorer kids will only have through special programs. But I think placement by subject is a good way to handle the academically talented.
The magnet school I went to in Detroit had special programs in arts and science, but also in trades, and musicians and the painters and the car repair guys generally went to the same science class, for example. Presumably the science kids did English comp with the HVAC kids. And the school was about 50/50 black/white.
In between the hell of Catholic school and the paradise of Magnet High was the purgatory of public junior high. There were a couple of other very gifted girls there, who were ostracized. It's sad in retrospect that we avoided each other as though we might be less outcast if we didn't hang with the other outcasts.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:29 PM
93:
I don't know why I feel this is worth fighting over. I wasn't picked on, I played a varsity sport, and I don't have any kids to be picked on. But do you know what, the kids who all were picked on--especially in elementary school and junior high--they were all smart. Not all of the smart kids were picked on, but the ones where were picked on, they were all both very odd and very smart. Those two attributes, they often correlate in youngsters.
And the bullies were mostly dumb.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:48 PM
that should read "the ones who were picked on."
Now you can see why I fit in with the jocks.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:49 PM
I didn't pay much attention to the kids who were picked on once I ceased to be one of them (which I suppose reflects poorly on me), but my impression was that non-athleticism was a more important factor than intelligence (although the two were often correlated). That's just in elementary school, though; I don't know how it worked later on.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:52 PM
certainly there are other important attributes: poorer kids got picked on, and kids who were probably gay, they got picked on.
But my original point was that intelligence is one quality that attracts bullies. All I've got is what I remember observing during my education for that one. Certainly people find lots of excuses to be cruel to each other, but one excuse is to imagine that the smart kid is really obnixious about her smartness.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:53 PM
obnoxious. fuck fuck fuck. I need to go put a smart kid's head in a toilet now.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 8:54 PM
In my experience, it wasn't the smart kids that got picked on; it was the socially awkward ones. Especially if the social awkwardness was paired with any hint of being effeminate.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:12 PM
What makes you think less-smart kids benefit from being around smart kids?
A good teacher knows how to structure classroom assignments so that the students have time to work together. It gives them a chance to explain things to each other and learn from one another. Often kids can explain concepts in ways that are easier for other kids to grasp than grownups can.
It's also beneficial for the smart kids to do this: as all of us who teach know, you learn things better when you have to explain them to others.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 9:15 PM
I've been thinking about this thread for a few hours, and maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but I'm seeing the move to refrain from supporting a gifted program as very privileged and not egalitarian at all.
Consider the bored child who is quite bright whose parents wish him to stay in the mainstream class all the time so he gets to know kids of different ethnicities and backgrounds.
First off, this seems to me to be a ridiculously privileged assumption, and I don't mean that because of the assumption that the 'normal' kids will be the 'poor' kids. It's this. The bored bright wealthy child in the normal stream will probably have lots of parental attention. Grades start to slip? Extra help and tutors. Trips to the museum to nurture Junior's chemistry skills. Moving in a social millieu where everyone his parents know move onto the Ivies or other great schools and then onto graduate and professional schools. Maybe some college courses on the side to beef up the resume. Great expectations. Bored and acting up? Therapy. Parents worried about the future? Lots of outside the classroom opportunities. Oh, and sports.
The poorer kid who needs to compete with the prep schools kids to get into college on scholarship? Needs the AP courses to prove his schooling has been good. If he acts up and does badly one year? No Kaplan program to up his SAT score. No enrichment program to take him to the local university for a couple weeks? Mum & dad aren't going to be dragging him off to it. They're busy. They don't know it's out there.
Oh, and if bored poor kid acts up, he'll just be a problem. Bored rich kid is from a good family. He's going places.
It's kind of like not needing to dress up for the opera because you know you're important enough to be there.
And realistically, if my mostly-decent public high school hadn't offered AP courses, I wouldn't be anywhere. It wouldn't matter how bright I was. College applications meant competing with academy kids who had every advantage in math and science. The regular stream in my high school? Terminates with pre-calc. That stacks up well against the kids coming out with calc II.
Or in other words:
I come to the opposite conclusion on egalitarian grounds--the middle and upper-middle class kids are going to have enrichment opportunities as a matter of course that poorer kids will only have through special programs.
What she said. It's hardly egalitarian if it all it means that when Junior trots off to Harvard he can tell sympathetic stories of having had a poor friend in elementary school.
---
The best magnet program I know of was one in Houston, where a magnet program of 90 kids per year (30 Asian, 30 black, 30 white) all were in an urban school. Yes, the kids took classes with their bright classmates. But all other activities -- football, music, etc -- was with the general school population. It seemed to work pretty well.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:03 PM
I don't think anyone's arguing that AP classes are the problem; even McG acknowledges that stuff like that is helpful (and they apparently have it in Scotland). I think what people are concerned about is stuff like special magnet schools where all the kids are gifted, and I think these concerns are valid. Magnet programs like the one you mention, which are part of ordinary schools, don't sound so bad.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:16 PM
People were talking about fully mixed classrooms; in a standard tracking system, while in theory one could be gifted in math and be in the remedial English class, it doesn't often happen. My high school wasn't big, but I knew mostly the other track 3 kids.
And if we're talking about having the smart kids teach the slower ones, well, that doesn't to me say magnet school. They tried that in sixth grade science. All it meant was the other kids fucked off, didn't do their work, I got a poor grade and my dad yelled at me for working in a group. Fuck teaching the other kids. That shouldn't be the job of an eleven-year old.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:24 PM
And if we're talking about having the smart kids teach the slower ones, well, that doesn't to me say magnet school.
s/b "That doesn't imply that we're only talking about concerns at magnet schools, since most schools are tracked.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:25 PM
Right, people are saying we shouldn't have magnet schools, and instead the smart kids should teach the slower ones.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:27 PM
they'd better, or else.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:32 PM
And I'm saying it doesn't work. (And btw, 'teaching the slower ones' means 'no AP classes for you.')
Maybe in theory, with well-trained teachers, and students who are all friends, and nine-year-olds who are natural instructors, and no kids who are ever bullies or mean-spirited or impatient with others, yeah. But in my experience, it meant the teacher got to relax by pairing up the bright girl with the sleazy group of boys so the girl could either do their homework for them or get a bad grade herself.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:34 PM
I'm not endorsing it, just clarifying.
And btw, 'teaching the slower ones' means 'no AP classes for you.'
How so? I assumed the "teaching the slower ones" stuff was about much lower grade levels.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:37 PM
In junior high I remember telling other group members who clearly expected me to do the work that I was fine with a bad grade because I could make up for it with individual work on other assignments. Everyone in the group ended up working and we did ok.
In college I was part of a group project in one class where I ended up doing most of the work including most of the writing. But in that case I took the work on voluntarily.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:42 PM
Fuck teaching the other kids. That shouldn't be the job of an eleven-year old.
I tried to come up with another way to express that thought earlier, but this pretty much nails how I feel about it. It also shouldn't have been the job of a 19-year-old in college calculus.
Posted by fedward | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:42 PM
But I don't really know. Does anyone who advocates this want to clarify?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:42 PM
125: It worked for me. I had some frustrations with badly-organized groups, and I don't really like the idea of group grades, at least not without some individualized component. But generally it's just a matter of assigning different roles to different members of the group, and monitoring what's going on (from the teacher's point of view).
Another reason it worked for me was that while I could explain long division to the pot smoker, he could explain to me what the stoners got up to, which helped me not be a total geek. Or I could help the ESL student with vocabulary, but then she could also help me with my Spanish. Or I'd help my best girlfriend with her social studies assignment, and she'd tell me which boys to avoid in the hallways.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:45 PM
It seems like people's opinions on this issue are shaped almost entirely by personal experience, which probably explains why this discussion has been so heated.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:46 PM
This discussion has been heated?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:48 PM
Fuck you, clown.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:49 PM
I assumed the "teaching the slower ones" stuff was about much lower grade levels.
I assumed that if we were against tracking because it wasn't egalitarian, it was teaching at all levels. Kids aren't generally tracked in elementary schools where I grew up. But I wasn't expected to teach my classmates, either, which is good, because I would have been a shitty reading teacher when I was eight and it just would have made life more hellish for me. According to gswift it must have been due to some distasteful personal trait in addition to intelligence, but whatever it was, school was hellish enough without me having to teach other kids. I had enough crap to deal with.
I dunno. I sorta think that maybe some of my later success in high school had to do with some of the extra exposure to science in the lower grades. Or learning logic games when I was seven. I probably could have done without Oregon Trail on the Apple IIGS.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:49 PM
128: But the point isn't that it's the kid's "job"; the point is that it's beneficial to explain things to others, and often one can use different metaphors or analogies that will help peers get it. And it breaks up the class time so it's not all teacher-driven lecture, and it helps students learn to rely on peers and that not all learning has to be from "authority figures," and that teaching doesn't require a special genius. It creates a more student-centered classroom and gets kids to be less dependent on passive learning.
I wouldn't advocate doing it all the time, but the point is different kids learn in different ways, and teachers have to take that into account. The shy kid who won't raise her hand in class might be great in a smaller group, the smart talker who dominates the big group has to learn to hold back and listen to what others have to say, and so on.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:54 PM
Cala: Look at McGrattan's 24, for example. A lot of people seem to be assuming you have to go 100% one way or the other, but that's just not true.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:56 PM
The shy kid who won't raise her hand in class might be great in a smaller group
Or might be doing just fine academically, thank you, and doesn't appreciate being forced on the spot in some group situation where it's no longer okay to be quiet and do well.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:57 PM
I am slightly more heated than usual. Elementary school and middle school were pretty much torment for me.
B, I can see if it was a straight give-and-take, well-moderated. The thing is, until maybe.... calc II as a college freshman... I wasn't in the position to be a 'taker' academically. School was ridiculously easy for me and so it wasn't help-Susie-with-math she-reads-your-essay and you-talk-to-her-in-German; group work where everybody copied Cala's homework because she never misses anything. And then maybe throws tape in her hair later for being the know-it-all.
It didn't lead to friendships because they didn't get to be in charge. It lead to... 10 year old girls hating me because the fact I could wire circuits around the little lightbulbs meant the cute boy liked me better than the ditzes.
Now, at age 27, I know how to navigate social situations politically. Plus, now I'm not the smart one in the room anymore. But I wasn't that socially skilled at age 10 and all the groupwork in the world didn't mean I learned it faster.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 10:58 PM
Yeah, I know that my opinions are certainly shaped by my experience. Without magnet schools, I wouldn't even exist. The old English grammar school system was what allowed my family to go from a bastard Lancastershire mill worker without all his fingers to a Cambridge graduate in one generation. Even my father could only get a good education because the state paid his way through magnet schools, since my grandfather took a pretty low-paying job after graduation.
As for myself, I got to go to a state-sponsored magnet school with a really diverse set of fellow students (far more diverse than most district-bound public schools, since it covered the whole state instead of one rich/middle-class/poor neighborhood). Not only that, but I was able to take classes which would not have been available anywhere apart from a couple other magnet schools and some super-exclusive private schools on the east coast even at the top private schools. Until you get the concentration of talent from a whole state, you can't fill classrooms with high schoolers taking Genetics, Number Theory, Calc-based Physics, Abstract Algebra, Multi-variable Calculus... Even our arts faculties were great, with a number of teachers holding PhDs from top schools (all in their field, no Ed degrees). After all, how cool would it be to just teach a big intelligent set of kids without the pressure of a top research university?
And that is why I love magnet schools so much. Basically, no where else would have been as nice, and I certainly would've killed some spoiled rich kid if I'd ended up at a private school capable of delivering nearly as good of an education.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:02 PM
Whoops, ignore that second "even at the top private schools".
I'm no good at this proofreading thing.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:06 PM
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my ambivalence about and essential indifference to the issue is the result of my experience with gifted programs: they were okay, but I don't feel like they were essential to my development. I actually enjoyed high school, without such programs, much more than lower grades. That might just be because elementary and middle school suck, though. Also, my high school was super-ghetto and awesome.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:09 PM
JAC (in 91): yeah, TJ, 1990-1994. Math was the only regular subject where you could "get ahead" - if you came in to TJ with an algebra background, you could be doing calculus in grade 10, and then a few post-calculus semesters after that (multivariable, differential equations, linear algebra), while the slowest math track had you doing calculus in grade 12. But for the sciences (bio, chemistry, physics, geoscience) there was only one option for each grade level, and the same was true for 2 of 3 years each of english (ap lit being the exception) and social studies (AP US Government was effectively the default for seniors - I was one of the slacking 10% who took "regular" US government). It is true that electives could be considered a bit of a filter based on ambition - take AP Physics, or Drama I? Philosophy and Religion, or another tech lab? But I'm resistant to calling it "tracking", since one wasn't sorted by percieved/measured ability into one of several possibilites, with different levels of material in each. It was nothing like the social stratification of the honors/regular tracking in junior high, where gym and shop classes were the only ones I had with non-honors students.
Posted by Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:10 PM
Group projects in high school were always a little tricky; there was less of the explicit "person X is smart, make them do it" but there were plenty of other problematic dynamics. I feel like most of what I got out of it was the ability to recognize such situations early, rather than any particular skill in accomplishing things in groups. In the classroom setting, the give-and-take that B seems to describe is an ideal, and many of us seem wary to risk the gains of that ideal against the experienced liklihood of being tormented/dragged down/embedded in politics. Teenage years are already full of interpersonal drama; making it easier for that drama to directly affect your academic performance doesn't seem like a great idea.
My girlfriend is currently in grad school, and she's encountering some of the same problems - but higher-stakes, of course. The general issue seems to be that the groups are set adrift to do a project and have to entirely self-manage. If there's no natural leader, then it's hard to cause things to happen, and even if there is, the leader-role person doesn't have the authority to make things happen (groups with at least one total slacker seem to be the norm).
Posted by Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:22 PM
137: Sure. But learning is sometimes uncomfortable, and being able to communicate verbally is a valuable skill. Plus, if the shy but brilliant student who is doing fine academically has good ideas, why shouldn't her classmates benefit from them?
I look at it this way. What is the benefit of the physical classroom? What do you have there that you can't deliver through a book, or online? One of the main things is the other students: instead of two brains (you and the teacher, you and the book, whatever), you have twenty, or thirty, or a hundred. That's a lot of opportunity for different thoughts and different ideas and different approaches, and it's something of a waste not to use them.
One of the things I remember learning in a teaching workshop was that there are three major points of contact with a new idea. The first is just the raw contact, e.g., first reading of something. The second is thinking about it, which includes notetaking or whatever. The third is testing your ideas or questions with other people, and that's the thing that you want students doing in the classroom--it pushes them along faster and helps them develop more complex understandings of things.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:23 PM
the groups are set adrift to do a project and have to entirely self-manage. If there's no natural leader, then it's hard to cause things to happen, and even if there is, the leader-role person doesn't have the authority to make things happen (groups with at least one total slacker seem to be the norm).
Yeah, you can't set them adrift that way. You need to give them fairly explicit directions about what they're supposed to accomplish in X amount of time. And you need to assign roles. E.g., one student takes notes. One student makes sure everyone says something. One student reports the group's findings back to the class. That sort of thing. And you have to circulate around the room and make sure that that's what's happening.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:27 PM
144: I think you're overestimating the variety of creative opportunities available in most pre-university classroom group assignments.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:30 PM
You need to give them fairly explicit directions about what they're supposed to accomplish in X amount of time. And you need to assign roles. E.g., one student takes notes. One student makes sure everyone says something. One student reports the group's findings back to the class. That sort of thing. And you have to circulate around the room and make sure that that's what's happening.
But doesn't this undermine the whole point of working in groups, which is to take advantage of the individual skills of each student and use them to teach the others? I mean, I guess if you knew what those skills were you could assign roles accordingly, but that doesn't seem too likely to me.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:40 PM
I don't think I've ever seen that kind of explicit role-assignment. More generally, it really doesn't sound like our (the collective complainers here) group experiences had very much in common with what you're describing as the way they should work. I don't know why this is; perhaps this is an area where doing it in a half-assed way is substantially worse than not doing it at all.
As for setting them adrift... that was as much about my girlfriend's grad school experience as it was about anything I did. Recently, she had two semester-long projects with semi-randomly assigned groups, which were left to self-organize, and report back/get instructor feedback perhaps monthly. Even in classes with shorter projects, the default mode for group assignments seemed to be "you three [creating a new group] - write a report on X using the techniques we discussed. It's due in two weeks."
Posted by Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:40 PM
The odd thing about my experience as a college student is that I've always been one of the people who talked the most. But I'd pretty much never talk for the first 2 or 3 weeks. Then I'd make a few comments and by the end of the term would be consciously not responding to some questions/comments that I wanted to talk about in order to avoid being one of those people who talks all the time.
I always knew I'd participate when ready and it really annoyed me when an instructor would call on me before then, unless it was one of those instructors who always calls on people regardless of whether they're trying to participate.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-21-06 11:52 PM
[sorry for the long comment]
FWIW, I never mentioned kids teaching other kids. To the extent it happens, it ought to happen organically and wouldn't, if I was dictator of the world, be a formal or preplanned thing.
Instead, when you have a mixed ability class -- particularly at elementary and 'junior high' level -- you maintain a class culture in which there are enough smart kids that being smart isn't wierd or stigmatised; where the less-smart kids needn't feel awkward about doing well or answering questions, and so on. And yes, where the less-able kid sitting next to his or her more-able peer can ask the occasional question.
Others have talked off the benefits of learning in a pro-learning culture once separated off with their intellectual peers. However, there's exactly the same loss for the people not separated. They are condemned to a learning environment which becomes increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-learning.
Again, everyone here who has positive experience of these types of programs has concentrated on the benefits of these programs for the smart kids and I wouldn't want to deny that those benefits can be present. I'd want to argue though that there are costs -- for the less able -- from those sorts of programs.
re: the scottish system
Primary School:
4/5 - 11/12: there are 7 years of primary education. All in one class with one teacher. The teacher will usually change each year. Primary school teachers often tend to specialise in teaching a particular age group.
High School:
11/12 - 16/18:
there are a minimum of 4 years of high school education and a maximum of 6. The first 2 years are taught in subject-specific classes but there is no streaming by ability and all classes are mixed ability.
At age 14 or so the kids begin Standard Grades which take 2 years. Depending on ability the kids will do a greater or fewer number. I think the maximum is 7 or 8 these days.
Some standard grade classes will be split by ability -- maths and english -- while all of the others will remain mixed ability.
At age 15 or 16 the kids will sit their standard grade exams.
Depending on results they will then do the Higher exams which take one year. They can do Higher study in pretty much any subject if they passed the preceeding Standard Grade in that subject. Some kids will leave at this point, aged 16. These days most stay on for 5th or 6th year.
Kids will do anywhere up to 5 Highers -- it's just not possible for reasons of time to do more than that in 1 year -- but some kids may only do one or two.
Higher maths for example, involves calculus, trigonometry, simultaneous equations and so on and sounds, from some comments above, like it's at a somewhat higher level than standard high-school maths in the US.
At the end of the higher exams -- aged 16 or 17 -- kids can theoretically get into University. However, most will stay on and acquire more Highers or do advanced study. The advanced maths courses at this stage, for example, are genuinely pretty advanced stuff corresponding to much of what would be taught in freshman or even sophomore maths in college, I believe.
Under the current Scottish system over 50% of kids leave school and attend University and more than 50% leave school with qualifications sufficient for University entry, even if they don't actually choose to go.
Note: this sytem has problems -- there's still a bottom 10-15% or so who are failed by that system. I'm not advocating it as perfect! However, streaming is minimised and only really takes place with respect to Maths and English from age 14 - 16.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:25 AM
When you're around a bunch of other kids like that, there's no real stigma of being a nerd just for being smart.
{mad chuckling}
Ah, yes. TAG. I got TAG in the mornings in 4th-6th grades. The rest of the time was regular. But I was in a very racially-mixed school. I was the poor child.
Then, they (my social studies teacher) got me into the full-tilt TAG downtown for 8th & 9th grades. So we got bused for an hour there & and hour back. The worked it the same way as in elementary school, so the afternoons we were mixed with the general population, and this school was in Little Mexico. Much resentment ensued. Unpleasant.
So I got to be resented by the hispanic kids for being white(ish) and in TAG, and by the preppy white TAG kids for being too poor, and resented by the nerds for being too cool (or not whiny enough), and resented by everybody for passing all my tests without studying, particularly in 'social studies'. And then I went home at the end of a given day and got random bones broken. And then spent the wee hours reading, since that was eh, 'my time'.
The teachers complained I knew everything but wouldn't write it down. Jeez, ladies, I was kinda preoccupied.
I opted for a regular high school after that. Stoners are much more pleasant to hang out with, even if you don't smoke dope.
max
['Much less whining.']
Posted by max | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:31 AM
I lean toward bitch and McGrattan on this, that pullling out and isolating the smart kids is a bad idea. I get to that on straight economic justice: middle/uppermiddle class parents will get their kids into these programs regardless of innate ability, and poor or less involved kids are screwed. There are counterexamples (Cala) but overall that's how it (IME) ends up working.
Watching professional-class white people figure out how to send their kids to the NYC public schools is kind of revolting. There are programs upon programs for special or gifted kids, and if you apply to enough, you can be pretty certain that your kids aren't going to have to sit in a classroom with anyone who isn't middle class, regardless of whether your kids are particularly bright or not. (I'm not guiltless on this one -- the local public school does suck pretty bad. Mine are going to a program a few blocks away which is better run. But it's still very integrated, economically and ethnically.)
The real issue is that it's not reasonable to say that pull-out programs for smart kids are necessary because otherwise they'll have to stultify in the nightmare of mediocrity we're condemning the regular kids to. There's got to be a way to make all the schools decent: that doesn't mean every kid is going to be academically successful or intellectually engaged, but it has to be possible to make every classroom a case where they could be.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 7:41 AM
Socially, on the other hand, programs that pull out the brighter kids are wonderful for them (or at least for me.) Gswift -- generally you're a lovely person, so when I tell you that the fact that I have no idea where you're physically located is helping me restrain my strong impulse to hit you with a brick, please don't take it personally.
Yes, kids aren't social pariahs only because they're bright -- I was a pariah, and my sister wasn't, and we're pretty similar brains-wise. But you have to be pretty fucking charming to get away with being visibly much smarter than the kids around you. (My grade school didn't give me any help there -- I got skipped a grade, which identified me as the brainy freak, and every goddamn teacher in the school spent six years cooing over how adorably intelligent I was. They can all rot in hell.) I wasn't ostracised for being anti-social or unpleasant, I was ostracised for being smarter than my peers, and wasn't charming enough to overcome the stigma.
Getting to a school for 'gifted' kids in seventh grade was the only thing that allowed me to become remotely socially functional -- a social environment where I wasn't starting from a position of being a contemptible freak changed my life.
Now, there's got to be some way of keeping what happened to me, and sounds like Cala, and probably other people, from happening to bright children generally (shooting all the teachers in my grade school would be a good way to start) without segregating them educationally. But saying that it's not a problem at all -- that the only reason smart kids get picked on is because there's something else wrong with them -- is crap.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 7:57 AM
My intuitions on this may vary because we didn't have magnet schools or the competitions for public schools where I grew up. Smaller town with a decent public high school. We had six elementary schools, but you went to the one you lived nearest.
And while the community overall was relatively affluent (my hometown seems to have taken off in the ten years since I've left), within the community there wasn't a rich kids school and poor kids school.
The real issue is that it's not reasonable to say that pull-out programs for smart kids are necessary because otherwise they'll have to stultify in the nightmare of mediocrity we're condemning the regular kids to.
See, I don't see that as the rationale at all. It's not like learning the times tables or how to read is mediocre in third grade; but if you already know how to read, there's little the teacher can do with you that doesn't involve ignoring the other kids.
I guess NYC is different and maybe deeply fucked up, but I'm certainly not seeing the gifted program as "ugh, so glad I'm here, otherwise I might have to talk to a mediocre poor kid who might have a different skin color."
But the point isn't that it's the kid's "job"; the point is that it's beneficial to explain things to others, and often one can use different metaphors or analogies that will help peers get it.
This works great in a university classroom. I'm uncertain how telling an elementary schooler that it's beneficial to help others is going to lead to much but resentment, and I'm also not sure what metaphors and analogies teach someone to spell or to memorize their times tables and what nine-year-old is going to think those up on the fly. (Am I the only one here whose schooling consisted of rote memorization for the first five years or so? There just wasn't critical thinking in third grade.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:04 AM
It's not like learning the times tables or how to read is mediocre in third grade;
Kids in the US aren't learning to read in the 3rd grade are they? If I understand the system that'd be around age 9? Seems very late.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:18 AM
We were still doing 'reading' classes where we read books designed to teach about reading. Volumes of easy short stories, that sort of thing. We still had spelling classes, too.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:22 AM
I figure Cala meant improving their reading. You're supposed to be literate in first grade, but not necessarily fluently literate for a while afterward.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:23 AM
And when you were fluently literate before starting kindergarten, that's four years that reading class is wasting your time.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:31 AM
158: God, I hated phonics. Years of goddamned punitive pointless little worksheets. I'll accept that it's the best way for kids to learn to read, but for Christ's sake let them stop when they're literate already.
I swear that's part of the reason I never liked school much.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:46 AM
Looking at 153, it appears I may still have some issues related to grade school. I'd like to assure you all that I'm feeling much better now.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:53 AM
Ah OK, that makes sense. Same here, then. Kids start reading in Primary 1 but continue on for a few years with work designed to develop their reading skills.*
* Arguably, when we give undergraduates bits of, say, Descartes to read we are still doing the same!
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 8:58 AM
Looking at this thread, you all have issues.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:03 AM
re: 159
Why would they do that? Make you do stuff you can already do, iyswim?
I don't remember doing anything like that after Primary 1. The little boxes with word-cards in them and so on were gone for most kids by the end of that year.
This comes back to a point I wanted to make earlier but didn't. A lot of the problems people describe above don't seem to come from their being smart or from being in mixed ability classes but from bloody terrible teaching methods and teachers.
It isn't that hard for competent elementary level teachers to structure work for different abilities.
Unlike some others, I couldn't read when I started school at 4, although I could recognise my name and a few simple words.
However, by the time I was 6 -- like a lot of other commentators here, I'd imagine -- I was reading Tolkein and works of similar difficulty.
The teachers didn't make me sit and read Janet and John type stuff all day. Our classroom reading schemes had a wide range worksheets and reading materials geared at all different levels and while some of my friends were working on the rudimentary stuff, I'd be working next to them on the harder stuff. Same with reading books. When we had periods to read in class, I wouldn't be reading the same thing as all of the others.
Doing anything else -- i.e. deliberately making kids do work completely unsuitable for them -- seems nuts.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:09 AM
This comes back to a point I wanted to make earlier but didn't. A lot of the problems people describe above don't seem to come from their being smart or from being in mixed ability classes but from bloody terrible teaching methods and teachers.
It isn't that hard for competent elementary level teachers to structure work for different abilities.
Somehow it seems to be that hard here. I really don't understand why. It's not the usual bullshit about how it's impossible to teach poor kids anything: the grade school I'm bitching about was in a middle class neighborhood -- no significant portion of underprivileged kids.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:16 AM
Second grade we had the Dick and Jane books (really!) and in third grade the school got brand new reading anthologies and then we had two tracks of reading: kids still struggling and kids who weren't. And that wasn't much better. After third grade I got to skip reading and learn other things.
I nearly got held back because after doing the phonics workbook, I'd run around the classroom, seeing no point to sit in my chair if I'd done all the work.
Doing anything else -- i.e. deliberately making kids do work completely unsuitable for them -- seems nuts.
But that's what any reading class at that level meant for me, and that's what it would have meant if I had to stay in the class, even if it was my 'job' to help other kids. The teacher had 25 other kids; she wasn't going to have time to design a separate reading curriculum for me.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:25 AM
And when you were fluently literate before starting kindergarten, that's four years that reading class is wasting your time.
My elementary school experience in a nutshell. The two schools I attended for elementary had no GT or similar program, but we had reading "groups." I was in a group by myself. And the material still wasn't challenging.
I haven't read everything on this thread, but one of the things that really annoys me is the notion that just because a child is particularly intelligent, that they should be perfect in every way. Thus, "gifted" children should be particularly humble and giving or whatever. That's bullshit; there's no reason to think that because someone is mentally advanced that they should have advanced social skills. In general, I hated the way that I was treated by teachers in school; they acted as if the fact that I was smarter than most of the other kids meant that I had to do the best in every subject, behave better, and be held to higher standards. So, I got unfairly punished for my misbehaviors (seriously—teachers sought to make an example of me—"see, we even punish the smart girl") and sent home with report cards saying my handwriting was terrible when it was merely just average, and unfairly bad marks in art class (of course, the fact that my dad is a relatively well-known artist in Egypt may have had something to do with that).
This was the way that they compromised for not having any special programs. If it seemed like I was acting up, I couldn't possibly be ready for harder shit.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:27 AM
I agree with McGrattan and Bitchphd.
I was in a part-time "gifted" program, and had a similar experience to Teofilo's. It was fun and novel, but didn't really do that much for me. Even at the time I thought it was kind of bogus since I didn't really see why I merited extra attention (and it was "extra attention" -- and extra resources -- because on "gifted" days I was in a class of only eight students while the "ungifted" back at my regular school were sitting in their class of 25 students).
Elementary school (with the exception of the gifted program) was unstreamed, but high school was streamed: courses were either "Advanced", "General", or "Basic." Fortunately, some classes, like Art, Drama, and Music, weren't streamed, and being around "Basic" students (who were, by the way, ususally poor) cut against the contempt that "Advanced" students otherwise found it easy to slip into. That experience teaches you that "lack of educational aptitude" does not necessarily mean "stupid". It makes me really angry when people equate the two, as one commenter did upthread.
I can't get too exercised about the problem of the bored, gifted child. Looking back, I think I was bored by classes, but I just learned to look elsewhere for intellectual stimulation. Finish my work early and read a book or write a story.
And with respect to bullying: In a school that's homogeneous in terms of social class, it's quite possible that it's the smart that tend to get picked on. In my school, it was the poor who got picked on. My sister got expelled from her elementary school for lashing back violently at girls who had been taunting her all year for being poor.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:45 AM
re: 165
The teacher had 25 other kids; she wasn't going to have time to design a separate reading curriculum for me.
See, I just don't buy that. Why not? Why shouldn't she have time? It's not as if there aren't resources alreayd in the school that could be drawn upon. Largely, t's going to involve allocating different books or simply letting the kid read something they want to read if they've finished all the other work early.
Why shouldn't the curriculum be designed in a way that accepts that kids will be of differing ability? Again, it's a surprise to me that it wouldn't be.
It comes back to the teaching. I don't buy, for example, the thesis that all the people who are pro- seperate classes were so stellar and brilliant that they simply couldn't be accomodated.
I genuinely don't intend that to be snarky, btw.
Further, it does sound like we're expecting something unrealistic out of school -- like it'd be this super-challenging system perfectly tailored to their abilities. Something adequately tailored to their abilities seems perfectly satisfactory to me and not that hard to achieve.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:49 AM
Largely, t's going to involve allocating different books or simply letting the kid read something they want to read if they've finished all the other work early.
Pwned by my 167.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:53 AM
re: 169
Pwnage is herebly acknowledged.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 9:59 AM
Why shouldn't the curriculum be designed in a way that accepts that kids will be of differing ability?
That's all the gifted program did. Twice a week I was pulled out of reading for an hour and did some other things. This wasn't some ridiculously complicated or expensive program. It was one teacher for the district who spent his time travelling to six different elementary schools.
I genuinely don't intend that to be snarky, btw.
And I don't mean to sound like I'm the most brilliant thing ever or stellar or whatever the hell conceit I'm supposed to be suffering from. I was reading at a high level very early. But that didn't translate into the emotional maturity to seek out knowledge or to move onto high-school level books or begin teaching myself algebra. It just meant I was bored and a potential discipline problem.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:03 AM
I don't buy, for example, the thesis that all the people who are pro- seperate classes were so stellar and brilliant that they simply couldn't be accomodated.
This may just be an attitude problem among American teachers. I was treated as a discipline problem for reading under my desk when I was done with other stuff -- while I was singled out as adorably brilliant, I was also in trouble all of the time. I don't think it would have been terribly hard to accomodate me at all -- I'm reasonably clever, but not frightening or anything -- but I got the strong impression in grade school that allowing me to do more advanced work while I was in the classes I was in would have been viewed as inappropriate.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:05 AM
I was treated as a discipline problem for reading under my desk when I was done with other stuff
What on earth could be the rationale for that? That's so ass-backwards.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:24 AM
It was disobedient. I wasn't focusing on what the rest of the class was focusing on. My whole grade schol experience was ostracism from the other kids, and alternating fawning from teachers because of my wonderfulness, and being sharply cracked down on because I had to learn to do what everyone else was doing. (I wasn't making trouble or anything, just reading quietly. But that was a problem. I had more books confiscated in grade school.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:29 AM
re: 172
This may just be an attitude problem among American teachers.
I'm curious. What are the qualifications required to be an elementary teacher in the US?
Here it'd be either a university degree in some mainstream subject like Maths or English + a seperate teaching certificate which usually takes a year to acquire or a 4 year specialist primary education degree.*
* There are, I believe, some other things that go on in England but they conform to that broad model. 4 year degree specialising in teaching or general degree plus teaching diploma.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:29 AM
Similar here. If there's a difference, I have the impression that grade-school teaching is unusually poorly paid for professions that require that much education, and that for that reason it tends (with many exceptions and I do apologize to anyone I'm insulting) to attract unserious people or those with few other options.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:32 AM
I don't know about other gifted programs, but the ones that I got into certainly didn't have a bias toward upper- and middle-class kids. Admittedly, my middle school was private, so that was really only rich kids, but it was too early for anyone to really identify themselves as rich. My high school was, if anything, skewed toward the poor and lower middle-class, and the same with Whitney Young (the magnet school for Chicago school district). In both cases, the rich and upper-middle-class kids went off to elite private schools like Lab or Latin or St. Ignatius, leaving the lower-class schmos to use the state magnet schools. Also, rich kids were typically in rich districts, which could afford decent teaching, so those parents didn't see the extra boost of my high school as being worth the boarding school part.
Still, no one has really addressed the top kids that I'm talking about. What about the kids who are ready and able to do sophomore- and junior-level math before they graduate high school? The kids who are doing advanced scientific research? The kids who are already writing high literature and/or plays? The kids who are already acknowledged artists, with sales and critical acclaim? Sure, these people may only be the top one percent at most, but they are worth special attention. If they were athletes, they'd have scholarships to top schools and special attention all through high school to work on their talents, why not extend that to academics? Once high school hits, I just think there's been enough of a spread in ability showing that the top kids are really wasted in a normal curriculum. Most high school teachers wouldn't have the university background necessary to teach them, and unless they live near a top university, they'd still be going to class with people a lot slower than them (just older and slower) which is equally infuriating and a lot more socially awkward.
What is the huge problem with creating these opportunities, which cut across all socioeconomic classes, for the very few kids who could really use them? It's not like every classroom is going to be stripped of its smartass, they'll still mostly be back at their home school doing the accelerated track. But those kids who feel nothing but frustration at the pace and level of even an accelerated classroom would get to be around others with the same interests and abilities.
Bleh, I obviously feel very very strongly about this.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:32 AM
re: 173 and 174
Yeah, I'm with dagger aleph on this. That's totally ass backwards. It sounds like you, LB, had really shitty teachers.
I was positively encouraged at school just go and quietly read once I was done.
I only remember getting in the sort of trouble you talk about once: when I did a whole term's maths worksheets in a morning. Which did piss my teacher off and, to be fair to her, she had told me to stop once I'd done the first couple and come and have her check them over.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:34 AM
It varies by the state, but it's usually a four-year ed degree. Problem is, the pay sucks. There are many fine teachers, but there's problem more people who squeaked through high school themselves and got an ed degree because it would go well with their husband's career.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:34 AM
If I relive my childhood I want to go to Scottish schools.
I knew how to read when I started elementry school. This wasn't much of a problem in half-day kindergarten (no pre-K back then) where it seemed we just played. That was OK, since I was a year younger than them anyway. But in 1st grade I was not teacher's pet. She had a bunch of other kids who didn't know how to read and me who had flipped through the textbook the first day. She was teaching "C-A-T spells?" and I was shouting out the answers (not good behavior and boredom was just part of the reason).
Her solution: she taped my mouth shut and told me to keep my hands off & not to peel it off. So I had great fun obeying her and used my tongue to slowly destick the tape. This really annoyed her. Ah, 1st grade. I wasn't the easiest student. 2nd grade got better as the teacher was more creative (reading period meant I went back to 1st garde and tutored). 3rd grade I did a bunch of classes with the 5th and 6th graders. They had learned to read by then. After 3rd grade my chaotic home environment meant I went to state-sponsored sleepaway camp & school for the next five years.
Oh, context: inner-city Boston schools in the mid- late-60s. The school and neighborhood was nearly all white working class.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:40 AM
The people I know who are teachers in the US seem to have gotten into it out of idealism. God knows it wasn't for the pay.
In my Canadian hometown, teaching is considered a very good job. It pays quite well, with good benefits and vacation time. Also, it's more respected as a profession there than it is here. M. Ed programs are very competitive, and getting a job after graduation isn't easy.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:40 AM
re: 179
An ex g/friend of mine was a primary school teacher and she, and a few other teachers I know, used to be very resentful of the "got an ed degree because it would go well with their husband's career" types as they'd always be the ones opposing industrial action by the teacher's union and be the one's most likely to cross a picket line, i.e. because they didn't see it as really their career but more a nice wee job to have to supplement their husbands income.
So that stereotype exists on this side of the big pond as well. Unfortunately.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:44 AM
181: Right. Good teachers in the US basically think of themselves as volunteers -- they're being self-sacrificing by teaching. Anyone who's doing it as a job rather than as a cause is likely to have questionable other options.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:46 AM
What about the kids who are ready and able to do sophomore- and junior-level math before they graduate high school? The kids who are doing advanced scientific research?
I've got nothing to say about education policy, a topic about which I know nothing, but: at the risk of providing a link that I may have learned about in these comments (don't remember, too many to check), you may find this Globe article of interest. Or maybe not.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:52 AM
Good teachers in the US basically think of themselves as volunteers -- they're being self-sacrificing by teaching.
I think this ties back in to the Linda Hirshman debate.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 10:59 AM
It does indeed.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 11:03 AM
That article looks interesting, I'm just starting it now. But yeah, those are some of the kids who really could use a top-notch magnet school system. One that brings together many of the genetic freaks in one place and provides them with lessons that (might be) a challenge.
When the article mentions the kid who's hailed as a "messiah", I have to laugh though. I remember there was a kid, Reid Barton, a couple years above me who kicked international ass at the International Math Olympiad and the Informatics Olympiad (comp. sci.) through all four years he was in high school. His final year, he got a perfect score on the IMO then flew to the IIO and got the highest score in the world (he had 580 out of 600, next highest was 540). Apparently the kid knew 7 languages as well. My final year of doing the USAMO (the olympiad-style final round competition to choose the 12 representatives at the IMO), all the qualifiers were flown out to Cambridge, Mass. for the competition, and Reid was being cited jokingly as a messiah figure. I can still remember walking off to the exam rooms with random people among us yelling out "All hail Reid!".
But certainly those kids will have trouble almost no matter where they go. There is a level of kids below them, however, who would benefit greatly from an advanced magnet school (the kids who are around the 1 in a thousand, 1 in a million, not 1 in 100 million).
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 11:07 AM
184: the bonus link in 104 takes you to our previous discussion of the article. I note this not to be like a certain commenter who I'll refrain from naming, but because someone might be interested in that discussion.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 11:20 AM
I'm not totally caught up, but I agree with something McGratten said above: there really is no reason why even a half-decent teacher can't accomodate, say, a kindergartener who already knows how to read (to use Cala's example). My teachers pretty much accomodated me from kindergarten through middle school by just letting me quietly open a book and read at my desk once I'd finished whatever the worksheet was, or by excusing me to go to the library. And in lower grades, don't teachers regularly divide kids into different level groups? Mine always did, so the kids who were better readers would be working on one set of things, and the kids who were struggling would be working on another.
Re. JAC's 177, I suspect that most schools are going to have only one, if any, prodigies with the level of talent suggested. That kind of kid is the one who you allow to skip prereqs that he/she already has demonstrated mastery of and you set him/her up with some kind of independent study or taking classes at the local CC for credit, or the parents put the kid in a private school that's designed for such kids (or the school provides the kid with a scholarship).
My point is that I'm not against GATE programs, really. But I think that they too often pull bright kids out of academic contact with everyone else (quite aside from the class/race problems), which is to no one's benefit. It's almost an admission that, "oh, *these* kids we can really teach, so let's get them away from the bullshit time-keeping we're doing with everyone else." It also stems, I think, from the idea that the *sole* purpose of public education is to teach academic skills. People who are academically gifted are obviously going to see this as a given, and where it's not true, we're going to see the schools as completely wasting our time. But I don't think that that *is* all that public education can or should do: I think the public part is really important, and one of the things I value most about my own education is that while sometimes the academics were a little dull (which wasn't a big deal, since--being bright and having bright parents, it's not like I wasn't learning anyway), not being in the gifted program gave me a chance to see and learn a lot of things that weren't necessarily "academic" in nature but that did, I think, contribute greatly to making me a better teacher and a better academic myself, as I grew older. I learned to think about things in other ways, and to appreciate that academic skill is great, but not all there is to life.
I do think that academics are the primary mission of education, obviously. But I don't think we can treat them as if they exist in a vacuum, outside of the social context. And I think that teaching children to have a broader social context is a really important thing.
The other thing I want to point out is that we all tend to think that whatever frustrated us in school was bad, e.g., social awkwardness or being bored. But at the same time, we all teach, and we know that sometimes students' frustration isn't because the thing that frustrates them shouldn't be there, but because they have some resistance built in because of their own lack of preparation or whatever. Too much frustration or boredom is bad, inasmuch as it interferes with learning, for sure. But some frustration or boredom isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 11:34 AM
The kids who are doing advanced scientific research? The kids who are already writing high literature and/or plays? The kids who are already acknowledged artists, with sales and critical acclaim? Sure, these people may only be the top one percent at most, but they are worth special attention.
The top one percent? Are you nuts? More like, the top 0.001%.
I think this thread has made me realize that I have some issues with the my educational experience that I still haven't come to terms with. Makes it hard for me to really participate in this thread. LB's descriptions of her experience made me realize that the same thing happened to me. I hadn't ever really thought about my experience in terms of hostility from teachers before, but it really is the case. Many of my teachers were even intimidated of me, and resentful because I was smarter and more knowledgable than they were. I didn't ever correct them in class or anything (well, not often, anyway, and politely) but a lot of my homework probably had that effect.
I think American schools give way too much homework.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 11:58 AM
"there really is no reason why even a half-decent teacher can't accomodate, say, a kindergartener who already knows how to read"
And another thing LB said that is awesome. In my experience, and I think many others' experience, I didn't have any "half-decent" teachers by these standards. When I tried to keep myself occupied, I was reprimanded. At best, I had teachers who left me to do my own thing. I never had a single teacher who assigned me work above and beyond what the rest of the class was doing.
I spent my entire time in public school carrying around books and reading them at every opportunity. I would read them in the halls, at lunch, after I finished worksheets. We had a "reading rewards" program called Accelerated Reader or something. A hundred page novel would net you 6-7 points, depending on the reading level. In the fourth grade, I had over four hundred points. In the fifth, over 600. It's true that much of this was reading at home.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 12:05 PM
I had good teachers in elementary school, which may explain why I don't have any of the issues with the education system that others seem to have. Middle school was a different story.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 12:11 PM
Yes, my reading class was tracked, even in second grade. But I was beyond the top track. (So were a couple other kids.) We were assigned stories in the reader. I read the whole reader. There wasn't anything more for me to be assigned to read; I was just supposed to sit quietly. When I got out of reading class in fifth grade we went to another room where we read articles on nuclear war prevention. I'm thinking that was probably more valuable than pretending I was interested in the reader.
I'm not saying above-average kids should be segregated from the rest of the class or shipped off to mini-ivory towers. On the other hand, the solemn life lessons we learn aren't always about how wonderful other kids are and an appreciation of the nuances of other cultures and ethnicities. First off, my public school was very homogenous. So was the greater metropolitan area. Second off, for me, quite a lot of it went like this:
If girls are friendly and want to put makeup on you, they're lying and are going to try to make you look ugly.
If you do well in math, a boy will grope you in the hallway because you beat his test score.
If you help someone in group work, they'll throw tape in your hair. If you do well in languages, they'll go through your hair with a flea comb in class. It's probably because you're not dressed properly, too, since no one ever gets made fun of for being smart unless they're also a freak.
If you try to slack off in group work, you'll have the teacher and your parents upset at you.
Yeah. What I learned from public school (which I did all 12 years) is mostly that kids are cruel little bastards.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 12:20 PM
I wish I knew something about what elementary schoolteachers are taught (or were taught when I was in grade school) about what to do with kids who are academically ahead of the class. I had the strong impression at the time that I was being disciplined on some principle -- that giving me more advanced work to do, or allowing me to quietly amuse myself, would have been wrong. Not too much trouble, but actively wrong. (This is exaggerated. There were a couple of teachers who let me read a stack of teen romance novels in the back of the room, and in fifth grade I got sent across the street to take 7th grade english, which was fun. But most of the classes were the way I've described them.)
I'm not sure if the thinking was that it would make other students feel bad, or that it would in some way be academically bad for me (that is, other children were in school to learn to multiply. I already knew how to multiply, so I was in school to learn that life is hard and no one cares that I'd rather not sit with my hands folded until everyone else finishes.)
I'm kind of bitter and hostile about it, because I never really pulled out of hating school. Grade school sucked so much that I stayed cranky and resistant all through high school, after it had stopped making any sense to be. I did fine, academically, but I didn't learn nearly as much as I might have if the first thing I learned in school wasn't that it was hateful and unpleasant and I was doing it wrong.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 12:41 PM
There's all sorts of crazy pedagogy out there, and the fashions are always changing. I think it's highly probable that LB's teachers were trained in a particular theory that led them to treat her the way they did.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 12:48 PM
It sounds as if Cala's teachers, and md20/200's (although those were really weird) were working from the same principles.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 12:51 PM
And pdf's.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 12:55 PM
I may have told some version of this story before, but going to a private elementary school where my grade was always combined with the grade above gave me a different experience. I also forced the school's hands.
Instead of sitting quietly and reading I used my spare time to do what I enjoyed most: working through the math book. It was clear that we were going to do all the problems by the end of the year so I figured I'd get started early. When my family went to visit relatives or took a vacation, I'd work on my math in the car or on the plane instead of reading.
I came back from winter vacation in 1st grade and handed the teacher the completed 1st grade math book. The school didn't have much choice but to give me the second grade math book, which was ok because the second graders were in the same classroom. It's not like I could just sit there for six months. This started the process that led to me skipping third grade. It wasn't a question of potential; by the time I skipped I'd already done the work.
By fifth grade it was clear that I wasn't going to skip again and I went into the public schools so I adopted a new policy during the school year: being quiet and doing the minimum possible to get a good grade. I did a bit of computer science and math a couple of summers but only the math was serious.
I'm ambivalent about all of this because of the way college turned out, as I said in the first thread I linked in 104. High school was fine, though. Not great, but not at all a bad experience.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:05 PM
re: Many of my teachers were even intimidated of me, and resentful because I was smarter and more knowledgable than they were. I didn't ever correct them in class or anything
It was a matter of school legend, and also true, that I once stood up, aged about 8, in a religious assembly with the whole school and most of the parents and corrected our fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian minister on a biblical quote. Apparently he took it with quite good grace.
I wasn't a bible nut, was always an atheist, but I had an impressive memory for facts and had just studied whatever passage it was in school.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:22 PM
Good for him (and, of course, for you.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:35 PM
I left public school after my first semester of high school. For a while, I thought I wouldn't even finish the first semester, so when a teacher asked us to choose subjects for a project due in two months, I came up with some bullshit subject. When plans changed, I decided not to switch the subject to a real subject. So my presentation ended up being about the effects of the Mohorovichic discontinuity and its effects on anatidaephobia in the midwest and coitus taboos in central Africa. I made a 96. I managed to even fool a few people in the class. That certainly gained me a bit of notoriety.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:38 PM
Yeah, I think that one of the sad realities (and for me, this is an argument against gifted programs, though not everyone may agree) is that what actually happens with gifted programs or AP classes is that the good teachers get rewarded with good students. And everyone else gets left with mediocre or downright bad teachers. I mean, a teacher who punishes a kid for being smart is a teacher who is not going to know how to get good work out of the kids who aren't already motivated. It's a terrible situation, and arguably one of the things gifted programs do is bandaid it. Obviously *all* kids ought to get creative, motivated teachers who come up with interesting stuff to do (beyond just workbooks).
The whole thing makes me sad. I'd love to go into public education, but I'm so afraid of being in a siutation where the only freedom I'd have to really do innovative teaching would be if I were "freed" from the mandatory testing and state-mandated curriculum and all the rest of it by being able to teach AP classes. At least teaching college or cc students you can design your own syllabi.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:48 PM
In my experience most AP teachers also teach non-AP classes, so I don't think the problem b mentions (which is quite real) applies so much in this case. It's a bigger concern for gifted programs.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:53 PM
Which is to say, although pay is a huge issue, I think it's not so much just pay as it is the sense in the US, at least, that teachers are not professionals, and that they are to be constantly overseen and second-guessed about how to do their jobs. Which pretty much breeds passivity. I don't see why people who go into teaching without any particular idealism, but just b/c it's a good, steady job can't become good teachers if they get continuing education and are rewarded for initiative and given good work conditions; the problem is that a lot of the things designed to make education better actually just treat teachers like service workers, which destroys morale.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:55 PM
In connection with 204, note that in the US teaching is a traditionally female occupation.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 1:59 PM
202: I was pretty much always in the gifted programs. Although the teacher in the class I mention in 201 wasn't such a teacher, almost all the other teachers I've ever had were top track teachers, and they were the ones that I had bad experiences with. A large part of that, I guess, was because the top track in the small school district I went to was more like the top 30% than the top 10% or 5%, so I and one or two other students were still a head and shoulders above the rest.
I spent four weeks going to a much larger district at the end of a semester, right after moving. (The first day, I took the state assesment exams.) I got an exception made for me and put into the GT program for two classes, Math and English, beacause the people admitting me saw my exceptional grades. The other students in the GT classes in the new district were amazingly more like me than I'd ever experienced up to that point--probably closer to the top 5%. But the math teacher was probably the worst I'd ever had about me reading after finishing worksheets.
And my other classes were such a bad experience (and the layout of the school was so terrible--a huge building, five minutes between classes, and a locker that was ten minutes out of my way) that I left the school to homeschool.
I think a very large part of the different experiences people have had are the different sizes of the school system they were in. Small districts don't have the amount of talent to justify grouping them into classes. Very large districts would be stupid not to do some grouping.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:00 PM
202: I felt much the same way, recently, when I was simultaneously teaching the same class to a huge class (35) of "regular" public-school undergrads and to a tiny class (9) of public-school honors students. I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the work done by the top third of the "regular" class and that done by honors students. Howeve, the honors kids were 75% white, almost all from wealthy families, and the "regular" students were 10% white, and almost none from wealthy families.
I kept trying to find ways to integrate the two classes, because I felt that it was so obvious that they'd benefit from dialogue with one another. The best-performing "regular" kids far outstripped the honors kids in creativity and willingness to make risky, brilliant arguments, while the honors kids were better at keeping up with the reading, having confidence in class, and knowing how to construct a paper. Surely, if they were together, we'd all have benefitted.
But this is why wealthy NYC parents send their kids to private schools--so that, unlike other brilliant, creative youths, they don't have to share class space with bored morons. My non-honors kids wrote on all their evals that class would have been better if the five or six slugs masquerading as college students had pulled their weight.
I don't know how to deal with either situation appropriately in the classroom, but it does strike me that the "we're getting held back!" meme is destructive for everyone, gifted students included.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:05 PM
I'm not following you -- were you teaching high school or college classes? (Because if college, I don't understand how the tracking was working.) And who were the 'slugs masquerading as college students', the slowest kids in the regular class?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:12 PM
I'd like to add that, in my neighborhood, most families choose to send their kids to the local "public" elementary school, PS 321, with the understanding that anyone who would have been able, financially, to send the kids to private school will donate a few thousand per kid to the school for resources--more teachers, computers, trips, etc. It's controversial, in that the school is now flooded, since parents find any excuse possible to get their kid into the 321 district so they don't have to send her to some other elem where the parents are not sending money in, and it gives the parent association an absurd amount of power over what the teachers do. That is, rich parents are "buying" the right to influence the elementary school program not only for their own kids, but for other kids (whose parents have not bought this power) as well.
In the meanwhile, Bloomberg continues to starve out public schools in Brooklyn. By the time I get them in public college, they are severely malnourished intellectually and starving to be taught. The first class I had, the evals said, "AWB really cares about her students. She knew my name at the end of the first week! I'll never forget her!"
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:13 PM
208: Yup, it's a college where there's a separate honors track in which "high achieving" students get free tuition, board, laptops, and completely separate classes in every discipline.
The slugs are a local thing, I'm finding out, and it's a really sad part of teaching public college here. In the regular classes, there is always a small number of kids who come in late every day, leave early, do not respond when you call their names, sleep through class, never do the reading, often plagiarize papers and then say the assignment was "impossible." Basically, I'm figuring out these are students whose academic confidence has been beaten out of them through 12 years of academic neglect, hostility from uneducated parents who fear they're trying to be "better" than they deserve, and ended up in college only because they thought it would be more of the same. Some of these kids can snap out of it. Others, I don't know. I email them. I call them. I teach really interesting texts, and still, they blink lethargically like they can't make up their mind whether being alive is worth much at all.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:20 PM
210: That's really crazy -- college students who are capable of more demanding work can't take the more demanding classes? I can see requiring an instructor's permission for the honors track classes, but not allowing non 'honors' students in at all seems bizarre.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:27 PM
Penn State has an honors college. Requires a 1350 SAT score. It's intended, I think, to attract kids who would otherwise seek out private schools. The classes aren't so much more demanding as they are smaller; but you have to be in the honors college to get into them.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:35 PM
211: I ended up gaming the "honors" system to get a couple of my favorite students from the previous semester's "regular" class into the honors section. Honestly, though, I ended up feeling like the split between honors/non-honors was more of a socioeconomic one than anything related to smarts.
The main reason the college is doing it, I think, is to attract more of the traditional "competitive school" seekers by (ironically) throwing a lot of money and resources at them. This way, more of the white private-school types will find this public college attractive enough that they'll turn down MIT (a commonly-cited option) and be able to say, "Well, it's not like I'm going to X College exactly; I'm going to X Honors College." This, in turn, attracts donors, and, presumably, raises the profile of the school.
In my opinion, the profile of this school should already be quite high. I have been truly amazed by the abilities of most of my non-honors students there and deeply moved by their commitment to learning. But even they diss the school because it doesn't have a reputation for being ... whatever. One of my students from that semester, not the best in his class, but not the worst either, became obsessed with applying to transfer to Ivy League U. He'd write to me and say, "X College is so beneath me!" and I couldn't help but say, "Then why are you struggling so much with the material in my class?"
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:39 PM
Yeah, smaller classes for honors students. Gah. Don't get me started.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:40 PM
Ah, yes, what Cala said.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:41 PM
Hrmphf. I'll have you know that my father dropped out of your school (among several other of the finest institutions of higher learning in the New York metropolitan area) many decades ago. If it's good enough for Dad to flunk out of, it's good enough for your students.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:42 PM
What do you do with a class of 35 students, 25 of whom think they're too good to be trapped in a room with any of the others? This is also part of the disease known as Freshmanism, I think.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:49 PM
It was very funny at the University of Chicago. When I transferred in, I was a junior, but had to take core classes (quite good ones) with the freshmen. I'd had most of the ego beaten out of me at MIT, and had a lovely time watching most of my classmates stride into class like colossi, about to show the U of C what the smartest kid to ever come out of Springfield High looked like. The giant egos mostly subsided by halfway through the first quarter when they realized that everyone else in sight was as bright as they were.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:53 PM
(wiiiiissshhhht. The representative from California has the floor...) This dissertation will be written to Green Day.
At Penn State, the honors college was a nice option for kids smart enough to jump to the Ivy League from public school who couldn't afford the ridiculous tuition. Because, basically, 35,000 people at a state school sucks. And for some, it was very nice to have. Certainly better than 'woo, you worked your ass off in high school and you're going where everyone else is! shoulda been drinking instead of studying for all the good that 1500 did for you!'
That said, it's pretty goddamn ridiculous that freshman biology has 900 kids a class to begin with.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 2:54 PM
I am ashamed to say that I had exactly the opposite experience. I remember thinking that going from Midwestern Public High to Highly-Competitive Private U would be really great, that instead of being 7th in my class, I might get to be 500th in my class. This wasn't the case. I was really shocked by the rampant laziness and irresponsibility of my new peers, who claimed they were "naturally smart" but had spent most of HS drunk or stoned. In my HS, there wasn't much patience for the idea of "naturally smart." We all worked our asses off.
Things, of course, evened out as we approached senior year. I got drunk and stoned, while my peers started reading the material.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 3:00 PM
Funny how smart kids who also happen to play a varsity sport aren't picked on. Funny how smart kids who are willing to punch another kid in the face aren't picked on.
gswift -
I don't know where you went to school, but my third grade didn't have varsity sports. Nor, as a small female, would it have been wise to try to 'punch another kid in the face'. Physical bullies seldom pick on those who can defend themselves by fighting back.
I got picked on because the freaking idiot who taught third grade would post the best and the worst test/homework papers up on the chalkboard. The "best" would have a large "A" made up of those little stick-on gold stars, the "worst" would have a "D" or an "F" in heavy black crayon. Then she would say things like 'If you all weren't so lazy, you could get all "A"s like D.' I was also the new kid in a small Massachusetts town, with a funny [fading Brit] accent and no television.
Oddly enough, the boy who used to grab my book bag and use it to pummel me, push me into mud puddles and kick me, wasn't the kid who usually got the worst grade; it was a kid from the low-middle end of the group. Apparently, it had been OK when it was a boy who always got the "A"s, but it wasn't OK for a girl. [The idiot teacher also posted everyone's quarterly grades, by name, so the whole class knew how one was doing.]
I cannot imagine the humiliation felt by the kid who usually got the worst grade - he'd been held back twice, today would probably be recognised as someone in need of special ed, and bore the label of "retard". In retrospect, his emotional damage was probably far worse than my physical wounds, but spending a school year in terror and pain isn't good for anyone.
Why couldn't I get it to stop? After I told my parents and they had complained to the principal, all that happened was that he stopped pushing me into mud puddles - that would be clear evidence - and started kicking me more. As we lived in the same area, it was impossible to avoid him.
Green monkeys are frequently the target of the other monkeys - people fear what they don't understand. A lot of folk can live on the fantasy that all they have to do is work out a little more, diet and use more make-up, practice those guitar riffs to be that sports star, supermodel, rock musician. But they know, deep down, that nothing they do will make them smarter. Combine that with our societal suspicions of intellectuals, scientists, etc., and the resentment builds.
There are also other lunacies out there - my baby sister - who is by far the most economically successful child in our family - was recently told by our mother that her MBA and stellar career meant nothing compared to my brother's PhD and my JD. [I should point out that my sister and I put ourselves through college/grad school; my brother got a free financial ride to Yale because he was The Boy.] My brother also believes this - FTM, he thinks a PhD trumps a JD - but somehow he never was picked on in school, despite the fact that he was pretty full of himself. Oh, yeah, I forgot - he was 5'9" by 3rd grade, 6'4" by 9th. That may have had something to do with it...
As I said, bullies don't pick on those who are able to fight back or those whose team members will fight for them. It's much easier to beat up someone much smaller or someone who's afraid his/her glasses will break, or someone whose bookbag is heavy with books. After all, it's the best way to feel superior.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 3:53 PM
That's really crazy -- college students who are capable of more demanding work can't take the more demanding classes?
LB - also crazy in HS. I had to fight tooth and claw to get into "senior honours" French [I was a junior], even tho' I'd spoken French since I was a small child and had the blessing of the French teacher.
When I started college, I was too young to understand that one could also argue one's way into a higher-level class - and equally too young to grasp that being placed by the school into a higher-level class didn't mean I had to take it. I took far more upper-level math classes than I might have done, had this been explained to me.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 4:02 PM
FWIW, DE, I got picked on the same way, for months, by another little girl in my 4th grade class. Finally, after talking to the principal, her mom, blah blah everyone, my mom decided to teach me to fight back. Being a big know-it-all, my mom, who is completely physically untalented, decided to teach me how to do judo.
Needless to say, I made an ass of myself. However, the fact that I at least tried to fight somehow made the bully stop bullying me. The only read I can come up with now, in retrospect, is that somehow refusing to fight made her think I thought I was better than her, whereas fighting back sort of implied a kind of equality. Anyway, after that she wanted to be friends. Oddly, I didn't.
All that said, your third grade teacher was a moron.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 4:07 PM
I had to argue my way into BC Calculus -- I had been tracked into regular rather than accelerated math in seventh grade, after some conflict with my seventh grade math teacher (who was also the department head. And who was probably justified in tracking me into regular math -- despite the fact that I'd killed the placement exam, my record of turning in homework as I was supposed to was poor.) Five years later, she was still cross at me, and didn't want to let me into BC rather than AB Calculus.
I had to spend about half an hour in her office listening to her saying that she just didn't think it would be a good idea for me, and repeating "If I'm allowed to, I'm signing up for BC Calculus. If I'm not allowed to, please give me some good times for my parents to come in and discuss this with you." She folded before I had to bring my folks in, which is good because I'm not dead sure they would have backed me up.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 4:09 PM
In middle school I almost had to deal with a bully when a guy went from being generally unpleasant to trying to push people around (no beatings though). In retrospect, I'm guessing that his change in behavior - I didn't remember him being someone who pushed people before - was related to something going on with his personal life. Not long - maybe a week or two - after he started becoming a problem he left the school. I assume his family moved.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 4:23 PM
re: 223
Yeah, fighting back generally worked. A couple of times kids tried to bully me -- not for being smart but just bigger kids trying to throw their weight around, or because I was small for my age, or, one memorable occasion at high school, because I was wearing the wrong coloured socks.
With the sock kid, who weighed about 30lbs more than me, I was pulled off his prone body by a PE teacher.
It, bullying, wasn't a big deal, though. I can count the number of times it was tried on the fingers of one hand. Our school was a moderately rough school, although by no means as bad as the worst urban schools, but I don't think bullying was a particularly big problem.
The really tough kids were more interesting in building a reputation as a hard case by fighting each other.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 5:29 PM
It's weird. I got my face split open a bunch of times, and fighting back only made them gang up on me more. I just got really stoic about my injuries, never cried or responded like they'd happened.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 6:24 PM
Oh, I'm sure the question of whether to fight back, ignore, act superior, beg, run away, whatever depends a lot on the specific bully and the specific bully-ee. I only introduced my story as a different angle, rather than the definitive answer.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 6:27 PM
re: 227 Really? That's crappy.
The most serious beating I took after leaving school -- I have a 1 inch scar on face still -- was an instance where I didn't make much of an effort to fight back. I still regret it to this day. On the plus side, the guy had to leave our part of town afterwards.
In my experience, fighting back almost never led to a worse outcome. Admittedly, since reaching adulthood, I'd be more reluctant these days. The consequences could be a lot worse.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 6:30 PM
Also, 228 is right. Some fights are just crazy and backing down the only sensible option.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 6:31 PM
Looking back on it, I was quite a little shit. Ugly, fat, four-eyed lesbian, yes, but also nasty, elitist, and dismissive. A lot of the blows I thought I was taking for the former were probably for the latter.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 07-22-06 7:45 PM
i remember being called gifted and talented. yet, i was put in a "special" class because i didnt speak the language. and then, the following year i was entered into a midwest talent search coz i apparently score 99% on my ISTEP. anyways, i think it's just a name. i mean sure i guess i'm smart, but there's nothing special about that. a lot of people are intelligent in their own ways. gifted and talented... another way to be labeled.
Posted by mynameishoneybee | Link to this comment | 07-23-06 5:48 PM
I was never small, except during that brief time around 12-13 when people grow rapidly, leaving some behind, but I was bullied some. I associated it with being different. The big deal teachers make about scores, etc. upthread is so nasty in its effects I almost wonder if it isn't deliberate. I got good results against bullies fighting back but got beaten up in some essentially random violence, and that hurt more. I too had glasses to protect, but could find situations where I could put them away before the fight. I saw myself as Michael Caine in The Ipcress File, who does just that.
I don't think if you were a bored kid who could think well ahead of the subject matter you should feel too much regret about having felt superior and showing it.
We all had to learn. But it doesn't sound like AWB bears any lasting resentments, and realizes that the other kids were acting naturally too.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-23-06 6:09 PM
168 et al: one teacher can't really accomodate all kids at different levels well. i went to an international school run on the british system in elementary school (because i didn't speak the language of the country i was living in) and got treated à la scottish system. i ended up being on a totally different textbook and grade level from everybody else and teaching myself math for grades 1-3. the teacher spent her time on the other 10 kids and figured i could just work things out on my own. it was sad and pretty boring - i missed the social part of learning, felt isolated from all my friends in the class, and missed instruction and stimulation from the teacher. being sent off to tutor kindergarteners who couldn't master the alphabet in 3rd grade didn't help either -- boring and i spent all my time keeping one girl, who probably had a mental illness, from biting everyone else and making them bleed...
in middle school i was in one of those full-time gt schools in public school...classes were much more interesting but i read under my desk in english constantly and got punished constantly for it like LB, and hated school. it used to drive my english teacher crazy that she couldn't send me to the principal's office more, because the nonGT sections of out middle school was pretty tough and had its own police officer assigned by the county who would sometimes take students away in handcuffs to the local precint for various pretty serious reasons, so she would have looked silly sending someone like me, shy and quiet and non-disruptive. i also read under the table constantly the one summer i went to CTY, which was really not as interesting as some commenters might make you think, perhaps esp. for the humanities. it wasn't any different from my normal middle school classes (in the US in Fairfax Cty, which had a good school system - pretty much all of my class went on to TJ, and i would have too if i didn't move). the CTY teachers didn't punish me like my middle-school teachers, they just got disappointed, which was kind of awful too.
high school on the other hand i loved. it was tracked but everybody chose freely what track they wanted to be on, depending on what their goals were, and then dealt with the results accordingly. probably what i loved most was being treated like an adult and allowed to make my own decisions. in that environment it was also much, much easier to get on with the other students, all of them, and find ones you liked.
in general, in that society (because i had moved out of the US again) we were treated in adults in many, many ways: the drinking age was 16, when we went on school field trips we had to show up for group activities but otherwise were unsupervised and left to explore the town we were visiting on our own, no complicated parental permission system, and we could come and go between school periods as we pleased. also the teachers were honest about teaching us things that mattered within a particular field, as opposed to useless hoop-jumping. we got the feeling that our education was up to us, if we screwed up we would take the consequences, but if we were interested and engaged, we could take the consequences of that too. responsibility. it was so much better for me than the long-term forced infantilization of the US public school system.
really i think the US public school system is designed to teach you to be obedient and follow rules and not much else.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 07-24-06 7:18 AM