5. There's a whole lot of elitism and hand-wringing about doing away with Pull Out. How will we know who is UMC and has aggressive parents???
Attend PTA meetings?
There's a whole lot of elitism and hand-wringing about doing away with Pull Out.
It's really not the most effective birth control.
Similar to the way that it's now considered beneficial to keep kids with disabilities in a mainstream classroom as much as possible, "push in" means that you keep the GT kids in the classroom, and introduce GT content to the entire class.
The great thing about this is that the slower kids get to feel bad because they can't keep up and the faster kids get to feel bad because the slower kids take it out on them, or get bored and disengaged because the class is going too slowly for them. I'm assuming that the idea is to make school as horribly unpleasant and draining as possible.
"Oh, but if you pull the faster kids out then it stigmatises the slower ones". Right. And putting them in a class where they will always be aware that they are the slowest kids in the room, that'll be just fine.
It's noticeable that no one ever suggests doing something like this with, say, sports.
How will we know who is UMC and has aggressive parents?
Oh, I don't think this will prove to be all that difficult. You know how to tell if someone went to Harvard, right?
It's noticeable that no one ever suggests doing something like this with, say, sports.
They do here for young kids in sports nobody cares about, like soccer.
My kiddos, now teens, have been in a segregated gifted environment since K, and I still feel entirely ambivalent.
@3, no, it's not the case that sports is segregated. There are inclusive programs, which my, not-gifted-in-sports, kids have taken advantage of, from the pool swim, rec hockey, baseball, . . .
Also, in sports, the degree that there is "club"/"travel", . . . , the selection is the ability to actually play the sport. For gifted education, the selection is often cognitive testing of some sort or another. It would be like choosing basketball players based on their height in K, and then providing only that subset of kids the opportunity to play. True, they might turn out to be great b-ball players, but, what about the other kids? who didn't get the opportunity.
How do I deal with the ambivalence in spite of personal choice? to admit it, and to bring up all the arguments against it and to argue for appropriate selection and inclusiveness where possible
(and, yes, ultimately the choice is that my kids thrive in this environment)
Maybe not "sports," but welcome to the difference between post-hippy modern & all sorts school vs. pure unadulterated Russian ballet training.
Being all together was great for my kid's social development for 10 years, although I suspect the relatively challenging level of the curriculum was part of why it worked for him (fewer longeurs than i remember for myself), but yowza is he ready for more challenging fare. He loved his summer class at Cal, is mildly stroppy about regression to regular school this fall. Hopefully teachers will throw their all at him, should be do-able as only 3 of them are doing the literature filière.
Among the skills child learned was how to carefully calibrate his contribution to group project when he was assigned to group of 3 & other boys' reaction was "awesome great grade at no effort." Child nailed lowest poss score so as not to screw self. This is a non-trivial skill! He also learned to not be an asshole when others aren't and to e.g., stick up for a young woman being humiliated by the horrific sports prof.
I just came back from a school celebration of the anniversary of the national anthem at which all three of my children among their six hundred peers cried at various times, in f case that remains a mystery to me rather spectacularly. I suppose THAT's a gift of sorts!
It's noticeable that no one ever suggests doing something like this with, say, sports.
Of course they do it with sports, and I sure am glad. I was poorly coached as a kid because I was a poor athlete. My kids are decent athletes -- and so am I, now. This is because we were able to find situations where we weren't required to excel as part of the price of admittance.
I'm not sure what lesson we should draw from this for other forms of education -- maybe just that everybody ought to be provided with an opportunity to go to school. But let's not pretend that restricting people's access to more advanced learning invariably serves meritocratic ends.
This is because we were able to find situations where we weren't required to excel as part of the price of admittance.
This was the Pittsburgh Pirates philosophy for years.
It's noticeable that no one ever suggests doing something like this with, say, eating Cheetos.
It's noticeable that no one ever suggests doing something like this with, say commenting on Unfogged.
It's noticeable that no one ever suggests doing something like this with, say, dressing Moby.
But let's not pretend that restricting people's access to more advanced learning invariably serves meritocratic ends.
Not in theory. But in practice, GT testing is a process reserved nearly exclusively for kids with advantages. GT programs are too frequently hijacked to perpetuate UMC privilege and have only a loose connection with making sure that bright kids aren't bored silly in school.
13: Isn't this the GT program for graduates of Crooked Timber?
I was a gifted kid in the 1980s. Like a lot of gifted kids, I didn't turn out smart, I was just precocious. By college whatever advantage I had disappeared. I don't know how smart my kids are going to turn out so I'm sending them to the fun hippie alternative public school (in the big city you get options).
It's one thing for a kid who's naturally brilliant, but I see a lot of little kids being pushed into gifted by their parents, kids wouldn't have made the cut if it weren't for a shitload of drilling (Kumon, apps, etc). I feel sorry for them.
Like a lot of gifted kids, I didn't turn out smart, I was just precocious.
Huh? Anyone following along here is plenty smart.
Or just enough of a profane asshole nobody can tell the difference.
Of course they do it with sports, and I sure am glad
Your school sports teams were selected on an ability-blind basis?
I was poorly coached as a kid because I was a poor athlete.
No, you were poorly coached because you had a poor coach.
16: Who wants to be the one to tell Moby the bad news?
20.1: My high school was really small. Anybody who wanted to play, got on the team. People who were horrible (e.g. me) didn't get much playing time, but pretty much always got at least some.
15: I think we are agreeing with each other. But I was using the word "meritocratic" totally unironically -- that is to say, I was using it to talk about a world in which people get opportunities based on merit.
But nobody uses the word that way any more, do they? "Meritocracy" nowadays just refers to the process of entrenching privilege. So yeah, GT programs often are, in practice, meritocratic by that definition.
G&T programs became available to me in high school, and to my kids beginning in grade school. And Lord knows, we take advantage of them everywhere that is possible. But I spent grades 1-8 in classes with the non-gifted-and-talented -- and I went to a fourth-tier college where I had the same experience -- and I don't think you can just write off the benefits to both sides of that kind of interaction.
In US society at large we see that adults who aren't "G&T" have become very suspicious of those who are, and vice versa.
Is it a stretch to blame the rise of Trump on G&T programs and "meritocracy?" Yes! But I'm allowed to do that because I'm so smart.
re: 23
I'm sure you know this, but Young, when he literally wrote the book on Meritocracy, always already saw it that way.
When I was growing up, we had G&T programs for elementary and middle school, but not for high school. I guess, since it was a big high school, there were already enough "tracks" that there was a de facto G&T program even though it wasn't called that.
I was in the G&T elementary and middle school programs, but don't remember a thing about them.
As for putting G&T content into regular classes, that sounds like it could be an OK or else a really terrible idea, depending on the circumstances. Did anyone consult the people who will actually be teaching these classes?
25: Didn't know that. See, that's why it's important that guys like me are allowed to participate in the gifted and talented comment section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
What is G&T content? From what I recall, in my mid-size school district growing up, everyone got tested in third grade, and then based on the test results you were placed in a regular class or in a "More Able Program" class. About 1/3 to 1/2 of the kids went to the MAP class.
I think the content of the classes was not all that different, except if you were in the MAP class the curriculum was somewhat accelerated. So, sometimes there were combination classes, where half the kids would be MAP kids from one grade, and the other half would be regular kids from the grade higher up.
I refused flat out to be dragged into anything of the kind.
Somewhat related, YIL that a (mid-size urban, lower-income community) school district in my area is offering a "dentistry academy." The school district encourages parents to enroll their kids in order to prepare them to join a lucrative field (the website notes that dentists make in the six figures).
The academy is an elementary school. Wtf?
Like a lot of gifted kids, I didn't turn out smart, I was just precocious. By college whatever advantage I had disappeared.
This is interesting. Did anyone else here have this experience? It seems a very stark way of putting things, and I'm not sure what the bar is: are you just ordinary if you settle into, say, a successful medical career without getting a dual doctorate and conducting innovative research?
I'm more familiar (in my clinical practice, you know) with the chronic-underachiever pattern, where native smarts are overwhelmed by poor practical skills and stubborn mental illnesses. But if you base your assessment on achievements as an adult, I suppose many more people look just ordinary compared to your MacArthur winners and Fields medalists.
I am curious about the parental obnoxiousness in the OP -- this is conventional wisdom, but are there specifics? Anecdotes? I have no coherent plan for my poor bored kid, but I do sometimes wistfully imagine her in a magical school with a challenging curriculum and imagine how happy it would make her, and then I feel queasy. I do viscerally want her to stay the hell away from mean rich kids for as long as possible.
I am curious about the parental obnoxiousness
I teach a class, if you need training.
Also, Remedial Obnoxiousness for the Barren.
Fully onboard with point #7 ("When I was a youngster, it was a relief to be in a Pull Out GT classroom"). In fact, it would be reasonable to describe the entire existence of my magnet high school like that.
I suppose it would have been better for the world if the regular classes didn't make me feel like I needed to escape, rather than providing an escape hatch for a few of us. I'd be very curious to see what "push in" looks like in practice.
The cost question would be good to know about. Clearly having pull-out is more expensive than not having anything (extra staff, space, transportation to the one school in the district that has the program, etc.), but I don't know how push-in is structured in terms of staff, for example.
Also, doesn't push-in have the problem that it's going to be competing for classroom time with the ever-increasing material for which there will be a high-stakes test?
Until today I never saw G&T stand for anything except Gin and Tonic, so I guess we learn something every day, even if it's only that precocious children should be taught to mix simple cocktails at the earliest opportunity.
My gifted program sucked. It was basically summer school, and only district wide. I was the only kid from my school who qualified, and the curriculum was completely half assed. None of the teachers wanted to be there. I sure as hell didn't. I still had to go back to the grind in September and I lost my summer.
That sounds like good preparation for life.
34: ordinarily I'd insist that I'm maximally obnoxious already, thanks. With this, though, I honestly don't know. There is such a fierce tension between eusocial behavior and individual needs: I find it extremely disorienting. The structure of children's education isn't remotely equipped to bear the load of hundreds of years of social inequality, so it's just a question of where it's going to fail and how badly. I know parenting is about learning to fail gracefully, but the school question is on a different scale.
I'm not exactly one of the people who have to teach this stuff, but I'm adjacent to them, and I affirm that Ajay is totally right in 3, but, further that it's shit for the teachers too. In any class you rely on the smarter kids for interaction, to answer questions, to lead by example, sometimes to help the weaker students. In a significantly unstreamed class you have either to abandon interaction for lecturing (bad for students, dull for teachers) or leave the bottom half of the class in the dust (and deal with the consequent discipline problems). Further, the brighter kids and classes make the dull ones bearable. If all the bright ones are squelched in unstreamed classes you'll soon be left with only demoralized or mediocre teachers.
My computer teacher had a coffee mug reading "I demoralize the future. I teach."
I have no coherent plan for my poor bored kid, but I do sometimes wistfully imagine her in a magical school with a challenging curriculum and imagine how happy it would make her, and then I feel queasy.
My kid is both reasonably bored and not particularly ahead. It's a wonderful world on every level hooray!
In any class you rely on the smarter kids for interaction, to answer questions, to lead by example, sometimes to help the weaker students.
I strenuously strenuously disagree with this!
I mean, it's an accurate description, but I think it is far from ideal.
Learning is the most fun when you're the one that makes the connection. If it's always the bright kid making the connection and spelling it out for you, it gets depressing real fast. The key is to create small scale situations where as many students as possible make the connection, but not be isolated. I think 2-3 student groups are best, with frequently changing the groups so that most of the students are sometimes in groups where they're the smart one.
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Tech money in West Virginia moves into politics. I have distant professional connections to this guy and wish him well. Lawyers here may feel differently, but it's interesting to consider whether the business model (of his WV operations center) is sustainable and how.
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Further, the brighter kids and classes make the dull ones bearable. If all the bright ones are squelched in unstreamed classes you'll soon be left with only demoralized or mediocre teachers.
And I actually find this to be the exact opposite of my experience. If I've got a very homogenous-ability class, I can really create eureka moments for everyone. If there are 1-2 students in a different league, it's a giant pain in the ass and I almost have to create separate, more challenging daily plans for them.
I suppose it would have been better for the world if the regular classes didn't make me feel like I needed to escape, rather than providing an escape hatch for a few of us.
Like many of us here I found school painful and frustrating (though I never found it soul-crushing; I just hated it) particularly for grades 7-11. There were some half-assed gifted programs (called TAG at that point) that I was involved with, but mostly I ended up finding my escape hatch outside of school. I got involved in role-playing games which were both a mixed-age group and provided an outlet and prompting to geek out on random stuff*.
On one hand this left me with a pretty strong sense that there's real benefit to not trying to have everything run through the schools or a coordinated program. There's something really valuable about letting kids be lost enough that they find their own community. On the other hand, that obviously doesn't work for everybody. Not only do many people fail to find a supportive community but also that has it's limitations. Among the people that I gamed with I was unusual in that I was both seriously into gaming and ended up being seriously into academics once I got to college. Not that many people do both.
But, still, darn it, I get a little itchy around the idea that gifted programs are the only (or even the best) way to solve that problem.
* for example: I remember playing through one Shadowrun module in which the villains were three people slotting BTL chips which made them think they were Jack The Ripper, Genghis Kahn, and somebody else. When we found that out I went and did some research on the three people (not much more than the equivalent of reading the wikipedia entry but pre-wikipedia) and it imbued in me a sense that Genghis Kahn is one of the most intimidating people in history which I still remember.
(ie so that they don't sabotage the experience for everyone else.)
I believe the children are our future.
Hold them close and teach those who can get an A.
If I've got a very homogenous-ability class, I can really create eureka moments for everyone.
Yes, which is why classes should be streamed. I actually agree with everything you've said, and all those things argue for streamed classes.
52: I'm sort of confused then. I thought "streamed" was short for "mainstreamed" as opposed to "separated by track".
To be clear, by "streaming" I mean roughly homogenous-ability classes, not not gifted programs, which IMLE are nothing but arenas for bullshit and class warfare. You don't need special classes with a special curriculum. You can have the same curriculum for everyone, the top stream masters the entire curriculum, each successive masters some smaller subset, the bottom stream can get extra resources so it doesn't fall below some minimum level. If you have a big enough spectrum of streams you test them to different standards, reflecting the subsets they can reasonably be expected to have mastered. (If that last is happening in mass schooling maybe you have serious societal problems, but pedagogically it can be workable.)
55 written without seeing 54. Yes, I mean separated by track.
@20, yes, everyone gets to play, in K-8 school. High school has been more selective, but even there, there are sports that nearly everyone could play.
And, without the "everyone can play" attitude, my kids wouldn't have gotten the opportunities to play.
@55, and big streams.
Also, no amount of homogenization actually homogenizes kids. You can pick the "top 1%" of the population, and there will still be kids who are learning a subject 100X as fast as other people in the class, and, it won't be the same person for every topic.
In public school systems, I think the self-contained (i.e. segregated) GT programs, combined with maneuvering by parents with the knowledge & resources, become homogenous classrooms, not just by ability/potential (even if we could measure those things well enough), but by all the other factors (excluding kids with learning differences, behavioral problems, english language learners, race, socioeconomic class, . . . .) and that is a desired feature, not a bug.
59: sure, and ideally you'll have a different stream for each subject. My HS did that beyond a certain age. Organizationally it won't always be possible of course, which is an argument in favor of schools big enough to support teacher specialization.
60: In our state at least those parentheticals are "gap groups" and schools have to report on how well they serve the students in them, including my daughters who are black AND have Medicaid/free lunch. My general theory now is that US education policy as practiced is mostly about creating a two-track system for failure and success to encourage a permanent underclass, but that's just me.
62: A sizable part of my personal policy as actually practiced amounts to creating tracks for failure and success, just because I'm forced essentially to choose who to invest in and who to neglect, and I invest where I'll see the biggest return, meaning generally the students who would do ok anyway. My only ethical defense for that is that those students are the majority in most classes.
32: My son's new dentist is hot. This makes me feel old.
I won't search, because I'm at work, but I'm guessing that dentists are pretty far below nurses and librarians on the "how frequently they appear in porn" scale.
That's because they used to all be elderly Jewish men.
Dentistry porn seems like it would be a niche kink.
66: That's a good point. My plan to make money after retirement probably wasn't well thought out.
Also, no amount of homogenization actually homogenizes kids. You can pick the "top 1%" of the population, and there will still be kids who are learning a subject 100X as fast as other people in the class, and, it won't be the same person for every topic.
I guess, but it seems like a bit of a nitpick. There're certainly classrooms that contain a narrow range of abilities on a topic and classrooms that spread over a wide range of abilities.
I think 2-3 student groups are best, with frequently changing the groups so that most of the students are sometimes in groups where they're the smart one.
That's what my kid's private school does. It seems to work pretty well, as far as I can tell, which isn't much. On the other hand, who fucking knows. I mean, my kid tested out as "highly gifted" one time but she sure doesn't seem to know that much. Honestly all the nine year olds seem kinda like a bunch of dumbasses. Singling out any one of them as "smart" is preposterous.
Don't they just pick the blonde ones?
Having had the "gifted" social millstone slung around my own neck at 11, I think I'd use a flamethrower on anyone who tried to describe my boys that way.
60 and 62.last are true as far as they go, but does it actually make a difference to get rid of those programs? That shit is so deeply, deeply entrenched. Nothing is going to shake the conviction even among pretty liberal people that intelligence is reliably heritable, can only be cultivated in stable homes full of artful language and wholesome food, and that anyone at a social disadvantage might be pretty good for their class, but there won't be any real surprises among the district's National Merit Semifinalist roster. I swear that even in my 80s childhood it wasn't this fucking bad.
Anyway, for real there should be two "gifted" tracks: the prep track and the nerd track. The prep track is for people who want the appearance of exceptional excellence and who talk a good game about the hunger-ending, cancer-curing applications of their work; the nerd track is for the kid who wants to spend the entire year running gels and charting data to prove an obscure point. The two groups should be absolutely segregated. Each can have contact with the rest of the student body.
I have no idea where my kid would go. Probably prep, alas.
Isn't push-in GT really just an excuse to get rid of GT without having to admit it?
My general theory now is that US education policy as practiced is mostly about creating a two-track system for failure and success to encourage a permanent underclass, but that's just me.
This accords with my general understanding.
74/75: I have also wondered that. In Heebieville, we aren't cutting GT staff at the moment, but it seems like it'd be a hell of a lot easier to cut a dedicated GT person once all the teachers are "trained".
We used to have one GT employee for all 6 elementary schools. She travelled around and visited each school once a week, except for the two poorest schools, which oddly enough only needed to see her every two weeks. They hired two more a year or two back.
re: 73.1
That sort of thing is why the whole G&T thing (which is very US-centric, it's really not much of a thing here) drives me mental.
--
I think I pissed off a sort of friend of ours (kid is in xelA's former nursery class), who has been asking me what you need to do to reliably get your kid into Oxford. And talking about private school and extra tuition for his 4 year old. When I basically rubbished (politely) all of that, he started giving me a* lecture about Oxbridge. Not realising that i) I went there, ii) I used to teach there.
But seriously, if you are already trying to work the competitive advantage angle for 4 year olds ...
FWIW, at least his kid seems really bright. I've had similar conversation with parents whose kids show zero signs of remarkable intellect.**
* mild, he's basically a nice guy, and a lot of this is immigrant anxiety. He wasn't being a dick.
** not that there's anything wrong with that. I think my own kid is pretty bright, but I doubt he particular radiates that to other people who don't know him.
78: I have a vague memory that at some point in my glorious elementary school career there was a special teacher that would come maybe once a week and spend maybe 30 minutes challenging me with special problems worthy o my extraordinary intellect. I'm fairly certain that all I got out of it was more reason to indulge in delusions of grandeur.
It's no wonder it took me so long to figure out that I was stupid.
The best universities in the U.K. both are named after ways to cross water. Coincidence or metaphor?
82: It's an island. The entire focus of study was trying to figure out a way back to the mainland.
I think 2-3 student groups are best
I say, spare a thought for the introverted kids and knock it off with the damned group work.
Nothing is going to shake the conviction even among pretty liberal people that intelligence is reliably heritable, can only be cultivated in stable homes full of artful language and wholesome food, and that anyone at a social disadvantage might be pretty good for their class, but there won't be any real surprises among the district's National Merit Semifinalist roster.
This is at strong odds with my actual experience in Los Angeles gifted schools. They were nearly entirely brown kids, mostly second generation Asian. There weren't surprises about who was a National Merit Scholar; we knew who was bright. But upper middle class white kids didn't overperform relative to their percentages in my school. Neither my parents, nor my friends' parents thought the way you're describing.
Actually, lemme look for it. There's a paragraph in whats'ername's essay about Korean parents scheming to get their kids into my school. BRB.
OT: Who got to eat Selena Gomez's old kidney?
Indeed, I've gradually become aware--via frequent newsletters--that behind those high brown walls flourishes a buzzing hive of Korean Magnet Parents. They are busily committee-meeting, Teacher Appreciation-lunching, and catapulting their children from Van Nuys High School directly into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley! Why should they spend $25,000 for each year of high school to make the Ivy League? These immigrants know how to find value!
I admit that I'm thirty years out of date, but you'll never convince me that gifted tracks are tracks for white people, the children of liberal strivers who are boosted by paid-for extracurriculars. Everywhere I've seen them, they're overwhelmingly brown.
She was funnier when she was making fun of Baywatch.
Yeah, my magnet program was like 65% first and second-gen Asian-American.
you'll never convince me that gifted tracks are tracks for white people
Did I say this?
No, you didn't. I extrapolated from this " can only be cultivated in stable homes full of artful language and wholesome food". If I misinterpreted your description of magnet supporters/participants, I am sorry.
We're having pizza tonight. I already called.
Not wholesome food or former Disney star kidney.
There's the hand-made organic artisan pizza place with $1 Straub, but that's not lazy enough for me today.
Until today I never saw G&T stand for anything except Gin and Tonic
In the electric power industry it stands for Generation and Transmission.
I had never heard of this "push-in" thing before, and I think I have the same questions about it that Nathan had in 36.
91: Ah, okay. I guess I'm curious: which parts of that particular stereotype of mine don't seem to describe the families you mention? Did the parents want upwardly mobile children, rather than to reproduce their own class status? Were they more dogmatic and less liberal-ish/research-driven (that is, consumers of the parenting-book industry)? I know the Amy Chua, "fuck well-roundedness" line; I don't know if that's what you had in mind.
In any case, as I said, I think the discourse around class and education has changed a lot since I was in school, and not for the better. I think the ideas in my comment would have seemed strange to me, even shocking, in 1990.
Heh. I typed and deleted a comment about how the parental contribution was a beating for any grade lower than an A, rather than gluten-free meals. Yeah, more dogmatic, not research-driven. Not liberal by any Portlandia markers. Definitely not policing class boundaries, because they'd be in the excluded group if their kids hadn't done well on a test.
If you want your kids to be driven, unpleasant assholes, you really do need to make sure they're successful so they can pay people to ignore the asshole-y-ness.
96: I suspect that "push in" versus "pull out" is basically the following.
In pull out, for a few hours the various "gifted and talented" students from classrooms across the campus trudge to a separate classroom with a separate teacher, who hopefully challenges them more than a group project. (In the 80s, that was my experience... though in grades 5-8 (ages 10-14) it more resembled Mossy's streaming example--so strong young math students and older less strong math students shared classes based on math ability during math period. Just like high school, just early.)
For push in, during a normal class day for a few hours, an extra teacher will rotate into the classroom and engage the identified gifted students with an additional project or otherwise engage them more deeply, while the normal teacher continues teaching to the remainder of the class. I'm hazier on this--it seems distracting, but if you break into multiple groups who are all rotating through activities, you could just spike the gifted problems when they rotate through that activity.
Right, 100.2 is more or less what I experienced as well in the 90s. I'm not sure about 100.3, though, since heebie says in the OP that the GT content is introduced to the whole class rather than just the identified GT kids.
IME, being not poor was a necessary but not sufficient criterion for getting into a gifted program. I.e. once you got to the comfortably middle class levels, it really was about "intelligence" (read: ability to do math and logic puzzles fast) than money or culture. That's not to say that many UMC people didn't wish they could game the system by being able to get their averagely talented but hard working and overcoached kids into the program, but it wasn't true. Those kids go to prep schools and then to Harvard.
I also found gifted programs to be a mixed bag. How awesome it was to find other people who were interested in nerdy problems and to find problems that were actually challenging! On the flip side, I do think it gave me a way-too-long-lasting sense that I was superior purely because of my talent, when what I really needed (and finally got beat into me) was the realization that it was a powerful tool that was only as good as the amount and ways that you use it.
100. In the various Leafy Suburbs I know*, it is more common to have the kids with issues go out of the class part of the day to special instruction based on their IEPs. Getting instruction geared to "high achievers" is done by tracking (more accurately, prerequisites that sort out the high achievers, especially in STEM). If you want G&T instruction you do it outside school ("Russian Math," Mandarin, etc.). There are no explicit G&T classes. The kids are used to this because their parents schedule all their time anyway, it's just a different thing than the stalwarts of olden days like piano lessons.
*Keep in mind that all Leafy Suburbs are different.
85 is exactly right that Indian and East Asian kids are disproportionately represented in anything that is "enrichment." It's the same dynamic that was pioneered by Jewish kids (really their parents, of course) to try to get around the various stratagems that the Ivies used to exclude them.
For what it's worth, I'm not myself claiming that gifted programs are the domain of the upper middle classes (or white kids, good Lord). I am saying that a lot of people in this country seem to have an unconscious habit of using class as a proxy for educational aptitude, even for well-meaning reasons like lamenting the lack of funding to public schools or pushing for a more level playing field, and while they regret the unfairness of the system, they do assume (until proven wrong) that it is going to work for their kids, personally. That ideology is going to persist whether there are pull-out GT programs, labeling, no labeling, etc. It will change whenever, um, huge demographic and economic changes occur in the U.S. over the next century, I would guess, but I really have no idea. I'm sorry for the confusing original comment. This one may also be bullshit, but hopefully less confusing bullshit.
My daughter's school doesn't seem to have GT programming for younger students. They all get some kind of aptitude test in third grade. I don't know if anything at all happens as a result.
TREELESS SUBURBS ARE ALL ALIKE; EVERY LEAFY SUBURB IS LEAFY IN ITS OWN WAY
In the past 20 years there's more and more attempts by asshole parents to try to take over things aimed at smart kids for their kids. In the 90s summer nerd programs only had kids applying who were interested and curious and actually wanted to go. (There's some class bias in terms of who found out about them, but I was poor and felt much less out of place for it than I did at college.). But at some point MIT started saying summer programs were a good way to help your application, and nowadays you have to worry about whether parents are cheating to get their kids into programs the kids don't even want to go to.
I think some kind of G&T infrastructure is important, because it's really lonely growing up as one of the only smart and interested people around, and really getting treated as an alien (and I don't think non-Americans will understand, many other countries have more positive views of intellectual pursuits). But it's hard to give that to the kids who need it without asshole parents trying to ruin it.
But it's hard to give that to the kids who need it without asshole parents trying to ruin it.
Ain't that the goddamn truth?
And why is it that we can't say 'Yes he was famous and well-beloved by many, but would it have been so hard for him to not be a dick to the female bartenders and servers he interacted with?' Like, maybe it would be good to say to budding old famous white guys: 'It doesn't cost you anything to be polite, asshole.'
Like, maybe it would be good to say to budding old famous white guys: 'It doesn't cost you anything to be polite, asshole.'
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice!
||
Maybe I need to be more gifted and talented, but do any of you iPhone users know how to increase the font in the browser (any browser, it doesn't have to be Safari)?
The front-page loads ok, but the comments here show up in really small type and there's no way I'm going to magnifying glass (with the accessibility settings) or horizontally and vertically scroll (with pinch to zoom) my way through a thread.
|>
Formerly gifted parent of a resolutely non-gifted high schooler chiming in. Similar to ajay's point above, my son is happier in school than he was in previous years, now that the gifted assholes are in a separate
track and not making the rest of the kids feel stupid. "push in" would suck for him.
I was in school before the era of G&T, at least in my school system. I was the asshole then, and I'm glad my son isn't surrounded by kids like Younger Me. Unfortunately for him, he still has to cope with two gifted asshole parents.
Formerly gifted parent of a resolutely non-gifted high schooler chiming in. Similar to ajay's point above, my son is happier in school than he was in previous years, now that the gifted assholes are in a separate
track and not making the rest of the kids feel stupid. "push in" would suck for him.
I was in school before the era of G&T, at least in my school system. I was the asshole then, and I'm glad my son isn't surrounded by kids like Younger Me. Unfortunately for him, he still has to cope with two gifted asshole parents.
Unimaginative's spouse was evidently too unimaginative to think of their own pseud.
"The best universities in the U.K. both are named after ways to cross water."
True. OxFORD. CamBRIDGE. HULL.
(Brits will know, of course, that only two of those are truly great universities.)
And Imperial, of course, is named after what you do once you've crossed it.
Brits will know, of course, that only two of those are truly great universities.
Yes, Oxford's a complete dump.
The entire focus of study was trying to figure out a way back to the mainland.
Since June 2016, this is once again the case for about a third of the faculty and half the undergraduates who want to do postgrad.
I still resent not being put in the gifted program in elementary school. Especially when they got to work with some sort of programmable Legos. God I was fucking good with Legos.
59: sure, and ideally you'll have a different stream for each subject. My HS did that beyond a certain age. Organizationally it won't always be possible of course, which is an argument in favor of schools big enough to support teacher specialization.
Wouldn't need to be that big, I'd have thought. My school was streamed on a per subject basis, and it was considerably smaller than the average US high school, in my understanding. Admittedly, it had vastly more resources, but we're still talking 20-30 people in a class.
117: I can confirm that programmable Legos are now available to all children, at least at our school. Students who aren't in the robotics elective can still join the after-school club or go to the dedicated space in the library. (There's going to be a Makerspace too, though I haven't heard details beyond the excitement of the administration. And the library is big enough this doesn't mean we're losing books. In fact they'll be adding a little free library too.)
re: 118
Mine, too. Bog standard Scottish comprehensive: 1600-1700 kids.
Not every subject was streamed. Depended on how many kids were doing it, so the big subjects, that a lot (hundreds) of people did exams in at age 15/16 and age 17/18 -- Maths and English in particular -- were streamed, but those that didn't have a lot of pupils doing them were generally not.
And it was quite possible for a kid to be one of the 'top' classes for Maths, and not in one for another subject. There wasn't division of kids into 'talented' versus not.
I suppose I could buy myself some programmable Legos.
120: mine too. I think it's fairly standard for Scottish schools. At least it was back then, don't know about now. There were a few subjects that weren't streamed (like Russian) because there just weren't enough pupils per year to make it worth while, as ttaM says, but the rest were; and streamed by individual subject. I think that was the case from about age 11 onwards.
Makes sense; if you have 70-90 pupils in a year, as we did, you can't teach them all in the same room, so you're going to have to split them up somehow. And if not by ability, then how?
Even cadet force was sort of streamed. You had to do two years' cadet training. Before your two years started, you did an aptitude test. It was basically an IQ test. It was pass/fail. If you passed, you could pick which branch (navy, army or air force) to join. If you failed you had to go into the army. This is, in retrospect, hilarious to me.
I think Russian had two streams for GCSE and one for A-level for us, but I could be remembering wrong.
Makes sense; if you have 70-90 pupils in a year, as we did, you can't teach them all in the same room, so you're going to have to split them up somehow. And if not by ability, then how?
By having elective courses? IIRC, there were two blocks of optional GCSE subjects, including Russian, History, Geography, CDT, Electronics, German, Ancient Greek and Spanish. I did Russian and German, but at the same time other people would be doing, say, Greek and CDT.
My high school worked by electives like that. There were 2 of us who took physics. It was a small school. I graduated 2nd in the class but not, without rounding, in the top 10%.
I assumed there that ajay's 70-90 per year was 70-90 per subject per year? Might be wrong, though.
At my school, Maths and English were pretty much compulsory O-grade/Standard grade subjects, the others (up to an additional 6 when I was there) were pretty much whatever you wanted. I did Chemistry, Engineering Science, Technical Drawing, Arithmetic, History, and Art (along with Maths and English).
Ditto for Highers, where you were strongly encouraged (although it wasn't absolutely compulsory) to choose Maths and English in the (up to) 5 you chose. I think it's different now, but broadly similar in many ways.
What is arithmetic, as separate from maths (sic)?
We had a lot more compulsory subjects, at least till GCSE. English, Maths, French, Latin, Science (Chemistry, Biology and Physics), and then non-exam subjects like PE and Divinity, which was a sort of general humanities subject. A level you could do whatever.
French and Latin? I don't think I've heard of a single American school that requires that many languages.
I took both o levels at 14 (French and Latin) Or was it Greek and Latin? I can't remember, though I know I hated Greek. We were streamed ("setted") by subject, but the forms were decided, at my prep school, by competence in Latin. I still think this was a rather admirable system. I mean, the streaming by subject makes sense, and why not pick as the flagship subject the one which is least oractical use?
OT: "The only way to stop a clueless bro with a gun is to have "
a clueless bro with a gun.
That could have been formatted more better.
We did not have gifted and talented programs when I was in school. We had ranked small reading groups in public school but they weren't really labeled. I. Private school we had French A and 2 sections of French B. In the 7th grade there were kids who got pulled out of French for 2 years so that they could work on writing and English. They always tried to say that the extra time spent on English wasn't remedial.
French and Latin? I don't think I've heard of a single American school that requires that many languages.
My school was founded when Latin was still the language of academia. I think they saw it as part of the scholarly tradition. Also, in retrospect there may have been a less high-minded motive, given that the head of Latin was on the exam board. French is (was?) the default second language in English schools and until relatively recently you had to do a second language to GCSE/O level.
I can't remember which one is NEWTS and which one is OWLS.
Speaking of garbage universities: Harvard, am I right?
I assumed there that ajay's 70-90 per year was 70-90 per subject per year?
70-90 pupils per year; but some subjects were compulsory up to age 16 (maths, English, French) and a lot of the others were done by most people; you had to do at least one other language (German, Russian, Latin) and at least one science, so even most of the non-compulsory subjects ended up with at least, i don't know, 50 pupils. Timetabling it all must have been a challenge; I don't know how they did it. Safe to assume not by computer, too modern, unless they had some sort of cyclopean rod-logic analytical engine designed by Lord Kelvin sitting out the back behind the gym.
I used to do that for my school in Samoa. It wasn't my job, but the vice principal was terrible at it. I did it by moving colorcoded rectangles of cardboard around on a big grid, but there's probably an easier way now.
LizardBreath and colleagues hard at work preparing for the new school term.
Not really that far off topic: I remember registering for college classes in the pre-internet days. You would go to a giant room, look at a wall full of the codes for courses and their sections, fill out a scantron sheet with the courses/sections you wanted, wait in line to hand it in, and watch as a lady feed it into a the machine. Then you'd sit and wait until a different lady called out your name to give you the printout showing you what courses you got. If your name was hard to pronounce (by the standards of people born in Nebraska during the 1940s), you'd have an extra hurdle.
I did French, and German for 2 years, and Russian for about 6 months. Didn't sit exams in them, though.
We had around 300 pupils per year, and about 20 or more possible O-grade subjects, so yeah, scheduling might have been quite hard. I have a vague feeling we (the pupils) did it, in some way. Because there were often several different possible slots for any given subject, and you picked the ones that fit. With some assistance from teaching staff to make sure you did actually get to do everything. But I may be misremembering now.
Thinking about it, I've basically always been about a high school sophomore. This was a really big deal when I was in fifth grade, but didn't serve me all that well as an undergrad. Then, in law school, it worked out again.
It doesn't cost you anything to be polite, asshole
I've made some progress on my family history project, and last night came to believe the plaintiff, sorry, pursuer, in this case is a cousin.
Thinking about it, I've basically always been about a high school sophomore. This was a really big deal when I was in fifth grade, but didn't serve me all that well as an undergrad. Then, in law school, it worked out again.
It doesn't cost you anything to be polite, asshole
I've made some progress on my family history project, and last night came to believe the plaintiff, sorry, pursuer, in this case is a cousin.
[Once again, with link fixed.]
118: My HS was ~30 students per class, ~200 per year cohort. It worked much like the schools in 120 and 122.1.
I remember registering for college classes in the pre-internet days. You would go to a giant room, look at a wall full of the codes for courses and their sections, fill out a scantron sheet with the courses/sections you wanted, wait in line to hand it in, and watch as a lady feed it into a the machine.
I'm enough of a young chicken to have registered entirely in the days of telephone registration.
That's how we did graduate school registration.
37: Let it be recorded that I, personally, have done my part in rectifying the misdirection of this thread title.
Though it turns out this Filipino gin is actually just cane spirit. Assholes. The label is pretty though.
This from lk is painfully familiar:
I'm more familiar (in my clinical practice, you know) with the chronic-underachiever pattern, where native smarts are overwhelmed by poor practical skills and stubborn mental illnesses. But if you base your assessment on achievements as an adult, I suppose many more people look just ordinary compared to your MacArthur winners and Fields medalists.
We had G&T programs in my school but they were limited to different subjects. Actually the only one I recall was for English and it was a god-send to be in it.
I mean, I was standing there, looking at the shelf, and thought to myself, let's try something different. Let's not be racist. There's no intrinsic *reason* Filipinos can't make decent gin if they try. And the label is pretty! Ironically Catholic, even. Assholes.
And yet requires juniper berries, the correct varieties of which grow in Mediterranean climates, which AFAIK the Philippines lack. But FFS, global village. Free trade.
Two of my kids went to grammar schools (like magnet I guess?) and were only setted for maths, and were assumed to need no further enrichment.
The other two went/are at a comprehensive, about 1400 pupils - they get setted for maths, English and science (and PE), but not for anything else I think. They have to do religious studies up to age 16, and are strongly encouraged to do at least one MFL and at least one of history or geography until that age too. There are various vocational options on offer as well as the traditional academic GCSEs. There are also completely random occasional invitations to G&T-type stuff, e.g. kid B had a day out at UCL, kid D has done various history and geography after school things (the latest was about the Vietnam war), but this has nothing to do with normal school.
|| I linked my cousin's court case above because it's a little surprising how much sexual harassment (of the hostile environment kind) you can get away with in Scotland before a summary termination is viable. Looking more into his career, I'm struck by just how volatile the careers of lower level soccer coaches are. Hired and fired constantly. Is English football like this as well? |>
|| Another thing that has struck me is how many teams seem to go into "administration." I don't perceive this to be going on at all in the US. Am I just wrong about that? |>
Speaking of garbage universities: Harvard, am I right?
So right, you have no idea.
"Thinking about it, I've basically always been about a high school sophomore. This was a really big deal when I was in fifth grade, but didn't serve me all that well as an undergrad. Then, in law school, it worked out again."
Perfection. 😘
I am seriously disgruntled with what the kid reports as an appx 2 yr regression in the level of maths instruction for the literature filière bc he's rather good at maths, but somewhat belligerently gruntled by his commitment to literature as it is the underdog fainéant track in the French consciousness at this benighted moment and FUCK THAT SHIT. My gruntlement is strongly reinforced by the really shockingly bad writing (clear evidence of bad thinking) i see from (not just junior) colleagues ALL THE TIME.
134: There is a public Latin school in Boston as well as Roxbury Latin. My girls school started us in French in 6th grade but sort o restarting in the 7th and Latin in the 8th. In the upper school you only had to do one language and could choose to do an entirely different one.
OT: Harry Dean Stanton was way older than I thought.
164 He lived a full life and was so excellent in so many excellent films and I'm really bummed by the news.
110: Maybe I need to be more gifted and talented, but do any of you iPhone users know how to increase the font in the browser (any browser, it doesn't have to be Safari)?
It's because the CSS basically predates mobile. I emailed Noflow with a fix awhile ago, although he hasn't implemented it. What I do is use a bookmarklet - which I tried to post in this comments, but it got stripped out. Hmm. Well, make your own bookmark, and set the address to:
javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20meta%20%3D%20document.createElement(%22meta%22)%3Bmeta.name%3D%22viewport%22%3Bmeta.content%3D%22width%3Ddevice-width%22%3Bdocument.head.appendChild(meta)%3Blines%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll(%22body%20%3E%20img%5Balt%3D'horizontal%20rule'%5D%22)%3Bfor%20(var%20line%20of%20lines)%20%7B%20line.removeAttribute(%22width%22)%3B%20%7D%7D)()
It's not perfect but it's a lot better.
Wait a minute, so if I get an iPhone I won't be able to read Unfogged on it because the font gets set so tiny with no convenient way to make it bigger?
1- no, it just means you have to click a bookmarklet on each thread;
2- maybe it's tolerable without that on the bigger ones; I have a 4" screen one;
3- fixing this would really be easy so if more people pester Nosflow I'm sure it will happen eventually.
