At least, I think this part is true, but I’m not positive.
Yeah, there’s definitely a difference between “gifted” and “performs well in school”, no question, and a lot of people, myself included, do tend to conflate the two. It’s easy to do because there’s a considerable overlap, but they are definitely two distinct things.
Wow, that’s really unfortunate. I can only say good things about the GT program I went through. We had some great teachers though. 
Heh, my high school did NOT do this for our GPA, but they DID do it for class rank (based on grades 9-11) and valedictorian/salutatorian (based on grades 9-12) calculations.
I remember one of my classmates being pissed when she figured out that she had a higher GPA than me but was ranked behind me. She didn’t react well when I shrugged my shoulders and said that I took harder classes than she did.
Wait, what???
If you said you wanted an honors course they put you in the same class with the regular kids but boosted your GPA? Who would say no to that???
My son was slated to do HS Freshmen algebra as a 6th grader (after being in a program to do Jr. High math as a 5th grader). I should’ve tracked what was going on sooner to have things slow down a bit.
However, I knew my son wasn’t ready for that level of abstract thinking and said “no” to this placement.
How did I know?
Math education is actually a significant part of my training; so when he was having difficulty with some of the word problems–and I saw quickly that he hadn’t developed the abstract thinking part (he was extremely good at the “rules” and following procedures part) that would be important to keep pace with that curriculum. I wasn’t going to set him up for that kind of failure.
1 Like
Yeah, I think that’s pretty different from an age-appropriate gifted program.
Algebra in 6th grade is a bit early. And putting a 6th grader in with 9th graders is even more questionable, IMO. I probably would’ve said “no” to that too, FWIW.
For some classes, yes. Things where they can’t really break out a class into an honors section because of lack of space, staff, time, etc.
They might have contrived limits on who can and can’t sign up (knowing there they do), but otherwise it’s a free way to inflate your GPA, which gives the school a chance to brag about how many kids are getting GPAs higher than 5.0.
He would’ve been placed with other junior high students (7th and 8th graders).
But I do agree with your thoughts about placing a child in that sort of context.
1 Like
Huh, I had the opposite happen. I failed to test into 6th grade algebra and my mom (being my mom) argued with the school that the test was crap, and thus began my gifted? honors? actuarial? education.
The whole point of G&T in elementary school was to keep us from bugging the regular kids & teachers when we finished the work well before everybody else. It was playtime, essentially. Got to do stuff like stop motion animation. That was pretty cool. We dissected a frog in 4th grade, I remember. In 2nd grade, they taught us chess, but I’ve always sucked at chess.
We had our own set of books and our own set-aside classroom, very similar to the self-contained special education classrooms my own son has been in.
These programs tend to be good for that. Special education students often can’t be mainstreamed because they won’t behave well and also don’t have the cognitive ability to deal with the classes, but don’t admit that some G&T programs are there because mainstreaming doesn’t work for the other end that well, either. Simply skipping grades generally doesn’t work, either, because going at normal speed with older kids is still too slow.
I linked to my high school, and most of the students there could be real trouble at their original schools. They had to draw from the entire state, and many kids at magnet schools etc didn’t get in, because it wasn’t merely about doing honors classes.
1 Like
When I was teaching junior high and high school, a few of the biggest trouble makers were the brilliant kids who got bored from being “mainstreamed”.
1 Like
It makes most sense to me as a form of “special ed”.
There does seem to be some real trouble defining it–
is it the top 2% or the top 20%???
Does it involve a new school, a new class, or just extra work?
Is it a permanent condition, or a temporary one?
Is the goal to teach or just alleviate boredom?
Etc.
Here’s things I remember we did in G&T:
- Went to the radio station, talked about replicating what they do. Never did.
- Talked about doing a TV show. Filmed everyone reading the news like they were on TV. Never did anything else with it.
- Played on computers. The Radio Shack TRS-80 models, which were state of the art at the time in our area. Not “here’s some instruction on how to do something,” just “here’s a book, figure it out yourselves.” Never discussed anything we were doing with each other for the furtherment of anyone’s knowledge, just go spend time on computers, make yourselves look smart.
- Play-Doh. Crayons and colored pencils and paper. That kind of stuff. Again, not for showing off around the school or anything - just “here, occupy some time doing something.”
- We “fixed up” the nature trail around the school, and by that I mean “we spent the spring walking on the trails, picking up sticks and such, and every so often as a special treat throwing fish food into the pond where there may or may not be fish.”
- Discussed D&D. This was really taboo, since it was the early 80s and D&D was the gateway to HELL. I think we even rolled characters up once. Never did anything else with it.
- Watched movies. No discussion, no nothing after those. Just something to occupy time.
- I’m not sure we even read books. We might have. If we did, … yep, no discussions, no interactions. Certainly no hey, let’s try to write a short story that the school could brag about.
In short: yeah, it was get these kids out so they’re not making everyone else uncomfortable. I think that speaks to the difficulty of understanding what to do with a G&T program in some places: teachers can recognize we’ve got some really smart kids here and still have no idea how to nurture and develop the talents those kids have.
Or maybe I just went to school in a middle-sized (enrollment ~750 in HS) school district that completely sucked ass in so many areas, it explains why I spent most of high school working at least a semester if not a full year ahead of the rest of my class and was bored out of my skull as a senior because I’d already learned much of the stuff being taught. Maybe it also explains why I can’t begin to count the number of times I wanted to do something and was told “you can’t do that” or “I don’t know how to do that” and have been successful in spite of the teachers I had.
Just to speak for my own kid… I don’t think she needs to do anything special. Shit I don’t think she needs to do anything at all. If they just let her sit in a corner and draw princesses or watch She-Ra all day that would be okay with me.
The problem is less that they fail to nurture, and more that they nurture too much.
Assuming four classes of an elementary grade, a school could simply implement tiered learning by test quartile. For kids great at Math but not as good at English (mirror: yeah, you/me), switch their math class to the other one. AND, adjust as needed, in case the test was not indicative (and not as in having a parent complain, I mean the student should be moved to the appropriate tier based on teacher observation and interaction).
I think this is what they did in my elementary school a few decades ago, starting in 4th Grade.
FWIW, my son D scores about 3rd percentile on the NY state tests.
He’s probably the highest scorer in his self-contained classroom. They’re all about 15 years old. Some of them can’t talk. I don’t mind having him take the annual tests, but there’s not a lot of point… except somebody has to be 3rd percentile. Might as well be him and his classmates.
The great bulk of students are in the middle. There are people who will work harder and can get really far academically. There are people who just slack off. But neither will get you to either 99% or 1%. The people that far out tend to be really weird.
1 Like
And then there are those who get irate over the fact that 50% of students in _______ score below the median.
2 Likes
Now it’s not true.
1 Like