Yeah, I had a student like this at the high school level. Absolutely brilliant and bored and a huge trouble-maker.
Only so-so grades though because she’d get bored and not do the work OR pay attention in class.
I started having her explain some of the stuff to the other kids just to keep her engaged. If she explained how to do problems in class that exempted her from having to do the homework (to motivate her to engage in class).
Her grades went way up (from C minuses to A minuses) after I did that because it forced her to pay attention and learn the material… and she was no longer getting dinged for not doing the homework.
She was pretty defiant though and she’d still have days where she refused to cooperate. Hence the A minuses.
Neither. It’s a group of maybe 20% of kids that will be disproportionately, but not exclusively, in the top 40% grade-wise… if you’re doing a good job of identifying them.
Like the gal who was valedictorian in my high school was not gifted. She was somewhat smart and a super-duper hard worker. I can’t even impress how much she did NOT understand Calculus at ALL. She would start prepping for a test like a week in advance by literally memorizing every single problem in the textbook and the corresponding solutions. Then she could usually regurgitate the correct steps on the test, subbing in the different numbers. She’d sometimes regurgitate the wrong thing though and have absolutely no clue why it was wrong.
I’d try to get her to understand something, but usually to no avail. I mean, she’d grasp things like “oh, so you do problem 37 the same as problem 24, not the same as problem 15” but getting her to understand why… that was hard.
So she absolutely deserved to be valedictorian because she worked her butt off and DID get better grades than the rest of us. And she’s very successful. I’m not trying to denigrate her accomplishments at all. But her success in both school and career were due to her superior work ethic, not giftedness.
To clarify here: are you saying “3rd percentile” as in “97% of students in NY score better than him” or “3rd percentile” as in “top 3% of all students in NY?” Asking because I’m having flashbacks to the kid at the AO who was considering an actuarial career, and he said he was in the top 95% of all students in math.
This sounds a lot like our salutatorian (I was valedictorian). Worked super hard but just wasn’t all that naturally smart. Always frustrated that I got better grades despite not preparing all that much, especially in math.
I’m no genius, I’m just good at memorizing things. She wasn’t exceptionally bright OR gifted, but I admired her work ethic. She became a PA, I think, so clearly no dummy or anything.
If I were to hazard a guess about why this was likely the case, it’d be that her mental model of math was set during junior high that math was “a set of (arbitrary) rules to follow and you just have to understand how to follow (arbitrarily determined) steps to solve a particular problem.” She then worked hard to understand problem identification (also likely reinforced in junior high) and relates problems in that fashion.
If she attempted to ask the teacher the “why’s” of some of this stuff, the teacher was just as clueless and would respond “that’s just the way it is.”
FWIW, I worked with a junior high teacher that was very much that way.
Yeah, none of my K-6 teachers or my 8th grade Algebra teacher would probably believe that I was a math major in college / actuary. My 7th grade math teacher emphasized understanding over memorization, so I did well in his class. But I didn’t particularly excel in math until we had to do original proofs in 9th grade Honors Geometry.
That was my favorite teacher and most people’s least favorite teacher. I aced the first test, which was insanely easy, and I was the only kid (in the Honors class) to even pass the test. The second highest score was like a 57%.
Because we’d been taught all along to be memorizers and I was an understander, not a memorizer. And I was some combination of less willing and less able to adapt my learning style from understanding to memorizing.
Geometry was SO easy for me and SO hard for most of the other kids. The exact polar opposite of Algebra, which I struggled with. That teacher didn’t care a lick of you understood the first thing about Algebra as long as you could recite her rules and kept a perfect folder with everything organized to her precise specifications.
Some of the kids came around and also excelled at Geometry. But I definitely came around the fastest. Because I never conformed to the prior teachers’ methods so I had nothing to unlearn like the rest of the kids.
I have a sibling who went to Hunter Elementary, and it’s well known that the kids who tested in from kindergarten were not quite at the same level as the kids who tested in at 7th grade. So I feel testing at 4 years of age is too early to start separating kids, especially since there is a cottage industry of tutors to prepare the kids for these exams. The mayor’s plan to start identifying kids in 3rd or 4th grade sounds reasonable, but the lack of details of how this will be accomplished doesn’t inspire much confidence. He has also tried to change the entrance criteria to the specialized high schools, which I absolutely do not agree with him on, even if I recognize there is a diversity problem (70% Asian, 70% male).
While we’re humble-bragging about the difference between work-ethic and brains, I was also lazy and math-smart. 6th grade algebra meant smooth-sailing through a lot of math exams into an equally lazy river actuary career.
There was another kid in my algebra class who was quite smart but --also-- hard working. That kid went on to become valedictorian --not at my school but at a top private school, and then on to ivy science degrees, piano concertos, writing and directing off-broadway, successful business entrepreneurship, etc. etc. etc.
Yeah the valedictorian at my school is definitely more successful than me. She’s a physician. I think medical school would have killed me. SO much to memorize.
But that is her forte, so she kicked ass in med school.
I stand corrected (for NC at least). I do remember you talking about this experience on a different actuarial site and thinking your experience was an outlier.
#1 - went to Washington University in St. Louis, got a degree in accounting, worked as a CPA for a couple years, married a doctor, has been a homemaker ever since. #2 - currently an oncologist at University of Chicago #3 - went to college for a couple years, got married, dropped out of college, has been a homemaker ever since. #4 - went to college, got a degree in … don’t recall, doesn’t matter. Got married shortly after college, has been a homemaker ever since. #5 - me, who had a brief yet outstanding career (IMO, of course) as a TV lawyer before getting fired because apparently where and when I took a shit was too much of a problem for an egotistical producer leaving the practice to focus on my marriage, and then reinventing myself as an actuary.
[quote=“Ted_Hoffman, post:74, topic:4284, full:true”] #5 - me, who had a brief yet outstanding career (IMO, of course) as a TV lawyer before ~~getting fired because apparently where and when I took a sh!t was too much of a problem for an egotistical producer/quote]
Nowadays you could WFH and film all your scenes virtually from your bathroom.
I have my bathroom walls and toilet painted green, just in case. Hoping for parts where slight grunting and occasional visible agony are called for, but I can make whatever work. I’m a professional and all.
Just from context, especially I kept mentioning special education, and that he has classmates who can’t talk and can’t go into the regular classrooms… and that they’re likely scoring even lower (I’m not sure they can even take the tests, in that I’m not sure they are able to fill in the bubble sheets)… what interpretation do you think I intended?
I have a lot of outlier experiences, from either end of the education spectrum. Even before my own son, my grandma & other relatives worked in special education, and that has definitely been around longer than the concept of G&T education. People on the low end very obviously have some functions of basic living they need help with. It used to be that a lot of them would be institutionalized if it were 70 years ago, but it was changing during my grandma’s era.
On the other end, I’ve lived in multiple states, so I’ve seen it in Georgia and Maryland, in addition to NC. When I was in middle school in MD, they had a G&T math class that drew from the whole county, and we’d go to the class once a week (on Saturday) – it was through the public schools. We took Algebra 1&2 and Geometry in 7th and 8th grade, setting us up to take calculus in 10th grade (which I did, later, in NC… and got me in some trouble).
Anyway, my experience has been that generally you have to draw from a very large population to get appreciable numbers for these sorts of classes, and similarly for pulling kids for music, sports, etc.
The entire state of NC was the population drawn from for NCSSM (and thank goodness, they’ve opened a second campus) – it’s on an order of magnitude similar to the population that the special high schools in NYC draw.
