A tale of two teenagers [Aporia Magazine] - gifted children

Parents Forum
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I am not sure I understand what is being proposed as the alternative.

How is the gifted class different than a normal class, but still below the next year’s class?

Incidentally if you pull them out together with a small cohort, you are getting in the way of them learning how to deal with the rest of the society. And obviously once they get to college or a job, they haven’t learnt this crucial life skill.

Only for one or two classes. Not for the entire school day.

For this we have personal experience. It is not as bad as it is made out to be. My son had a lot of friends that were one or two years ahead. He still does have mixed aged students in his current classes in college. No one thinks twice about this. Incidentally you should put them in the upper level class with the advanced class; Not the slower kids in the upper level class.

Better still, the teacher can exclude them when curving the upper level class. So whoever is in the upper class will not be affected by these kids, and won’t feel insecure.

These are just details. I am saying once you pull the kid out of the entire system, you are significantly impairing his ability to learn core skills that are even more important to him/her than for the normal kid.

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65

It’s definitely going to happen if you call 40% of kids in a high school “gifted”. There’s no reason to think that putting a top 0.1% kid in a class with top 10% kids is drastically better for them than being in an undifferentiated class.

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66

The non-gifted student will simply think that maybe he hasn’t worked hard enough. The gifted student won’t understand why he did poorly. Because in his framework, he is gifted, and all of this comes easily to him. No wonder we have mental health issues in colleges. Kids being told that they are great, and given 4.0s on grade inflation, come into college, and brought down to reality – I know this is a slightly different, even if related issue.

If kids learn to attribute more of life’s outcomes to effort and less to intelligence (as Einstein, Edison and Terence Tao suggest to be the case), there will be less stress, and more sanity. Less feelings of jealousy about other people etc.

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I don’t understand this at all. Perhaps there are people with similar intellectual ability who don’t work hard and therefore don’t succeed? But extraordinary intelligence is a pre-requisite for what those individuals achieved.

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I am just saying those three individuals have specifically said that outcomes are a function of 99% effort and 1% inspiration/intelligence or whatever. :-).

We don’t give enough credit to effort, and give too much credit to intelligence.

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The “traditional” definition of “gifted” is the “top” 5% by some academic level of talent.

Unfortunately, “IQ tests” are really bad at doing this.

The real test for giftedness is creativity, and “IQ tests” do not test for this. They generally test how advanced a kid is, relative to their age. However, that not only depends on how smart the kid is, but also on whether there was anybody to make sure that the kid could learn advanced material., and whether there was any such material available.

A fascinating phenomenon is that the people who work to identify gifted kids all often certain that the tests work. However, when you actually look at how they administer the tests, they are really looking at how the kid behaves and how the kid goes about solving problem. So the testers are really not relying on the tests per se.

But because of the issues I mentioned about access, it is much more difficult to “officially” identify giftedness among low income families, as well as among families who do not see “giftedness” as a positive trait.

However, anybody who composes original music, write creatively, provides original solutions to math problems, creates original research projects, etc, are gifted, whether they can score high enough on the Wechsler or Stanford-Binet or not.

Ironically, the opposite is true. We know people who moved their PG kid to a school which focuses on gifted students, and they had many issues. The school simply did not recognize thet PG kids are often a different from “regular” gifted kids. The school did not believe that a PG kid needs anything more than what the school was offering to other kids. I heard from a number of parents and specialised counselors that this is actually pretty common.

On the other hand, a good and responsive public school, will allow parents to set up a program that is tailored to their kid. From the school’s point of view, since they are already working on tailored enrichment, they will let the parents take the lead and tell them what is needed.

There is only one high school really set up for PG kids is the Davidson Academy.

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70

Alternatively, we give false hope to people by suggesting that if only they put in the effort, they can succeed at anything.

Strangely that doesn’t seem to be the message to those with unrealistic aspirations of becoming stars in sports or movies, who (sooner or later) tend to get realistic feedback about their lack of talent.

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I am not sure the hope is false, certainly in non-winner take all endeavors. And there is continuous feedback whether the effort is of the right kind or not.

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Agreed. Most people are not intellectually capable of brain surgery for example, it isn’t a matter of just hitting the books harder. There’s been loads of research done on this. I recommend Freddie DeBoer’s Cult of Smart.

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The question of interest is at what age people step off of particular paths. Certainly if you are measuring effort and outcomes starting in 9th grade (as an example), it may be too late. Your abilities are somewhat set.

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There was this website I found, and I cannot remember what the URL was, but it was for mothers who wanted to get their kid designated as “gifted”. It had advice and pointers. It the stopped JUST short of telling parents to practice doing the actual Stanford-Binet tests before the test, but that was it.

I think that there may have been a list of “sympathetic” testers there as well, but I cannot remember. I’m pretty sure that there is a forum for people like this where they share this info.

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Where do kids go from the Davidson academy? Do they enter normal colleges? Is that time of separation from a normal student body sufficient for their needs?

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See for yourself:

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77

Very interesting, thanks! There are only 7 colleges on the list with the 2 stars ** (more than 5 students): Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, U of Nevada Reno, and UT Dallas. Self-explanatory.

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Thanks.

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In our school system, they pull out the profoundly gifted kids (not the regular gifted kids) and put them all together in a separate program that meets at a separate school. They learn exceptionally fast. I don’t know if you remember high school math class, but there is a lot of boredom there while the teacher is trying to get the kids who aren’t interested to pay attention even in advanced classes. There’s none of that in the profoundly gifted program because they can move very fast.

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What percentage of the students are these profoundly gifted kids?

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If they were profoundly gifted, why can’t they just take a class 2 or 3 levels up? Or more if necessary.

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Because it’s not that easy, at least not if you are truly trying to meet their needs. An 8 year doing 12 grade math is still emotionally/developmentally an 8 year old. They do not belong in a classroom of people 10 years older than them, even if they are capable of doing the same work.

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83

For sure, yes. If the differences are that large …

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