Encouraging "gifted" students to branch out rather than just go up

Parent Cafe
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@theloniusmonk, you wrote:

„Lower self-esteem kids cannot be happier, that’s a contradiction that should have been picked up in this survey. By definition kids with low self esteem feel unhappy - incapable, incompetent, unworthy. And you think those are happy kids? That is such flaw in that conclusion that I would believe little else in that study.“

I did not write low self esteem, I wrote lower self esteem, as compared to the control group. I assume that the emphasis was on academic self esteem, not whether the kids liked their athletic prowess or their looks or how popular they were. They may have still felt very capable academically but had, for the first time, encountered challenges or competition.

You can have high self esteem if what you are and what you do corresponds with your own values (such as your intellectual capability and your sense of justice) but still be unhappy because others resent you for what you are and what you do so you have no friends.

Maybe an anecdote will help you:
My gifted kid, in gifted track, recently had his first bad grade ever. It was a blow to his self esteem - until then I believe he truly thought he was above such things as having to study even a little in order to get good grades, and for good reason, because that was certainly what elementary school was like for him.

Even though he does not necessarily have more friends now than he had in elementary school (he was lucky with his class and his teachers) he still likes his new school better, because he is no longer the outlier, but fits right in.

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@intparent wrote

It is lonely. I remember trying to “pass” as average when I was a kid. It didn’t work. Everybody knew. It is strange and sad to feel that intelligence is shameful. I talked mostly to educated adults when I was a kid and didn’t find peers until I enrolled in an honors program at my state’s public flagship. It was a relief to find others like me and beyond me.

I have no idea where I fall on the gifted scale, probably lower end HG. I was reading at a fairly advanced level and began to intuit mathematical concepts at age 4-5.

I can’t imagine how lonely it must be for the PG.

I have the utmost respect for parents, educators, and advocates who provide the necessary accommodations for gifted young people to be challenged and to develop positive self-esteem

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Yes, it can be torturous.

During 3rd grade, my D (see post #154) came home from school everyday frustrated and angry. She hated school. She had no friends (“friends don’t understand me”). At one point, she told me, “Why do I have to spend 6 hours to learn something I can in 20 minutes by myself?”

Twice a year, each class would have a show for the parents, mainly singing and dancing. Every kids liked the shows and liked practicing for the shows. My D hated having to participate. She thought they were silly and were a waste of time (I’m not saying she was right or wrong). She liked (and still does) baroque music and opera, and taught herself violin and piano.

The only time we saw her happy and excited was when she was listening to lectures from EPGY cdroms. At that point, we realized that we needed to pull her out of the normal school environment. She just didn’t fit.

That’s too. My D’s third grade teacher could not understand my D’s behavior in class and labelled her as “trouble maker.” She once told my wife to bring my D to a doctor for ADHD assessment. My D, on the contrary, has a very long attention span and is very focused if she is interested in something. When we finally homeschoolled my D, she might spend the whole day (10 - 12 hours at times) on a single subject. One of the reasons why she got frustrated at school was that at the end of a “normal” period of about 30 or 45 minutes, she started feeling “warmed up” and the teacher changed the subject.

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“People who are not gifted have a hard time “getting it”. I don’t want my kid to be snotty to others, but she is entitled to own and show her talent as much as the football players are. Why is helping my kid know she has above average intelligence and helping her manage and use that inappropriate?”

There’s nothing inappropriate with that, parents encouraging kids to develop strengths further is great. My point was that judging people so early and putting them in smart/dumb buckets is not good.

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@Tigerle

Then, the PISA tests aren’t a particularly useful data set, for determining what percentage of kids are ready to be skipped a grade. The US public education system is designed to create mastery of specific content, rather than generic “critical reading and problem solving” skills. You might argue education should be geared toward the latter, but that’s a sidebar which could be its own thread.

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theloniusmonk, #347, you are assuming that my husband or I told our daughter that she was “smart.” No. I sincerely do not know where her comment about her friends not liking her if they knew that she was smart came from. We bought into the idea of complimenting the efforts and not labeling anyone very early on.

A gifted child can hide elements of giftedness when they are aware that these make them different. For example, my daughter’s early-year teachers had no idea that she knew about negative numbers and could work with them. On the other hand, the effects of giftedness do tend to “spill out” in ways that the students may not have learned to guard against. Another point of difficulty: When the teachers and the standardized tests want students to explain how they solved a math problem, “by looking at it” tends not to be an acceptable answer. “By inspection” shows up in a lot of college-level math proofs, though.

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I’d like to return one more time to the question of whether gifted students should have to work as hard as average students during class time, or not.

Perhaps the reason that this is only resonating with a poster or two (thanks, wis75 and Tigerle) is that the great majority of posters on this thread have gifted children and want them to be challenged.

The motivation for my raising this issue was this: In a lot of cases, it is not budget constraints that prevent appropriate education for gifted children, especially at the elementary level, but rather a belief that it is “elitist” or “unfair” to have special material for more advanced students.

I suggest turning the issue of fairness around, by asking whether it is “fair” that average students have to expend effort to understand the material being presented in the classroom, while gifted students can take it in very quickly with little or no effort. Shouldn’t gifted students be expected to think as hard as everyone else? This can only be accomplished with more advanced material.

With regard to the point that many advanced students are not exactly clamoring for harder work: Man is born industrious, and everywhere he is out to lunch.

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The most frustrated I have ever seen my daughter after school was back in third grade, when the students in a pull-out gifted program had one of those logic sorting problems of the type: "The bear lives in a green house. The animal that wears a hat likes beets. The horse does not live in a pink or yellow house. The resident of the red house wears a red sweater and like cake. . . " You know the type of question. The answer key was wrong. The G&T teacher did not entertain that possibility, despite my daughter’s setting out the logic of the problem clearly.

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@roethlisburger You touched on a primary issue for the US’s educational weakness in k12 education (and one of many reasons why we homeschool), problem-solving not being an educational objective.

Your post reminded me of a lecture given by Richard Rusczyk at Math Prize for Girls. During his presentation he described the founding of AoPS and what happened when he sought funding from the DoE.

His entire talk might be of interest to those with gifted kids. (I really enjoyed it, but his educational philosophy totally meshes with mine.)
https://mathprize.atfoundation.org/past-events/2009/Rusczyk

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https://mathprize.atfoundation.org/past-events/2009/rusczyk Not sure why the other link isn’t working, but this one appears to be.

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DS is gifted but we never felt like that was relevant. He did not have to expend any effort in class and never had homework as he could complete the assignments very quickly. Homeschooling would have been ideal but he is very social and always enjoyed school, so we supplemented as we felt if other kids are “working/learning” then he should also.

I wish the US would forget about gifted and spend more time on achievement. If the kid can already do his multiplication/division or whatever just move him up to a different class. Luckily with the internet it is easy to supplement.

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Just listened to an NPR program on the Profoundly Gifted. It touches on many of the topics discussed aboved.
Who are the profoundly Gifted? What are some of the stereotypes around the gifted? Etc.

Many of the issues can also be applied to the Gifted. It seems the issues are just amplified with PG.
https://the1a.org/shows/2018-01-02/rated-pg-profoundly-gifted

Seems the posters here are correct. Kids can work many levels above grade level and are very unhappy without intellectual stimulus. They also have many PG people speak of the sadness of being PG. While I generally don’t like listening to programs online this is worthwhile.

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“The motivation for my raising this issue was this: In a lot of cases, it is not budget constraints that prevent appropriate education for gifted children, especially at the elementary level, but rather a belief that it is “elitist” or “unfair” to have special material for more advanced students.”

If it was only one or two kids, then it wouldn’t be an issue to have them skip a grade or get supplemental material. What happens is that other parents find out and say their kid is also gifted and pretty soon most of the class is now gifted.

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It seems this could be addressed by giving achievement tests. If many other kids can pass the test, let them be advanced also.

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@roethlisburger, you wrote:

„… the PISA tests aren’t a particularly useful data set, for determining what percentage of kids are ready to be skipped a grade. The US public education system is designed to create mastery of specific content, rather than generic “critical reading and problem solving” skills.“

I would say any education system is designed to teach both competency and content. I’d go so far as to suggest that the US system, with its high reliance, at critical junctures, on standardised testing like the SATs or MAPs which are meant to work nationwide for hugely different systems or even schools, and the reverence for the liberal arts model, values competency more than content, but maybe you’d say that isn’t true for K-12.

The PISA survey, of course, being international, cannot compare content across countries, what would be the point of asking US students about Finnish history. So they compare what can be compared, which is competency, and the idea is that it stands in for how well students are taught to learn, not just ow much history (or biology or whatever) they know. (After all, you can always google about Finnish history once you’ve learned critical thinking, right? :p)

But I didn’t refer to the PISA scores to say that they might make a good basis to decide on how many students should be skipped. I agree that that would be ridiculous.

The point I was trying to make was more fundamental:

There is a narrative among educators in a lot of Western systems (certainly most that l am familiar with):

that a large majority of children can be served educationally by assuming that at a given age they work at a given level and will progress at a given pace, and that there are only a few outliers to the top and bottom who are not being served well by this model (special ed students, though I have heard even that contended - “everyone is different, just differentiate!” - and the “truly gifted”, variously called 1 in a 1000, 1 in a million, or “little Mozarts and Einsteins”)

and that all differences that are observable are being artificially created by economic circumstance, ie heterogeneous societies, heterogeneous school systems or, as the parents of gifted kids tend to be accused, by “pushing”, “hothousing”, pick your favourite term.

And the international survey shows that this is just not true. It is not even a majority that works at a any “grade level” in any kind of society and any kind of system (ie with reference to a test that considers 40 points a grade level, within +/-20 points of the average), it’s more like 30%, and then maybe another 15% about a year above or below, and then maybe another 10% +/- 2 years…looks suspiciously like a bell curve, doesnt it.

Differences can be minimised in a fairly homogeneously affluent society with a homogeneous school system by supporting weaker students the way Finland does, or just by just teaching everyone badly in a poor country the way Algeria or the Dominican Republic apparently do, but you will never get them compressed to one grade level for the majority of students. In any given system, the strong students profit more than the weak ones (called the “Matthew effect”) and the strong students will always be several years ahead of the weaker ones, even though the weakest students in Singapore do better than the strongest students in Algeria.

So without getting rid of those two myths, you can’t even begin to design a school system that works for the majority of kids, let alone for the “almost everyone” that public school systems should be designed for.

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@theloniusmonk My kid had her first 160+ IQ test at four. Testing suggested by her pre-school teacher. What should we have waited for? Why do you think giftedness doesn’t show up early? She had a huge vocabulary at that age (better than many adults). Other kids were puzzled, and adults were in turn delighted or taken aback. The whole point of providing services to gifted kids (and in my opinion, every kid) is to allow them their own pace of learning. Why shouldn’t that start very early? If someone else blooms later, they can then accelerate at that time (or should be able to in a well constructed education system).

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This is a challenging topic in many ways, as every kid is different and schools vary widely. Not only IQ, but personality plays a huge role in the need for differentiated education. It is also a loaded topic, as the “need” for gifted education is not accepted by many. It is not necessarily the straight A student that needs the program the most, it is the kid that has been turned off to school because he or she has determined that they learn nothing in class.

The kids that need something different are not the kids that could be one grade ahead, but the kids that score 5 to 6 grade levels ahead, or those that do better than 95%+ of HS seniors on the SAT while in 7th grade. These are the kids that the other kids KNOW are super smart - that doesn’t necessarily make them popular, although a lucky few are gifted both intellectually and socially. They don’t have to brag about it, they are the ones the teacher asks to help the others or simply the one that knows all the answers.

The reality is a highly motivated, bright to mildly gifted kid can be highly successful and even get a PhD from a top university. Not every kid at MIT or Princeton has a 145+ IQ. Alternatively, not every kid that is highly or profoundly gifted has the personality to put in the effort or follow the path that is required to achieve great things. That is where a lot of people feel like gifted ed does not matter - because the kid that gets into Harvard does not necessarily come out of the GT program.

I don’t know the answer. Certainly, highly gifted kids need to learn how to function in the “real world” so being in a general classroom much of the time has some benefit. But they also deserve to learn something in the classroom and not spend all of their time isolated from similar students. For mine, the pull-out programs were great in elementary school, especially once the district went to clustering the GT kids in one classroom within each elementary school. For other kids, acceleration was the answer.

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@theloniusmonk

Don’t you think it’s necessary to provide early help to developmentally challenged kids? Would they tough it out if we don’t put them in that bucket and treat them as if they don’t have the learning disabilities?

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@QuantMech, you wrote:
“I suggest turning the issue of fairness around, by asking whether it is “fair” that average students have to expend effort to understand the material being presented in the classroom, while gifted students can take it in very quickly with little or no effort. Shouldn’t gifted students be expected to think as hard as everyone else? This can only be accomplished with more advanced material.”

The problem is that, in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, educators will then design education so that everyone has the same amount of low level busywork. The busywork exhaust even the gifted physically because it takes them just as much time to write it and intellectually because they are treading water. When they or their parents ask for more, they are told “only if you finish the work the others have to do, too, otherwise it’s unfair”.

You cannot conceive of making someone “think harder” unless you accept that these levels of thinking even exist. Ie the concept of giftedness as such…

I wouldn’t frame the issue of fairness as making every one work equally hard, anyway. Students are not conscripted labourers, they go to school to learn. And learning only happens in your zone of proximal development. Not above, and not below.

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@mom2and

It’s more than “can.” Many believe that those kids are, on average, far more likely to be successful than highly to profoundly gifted kids in the current system, because their intelligence level is enough to excel the standard and they have less difficulties related to high intelligence.

And some think that the latter should be supported more adequately.

I read a gifted education specialist saying that parents of those around IQ 140 would be the luckiest in South Korean system. Based on her logic, adjusting to the U.S. standard, those around IQ 130~135 would be the ideal beneficiary of the current U.S. K-12 educational system.

Early grade school experience is nothing like the real world other than prison.