<p>I was lazy in elementary, I didn’t want to take it yet but it’s never too late. The test is the CogAT right?</p>
<p>It’s some random, dumb test. In 3rd grade, we decorated an egg on a piece of paper. In 5th grade, there was a question like “If you fold a piece of paper 8 ways and punch a hole in the middle, when you unfold it, where are the holes?”</p>
<p>DUMB.</p>
<p>^ IQ test it seems, but I guess I better ask my counselor. That question is dumb, yes.
8 flaps, one punch lol well…</p>
<p>Dumb question, but I couldn’t answer it then and can’t do it now. Oh well, I got into Gifted. I don’t care anymore lol.</p>
<p>You guys had Gifted classes in elementary school? The only idea of gifted we had in elementary school was our classes would be split up into 3 groups for reading - about 7-8 kids reading a very easy book, 7-8 reading medium difficulty, then the smarter kids in their own group. You’d read your book while the other groups were meeting to talk about their books, then your group would meet with the teacher to talk about what you read.</p>
<p>That, and the advanced math/Pre-Alg in 7th grade, advanced math/Algebra I in 8th grade for 25 of us. That was the only separation we ever had before HS.</p>
<p>Yeah. In elementary school, we went a Gifted class one day out of the week. In middle school, we had two Gifted classes per grade level, with the same math schedule you had. Even now, the class roster has AP classes seperated, AP and AP Gifted.</p>
<p>When you think about it, calling one group of students “gifted” is pretty screwed up. What are you telling the other students? And it seems to create a lot of ego problems, looking down on “less intelligent” people, and “My IQ is xxx, what’s your IQ?” which quickly turns into superiority complexes even within the in-group. Psychologically, I think it’s a mistake.</p>
<p>I agree, but most kids at my school didn’t really care. Besides, by the time HS rolls around, almost anyone can take an AP class.</p>
<p>Well, in my school district, “gifted” ends after middle school. I don’t see how AP and AP Gifted is supposed to work. Are the “regular” AP students being taught less challenging material? Does this result in being less prepared and scoring lower? And are these score differences used to justify the continued split in AP classes?</p>
<p>No, it’s the exact same class, but the school gets more money off the “Gifted” label.</p>
<p>In unrelated news: It’s the 3rd day of school, and some moron brought a handgun to school. DUMMY.</p>
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<p>Some people ** are ** more intelligent than others. There is no denying that. Why should we group the intellectually superior students with the slower learners? In such a situation, the gifted kids are held back and the non-gifted kids are forced to speed up the learning process thus resulting in a lack of comprehension of the subject matter.</p>
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My point is, the terminology is flawed. It is implying that one group of children has “gifts” and another group does not. And phrases such as “intellectually superior” sound pretty pretentious. Intelligence is unquantifiable, if it even exists as the concept most people think of, and there are situations in which the definition or type of intelligence is different.</p>
<p>I was not criticizing the idea of different levels of classes, simply the terminology and mindset of “gifted”.</p>
<p>What should it be called? Honors? Enrichment? Accelerated?</p>
<p>Instead of tagging classes “gifted,” they should tag them “for stupid people.” Not the regular classes, they should tag the gifted classes “for stupid people.” The gifted kids know they’re smart, so they don’t care, and we keep the self esteem of the regular kids up.</p>
<p>No more “Gifted AP Physics C,” instead, “AP Physics C for stupid people.”</p>
<p>On a serious note, my school actually had something along the lines of a “for stupid people” label. There were classes marked “X” level, and those were inferior to the “regular” level classes.</p>
<p>Even better. I like it.</p>
<p>Other possible labels: “for the unfortunately unintelligent,” “version 0.3a,” or “easy mode.”</p>
<p>“AP Physics C for the unfortunately unintelligent.”
“AP Physics C version 0.3a”
“AP Physics C, easy mode.”</p>
<p>Superhard AP Physics C</p>
<p>^That’s what you should call regular HS Physics, which isn’t calc based and doesn’t prepare you for the AP test.</p>
<p>I just think it would be funny if somehow a college adcom could be looking at someone’s transcript, and see it full of things like “AP Physics C for stupid people.”</p>
<p>Hmm. Why-am-I-taking-this AP Physics?</p>