>>We have weird feelings about the idea of gifted education because academic success in our town seemed to be determined more by economic advantage and having highly educated parents who knew how to play the game.<<
That can happen. Parental socioeconomic status has a prevailing effect on child success. But that's not the same thing as intelligence. It just means that a rich but dumb child will be pushed and coddled through high grades that a smarter child earns naturally.
>>
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>>We have weird feelings about the idea of gifted education because academic success in our town seemed to be determined more by economic advantage and having highly educated parents who knew how to play the game.<<
That can happen. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-success-income-inequality-2014-1">Parental socioeconomic status</a> has a prevailing effect on child success. But that's not the same thing as intelligence. It just means that a rich but dumb child will be pushed and coddled through high grades that a smarter child earns naturally.
>><Neither of us feel like we were intrinsically smart so much as put under immense pressure to be academically successful, and (putting this in the least dramatic way possible) we both feel traumatized for it. <<
That sucks.
>> I do know some people who seem naturally gifted, but I don’t think that kind of intelligence (defined in this article as a finely tuned and biologically advanced perception system and a mind that works considerably faster than 95% of the population) can be spotted with the types of tests we were given.<<
Well, there are a lot of factors. How well the test is written, what it is even looking for, how honestly it is graded, and whether a child bothers to try. I broke the top off the standard tests in gradeschool, and that was <i>with</i> me inevitably getting bored and marking random answers on a bunch of stuff. There are many types of intelligence, and if you look around, specific tests for each of those. Most schools only care about limited subjects, so most tests focus almost entirely on logical-mathematical and/or linguistic intelligences. But I broke the top off the Pimsleur language test too, and apparently nobody had done that before, in a magnet school where there were kids who spoke 12 languages. Go figure. Certain other intelligences, like kinesthetic or mechanical, are not picked up on most tests.
The kind of things that really make gifted kids stick out are just not things that can be created in someone else. Speed is one thing. Skipping is another: where most people have to go from A to B to C, a gifted person will go "A, B ... F ... oh hey, Q!" But another really big one is: "Talent hits a target nobody else can hit. Genius hits a target nobody else can <i>see."</i> We just notice things other people don't, things that seem obvious to us but not to anyone else.
Where environment comes in is development. A good environment lets a child develop to their maximum potential at their comfortable speed. Take Montessori, it's all designed to support learning whatever interests the child, so kids can go fast in their better subjects and slower in their worse ones. You don't get cookie-cutter students, but what they have learned, they have learned quite solidly. A bad environment undermines development. You can't learn to read without books or something else to read, and if all the ones offered are awful, you won't learn to love it. A hostile environment teaches children to hide and evade. Useful skills, but not academic ones.
Get into the workforce, though, and it's different yet again. American purports to be a meritocracy but really is not. What people care about is appearance, connections, socioeconomic status, and paperwork. A pleasing incompetent will consistently get chosen over a less-pleasing but more capable worker in most situations. And since gifted people tend to think those priorities are <i>stupid,</i> that also makes them less employable. The ones who succeed the best are typically either in a field that absolutely requires competence (you get the chemistry right or you blow your hands off), or they work for themselves.
>>But in regard to the special education that's required for this designated group of people... if a "gifted" person requires so much accomodation in order to thrive in the world as it is, isn't it more of a disability? <<
It can be. It certainly sets you apart from others, which some people find uncomfortable. It can make people put unreasonable expectations on you, which nobody likes. It can make it very difficult to understand a world that runs on emotions far more than reason.
But the accommodation needed isn't the same as accommodations for disability. It's mostly two things: get the fuck out of the way so we can go at our own speed and not be held back by idiots, and give us the tools to learn at our current level. In a Montessori classroom, that's not accommodation, that's the norm. Everyone can pick up whatever tools they feel ready for in any topic. But it's not the norm in most schools, which are mostly aimed at the middle of the bell curve. They are bad for smart kids and for slow kids.
>>If any kind of person was given that level of special attention in their education, wouldn't they also excel?<<
Well, that depends. If you mean tailoring things to a student's current level and interest, then yes, that's good for everyone. They just won't all want the same supports. It's good to have different skills and interests.
If you mean throwing everyone into a fast-paced classroom, or offering them complex tools, it will be overwhelming or boring for kids who aren't at that level. That's not good.
One gifted program I was in had a resource room where we could explore things -- there were experiments to do, and puzzles to solve, but also just a lot of things to fool around with. There was a microscope with hundreds of slides. I was fascinated by that thing, and so were several of the other gifted kids. The regular kids? If pushed in front of one, they could use it to work through an assignment, but they were not <i>interested</i> in it, in seeing the world a whole different way, or figuring out how life worked. Those kids were interested in dolls or cars or who got invited to a party or not -- which I had no more interest in than they did in how cells worked.
I can <i>use</i> that knowledge in everyday life. Frex, I know that freezing organic matter causes ice crystals to rupture the cells, so when making ice cream, I use frozen-and-thawed fruit instead of fresh. That way it releases more juice and doesn't freeze into little rocks. Nobody taught me that application; it just seemed obvious to me from knowing about cell dynamics and having eaten other people's ice cream with rock-hard fruit. It's the kind of leap that gifted people make routinely and other folks rarely do. One reason people like my recipes is because I not only describe what to do, I also explain <i>why</i> in cases where it deviates from the usual or I want folks to avoid problems that are easy to fall into.
>>I guess there might be a context for gifted education that we’re missing, though. We only have experience with this one school district and this article seems to be addressing an audience that genuinely comes from diverse backgrounds. That is unheard of for us.<<
The magnet high school I attended for the last two years of high school was so mixed that it didn't <i>have</i> a majority. That was awesome. Granted, the socioeconomic status was slanted high, but there were some scholarships. My parents were teachers, so we were marginally middle class in a good year.
One thing that undermines diversity is plain old prejudice. People think girls are dumber than boys, so fewer girls are invited into gifted programs. People of color are considered dumb and dangerous, so they are pushed through the school-to-prison pipeline. Now that's incredibly stupid: do you <i>really</i> want a genius studying crime from expert criminals? I don't, but nobody asked me.
All genders and races and classes are equally prone to produce smart or dumb individuals, but they are not often recruited equally. That skews the programs, which is a problem. But not <i>all</i> programs have that problem. Get one run by actual gifted people and they are more likely to make it closer to equal, because they usually don't give a flying fuck about the social shit that other people care so desperately about. It's also why some of them have created their own targeted programs, like women entomologists running a summer school for girls who like bugs, or the multiple "chess in the ghetto" programs run by black logicians.
>>This is interesting. I’m actually pretty adverse to taking pills for mental health so I didn't stay on them for too long. <<
Then it probably did little or no damage to you, which is great.
The problems come when someone is drugged for a year or more during school. Imagine someone drugged clear up through high school, then they turn 18 and either quit because they're adults or get kicked off their parents' insurance and can't <i>afford</i> drugs anymore. And suddenly they struggle to remember things they used to recall easily, because in college they are sober instead of drugged, and the biochemistry doesn't match, so it's harder to find the drug-encoded memories from a sober state. :/
>>I actually have gotten concussed since then but I'd like to believe that it hasn't changed me too much haha.<<
A mild concussion usually heals with no lasting effects, <i>provided</i> you don't get hit again before it finishes healing. More serious head injuries can have a whole host of mayhem that may heal slowly or not at all. See this excellent article on <a href="https://archive.vn/MCaxh">post-traumatic brain injury</a>. Basically, anything your brain does -- which is almost everything -- can be damaged or destroyed by a bad enough injury. But most people do not know enough about brains or neural damage to connect a past injury with a current problem unless it is very obvious like going blind after head trauma. Changes in dexterity, cognition, executive function, etc. are routinely overlooked.
>>It’s a weird situation where I’m doing an accelerated program through a private college that pumps out a new graduating class every three months. Three years of school are packed into a year and a half. The teaching staff has a high turnover and lectures are pre-packaged.<<
That does not sound ideal.
>> It’s disorganized, and sometimes the professor doesn’t even look at the PowerPoint before giving lecture. You’re more likely to get mocked by the staff if you ask for help.<<
That is actively counterproductive at best, and dangerous at worst.
>> (Not to sound ungrateful, though. I'm incredibly priviledged for the opportunity to do this at all.) <<
... if it works, and doesn't grind you up or leave you with major gaps.
>>It’s a healthcare specialty and there aren’t enough programs to meet the demand for workers right now, so people take this route in order to avoid waiting 3-4 years on a lottery system to start working on their degree.<<
I can see why people would choose that, but: do it fast, do it wrong, do it over. In health care, mistakes can kill people.
>>Even if I don't have a thorough understanding of the material, I have all these bitter opinions about the ways I would rather have it presented.<<
I spent most of my school career in classes I could've taught better than the teacher or textbook did. Yeah, that's frustrating.
>>The current system works for people who can sit down and remember everything through a lecture, but I'm not wired to listen like that. I have to read and practice on my own, but there isn't much opportunity to do it.<<
People have different learning modes. Mine is text. I could usually just let the teacher blather, then read the book and learn from that. But if the book isn't good, that doesn't work well. Some kids are the opposite, they only learn well from people, not from books.
>> I could spend a whole semester doing my math wrong and never even realize it because the person who is remotely hired to grade my work isn't looking that closely.<<
See above: mistakes in health care can kill people. >_< And from the results I see, most of the training is very bad. I mean most medics can't remember a thing I've told them for <i>five minutes</i>. I've seen competent ones, but they're very rare. I'm pretty sure the best one I've seen is neurovariant. So I find it disturbing, but not surprising, that there's a program using fast and sloppy methods to train people for health care. If it was <i>working</i> then that would be different. The flaws you describe are clear and concerning, even if some students do fine in that mode.
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dancing_serpent
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2023-01-18 09:59 am (UTC)That can happen. Parental socioeconomic status has a prevailing effect on child success. But that's not the same thing as intelligence. It just means that a rich but dumb child will be pushed and coddled through high grades that a smarter child earns naturally.
>>
That can happen. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-success-income-inequality-2014-1">Parental socioeconomic status</a> has a prevailing effect on child success. But that's not the same thing as intelligence. It just means that a rich but dumb child will be pushed and coddled through high grades that a smarter child earns naturally.
>><Neither of us feel like we were intrinsically smart so much as put under immense pressure to be academically successful, and (putting this in the least dramatic way possible) we both feel traumatized for it. <<
That sucks.
>> I do know some people who seem naturally gifted, but I don’t think that kind of intelligence (defined in this article as a finely tuned and biologically advanced perception system and a mind that works considerably faster than 95% of the population) can be spotted with the types of tests we were given.<<
Well, there are a lot of factors. How well the test is written, what it is even looking for, how honestly it is graded, and whether a child bothers to try. I broke the top off the standard tests in gradeschool, and that was <i>with</i> me inevitably getting bored and marking random answers on a bunch of stuff. There are many types of intelligence, and if you look around, specific tests for each of those. Most schools only care about limited subjects, so most tests focus almost entirely on logical-mathematical and/or linguistic intelligences. But I broke the top off the Pimsleur language test too, and apparently nobody had done that before, in a magnet school where there were kids who spoke 12 languages. Go figure. Certain other intelligences, like kinesthetic or mechanical, are not picked up on most tests.
The kind of things that really make gifted kids stick out are just not things that can be created in someone else. Speed is one thing. Skipping is another: where most people have to go from A to B to C, a gifted person will go "A, B ... F ... oh hey, Q!" But another really big one is: "Talent hits a target nobody else can hit. Genius hits a target nobody else can <i>see."</i> We just notice things other people don't, things that seem obvious to us but not to anyone else.
Where environment comes in is development. A good environment lets a child develop to their maximum potential at their comfortable speed. Take Montessori, it's all designed to support learning whatever interests the child, so kids can go fast in their better subjects and slower in their worse ones. You don't get cookie-cutter students, but what they have learned, they have learned quite solidly. A bad environment undermines development. You can't learn to read without books or something else to read, and if all the ones offered are awful, you won't learn to love it. A hostile environment teaches children to hide and evade. Useful skills, but not academic ones.
Get into the workforce, though, and it's different yet again. American purports to be a meritocracy but really is not. What people care about is appearance, connections, socioeconomic status, and paperwork. A pleasing incompetent will consistently get chosen over a less-pleasing but more capable worker in most situations. And since gifted people tend to think those priorities are <i>stupid,</i> that also makes them less employable. The ones who succeed the best are typically either in a field that absolutely requires competence (you get the chemistry right or you blow your hands off), or they work for themselves.
>>But in regard to the special education that's required for this designated group of people... if a "gifted" person requires so much accomodation in order to thrive in the world as it is, isn't it more of a disability? <<
It can be. It certainly sets you apart from others, which some people find uncomfortable. It can make people put unreasonable expectations on you, which nobody likes. It can make it very difficult to understand a world that runs on emotions far more than reason.
But the accommodation needed isn't the same as accommodations for disability. It's mostly two things: get the fuck out of the way so we can go at our own speed and not be held back by idiots, and give us the tools to learn at our current level. In a Montessori classroom, that's not accommodation, that's the norm. Everyone can pick up whatever tools they feel ready for in any topic. But it's not the norm in most schools, which are mostly aimed at the middle of the bell curve. They are bad for smart kids and for slow kids.
>>If any kind of person was given that level of special attention in their education, wouldn't they also excel?<<
Well, that depends. If you mean tailoring things to a student's current level and interest, then yes, that's good for everyone. They just won't all want the same supports. It's good to have different skills and interests.
If you mean throwing everyone into a fast-paced classroom, or offering them complex tools, it will be overwhelming or boring for kids who aren't at that level. That's not good.
One gifted program I was in had a resource room where we could explore things -- there were experiments to do, and puzzles to solve, but also just a lot of things to fool around with. There was a microscope with hundreds of slides. I was fascinated by that thing, and so were several of the other gifted kids. The regular kids? If pushed in front of one, they could use it to work through an assignment, but they were not <i>interested</i> in it, in seeing the world a whole different way, or figuring out how life worked. Those kids were interested in dolls or cars or who got invited to a party or not -- which I had no more interest in than they did in how cells worked.
I can <i>use</i> that knowledge in everyday life. Frex, I know that freezing organic matter causes ice crystals to rupture the cells, so when making ice cream, I use frozen-and-thawed fruit instead of fresh. That way it releases more juice and doesn't freeze into little rocks. Nobody taught me that application; it just seemed obvious to me from knowing about cell dynamics and having eaten other people's ice cream with rock-hard fruit. It's the kind of leap that gifted people make routinely and other folks rarely do. One reason people like my recipes is because I not only describe what to do, I also explain <i>why</i> in cases where it deviates from the usual or I want folks to avoid problems that are easy to fall into.
>>I guess there might be a context for gifted education that we’re missing, though. We only have experience with this one school district and this article seems to be addressing an audience that genuinely comes from diverse backgrounds. That is unheard of for us.<<
The magnet high school I attended for the last two years of high school was so mixed that it didn't <i>have</i> a majority. That was awesome. Granted, the socioeconomic status was slanted high, but there were some scholarships. My parents were teachers, so we were marginally middle class in a good year.
One thing that undermines diversity is plain old prejudice. People think girls are dumber than boys, so fewer girls are invited into gifted programs. People of color are considered dumb and dangerous, so they are pushed through the school-to-prison pipeline. Now that's incredibly stupid: do you <i>really</i> want a genius studying crime from expert criminals? I don't, but nobody asked me.
All genders and races and classes are equally prone to produce smart or dumb individuals, but they are not often recruited equally. That skews the programs, which is a problem. But not <i>all</i> programs have that problem. Get one run by actual gifted people and they are more likely to make it closer to equal, because they usually don't give a flying fuck about the social shit that other people care so desperately about. It's also why some of them have created their own targeted programs, like women entomologists running a summer school for girls who like bugs, or the multiple "chess in the ghetto" programs run by black logicians.
>>This is interesting. I’m actually pretty adverse to taking pills for mental health so I didn't stay on them for too long. <<
Then it probably did little or no damage to you, which is great.
The problems come when someone is drugged for a year or more during school. Imagine someone drugged clear up through high school, then they turn 18 and either quit because they're adults or get kicked off their parents' insurance and can't <i>afford</i> drugs anymore. And suddenly they struggle to remember things they used to recall easily, because in college they are sober instead of drugged, and the biochemistry doesn't match, so it's harder to find the drug-encoded memories from a sober state. :/
>>I actually have gotten concussed since then but I'd like to believe that it hasn't changed me too much haha.<<
A mild concussion usually heals with no lasting effects, <i>provided</i> you don't get hit again before it finishes healing. More serious head injuries can have a whole host of mayhem that may heal slowly or not at all. See this excellent article on <a href="https://archive.vn/MCaxh">post-traumatic brain injury</a>. Basically, anything your brain does -- which is almost everything -- can be damaged or destroyed by a bad enough injury. But most people do not know enough about brains or neural damage to connect a past injury with a current problem unless it is very obvious like going blind after head trauma. Changes in dexterity, cognition, executive function, etc. are routinely overlooked.
>>It’s a weird situation where I’m doing an accelerated program through a private college that pumps out a new graduating class every three months. Three years of school are packed into a year and a half. The teaching staff has a high turnover and lectures are pre-packaged.<<
That does not sound ideal.
>> It’s disorganized, and sometimes the professor doesn’t even look at the PowerPoint before giving lecture. You’re more likely to get mocked by the staff if you ask for help.<<
That is actively counterproductive at best, and dangerous at worst.
>> (Not to sound ungrateful, though. I'm incredibly priviledged for the opportunity to do this at all.) <<
... if it works, and doesn't grind you up or leave you with major gaps.
>>It’s a healthcare specialty and there aren’t enough programs to meet the demand for workers right now, so people take this route in order to avoid waiting 3-4 years on a lottery system to start working on their degree.<<
I can see why people would choose that, but: do it fast, do it wrong, do it over. In health care, mistakes can kill people.
>>Even if I don't have a thorough understanding of the material, I have all these bitter opinions about the ways I would rather have it presented.<<
I spent most of my school career in classes I could've taught better than the teacher or textbook did. Yeah, that's frustrating.
>>The current system works for people who can sit down and remember everything through a lecture, but I'm not wired to listen like that. I have to read and practice on my own, but there isn't much opportunity to do it.<<
People have different learning modes. Mine is text. I could usually just let the teacher blather, then read the book and learn from that. But if the book isn't good, that doesn't work well. Some kids are the opposite, they only learn well from people, not from books.
>> I could spend a whole semester doing my math wrong and never even realize it because the person who is remotely hired to grade my work isn't looking that closely.<<
See above: mistakes in health care can kill people. >_< And from the results I see, most of the training is very bad. I mean most medics can't remember a thing I've told them for <i>five minutes</i>. I've seen competent ones, but they're very rare. I'm pretty sure the best one I've seen is neurovariant. So I find it disturbing, but not surprising, that there's a program using fast and sloppy methods to train people for health care. If it was <i>working</i> then that would be different. The flaws you describe are clear and concerning, even if some students do fine in that mode.