I don’t remember much about the program when I was a kid, but I certainly don’t remember getting much out of it. My impression, after a couple of intervening decades, is of playing games with the other “smart kids.”
And certainly nothing about ethics.
Was it a laugh? you know
Rdrr.
I was in two gifted programs in two different school systems. As well as CTY (Informal Logic, writing)
I quite enjoyed them. I suppose that the first can be described as how a math class would be if it was taught by Martin Gardner et al.
The second was sort of a “honors classes” system that gradually morphed into AP stuff. For instance, Geometry was taught as if everything was to be proven-- and the regular Geometry classes apparently skimped on proofs.
(I always found classes that explained “facts” not as sterile components but in terms of “how we know this to be true” to be the most interesting.)
Is it ethical to reserve the richest pedagogy to “gifted” students? I don’t know. But I didn’t enjoy being bored.
(this is a remedial class)
The richest pedagogy, and often the richest students. I was by far the poorest student in the gifted programme, which was one of the reasons I kept being pulled out and then put back in it – teachers who only cared about ability would put me in, and then the snobbish parents of the other kids would basically say, “what, we’re letting in everybody?” and I’d get kicked out again.
Gifted kids tended to become friends. Couldn’t have the riffraff included.
No wonder I love Harry Potter.
Geometry was the only math subject I enjoyed, and I lived for proofs.
Have you seen 3 blue 1 brown on youtube?
No…It’s been 35 years since geometry, but I’ll check it out!
I was tested for it. I didn’t make it in, mostly because my talent isn’t in fitting together twenty different shapes in a precise pattern to fill in an outline. Art, especially visual, is not my strong suit.
That doesn’t make me less talented or gifted than the people who got in, IMO, it just means I don’t think in the same patterns other people do. My high school computer teacher called it “strange logic”. He could not figure out my programs by reading the code, but it had to be logic, because the computer executed them flawlessly. My chemistry teacher noted something similar: he couldn’t figure out my equations, but I got things right far too often for it to be chance. Luckily, he recognised the validity of it, but warned me that it meant that he couldn’t help when I did get it wrong.
As long as I had teachers like those, I did great. With the prescriptivists, not so much. And to get into the program (at least the one here) you had to do things the right way, not figure out your own way.
True story: I am the kid who failed to get into the gifted program, but got kicked out of the reading and writing contests because “we want to other kids to feel like they have a chance, because they know you’ll win.”
Hence my cynicism towards those programs. Not to mention the fact that I have seen parents using that label to deny real, obvious untreated MI.
Pretty much. Since one of the indicators of “gifted” is supposed to be creative thinking, you’d think fresh approaches would be good…
Sorry, what is MI?
Mental Illness. "Josh is just special " say mommy and daddy, “you can’t expect him to be like the other kids. He’s just expressing himself” while we kids can recognise Josh is having a manic phase, and actually feel sorry for the teacher who is trying to maintain order.
Yes, said parents were universally white, suburban, solidly middle-class, in case you were wondering.
At best a manic phase.
At worst, sociopathy or narcissism.
I taught a bunch of gifted kids my last year of teaching. The gifted programme had run its course, but a bunch of them took one of my computer classes.
“But I’m gifted” was used as a regular excuse for skipping tests without telling me and going to do some club event, or not handing something in on time, or just generally being an asshole in class.
They didn’t entirely believe me when I said I’d been in the gifted programme too, 'cos you know, I was just a lowly teacher, and their parents had assured them all their lives they were going to do something special.
And yup, white, suburban, and middle-upper-class to the last one.
I was in a mix of gifted, regular, and eventually special ed. I didn’t notice much difference among the students. More among the coursework.
Especially in black-and-white, it looks like something out of a Tim Burton movie.
I have written this before but will again, my mother was a gifted ed teacher. The whole idea behind gifted ed is that gifted students are at risk. They are the ones who drop out because they are bored. They are at higher risk of doing drugs. They are at higher risk of committing suicide. Many gifted students are not the teacher’s pets - they are the opposite - the rowdy students that the teacher hates because they are bored out of their skulls in a regular classroom.
When my mom was teaching, it quickly became a badge of honor to be in the gifted program, and all the straight A students’ parents - the students who were actually being served perfectly well by the regular classroom - started advocating to the principal that their little special bundle of joy get into the gifted program. And of course the administrators wanted to please. So all those people got in and the poor, reckless, rowdy kids didn’t get tested because the classroom teachers were the gatekeepers to the test, and how could a D- student be gifted, amirite?
This synchs well with something I learned in teachers college – that 80% of school dropouts are more intelligent than the ones who stay in school.
Fun fact: when I was in the middle of the process of skipping from Grade 2 to Grade 3 (took about four weeks, felt longer), I sometimes did classes with the Special Ed kids. Bear in mind this was a rural 300-student school, half of which were French Immersion students. In retrospect it’s amazing we had the resources we did.
So that had everyone freaking out because a “browner” was in with the so-called slow kids (only a couple of which were actually slow). The only people who were nice about it were the Special Ed kids. And then my Grade 3 teacher, but that was after she got a chance to teach me.
There’s gonna be a lot of avatar change today.