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Old 04-20-2014, 04:51 PM
 
6,129 posts, read 6,791,059 times
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This is going to be an unpopular statement:

A lot of kids we think of as "gifted" are not actually gifted. They are just bright kids. They don't need a special school. They need perhaps advanced classes at the high school level, special attention in the form of supplemental programs and differenciated assignments in the lower grades. A lot of the so-called "giftedness" disappears as these kids age.

TRUE gifted status is very rare and there are programs for those kids. If your child is really a genius, it will be identified.

I was a "gifted" kid, I went to school with other "gifted" kids, and I look back on all of us now and see where we all ended up and I know we were not geniuses. LOL. Everyone is doing fine but no one cured cancer. Some of the people that were "gifted" in elementary school were quite normal by high school, some not. Funny in my high school that was supposed to be for advanced kids there were a handful of students we were all awed by. The rest of us were just smart. LOL

I think if your school is properly staffed and teachers well trained the bright kids will be well taken care of without a gifted program.
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Old 04-20-2014, 05:47 PM
 
Location: My beloved Bluegrass
20,110 posts, read 16,086,069 times
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I think tracking needs to make a comeback.
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Old 04-20-2014, 06:09 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,464,273 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinawina View Post
This is going to be an unpopular statement:

A lot of kids we think of as "gifted" are not actually gifted. They are just bright kids. They don't need a special school. They need perhaps advanced classes at the high school level, special attention in the form of supplemental programs and differenciated assignments in the lower grades. A lot of the so-called "giftedness" disappears as these kids age.

TRUE gifted status is very rare and there are programs for those kids. If your child is really a genius, it will be identified.

I was a "gifted" kid, I went to school with other "gifted" kids, and I look back on all of us now and see where we all ended up and I know we were not geniuses. LOL. Everyone is doing fine but no one cured cancer. Some of the people that were "gifted" in elementary school were quite normal by high school, some not. Funny in my high school that was supposed to be for advanced kids there were a handful of students we were all awed by. The rest of us were just smart. LOL

I think if your school is properly staffed and teachers well trained the bright kids will be well taken care of without a gifted program.
It may be unpopular, but I agree.
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Old 04-20-2014, 06:44 PM
 
8,275 posts, read 7,918,958 times
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Yes, the goal is to make everyone mediocre - not to promote greatness. Money should be spent most heavily on the bright/inquisitive kids that are the most likely to transform society for the better. We should also do our best to try and educate the less intelligent, though still motivated and ambitious kids.

The lazy and/or troublemakers should be cut as losses and removed from schools in order to prevent disruption to the kids that want to learn. Not sure where they should be put, but anywhere is better than the general vicinity of kids that actually want to learn.
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Old 04-20-2014, 06:54 PM
 
3,281 posts, read 6,261,263 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinawina View Post
This is going to be an unpopular statement:

A lot of kids we think of as "gifted" are not actually gifted. They are just bright kids. They don't need a special school. They need perhaps advanced classes at the high school level, special attention in the form of supplemental programs and differenciated assignments in the lower grades. A lot of the so-called "giftedness" disappears as these kids age.

TRUE gifted status is very rare and there are programs for those kids. If your child is really a genius, it will be identified.

I was a "gifted" kid, I went to school with other "gifted" kids, and I look back on all of us now and see where we all ended up and I know we were not geniuses. LOL. Everyone is doing fine but no one cured cancer. Some of the people that were "gifted" in elementary school were quite normal by high school, some not. Funny in my high school that was supposed to be for advanced kids there were a handful of students we were all awed by. The rest of us were just smart. LOL

I think if your school is properly staffed and teachers well trained the bright kids will be well taken care of without a gifted program.
No one would ever advocate such a position for students on the opposite end of the spectrum with low ability. Even if we're not talking about the truly gifted (Einstein type intelligence is indeed rare), there is still an advanced student population and in my opinion we're doing them a disservice (and as a country, ourselves as well) by not developing their abilities.
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Old 04-20-2014, 06:55 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,464,273 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattie View Post
That has been our experience also.


Wait, didn't your daughter skip a grade, or two? That doesn't constitute a G&T program anywhere I've lived.

We had two sons go through G&T in 3 different states, and they thrived. They remained with their friends, and maturity level wasn't an issue. G&T really didn't offer much prior to middle school, but then it certainly became a more challenging curriculum than what our 3rd son took. That 3rd son took 5 years to complete college, the other two breezed through without issue.

The youngest is still rooming with, and has remained best friends with another boy from G&T. They were very competitive with each other, taking the SAT 3 times each to top the other's score. Meanwhile, their first attempt was enough to get them into the college they both wanted. I hate to think of how being offered the regular curriculum would have cheated these kids.
In my district, grade skipping, sometimes just for a single subject, was a component of TAG when my kids were in ele/middle. A friend whose daughter was a young 7th grader was skipped into 8th grade language arts and social studies, a combo class at our middle school. The mom said she could definitely see a difference in insight between her daughter and the older kids. Even later elementary kids were skipped up in math, with some 5th graders going to the middle school for math.

Quote:
Originally Posted by AndyAMG View Post
Talented and gifted has become harder busy work with no tangible value. All the funding goes to ESL and special ed. All the teacher focus these days is on problem children and those who can't/don't want to learn. Back in to old days those kids that had no interest in school worked on farms or in factories. These days we push unintelligent and lazy children through the system grade by grade. They have learned almost nothing, don't care one little bit about education, and have put forth minimum effort to pass standardized tests. Then the American government funds billions in student loans for people who have no interest in education to go to community college. The only reason they are there is because it's quasi-required in today's job market.

Our local Community Colleges have a less than 30% 4-yr transfer or completion rate, ALL OF THEM. Let that sink in.... If you aren't disgusted by that figure there is something wrong with you. We need to quite forcing education on people that don't want to learn. Let them go move sprinkler pipes in a field or pick apples or flip hamburgers, no one owes them a $20/hr job. We should fully support those who do want to learn and have a proven track record in school. We should never sacrifice those with potential for those who are detrimental. EVER! We spend an inordinate amount of time and resources for a 3% gain in graduation rate or standardized test scores at the bottom end. Some say 3% on the bottom end is worth it, but very few studies have determined what happens to the top end. The few studies we do have suggest that any gains made at the bottom hurts the top and middle performers unproportionaly. The reward is not worth the risk.

The race to the bottom everyone!
College attendance is voluntary.

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Originally Posted by Momma_bear View Post
Wow. I had no idea the funding gap was that large.
That number is based on someone's recollection of what they read. May not be the actual case.
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Old 04-20-2014, 08:20 PM
 
13,979 posts, read 25,887,117 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana View Post
In my district, grade skipping, sometimes just for a single subject, was a component of TAG when my kids were in ele/middle. A friend whose daughter was a young 7th grader was skipped into 8th grade language arts and social studies, a combo class at our middle school. The mom said she could definitely see a difference in insight between her daughter and the older kids. Even later elementary kids were skipped up in math, with some 5th graders going to the middle school for math.
It was done by subject in our schools too, and that makes perfect sense to me. The students still see their friends for lunch, gym, etc. It doesn't make sense to push kids ahead an entire grade when they may lack the maturity to be around older kids.
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Old 04-20-2014, 11:11 PM
 
Location: PNW
682 posts, read 2,416,850 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oldhag1 View Post
I really think the grade skip was the far bigger problem than the GT programs, very few kids are emotionally equipped for that. I started college at 16 - not something I would recommend to anyone.
I left high school half-way through my sophomore year (at 16) to finish school at the community college. I did this for a variety reasons, but partly because I wanted more than what I felt I was getting out of high school. This was entirely my choice, and my parents never pushed me one way or another. I feel like it was a good choice for me. But I also think I would have been fine staying in high school.

I guess my point is this, there are several good high school completion programs at community colleges, and high school is not for every student--whether they be high achieving, or whether they be students who would benefit from a trade school. I think it should be an option, but also recognize it is not for everyone.

It was definitely ego-busting at first, especially to go from being an "excellent" writer for a high school kid to being a mediocre writer as a college student. It's not such a bad thing to have your ego bruised a little every once in a while.

I think it's important to continue to have programs such as these available, especially if we're going to continue to gut the G&T programs.
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Old 04-21-2014, 04:27 AM
 
51,616 posts, read 25,673,407 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemlock140 View Post
The problems with education today started when tracking ended. When I was in school we had all of the kids tested and in classes based on their ability levels, so they all learned at the same or very similar pace. In order to avoid stigmatizing the slower classes they would use something like 7A-7I where maybe D was the best and B was the slowest class (though we all knew). With the popularity of political correctness, trying to treat all kids equally and have the gifted together with the slowest in the same class teachers have to teach to the common denominator. The gifted are bored and the slower kids are lost. Gifted and talented programs sprang up in an attempt to rescue the best students but funding and a threat to the self-esteem of those not making it into the G & T classes have reduced or eliminated them in many districts. Well educated and caring parents can help overcome this by doing their own supplemental teaching or paying for private advanced programs or schools, but the biggest result today is that parents move to areas with the best schools, and drive up the home prices. Eventually the best schools end up in the affluent areas, where most of the kids are at the same learning level and have the same parental concern and participation. The difference between them and the schools in the poorer areas widens every year as people with kids that can afford it move away.
Exactly.

We are comfortable tracking kids in sports with comp teams composed of higher performing kids. We are comfortable with tracking students in high school. But elementary and grade school are a different story.

Which is a shame as we are wasting so much potential.

Mainstreaming made this even worse. When we eliminated self-contained classrooms for students with special needs and dumped them into regular classrooms we increased classroom disruption and tied up a lot of teacher time and attention.

Torey Hayden, a SpEd teacher in MN has written several books on her experiences in self-contained classrooms. She quit teaching when mainstreaming came in vogue. She wrote that some students need to swim in a small pond for a time, that it is unrealistic to expect them to be successful until they have the basic skills they will need to for success in regular classrooms.

Our kids have been in classes where as much as a third of the students were SpEd students who really could have benefited from smaller, more focused classrooms. The education of all the students suffered.

Many parents of students who need SpEd services think that their children are benefiting from being in a regular classroom and that it doesn't hurt the rest of the kids to have them there. It definitely impacts the education of the rest of the kids and I'm not sure it does much for the students who need SpEd services.

The parents may fool themselves into thinking their kids are just like all the other kids with the exception of few areas where they may need a "little extra help". But the students know whose who. It's no mystery to them that some of these kids are not like the others.
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Old 04-21-2014, 06:09 AM
 
Location: Whoville....
25,386 posts, read 35,464,474 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oldhag1 View Post
I think tracking needs to make a comeback.
I would agree. As things are the bottom of the class can't keep up and focusing on the bottom results in the middle/top learning less. I'm not concerned with the top because I don't believe something bad happens to them if they are not challenged. They don't stop being smart if they aren't challenged on a daily basis and I find that many of them make their own challenges. I think they just stop being ahead but I'm not sure ahead is a good thing. However, being behind is a bad thing. At the very least, the bottom third of students need to be placed into smaller classes where they can get more individualized attention. I think the top are going to do just fine either way.

As a teacher however I'd love to see multi level tracking with lower classes having fewer students than classes on the upper track because of behavior issues that tend to go along with poor performance in school. It's much easier to teach when kids are tracked.

Last edited by Ivorytickler; 04-21-2014 at 07:02 AM..
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