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Old 12-23-2009, 06:16 PM
 
Location: Eastern time zone
4,469 posts, read 7,181,651 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post
I've never said we're all the same. If we were, there'd be no need for this thread, now would there?
In which case what you've suggested is even more horrifying. If we're not all the same, and you're advocating only reaching the average kids, you're throwing both the kids who need more help in order to not be a burden, and the kids who are best able to reach the stars, under the bus.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post

Whether or not this little boy will be fine without fitting is is yet to be seen but now is the time to start doing something about it if it is to be changed. If he should decide later that he wants to live the life of a hermit that is his choice but to be forced into that life because his parents failed to do anything to help him fit in would be a trajedy.
He's bright. He's healthy. He's apparently happy on his own. "Normal" is not necessarily a goal, but rather a setting on a washing machine.
What was that about making children live up to artificially applied parental expectations?
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Old 12-23-2009, 06:25 PM
 
2,195 posts, read 3,633,184 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aconite View Post
In which case what you've suggested is even more horrifying. If we're not all the same, and you're advocating only reaching the average kids, you're throwing both the kids who need more help in order to not be a burden, and the kids who are best able to reach the stars, under the bus.
Ivory's belief is that the gifted need no help to reach the stars, or they are not truly gifted.
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Old 12-23-2009, 07:01 PM
 
Location: Whoville....
25,386 posts, read 35,466,787 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aconite View Post
In which case what you've suggested is even more horrifying. If we're not all the same, and you're advocating only reaching the average kids, you're throwing both the kids who need more help in order to not be a burden, and the kids who are best able to reach the stars, under the bus.



He's bright. He's healthy. He's apparently happy on his own. "Normal" is not necessarily a goal, but rather a setting on a washing machine.
What was that about making children live up to artificially applied parental expectations?
Don't mistake recognizing the purpose of our current public school system for advocating thowing away anyone. The gifted, certainly, are not being thrown away. Their gifts don't cease to exist if they don't get jsut the right education. Giftedness is not that fragile a thing. Reality is, our schools must do that which benefits society, as a whole, the most and spending disproportionatly on a small group is not it unless there is some gain to be had for society by doing so. I can make a better argument for special ed services than I can G&T programs. Teaching the lower end to read enables them to hold down jobs and become productive members of society. The gifted already have their first helping and then some. It's polite to make sure everyone has, at least, one helping before you go back for seconds.

One of the purposes of school is to try to make sure kids are not a burden. This does benefit society.

Actually, normal is the big area under the bell curve. Pretty much two sigma.
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Old 12-23-2009, 07:13 PM
 
Location: Whoville....
25,386 posts, read 35,466,787 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aconite View Post
No. I understood your point. I think it's idiotic.




I think the problem here is terminology. "Gifted" implies something extra, a toy, like a really cool Lego set or cordless drill. What we have here, with profoundly gifted children, is completely different wiring. A profoundly gifted child is knd of like sticking a transformer meant to handle the power for Disney World in a tract house. Whether or not you throw the switch (and risk blowing things up if you don't know what you're doing), whether you use it or not the transformer's power is still there. And you can only hope that when you try to channel it into running a $10 toaster (the metaphorical equivalent of that second grade classroom you want the child to "fit into"), you'd better hope the only thing that blows is the toaster.




Well, that depends. Coax it out? Possibly not. Identify and accommodate? In states in which gifted ed is cosidered part of SpEd, it most certainly is "up to someone else". That's that pesky "free and APPROPRIATE education", bay-bee.






Oh, the gifted will, eventually, use their gifts....one way or another, those talents show. It is incumbent upon us, as the adults in the equation, to teach them to (as the saying goes) "use their talents for good and not evil". Given your rantings about needing to serve society's best interests (well, in between the rantings about how your best interests are paramount, anyway), one would think it would be preferable to nurture the more able, rather than to throw them to the wolves to raise.
History, in the context in which you use it, is a notoriously bad witness. Given the commonly accepted theory that those who are at least highly gifted occur approximately once every thousand individuals, there should be a whole lot more standouts just in US history, let alone Western Civ or World History. Clearly, over the last several centuries, there are a whole lot of people either not performing, or not making the books.




My, we do think highly of ourselves, don't we?
Once again, one anecdote cannot prove anything. It can disprove a blanket statement (e.g. "all engineers are purple") but it cannot prove anything.





The plural of anecdote is not data. C'mon, you can remember that.




Well, it makes a great excuse. I'm of the opinion that education is a team approach, not something best presented as "here it is, take it or leave it, I could care less". I'm unsurprised that your students fail to find your classes fascinating, and that parents are reluctant to get involved.



Here's where I will marginally agree with you-- only because, in this county, gifted classes are the ones being taught in anything approaching an engaging and challenging manner. Were all children offered the options reserved for those with IEPs or EPs, we might actually have a graduation rate somewhere above 70%.
We don't have the resources to give every child an IEP. Nor should we. Public education is geared towards the average becuase that's where most people fall. We recognize that some are so far from that that they need something extra and give them IEP's. Most can be served quite well with a system geared towards the avereage.

It's not take it or leave it. If you have special circumstances, you get an IEP written to cover them. If you don't have special circumstances, then you adapt to the system.

Ah, such melodrama. No one is being thrown to the wolves. Do you really think being gifted in a regular school is being thrown to the wolves? If a child is that different, they'd have an IEP to handle their learning issues. If they don't have an IEP, it's because it's been determined that they don't have issues serious enough to create a problem with the standard system.

Well, gifted does mean more, at least when talking IQ. If it comes with learning issues, then those are best dealt with with an IEP.

What you seem to be missing is that if a child needs accomodations, all they have to do is prove they need accomodations. After that, the law is on their side. If giftedness creates a learning hardship, you deal with it. If it doesn't, you adapt to the system because the system is not designed or funded to accomodate every single person's individual style of learning. We couldn't afford it if it were and I'm not sure it would be a good idea to do that if we could. The world will not adapt to the child when they are adults. They will not get a job with accomdations for them. They will be the ones expected to accomodate the job. Bringing them up through a system that accomodates their every whim would be setting them up for a fall.
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Old 12-23-2009, 07:20 PM
 
Location: Eastern time zone
4,469 posts, read 7,181,651 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post

What you seem to be missing is that if a child needs accomodations, all they have to do is prove they need accomodations. After that, the law is on their side.
<snort>
The law is on the child's side. The school systems are not necessarily so.
Thus the abundance of advocates and education attorneys-- and private schools and homeschoolers.
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Old 12-23-2009, 07:20 PM
 
Location: Liberal Coast
4,280 posts, read 6,072,665 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post
I've never said we're all the same. If we were, there'd be no need for this thread, now would there?

Whether or not this little boy will be fine without fitting is is yet to be seen but now is the time to start doing something about it if it is to be changed. If he should decide later that he wants to live the life of a hermit that is his choice but to be forced into that life because his parents failed to do anything to help him fit in would be a trajedy.
What it sounds like is you want to change the boy so that he fits in. Personally, I wouldn't want my kids to really fit in with most kids today. Not fitting in also doesn't equal being a hermit. I didn't fit in through most of school, but I most certainly wasn't a hermit. You join activities that you do enjoy. That is where you fit in. I fit in extremely well in my athletics. I still don't fit in with most people. It isn't a problem, though. I'm very glad about it because of the morals and lack of motivation of most people my age. The only way a parent can really help a kid to fit in is to change that person. I'm sorry, but that isn't up to the parent. Five year olds are smart enough to know if they want to do one thing or another thing. If he wants to be social, he will. If he doesn't want to be, he won't be.
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Old 12-23-2009, 07:38 PM
 
Location: Whoville....
25,386 posts, read 35,466,787 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by psr13 View Post
What it sounds like is you want to change the boy so that he fits in. Personally, I wouldn't want my kids to really fit in with most kids today. Not fitting in also doesn't equal being a hermit. I didn't fit in through most of school, but I most certainly wasn't a hermit. You join activities that you do enjoy. That is where you fit in. I fit in extremely well in my athletics. I still don't fit in with most people. It isn't a problem, though. I'm very glad about it because of the morals and lack of motivation of most people my age. The only way a parent can really help a kid to fit in is to change that person. I'm sorry, but that isn't up to the parent. Five year olds are smart enough to know if they want to do one thing or another thing. If he wants to be social, he will. If he doesn't want to be, he won't be.
I see nothing wrong with helping him fit in. He's a long way from making the decision that he'd be happy as a hermit. Perhaps he will and if he does, that's his decision, however, now it's his parents decision. They need to prepare for all possibilities including the one that holds that he might be happiest with other people in his life. It is because we don't know where he ends up that something needs to be done now. If it turns out that he would have been happier with people in his life but no one ever helped him learn how to fit in, he will lead a lonely life and not of his own choosing.
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Old 12-23-2009, 08:01 PM
 
2,195 posts, read 3,633,184 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post
What you seem to be missing is that if a child needs accomodations, all they have to do is prove they need accomodations. After that, the law is on their side.
If only you understood special education law and practice.

School system after school system denies children needed accommodations - and only the parents with the resources to fight it can do so, even assuming they know their rights fully, especially given how many schools fail to even fully present the information to the parents.

"Proving" the need for accommodations is non-trivial. For example, in Maine a couple years ago, a family claimed that their child's emotional needs were hurt by the school's failure to provide accommodations. The school insisted that so long as the child was meeting grade level academic standards, they were under no obligations to do anything for the child.

The courts ruled against the town.

Have other school systems embraced this ruling?

NOT A CHANCE.

From the United States Supreme Court's decision this past summer, in the case Forest Grove School District v. T.A.:
[SIZE=2]This dispute "... differs from Burlington and Carter in that it concerns not the adequacy of a proposed IEP but the School District's failure to provide an IEP at all . . . moreover, when a child requires special education services, a school district's failure to propose an IEP of any kind is at least as serious a violation of it's responsibilities under IDEA as a failure to provide an adequate IEP."
[/SIZE]

[SIZE=2]
[/SIZE]

[SIZE=2]"The District's position similarly conflicts with IDEA's 'Child find' requirement . . . [requiring States] .. to identify, locate, and evaluate all children with disabilities' to ensure that they receive needed special education services."
[/SIZE]

[SIZE=2]
[/SIZE]

[SIZE=2]"Indeed, by immunizing a school district's refusal to find a child eligible for special education services no matter how compelling the child's need, the School District's interpretation [of the statute] would produce a rule bordering on the irrational."[/SIZE]
Irrational.

This is not even slightly an uncommon conclusion by judges when faced with school practices.

"all they have to do is prove they need accomodations (sic)??"

Fat chance.
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Old 12-23-2009, 10:20 PM
 
Location: Eastern time zone
4,469 posts, read 7,181,651 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post

Ah, such melodrama. No one is being thrown to the wolves. Do you really think being gifted in a regular school is being thrown to the wolves?
IME as a parent of four children who fall in varying spots along the gifted spectrum, and as a student (admittedly back in antediluvian times), yes. IMO, according to what you have posted of your classroom, absolutely yes.
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Old 12-24-2009, 05:54 AM
 
Location: Whoville....
25,386 posts, read 35,466,787 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aconite View Post
IME as a parent of four children who fall in varying spots along the gifted spectrum, and as a student (admittedly back in antediluvian times), yes. IMO, according to what you have posted of your classroom, absolutely yes.
Again such melodrama. You forget I'm also mother to one, possibly two gifted children (It's been suggested, but not strongly, that dd#1 is also gifted).

So, what is it about my classroom that would be throwing them to the wolves? And what will the wolves be eating that will disappear? The implication with your wolves analogy is that something is destroyed. My experience is that giftedness doesn't go away because you were in a regular classroom. Why is your children's "giftedness" so fragile a thing that it's eaten by wolves if they're in a regular classroom?

On another note, how would YOU teach my class since you think it eats your kids alive? What do you see wrong with my class? (BTW, science scores are up since I started at this school. While I can't take credit for that we can conclude I've done no harm.)
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