I am a child of the 1970s and my parents moved around a LOT. But that means I experienced a lot of the 1970s experiments in education - from open schools to traditional ones. I spent six months in an elementary school without grades. And I loved it - but I’m autodidactic. Basically - young kids were at one end of the school and older kids were at the other. You moved in modules of kids with your same skill set. And a lot of the learning (except math, I remember math being pretty traditional) was self directed - you read, researched, and wrote a report. You picked a Science lab - read the materials, took a quiz to make sure you understood the purpose of the lab, did the lab and turned in a lab report - think fifth and sixth grade science experiments - making rainbows, wiring a lightbulb to a battery. Unfortunately, I have no idea how the struggling kids did - I never interacted with them, since I was there in fifth grade, so was in a room full of really smart fourth graders, smart fifth graders, and sixth graders who I think were probably pretty average.
And again, in case you missed it, I hope to put my own son in a hybrid school next year precisely because I am trying to avoid the “gifted” label and because I think it offers fascinating potential for differentiation. But I don’t think I would if I didn’t feel confident that I could monitor his education, be an informed advocate for him, and basically supplement anything I see missing. So I agree with you that there is a lot of potential here for improving education for every child–but it’s very new and there’s a lot to be worked out. And do not underestimate how vigilantly the “parents of agency” will fight to make sure their kids get a bigger piece of the pie.
Specific comment to this.
Unlike many of the posters here I was never in any gifted education program. Did well enough and in classes with “the smart kids”, but in my school I was a wannabee compared to the ubernerds. Every step of the way I have been fortunate to never be at the top of the group I was travelling in, and never at the bottom. By the time my formal education finished I was in class with many people who had been identified as gifted from early on and many many who were clearly more intelligent than me. By definition my level of ability is normal and gifted is some significant level higher. These folks were that. And there was nothing inherently ineffably different about how their minds worked. Some of them had a harder time in med school than I did precisely because they had never not been one of the very top before and being in the middle of the pack was psychologically dissonant with their identity (while I was thrilled to be in the middle of that group). But they memorized using the same methods I did, they had a variety of ways of learning, many similar to approaches I took. And intellectual habits of mind? Ways to approach that are trained into us, either taught by others or developed on our own? Some not so great. They hadn’t needed them so much up to then, they could do well enough without them, while for me, those habits and long been required and were what got me able to hang on some of their rear tires and keep up to the pack (excuse the cycling metaphor).
Gifted is over-rated I think. Self-identity as gifted I think is potentially counter-productive to maximizing outcomes. The general goal (excepting special needs populations mainstreaming) should be to maximize the number that experience being in groups where they are in the middle of the pack they learn with, at all levels. I believe that is where each of us experience that which brings us closest to our individual potential.
Oh! To this. The elementary school that my kids went to was, compared to the village overall, full of the most kids with academically oriented and professional two parent households, almost all of whom felt their little darlings were gifted, often having successfully fought for the kids to get into the summer gifted and talented programming. One of my favorite parent moments was the meeting introducing us as parents to the Middle School program, which mixed kids up from across the district. Oh the number of questions about how their gifted children would have their needs met! I knew these kids: the one who really was, his parents were quiet; the others, not gifted, just smart upper SES two educated parent household children whose parents did their igloo projects for them. The looks I got when I got up and asked “As the parent of a child who clearly is not gifted, and can get a bit disorganized and overwhelmed sometimes, what resources are available for kids like mine?”! FWIW he’s doing just fine in his psychiatry residency now. Not gifted then, not now, and it took a bit for him to develop the needed habits of mind and discipline to achieve academically, but he got what he needed at Middle School.
I know, right? This is the sort of thing I thought would be better, now, decades later, but in my son’s current district, it was exactly the same. The kids at that meeting are now the parents, asking the same questions. What really, especially drives me crazy is that they aren’t actually super interested in their kids’ education, near as I can tell. My son likes math, and he does really well at it. The school isn’t really set up to develop his math the way he wants to: he can’t teach himself, and no one there has time to push him as far as he’d like to be pushed. So we have always done math on our own–not rigidly, but 2-3 times a week, we’ve always a math lesson, because we do value making sure he’s challenged and engaged academically, and while he isn’t eager every single time, he is generally in favor. But all these parents that would bitch to me about how shameful it was that their kid wasn’t perfectly challenged really didn’t work with them much. In some cases, it really felt more like they wanted their kid to be recognized and wanted to make sure no one else was getting more attention than they were.
I haven’t done more than skim this yet but just found it and figured I’d share.
https://www.ojed.org/index.php/jimphe/article/view/2428/1174
I’ll stop hijacking now! Thank again though for the informed view of the idea.
I understand it’s just an overview, but it doesn’t distinguish between grade school and college. The structural issues are huge: college is 15 hours of class a week, and the expectation was always that you were spending twice that outside of class doing readings and homework. K-12 is 35 hours of class a week. So the outside-of-class expectations are really different. But, again, videos watched in class, and accessible later for refreshers, may well have a place. But I worry about over-eager teachers assigning an hour long video a night and expecting kids to also finish up any classwork that didn’t get done during collaborative time.
I also wish all teachers would sometimes watch students work at whatever the tasks of the discipline really are. I sometime give them reading days and just watch them read. It’s really fascinating: the range of reading speed is so vast, and not correlated especially with retention. And writing! Watching a 14 year old you know damn well is perfectly bright try to assemble a complex paragraph is mind blowing. They just process more slowly. Even the ones that grow up to go to Harvard. It’s so easy as a teacher to over-assign work (it’s just 30 pages! 15 problems! Two free response questions!) Watching them work really helps calibrate expectations.
[Bolding mine]
Quickly.
In 1966 when I graduated from a very good academic junior high, no one applied to the specialized schools. They were too damn far away, and the high school we would be attending was very good with very high test scores. Back then I was pretty sure that you got to apply to a specific specialized school. It would be pretty dumb to assign someone living in Brooklyn to Bronx Science.
I never regretted not applying to them.
I’m still not sure that the split needs to be “binary,” any more than it is for kids with Individualized Education Plans. We recognize that a kid with an IEP for reading may not need one for math or behavior, right? Yet we still identify the kid with an Exceptional Children label.
Is the AIG label necessarily different from the EC label?
Certainly some districts are fucking it up, doing the equivalent of putting the EC kids all in one self-contained classroom with a judgmental label on the door. But I think there’s a danger in looking at these fuckups and concluding that the entire process is unsalvageable.
There’s no ineffable quality of “giftedness,” and to the extent that districts are doing that, let’s change it. But there are kids who score in the 97th percentile on (for example) quantitative aptitude, and those kids have a tendency to get bored and to disengage from instruction when the instruction is too repetitive. And some of those kids don’t score well on achievement tests, for a variety of reasons, but will benefit from an Individualized Differentiation Education Plan.
I keep coming back to the idea that, with the kids I know best–at the elementary level–I’ve not seen a better system than having pull-out classes for differentiation for kids with very high aptitude for learning within these specific domains. Basing it on achievement or specific skills risks missing the kids whose families lack the specific academic background that facilitates high achievement or specific skills. If we’re interested in meeting the needs of each child, we need to differentiate for these kids for whom core instruction doesn’t suffice, and I’m not sure how else we accomplish that at the elementary level.
Quick as an Adverb
Adverbial use is seven centuries old.
Interest in language is always an encouraging sign.
But the next step of the process is, of course, to begin to learn about it.
Modhat: Thank you for that and you are correct, but this is a potential derailment to the thread. Please everyone drop grammatical side issues. @I_Love_Me_Vol.I, this means you too.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
You certainly have a lot more hands-on experience with the logistics, and I wouldn’t dream of challenging you on that. I don’t really mind the pull-out model, but I consider these things important:
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Get rid of the term “gifted”. It’s an outdated term that is just packed with toxic implications.
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Pull out programs should be skill specific–not “All the GT kids” go on Tuesdays and get the same things. Also, no needing to qualify in 2/3 domains to qualify.
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Fluid standards for entry: if a teacher thinks a student would benefit from advanced work, you shouldn’t have to wait until they are formally assessed to send them on the advanced pull out.
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Programs should be sincerely rigorous and students should be able to identify what they learned
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GT teachers should be engaged in the regular school community. They shouldn’t be a mysterious figure only known to the “smart kids”. All students should have exposure to more innovative, project-based approaches to learning.
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Finally, at my end, once you get to HS where you can bump up a class or take AP/IB, there should be no special “GT” sections and classes should be open-enrollment (though I can agree to the idea that you need to have passed the pre-requisite course).
It sounds like your program meets most of those, except the first. The one in my son’s district absolutely did not. I don’t know what is more common.
Thanks again for starting this. I’ve really enjoyed input from others and working out my own ideas.
We’re halfway there already, in that for all the parental involvement stuff (PTA, Dad’s Club, Garden, etc…) it’s nearly all white or hispanic parents. No idea why that would be, with the school being roughly 40% black, but it’s how it seems to run. I don’t think it’s specific to our school though; my wife is friends with a woman who used to be a teacher at one of the nearby mostly black elementary schools, and with another mom whose kids went to our local school, and both report that the PTAs at those schools were nearly 100% staff members and a tiny handful of white parents. There seems to be some sort of cultural thing driving the non-involvement in our area, not just at our school.
The kids all intermingle and make friendships at our school though, and the faculty seems to be pretty diverse as well, so that’s good.
The situation was entirely different by the 1980s. There was pretty clear stratification by then. One of my best friends from high school lived near coney island.
Your local high school might have been pretty good but my local high school had at least one stabbing a semester. I commuted over and hour to get to school and another hour to get back.
I never regretted going there. I would have gone to any of those schools regardless of commute to avoid my local high school. Most NYC high schools outside of very white neighborhoods were in the same boat.
I never regretted applying.
My sister was in Bronx Science and my other sister was in the local HS. No shootings or knifings back then. This would be around 1969. Both hated when we moved down to NJ. High School is a tough time to change schools.
My sister was really challenged by Bronx Science and loved her time there.
My cousins has experiences more like damuriajashi described in their local NY high school in the late 70s and 80s. The city got dangerous pretty quickly in the 70s and didn’t really get safer again until the mid-90s.
We did have one shooting in the hallway, and fist fights in the cafeteria. But it was probably safer than the subway.
My school is still good. There was an article in the Times about it a few years back, which said that the scores were still tops and lots of people from all over the city tried to get in.
Commuting would have been more than an hour. We had a pretty long bus ride just to get to Main Street Flushing and on the subway. I went to a career fair at Fordham once, and it took forever.
I’m so glad I don’t live in America!
Modnote: I had to resist, everyone else should also resist responding to this post in this thread to avoid a hijack.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
You’re talking about the post immediately above yours, right?