Gifted/Talented Education, Back in the Day

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I attended elementary school in the 1970’s. The staff was opposed to gifted and talented education, worried that someone who was gifted might be left out because he or she didn’t test well.

However, when I was in fourth grade, somebody (a parent? the Board of Ed?) must have insisted, because one day the teachers sent students in fourth grade or above with high grades (including me) to a room. When we got there, a teacher told us, “Each of you needs to write a report about how clocks were invented.” We had about a week to do it. I handed mine in. I never got it back or heard anything else about it. Our group never met again…

Until the following year. Same kids, same room, same teacher. *Same exact assignment. * :confused: Same lack of feedback, too. Again, no second meeting.

Sixth grade. Read the previous paragraph again, because that’s what happened again. :rolleyes: Now, if I’d been really bright, I would’ve kept a copy of the report from the previous year.

I don’t think anyone who was gifted and talented but missed the experience lost out on going to Harvard because of it.

Any other stories of G/T education way back when?

2

We had a decent GATE program - got to spend an hour in a room doing all kinds of things way past 5th-6th grade level. I remember a pretty decent chemistry lab (the kind that came in a bunch of cases), and particularly one of those giant wall slide rules. I got to take it home on weekends, and as a result I may have been one of the last people in the western world to learn to work a slipstick. (I have five at hand, including the Rolls-Royce of the day Log-Log Duplex Decitrig… in 6, 10 and 20 inch lengths.)

But was it “education” in any meaningful sense? Probably not. Just the usual public-education sop to the inerasable fact that all students aren’t exactly alike.

3

I went to elementary in the 1980s. The G&T program was a pullout program for an hour or two a day. The subjects were certainly more fun than regular classroom subjects. We had our own classrooms in middle school, and only mixed with the rest of the school for lunchtime and electives. Then in high school it all turned into AP classes… we were a pretty tight group in middle school, but people drifted away and other people drifted in and oh well.

4

Elementary on the 60s - Back then it was called Mentally Gifted Minors (MGM) and at my school was a pull-out program. Once or twice a week we were pulled from our classrooms and would meet for “enrichment” activities. these ranged from reading and putting on plays to museum trips to going into LA to see an opera. My first memories of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the rest of the Music Center are from these field trips. They weren’t all serious, either. I remember going to the Cinerama Dome with the group to watch “The Battle of the Bulge” in Cinerama. We also got tours of the local Air Force base, which led to me winning a pilot’s helmet for a drawing I did of a Mercury rocket. I still have it.

5

I don’t think GATE and AP have much in common. GATE seemed to be genuinely about trying to engage and further the brighter kids; AP is about getting a 5.0 on your transcripts.

6

I started 1st grade in 1960 in a Catholic school. There was no such thing as gifted programs, but we were divided in each grade according to aptitude or abilities or some test score. I don’t know that we were given any additional challenges in the highest group, but knowing the parents and nuns of the day, I’m sure we were expected to perform at a high level. And all the kids knew who was in the “smart” class and who was in the “dumb” class - not PC, but that’s what we called it.

When my daughter was in second grade (1998?), she was tested for G&T and they said she just missed out. I thought they were wrong (of course I would!!) and based on some specific questions on the test, I still think their system for picking kids was flawed. For example, she was asked for examples of heroic deeds. She’d never heard the term so she didn’t know what they were asking. I felt like her lack of exposure to a specific word should not have been an indicator of her potential or abilities, but I didn’t fight it. She always did well, spending most of her time on honor roll, and now she’s [del]warping[/del] molding young minds as a teacher, so she didn’t suffer by not being in “gifted” classes. I’d have liked her to be more challenged, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a huge deal.

7

We were in Indiv. Ed. Program (I.E.P.) and it was basically a way to task the kids with extra work. It did give us access to a special area of the library… or that might have just been me because of my research topics… but I remember the librarian giving me the stink eye because one of my topics was Stalin and Communism (books that were kept under lock and key)… then I followed it with something about witchcraft in early America. I’m sure the poor woman was convinced that I was going straight to Hell.

There was one kid that should have been in the program. I don’t know if he refused or was over looked, but he became the school chemist. They would have been much better off if they’d have put him in the program. I’m sure he eventually ran one of the first meth labs in the country because he was very much into home made pharmaceuticals.

8

School in the 80s. GT pullout started in 2-3 grade, and was consistently, through several teachers, the highlight of my day. I remember a few things about my fourth-grade GT teacher:
-I had a huge crush on her, the only crush I ever had on a teacher.
-At some point we did a brainstorming activity to test both fluency and creativity. I didn’t win “fluency”, but in answer to “things that crackle in your hand,” I answered “cockroach,” and won some sort of award.
-We created early electronic games by creating aluminum-foil circuitry on the back of a posterboard and using it to invisibly connect questions and answers. When you touched a wired pen to the correct question and another wired pen to the correct answer, a light bulb at the top would light up. It was just about the coolest thing ever.

In fifth and sixth grade, I went to our district’s self-contained GT class, by that time called AG (Academically Gifted). We had three teachers. Science-and-math was pretty good, Reading was a horrible sadist who couldn’t teach her way out of a paper bag, Writing was a terrifying ogre of a man who was among the best teachers I’ve ever had. In addition, we had weekly guest lectures by a local astrophysicist professor, who was astonishingly good at explaining things like the four major forces at a 10-year-old level.

By sixth grade, it was just two teachers: weekly science with the okay teacher, and everything else with the terrifying ogre. That was possibly the best year of schooling I ever got: the ogre was uncompromising (if, on a test, you circled the ten correct answers instead of underlining them as the instructions suggested, you’d score 0/10; and the next section of the test would tell you to circle, and if you underlined those, you’d get another zero), but his ridiculously high standards forced students to extend themselves to live up to the standards, and I learned a tremendous amount with him.

Almost thirty years later, I often find myself trying to channel him as a teacher.

9

ETA: 1980-1992

I spent some time in groups with three or four other “smart kids”, just physically isolated either within the classroom or sent to the Learning Resource Center (the school library) and given our own “Gifted” work. I used to love the little individual slide projectors and headphones, and these cool systems with this plug, like a headphone plug, that you’d put in a hole by the answer of your choice, and it would tell you if you had the right answer. There were also some sort of sheets you would arrange in a plastic case, close the case and then flip it and open it. If the pattern on the back matched the answer key, you’d gotten the answers right.

And grease pencils! The Gifted Kids got to use the coveted grease pencils on plastic wipe-clean worksheets in the LRC. The grease pencils were generally off limits to students. I remember one day when the whole class was down there, and offered the opportunity to use the grease pencils. I was the only kid who knew how to tear down with the little string and unwrap the paper to expose more of the “lead”! Proud moment for a second grader. :smiley:

But for much of elementary school and junior high, I was just sent to the grade level or two up for Math and Reading, and later, for Language Arts as well. Not a gifted class, but the “high” class of another year. The problem was that the classes weren’t always scheduled at the same time, so I’d miss, say, fourth grade social studies because that’s when the fifth graders had math. Then during fifth grade math time, I was expected to catch up on what we’d covered in social studies, but working pretty much on my own.

The system didn’t work all that well in sixth and eighth grades, when those were the top grade level in the building. Those years I was just handed books and assignments and sent to the table in the back of the room to do my own work (remember those banquet tables every classroom used to have, covered in drying artwork? That one. I had paint smudges on my elbows for a year.)

By high school, when all the other elementary and junior highs were fed with mine into a single high school, there were plenty of other kids at or above my level, so I was just in Honors and AP classes as needed.

10

In elementary/junior high in the late 70s and early 80s, our GT program was actually an alternate math program.

It was, for me at least, both fun and tremendously useful. We skimmed through the required math curriculum for the year as quickly as possible (which took about a month), then spent the rest of the year doing more interesting things. It resulted in learning, among other things, how do deal with base-N math in first grade, with special attention to binary and hex. We also did some very basic programming. Early exposure to those has made many computer-related things easier over the years.

Later on, in high school, it shifted to an “enrichment” class, which was utterly useless. Still, I consider the program as a whole a net win for me.

11

I was in grade school in the ‘70s. From 4th through 6th grade I was in a program called HAP (High Academic Potential). We had two classrooms that were connected (the wall between them had a chalkboard and it slid open so we could combine the two rooms if needed. There were two teachers: one was a no-nonsense middle-aged ex-Army officer (he was my teacher) and the other was a younger, nerdy guy. Both were beloved by their students. The 4th, 5th, and 6th graders were divided between the two classes (some of all three grades in each) and the classes stayed together for all three years. We also had our own library, that was several shelves’ worth of books that we could borrow whenever we liked (I’m not sure where they came from–whether parents provided them, teachers did, or what, but there was a very eclectic collection), in addition to the school’s library.

I absolutely loved it. We had kind of an open schedule–there were periods where we had specific things we would do as a class, but everybody got at least one free period a day that we could spend on homework or on playing with the various educational toys and games that were in the back closet (things like Legos, a mancala game, Scrabble, and a bunch of other stuff).

Once a year we would have to write an “economic report” where we picked some kind of commodity and researched where it came from, where it was used, and that sort of thing. The teacher would give each report a numerical score, and that was how many “stock certificates” you had to spend on “Stock Market Day,” when everyone (including the teachers) would bring in stuff that people could buy, sell, or trade. I really got into this report, and my parents helped–one year I picked “paper” as my commodity, and my Dad showed up one day (unexpectedly) to take me out of class and take me on a field trip to visit a real paper mill.

We also had “Gold Rush Days,” which was an overnight event where we pitched tents out on the far side of the school grounds, and they filled a nearby ditch with water and little shiny items and gold BB’s for us to “pan” for. We could also set up businesses that people could use their “gold” to purchase items from (I made quite a bit renting out comic books by the hour).

Friday afternoons were usually some sort of party for the last couple hours of the day. We could bring in records, food, and whatever, and just hang out and decompress from the week.

Those three years were some of the happiest memories I have.

12

Elementary/Middle School in late 70s, early 80s

My first elementary school had no GT program whatsoever. They were actually an all-around mediocre school, I think, looking back.

My second elementary & then middle school had a limited GT program which was, like Balance’s, pretty much just an enriched/alternate math program for a limited number of students. I remember first being pulled out of regular math in 4th grade, and I and about 20 classmates spent 2 weeks doing logic puzzles with an “instructor” from the local university. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in school, up to and including grad school. That must have been the basis for the GT program, because the next year 10 of us were put into a new accelerated math program, where we covered regular math but also lots of fun stuff like more logic puzzles! In high school we were merged with the grades above us in math, and ceased to be a separate group.

13

Louisiana passed a law requiring all parishes to implement Gift & Talented education when I was in 4th grade. They had to hire a dedicated teacher for it, buy things like computers (a big deal back then) and construct a special classroom for it in every school in the district. They sent a number of promising students to a school psychologist they brought in to identify the gifted ones and… I was the only one who passed for the first year in the whole parish. I had a dedicated teacher and two Apple IIE computers to play with. The program was only 3 hours a week however and you had to ask to be let out of your regular class to go (it wasn’t required if we decided not to go for any reason and we didn’t get grades in the gifted and talented class). That was an easy job for my teacher for the first year - 1 student, 3 hours a week. We learned BASIC programming together however and that is a skill that led to an eventual career.

They identified a few more students the next year but there was still only a few of us per school at most so we had tiny classes. The teacher traveled around to each school. We did some cool stuff, especially funded field trips that nobody else got to do. We did an archaeological excavation of an old home site once and went to see some plays in the nearest city for example.

However, it wasn’t good for your social status outside of the program. It was obvious to everyone why we got special treatment and it didn’t go over well with people that made better grades or worked harder in regular class (that wasn’t too hard to beat in my case). I stopped going regularly in high school. My uncle married my Gifted and Talented teacher so she became my aunt as well as my teacher. That was way too close for me because we didn’t always get along back then. The early years were very worthwhile but I wish I put more into it in high school just because I am sure I missed out on some fun things.