In Spain until the 1980s those kids had the chance (if the parents agreed) to be moved several courses up. In order to stay ahead of their biological peers they needed to keep a higher grade average than their classmates. In general, Pass was 5/10; if you were one year ahead you needed to keep a 6/10, for two years a 7/10, etc.
My parents refused this option; I had a K-12 classmate who was one year ahead and one in college who was two years ahead.
Now it’s not acceptable; they have the options of learning to be bored in silence and stillness or of being packed for several hours away with the slow kids, who are also not being set one year back (the traditional option) without a bull from st Peter, one from Stalin and a stack of letters from both Jung and Freud. Personally, I liked the old “discriminatory” option best.
I came into the thread to talk about this, having been involved on the content-providing and delivering side of this, organising, preparing and delivering what were known as “enrichment” activities for gifted and talented youth at the uni where I was a grad student. These activities would take place during normal lesson time, but at the uni, and would be with students from other schools too. We designed the activities off the back of first year undergrad labs, which seemed to work rather well, and I think the students got a fair bit out of it.
I also used to run residential courses – very intensive week-long courses for 17/18 year olds, consisting of about 20 students in a purpose built centre just outside Cambridge. We’d use a variety of teaching techniques to introduce concepts that were probably more like 1st/2nd year undergrad concepts, and really challenge the students. Most of them rose to the challenge, and in many ways helped them realise that they’re not freaks and that there are other people just like them. And well, we were able to really extend their horizons (I remember some of the students who were from the larger cities had never seen the Milky Way before).
My main thought on all of this is that whilst these things were good in that the students did get “enrichment” activities that actively pushed them and made them think for themselves etc, they all still used to complain that they were/are bored in school, so I don’t know just how effective this really is…
The problem is, however, that “brainy freak climbing the walls” isn’t a very good recipe either–some kids are just never going to fit in, unless they get into some sort of program for kids like them. Skipping a grade isn’t common in the US either for this reason, but sometimes it can be a better fit if there’s no other solution.
Angua, that sounds neat. One problem we have here is that kids are often put into pull-out ‘enrichment’ programs that aren’t necessarily a good fit–kids learn extra fun stuff like Greek mythology or something, but why shouldn’t regular kids learn Greek mythology too? And meanwhile they’re not being challenged, they’re just going to this sort of summer camp version of school and still doing baby math or whatever in class. Your labs sound much more worthwhile–can you maybe tell me what sort of labs they are? The residential courses sound great–I’ve heard wonderful things about programs like that. At least they’ve got a week or two to live for, kwim?
I really think that gifted education must be one of the hardest things to get right in a school system, for a lot of reasons. It’s another type of special education, where you’re trying to meet unique needs, but there are all these pitfalls! You have to worry about charges of elitism, indifference, missing minority kids who are labeled as misbehaving, parents who try to force their kids into a ‘gifted’ labed for the prestige, all sorts of problems.
(I probably sound idiotic but I’ve never really given it much thought before; my own kids have been too young and there wasn’t any gifted education in my school. Smart kids were just bored.)
Interesting. It was very common in New York when I was growing up. I got offered it, and there was a program in junior high (grades 7 - 9) to allow students to do it in 2 years. About half the students offered a gifted track took it. The alternative was an enriched track. Luckily, my mother decided I was too young, and I stayed with my age group. (I would have been drafted if I had moved up a year!)
Now it seems very uncommon, in fact my old district in New Jersey had a pre-first program for kindergarten kids who weren’t quite ready. It seems far more common for parents to wait a year for kids to go to kindergarten so they’ll be more mature. We did that with our younger daughter and it worked great.
The answer to boredom is either enrichment or tracking. I was tracked all through school and I was seldom if ever bored, and I don’t recall any of my friends ever complaining about it. Tracking is considered elitist these days, but I’m all for it.
In Victoria, Australia, there’s not nearly as comprehensive a program as New South Wales but one option that’s been growing is for private schools to offer the International Baccalaureate program instead of the state sponsered Victorian Certificate of Education. The IB tends to be a far more rigorous and challenging program and it’s hardness tends to function as a weed out system that concentrates the gifted.
Well, some of the labs we do with them include stuff like using optical images and spectra to get them to derive Hubble’s Law from a sample of galaxies, or there are projects involving the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, where they again use actual data to do stuff about the evolution of galaxies (adapted from here actually), and similar things using Chandra publically available data on stuff like the supernova remnant Cas A.
And the residential courses always get good reviews, we do a lot of intense mathematical stuff, but also fun stuff like “present this science story at a press conference as if you’re the scientists involved” and star gazing and things like that…