Talented and Gifted Education vs. Remedial Education

Great Debates
21

How is that in any way fair to either set of students? The advanced are not there to teach, and the slow are not there to learn from other kids.

They did something like that when I was a kid. It didn’t work at all, unless you mean ‘got the slow kids to pass the test while the advanced ones were horribly bored by the whole affair and wishing that they could just jump a couple of grades and get into the calculus class they really needed.’

None at all. It’s a serious detriment to the gifted to force them to slow down to the pace of everyone else. Quite frankly, the time I spent in high school ‘gifted’ classes making sure the football team had a C average didn’t help me one fucking iota, and it sure didn’t make them any smarter.

In a roundabout way, this is what happens in countries where high school has an entrance exam and kids are tracked into academics or trades from the time they are young. We hear regularly on the news how far behind these countries American high schools lag.

I did experience it. The whole thing was awful. I felt like i was being held down the entire time and that my brain was being wasted and that I’d be far behind the students who came from schools where there was more than one advanced placement class when it came time for college. And let’s face it, when you’re 14 and you have to tutor the varsity football team so that they can play on Friday night, it doesn’t win you any popularity contests. This isn’t the movies, and they really do treat you like a piece of shit little nerd who should just make them a cheat sheet or get beat up.

22

I’m assuming that “gifted” means very smart.

One nice thing about being gifted is that you can learn a lot without any special attention, just by going to the library, using the internet, & cetera. You don’t have to be spoon fed stuff by a teacher.

So as a practical matter, gifted people can exploit and benefit from many publicly funded resources unavailable to others.

23

Well…what does gifted mean anyway? I’m actually one of those kids who fit into both TAG and special ed. Let me tell you…the system tends to be set up for the mythical average kid. It really doesn’t do anything for the bright kids or the kids who might be receieving special ed services.
Gifted doesn’t nessarly mean high IQ or advanced classes, and neither does sped mean dumbasses. One of the things that really irrirated me about sped is that a lto of the kids in it, seemed to be there b/c they were apatheic “Who’s President Bush?” types. Unfortunatly, a lot of the teachers just lumped you in with the dumbasses.

24

In our school system it worked like this. In second or third grade (depending on the funding) kids scoring in the highest 2% I think of standardized tests were identified for further testing. It was not limited to these kids - teachers could also identify kids they thought qualified, as could parents. These kids got additional testing with a psychologist - one on one when there was money, in a group when there wasn’t. They looked for things besides just test scores. There are certain indicators.

We had gifted English and gifted Math, or both.
And giftedness is no assurance of success. There are plenty of GATE dropouts, and some in our continuation school. Someone being both GATE and special ed identified doesn’t surprise me at all.

BTW, what resources unavailable to others do gifted students benefit from? The ones you listed are open to all.

25

The problem is that non-gifted students are less capable or incapable of learning on their own. So they can’t make use of a lot of resources that are “open to all.”

26

IANAT but I used to be a student. And a tutor, starting at age 4. I’d learned to read on my own before I was 3 (the pre-kindergarten teacher called my parents to yell at them for “forcing their poor daughter to learn to read”, they looked at each other completely stumped… they’d thought I was just looking at the pictures when I’d been reading the newspaper cover-to-cover!); when I got to the school where I did kg-1 to 8th, I was set to help one of the students who were learning their letters slowest (later found out her whole family is heavily dyslexic).

At the end of every school year, those of us who were “released from finals” would still go to class, but to tutor our unreleased classmates one-on-one. This policy was also followed in high school.

I was on the receiving end of the tutoring once, as well, for PhysEd. The Most Hated Woman In Three Provinces was on maternity leave: the sub was her sister. MHWITP gave specific instructions to flunk four of us; instead, sis got us paired with the four best… for once, I wasn’t expected to “just vault over”, I was told how! The B+ I got that month wasn’t any gift, I’d actually learned something for the first and last time in 9 years of PhysEd.

Does it work? Hell yes, for both parts. Having to explain things to someone who “doesn’t see it” made me have to really analyze those things; it taught me to look for alternative explanations that different people would understand. In 11th grade, several of my classmates didn’t understand “the charging of condensers”; realizing who it was, I asked the teacher for permission to give it a try when he just couldn’t think of another explanation… “he-electrons and she-protons” worked just fine. You see, those classmates were the girls whose life revolved around “having a boyfriend”. When my Physics 101 college professor started his explanation on “she-electrons and he-protons”, I laughed out so loud he asked what’s the joke.

Right now I’m taking a break from writing a course that’s going to be used to train several thousand lab workers over the next five years. When I joined my current team, the bosses were skeptic when I said I “enjoy and am good at course preparation”; most consultants hate it. After giving me one to do and seeing the result, they’ve handed me a dozen more. Where did I learn those skills? Teaching a dyslexic how to read, that’s where.

27

From the article BrainGlutton indicated:

To me, tutoring those students (who weren’t necessarily “the dumb ones”… the same student could be helped in Math and helper in Bio) gave me a wall I hit and needed to figure out how to get over. If I’d just been allowed to go to the pool, I wouldn’t have hit that wall until I was a college graduate and, like so many of my colleagues, would hate it because I wouldn’t be equipped to deal with it.

The two best times of my life were 4th-year in college and one of my jobs. They were the two times when I had to work “brakes off” instead of going through life waiting for everybody else to catch up.

28

I see. And such it will always be, I’m afraid. One of the indicators of giftedness is going into great depth about something, almost obsessively. That teaches how to use resources more effectively, as a side effect. Today, however, it is a lot easier to use resources than it was when I was a kid. To do any kind of decent research I had to take the bus to the central library and pore through the Reader’s Guide. Oh for Google!

29

Maybe so, but it’s not unreasonable for governments to make extra resources available to help people who can’t take advantage of other public resources.

30

Its not, I think a matter of whether one is spoon-fed or not, but rather a matter of mental stimulation.

I say this in my capacity as a tutor for the British national gifted and talented ‘academy’, but it becomes a matter of being able to be stretched in a classroom type environment. You’re right in that the G&T kids really don’t need spoon-feeding, but what they do need, in my experience, is firstly to be reassured that they’re not freaks for enjoying something academic and secondly to be shown that there is more to the subject they’re interested in beyond the ‘boring’ stuff that they’re being forced to do in normal classes at school. This takes time and money, and is woefully underfunded.

The courses I teach are week-long residential courses at a dedicated centre and day-long events at local centres (mainly universities). We don’t charge for the day events, but obviously the residential courses do need to be paid for obviously. Even with a dedicated centre these cost about £1000 per student, and are heavily subsidised already, we only ask the student or the school to stump up £200 per student, the rest comes from a combination of government funding and a charitable trust.

In the years I’ve been teaching the courses, I’ve been consistently amazed by the students, the questions they ask, the issues they raise, the way they tackle problems etc would put many undergraduate students to shame. At the end of it, the evaluation forms all have a consistent theme: “we loved this week, we want to be able to do more of this, and wish we were challenged in school like this.”

Their work was consistently amazing, they went into obsessive detail about things, devising novel methods in order to try to do things properly. They don’t get to do this at school; at school they’re unchallenged and more or less left to their own devices. Its one thing to go off on your own bat and do extra research because you enjoy it (and they do), its entirely different to be able to do it in a classroom setting and not feel like a freak because you did more homework than the teacher really wanted. And in my experience (having been in that position as a student), its the feeling like a freak bit that needs more help than the rest of it, and having dedicated G&T programmes is one way to stop that feeling and means that the students are challenged consistently in a classroom environment.

31

Well, we could all move to Lake Wobegon where every student is above average or we can recognize that no matter where you draw the curve there are going to be students on both ends of it. And we can also recognize that any allocation of finite resources requires that decisions be made about how much of a share every indivudal gets - and “everybody gets all of it” isn’t a possible answer.

32

It only made me bored, because instead of being allowed to progress at my own pace beyond the material I already knew, I was being forced to re-hash it over and over again, which I found to be extremely unfair.

Those who couldn’t get it never did, and I missed opportunities to learn something new and be challenged. I thought it was an awful way to go about things then, and I still do.

I really don’t see the need to ‘look for alternative explanations’ for concepts that I already have mastered. That time being wasted on rehashing the same thing could be better spent learning something new. There are plenty of walls to hit at levels far and above what I was forced to go over again and again because we just had to have the 140 IQs in with the 70 IQs.

The material was constantly far beneath my level, far above theirs, and only suitable to the middle of the road, C-average kid. I spent the first thirteen years of my education bored out of my mind because I wasn’t allowed to go beyond what was in the lesson plan - and that material was so easy I could’ve done it in my sleep. Many times, I did do it in my sleep. I’d have all my work done in the first five minutes of class, and then have to go about explaining it to the slow kids rather than learning something else. I used to take it upon myself to find new things to learn, and I would be punished for it. I spent an entire year on detention for reading books like The Scarlet Letter and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye.

That was fifth grade, where I was told that I was not supposed to learn those books until high school, and that if I read them in fifth grade, there would be nothing to teach me in eleventh grade. Should I have sat back and been happy about being stifled? How is that better for the gifted kid than continually challenging them to grow and learn and seek out their own top-end limits?

Artificially throwing a block in front of the gifted kids at the same level as everyone else is like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then telling them to be happy about hobbling as fast on crutches as everyone else can run.

33

The education column in the Times today is about how the demands of No Child Left Behind has led to the gutting of gifted programs throughout the country. Gifted kids are always going to pass the tests, so schools under the gun are going to take money from them and put them on those who are at risk. While it is important to bring everyone up to speed, we shouldn’t shortchange people who are going to be important for the growth of the country.

Should my high school have taken money from the basketball team to provide me and my friends more basketball practice and coaching? The basketball team at my high school was not at risk of producing NBA stars!

34

See Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron.

35

My recollections of Gifted and Talented programs include being pulled out of math instruction every day for three years (so that I was actually behind in math when I got to junior high) to go glue macaroni to paper plates in the room next door to where the remedial/special ed. were gluing macaroni to their own paper plates.

36

We were supposed to be learning advanced things, like algebra and foreign languages, in elementary school starting with second grade. Unfortunately our district couldn’t afford to hire teachers who knew the subject matter to teach us, so we ‘learned’ Spanish from a teacher who couldn’t speak Spanish, and never got to algebra. Instead, we had to help other kids learn the multiplication tables and spelling words.

37

My daughter got pulled out for “Gifted” instruction in reading and writing in 4th grade–and then, since she had missed Science by being pulled out, was told to “just read the textbook; you’ll catch on quick enough.”

She was essentially punished for being gifted–made to do independent study in a subject she was not gifted in(science). I have never understood this bias against “gifted” students–many, if not most GT students need instruction and guidance, just at a more sophisticated level. They don’t all just “figure it out on their own.”
I was the farthest thing from gifted when it came to math, but I well remember when the slower students (handicapped and “retarded”) were mainstreamed. The teacher spent so much time trying to understand this one child, that she literally had no time for our questions. I received no math instruction in 6th grade, essentially. The teacher was determined that Jimmy would have a good experience. Well, bully for Jimmy, but there were other students who also needed instruction, but Jimmy came first. (this sounds awful, but I still resent that today. I’m all for educating the handicapped etc, but not at the expense of the average and the gifted).

I am glad I never had to “teach” slower students in history or English–that would have turned me off those two subjects for life.

38

There are lots of ways of screwing this up. Our advocacy group meetings often had a lot of time taken by the parents complaining to the GATE specialist about problems. The first one I knew had a lot of influence, and worked hard about correcting problems, but how many districts had this and a parents group?

Here’s how this got handled in schools in Queens in the '60s. it worked really well for me, though you’ll probably consider me an elitist - hey - what happened to the putz smiley?!?

In elementary school there were four classes per grade, and after second grade we were sorted by some measure of intelligence, test scores, or what have you. It was pretty clear which was which. My class got special language instruction from third grade onwards.

In junior high there were 12 regular classes, and 6 SP (special progress) classes in 7th and 9th grades. Three were accelerated, and took two years to get through junior high. The three SP classes were pretty much equivalent, but the regular classes were numbered in order of achievement, with 12 being the special ed class. That kid would not have taken a teacher’s time. One special ed kid was in my shop class, and I’m glad I got to know him, but this was before mainstreaming.

In high school we were big enough to have two levels of honors classes, besides the few AP classes given in those days. All I can say was that I was never bored in high school, and I got to be with a group of kids who considered learning and intelligence nothing to be ashamed of. My AP history teacher never assigned homework besides reading and never gave tests, because he knew that we didn’t need to jump through hoops. I think half of us got 5s on the AP test.

This philosophy wasn’t limited to academics. Because of the size of the class, the gym teacher never gave us dweebs a hard time so long as we gave the basketball shoot a chance.

I don’t know if the kids in the middle classes felt oppressed, or did better because they were with their peers. Our high school had the best scores of any non-specialized school in New York, so something worked. I suspect, as usual, our parents had more to do with it than we did.

Anyone have similar experiences? Is this too elitist for words? The Times column today noted that schools like MIT, Harvard, and CalTech (okay, maybe not Harvard :slight_smile: ) were schools for the gifted, and no one compains about that.

39

This sounds rather like ‘streaming’ or ‘setting’ that we have in the UK; basically each year group is divided into classes based on ability. At my school we were ‘setted’ initially based on what our primary school records were like, and then class assessment became the criterion for moving between sets, i.e. if you were ‘average’ at primary school but were a late academic bloomer, this would be noted and you would be moved class accordingly, and likewise if you were an average fish in a small pond at primary school, but it became obvious that you couldn’t cope with the high end, then your set was adjusted too. IMO it did work rather well.

40

We call it tracking here. And all the elementary school teachers will deny it, but the parents have figured it out, as have the kids. Both my older kids were in the “identified gifted pool” before 3rd grade, and in some type of program from 3rd grade on–not in all subjects. After 3rd grade, the pullout gifted stuff starts, and continues through middle school. My daughter, who qualified for honors social studies and history in middle school, was not allowed in the class, due to size constraints-catch that happening to a remedial student. Requirements for remedial or special ed are state mandated (dunno if they’re federally mandated), so the school must find the helpers, room etc. Not so for gifted kids. She was heartily bored in her soc studies class, until the teacher petitioned the school to allow him to present her with the gifted curriculum. They allowed it and so she did independent study (essentially) there as well.

HS is much better–it’s a blue ribbon school several times over (for what that’s worth).

Our HS has three levels–all called things very PC. When I went to this HS, we also had 3 levels, not so PC: they were honors, regular and essential. Now they are honors, college prep and regular. This is supposed to have improved something, not sure just what (although I do think that the relabelling probably helps the more remedial students-nothing like having a level called “essential” to tell you, you aren’t going to college). Anyway, students in the honors and college prep levels are encouraged to take AP classes. The curriculum is rigorous, as it was for me in that HS way back when. I took Existential Lit and Lit of the Absurd–in HS, as well as Shakespeare, Poetry etc. These were not part of a larger English class–these were the classes. It was very much like college. I loved it.
The special ed kid, God love him, had cerebral palsy, a horrible speech impediment and some retardation issues. He was very nice, but he required too much one to one attention to be mainstreamed.