Re:Should gifted students go to a separate school?
by stevejb on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @02:06PM
(#13484779)
When I was a kid, I would happily teach another kid something if that kid was generally smart. It was an investment of time. There was the possibility that they could teach me things.
For a given pair of students X and Y, it may be a poor investment for X to teach Y anything, if X will almost surely dominate Y within the problem domain. It would be stupid to force X to teach Y in this setting.
Re:Should gifted students go to a separate school?
by ZeroGravitas on Thursday January 26, 2017 @06:21AM
(#13490468)
I think the general argument is that attempting to teach something, forces you to work with the material in your own head in a way that improves your own understanding. This is similar to "rubber duck debugging" where explaining a problem to an inanimate object leads you to the solution. But interacting with an actual human being often helps too.
In a thread filled with anecdotes, and people who consider themselves experts on school because they went to one, the idea that you criticize is just about the only one with basis in research. Teaching the material is an effective way to gain insight on a subject.
> We don't gain anything by throttling the motivation of gifted kids
This keeps surfacing every time someone brings up education. Probably because it is so easy to argue against. The thing is, nobody wants to do that. The question at hand here is what makes for a better education for gifted children. That's not as clear cut as one might think.