All of them went on to become successful in college (only a few have graduated so far). They consist of medical students in top medical schools in the country, one International Physics Olympiad gold medalist (currently at MIT), one International Chemistry Olympiad gold medalist (currently at U of Tokyo). All of them from a 200k-people city in a developing country and I only taught math to a few classes of these students (for about 4 years) before moving on to another education venture.
I would say it is highly likely most of these students would go on to have very good careers. We still do not know whether they will achieve great things but their trajectory is much brighter than average kids.
I agree that putting young kids in remedial classes could be problematic, but gifted kids do benefit from suitable gifted education.
If you show me that other students don't benefit from suitable gifted education, then you'll have an argument. Claiming that treating children with gifted education increases their chance of success is obvious, but misses the point, does it not?
I can specifically remember back to when the TAG Math students (Talented and Gifted) were learning what negative numbers were. I kept hearing about them. I imagined what they might mean, how you use them. When I was finally introduced one year later, I was disappointed, you mean it's literally just subtraction? I could have done that one year ago. And same with all the other students in the normal math course, if they had the same level of attention and care.
The worst part was this: the students in TAG math had a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, while the normal math students had a ratio of 20:1. The remedial students had a ratio of 10:1, but the remedial teacher was from the special ed department, not a specialized math teacher that the TAG and normal students got. The TAG program at my school was praised, and the teacher acted as if she was doing God's work. Of course, she had children who were students at the school, and of course, they were in all of her classes.
Now, looking back on it, I realize how broken this frame of thinking is. Yes, students will benefit if you put them in an elite math course with more resources than other children. Other students will bare the cost. I think a better allocation of our time and money would be to spread resources evenly. If you really want to get ahead by one or two years, take summer classes in middle or high school. That way, the students bares the cost of the additional time and effort, and we can still evenly allocate resources so every eight year old gets the same opportunity.
EDITS: spelling bear -> bare
You're thinking about this as if they're taking your resources. Let me turn this around for you. What if they aren't being given special treatment because they need the resources, but because they need an environment where the way they think is acceptable? How many of them would still show any talent or aptitude in normal class with normal classmates? Think about your reaction to negative numbers versus their own. Maybe gifted and talented classes aren't so much giving them more resources as they are giving them an appropriate education. Maybe it's about creating a safe environment for kids who tend to be more abstract to flourish.
The notion that gifted students need a special environment to learn is comical. If they're actually talented and gifted, they should certainly be able to learn effectively in the same environment as "normal" students.
Learning to read and do arithmetic is important in the 3rd grade, but it isn't as important as learning social and communication skills. I don't deny that there are gifted individuals among us, I'm advocating that we wait on trying to identify the gifted ones at least until puberty.
Another data point from a personal perspective: I was fairly gifted (though far less than the names I mentioned) and came up with the idea of limits in math on my own when I was 9 years old. I never got any proper mentorship and the development of my math skills and intuition was held back by the boring classroom materials and routine homework I needed to attend/finish. I did not have access to or even aware of any advanced materials I could learn from, and thus wasted several of the best years to develop those math skills and intuition.
They may need a special environment to be allowed to excel in learning without getting bullied.
I was just responding to this paragraph:
> Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception.
All kids would likely benefit from a better form of teaching than the conventional school methods. However if you get a classroom of gifted children and you add a non-gifted child, the non-gifted child likely won’t be able to keep up at the same pace. There’s something to be said about segregating children with similar learning abilities so that the pace of the classes are at good levels for everyone in the class.
My son is already reading at an advanced level and doing math while his classmates barely know the alphabet. He hates school because it's so boring. We are sending him to a class with similarly gifted children so that he won't hate school and will be challenged. Keeping him in a class where kids don't learn as quickly as he does would definitely be a disaster in this case.
Sure, but why?
There are few Academic Olympiad gold medalists from the city. In fact, I only know of these two who were my own students so far and another bronze medalist many years previously. (From his later scholarship--he is now a math professor--I think he would have earned a gold medal had he have gifted education back then.)
That said, it was not a controlled experiment so you can think of it as a case study but not gold-standard randomized controlled trial.
The test was a set of challenge-style math problems for primary kids. Solving them would require more creativity and facility with thought than regular math problems.
I was in the “slow” reading group for the first half of first grade, then quickly got moved to the “fast” group and eventually ended up scoring a perfect score on the verbal portion of the MCAT as well as top percentiles on other standardized tests. My point is that sometimes remedial has nothing to do with potential.
We should stop viewing remedial as “bad.”
Needless to say, I am also very skeptical of identifying gifted students at a young age. IMO society over-values so called natural talent, and trying to find that talent in an 8 year old is silly, with rare exception.
Now, many of my higher performing peers from 3rd grade are lost. Hopping from career to career, city to city without a sense of direction. A few of the high performers have gone on to do impressive things, but nothing shocking, nothing that is any more impressive than what my stoner friends and I were able to accomplish after a few extra years to mature.
It took me more time to find that what I really enjoyed was engineering and math. Of course, this is a first person account, so take it or leave it. Worth noting that there is a whole lot of very bad education research, so anyone whipping out journal articles to prove a point should be cautious.
The problem with treating "gifted" students differently is similar to gender bias in STEM, and racial bias in education overall. Some people are told they can, and other are implicitly told they can't. These messages get internalized by students, especially if you are unlike myself and don't have a mother who will stick up for you, and take you out of that remedial math course.