1. The gifted program (at my school) was next to worthless. We skipped one regular crap class (social studies) to go build paper airplanes to prepare for this competition: http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/
2. Early intervention (yes funded with tax payer dollars as part of a program) helped my son with high functioning autism. Due to that intervention he is now (besides from some personality quirks and the occasional melt down) virtually indistinguishable from any other student. In fact his IQ puts him very close to the gifted range.
Yes, this is a personal anecdote.
I would like to see the research on gifted programs. Are they worth the cost?
As a "gifted" student, I learned much more from the library (and now the intranet) than any kind of gifted program.
This program was great. I loved it and learned a lot. However, it was controversial because it came at the expense of what was called "mini-school", a program for low achieving (but not handicapped) students, which basically allowed them to do very little academic work and still graduate.
Trading one of these programs for another was a bad choice though. While I clearly didn't suffer negative consequences, every student that took a normal (not mini-school, not high achieving) class did, as they suddenly had a bunch of kids who didn't do well in a normal school environment disrupting their learning.
The lesson I took away from this is that regardless of "giftedness" students will generally self select into the level of classes that is appropriate for them. All that the school needs to do is provide these classes. While this is a hard question, I think it is a more appropriate question than "what do you do with gifted kids"?
Its a great program though. We competed in the "structures" division, where you build balsa wood structures and see how much weight they can hold. You also have to perform skits (think mini theatre performances) and do "spontaneouses", impromptu activities designed to make you think creatively or work as a team.
Totally awesome program, definitely on my short list of things I'll get my kids involved in.
1. I was also in a couple of gifted programs in school that didn't do much. They were fun at the time, but I don't really think they helped me develop much personally.
2. I participated in some out of school gifted programs that helped me tremendously. I also just learned things on my own time for fun.
3. I went to 2 different middle schools and 3 different high schools (one of them being the school recieving the lowest amount of funding among all the schools in the state). Most of them were really tight on money and were cutting a lot of programs, both academic and otherwise.
While I do wish that school sponsered gifted programs could get more funding as I know gifted programs can be great, if money is tight, I'd rather money go to other programs. There are many ways a gifted child can learn on their own if they choose to, if some one has an undiagnosed learning disability they can't just change that on a whim.
Really I wish schools just got more funding in general. It varies greatly from school to school (I reccently saw my partners old high shcool and I was amazed at how nice the they had proper gym equipment and clean facilities, I don't know about their actual programs, but it looked like they'd have the money to spend on gifted programs), but at the schools I went to there simply wasn't enough money to go around.
I think I did "Crunch" (building a balsa wood structure to hold weight) and "Scientific Safari" (some really lame skit thing)...
http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/materials/1995problems.php#p...
http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/materials/1996problems.php#p...
When I was in elementary school, I went to Spokane District 81's Tessera program. That program challenged me, and encouraged creative and self-directed study. I absolutely credit it with a big piece of how I think today.
When I was in middle school, I took the school's gifted class as an elective. We made gingerbread houses, told stories, carved pumpkins, and did word search puzzles. It was a profound waste of time.
I have always had a hard time making friends because I think differently than most people. Tessera was the sole exception to that, and I wouldn't have traded it for anything.
False dichotomy.
1) To begin with, scholastic success correlates most heavily with income, so we're not quite rewarding what you might think we're rewarding
2) The whole purpose in this case is to help these kids become independent or be able to function properly in society. Cutting these kinds of programs only increases the number of people who need to be assisted.
> "When you read articles like this one, you realize that the people who move society forward in leaps and bounds, the ones who create great businesses, create new products, discover new medicines are predominantly the talented and gifted ones."
This is a tautology. These people don't necessarily do well in school. Success in school != success in life, despite what my family told me.
But why screw with the disabled and learning challenged when there is the other 79.5% of the funding you are ignoring? Or the fact that massive funds are spent on standardized testing which can be so difficult that high-achieving adults have trouble passing them?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/2011/1...
The talented and gifted students don't really need much help in school. Often the best thing you can do is get out of their way, perhaps offer them some organizational skills, but those should be offered to all students. I got more from that in school than any other instruction offered.
That couldn't be further from the truth. Every study shows that T&G students need more interaction and more guidance than other students to ensure their increased appetite for knowledge is met. Otherwise, they become bored and disinterested. If you read the Steve Jobs bio, it's a great example of what happens when a gifted kid isn't taught properly
Now, I'm a professional programmer so of course I'm just fine. But I think I might be even more accomplished if I had a little more help in high school (today's internet might have also sufficed). I think the real super geniuses might not be held back, but I think there are lot of cases like me where you have less than genius but above average intelligence that could accomplish a lot more if challenged a little more.
I would appreciate citations to any study you can cite for interested readers here. There seem to be quite a few comments on this issue in this subthread, so let's all check sources together.
Did you look at the test? He may be considered "high-achieving", but don't you wonder what he's missing by being innumerate?
Here's one HN thread, with links to a Florida test.
As phillmv pointed out, this is a false dichotomy. If somehow these two were mutually exclusive, I would argue that (if anything) spending on gifted students hurts disabled students. Like pragmatic, I also have some experience with programs for the learning disabled and for the gifted. My twin brother Henry is extremely "intellectually disabled" (he has severe Autism and cannot speak English or take care of himself).I tested into my school district's gifted program in 4th grade. The gifted programs at the schools in the district seem very well funded, while the care my brother was bad enough that we moved Henry to a private school.
> If we as a nation are making a decision to cut funding to these gifted students, are we at the same time making a decision that jeopardizes the advancement of our society as a whole.?
Don't be ridiculous. Gifted programs are pretty useless. The truly gifted will find time to work on what they're good at, no matter the circumstances. Speaking from personal experience as a student in my district's gifted programs, most of them are wastes of time and money because they don't allow students to explore what they're interested in.
My elementary school's gifted program was worthless - we gifted students skipped social studies (like pragmatic) and learned... all about Louis and Clark's journeys. If you weren't interested, too bad. The program did not suffer from lack of funding - We had guest speakers and access to the internet - but lack of good design.
In middle school, we got to skip one class a week to work on whatever we wanted (within limits). Every week there were a couple of different projects that we could work on. My favorite were the lego mindstorms, but I also really enjoyed some of our literature units. The program was extremely well done - give students a chance to miss a class they dislike to focus on something they might, while still exposing them to different areas of knowledge.
Unfortunately, the Highschool's program was terrible. Taking the place of a free period, we had a curriculum set without any input from the students. There were no grades, but we were expected to attempt to do well anyway, regardless of whether or not the area of study was interesting (usually not). Again, it didn't suffer from lack of money, but fundamental problems in how that money was used.
About nine out of ten gifted students at my school dropped out of the program after the first year of Highschool because it was such a waste of time. All of these kids are intelligent and hard-working - they quit because they realized they could spend their time more efficiently.
DISCLAIMER - This is all based off of personal experience. I cannot speak for all gifted programs in all schools.
What we call "gifted" has nothing to do with "gifts" during the elementary education phase. It has to do with a child's learning style properly fitting the surrounding environment. These children succeed because they fit the system. Others, like me, who have an "impedance" mismatch with the educational environment struggle to gain basic skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic.
However, if those basic skills can be mastered and the environment can be altered to fit these "disabled" students they can become highly successful. I consider myself to have succeeded in academia despite not learning to read till the third grade. If I had not been placed in the proper program I would have likely failed to learn to read, write and do arithmetic for a much longer period of time.
While "gifted" students need assistance and programs designed for their needs as much as "disabled" students it makes no sense to reduce already limited resources available to programs for disabled children. These children can become productive, highly successful individuals if given the proper support.
How do you handle properly socializing your kids? You can't teach them that.
Something else I've noticed is that homeschooling has given me a certain resilience to crappy teaching in college. I don't care as much, because I know I can just read the book and get what I need.
We're very concerned with socialization. I dont have time to talk about it right now, but I'm not convinced that what goes on in a typical school is in any way "normal". It is a very contrived environment.
My wife and I home schooled (up to high school) our kids and socialization is a non-issue for three reasons:
1) There are other home schooled kids and they often get together in groups (more on that in a minute).
2) Good home schooling involves interacting with a lot more people from different backgrounds giving more social experience per unit time.
3) One of the common complaints of school students is how messed up the social scene is with regard to cliques, fashion herds, and morality memes.
The image that comes to mind when you think 'home school' is that you and your kid, one on one, going through the curriculum. However, there are lots of people and if you look around you will find that a lot of them are home schooling too. When you find the group that is compatible with your tastes you can plan group activities. Our group was covering science by each parent taking the whole group one day a week to focus on something they knew really well, that group was 10 - 15 kids of a variety of ages.
Then there are programs like the Riekes Center[2] which spend one day a week with a group of kids understanding a local park's biological diversity.
The bottom line is that socialization is the least of the problems you will face. Things that annoy you, people 'turning you in' because your kids aren't in school. People assuming that because you are home schooling you are a science hating religious fanatic, or are a science hating alternate medicine/crystal/universe fanatic, or are sacrificing your child's well-being because they are too lazy to go to school.
[1] "bogey man" that mythical creature that is going to 'get you' if you don't conform. Used by parents to tell kids that if they don't go to sleep the bogey man will get them.
I went to one of the most backwards and messed-up schools here, a Christian Brothers all-male, catholic priest-taight school... in the 1990s! (it has since reformed and is now mixed-gender)
Stories of bullying often end up with lots of comments here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709733
Not many people care about those with a learning disability - see the death rates and poor health outcomes for simple illnesses.
Whether it's acceptable to have the IBMs and DuPonts providing funding for education is up for debate. Seeing the god-awful job that governments make of education for regular students I'm not sure many people would be too upset.
Finally: learning disabled covers a wide range; unfortunately it's sometimes used to include "people with mild dyslexia", and everything done for those people gets included in that budget. So people with severe need may not be seeing much result from that money because it's all being used for, for example, photocopying handouts onto different color paper.
From an economic perspective it just doesn't seem like a valuable use of resources.
The amount of money spent on education goes farther if the people being educated have more potential. You could use the money to make someone below average less below average, or you could make someone above average into the next Einstein. I'd rather spend my money on the future researcher that cures cancer rather than on someone who will do little more than collect welfare checks and eat a bunch of high fructose corn syrup.
(The good news is that enough money seems to be being spent on gifted programs. I got to go to a state-sponsored math and science high school, and it was the best experience of my life.)
A much more tailored approach is needed, where students falling behind are helped in their specific problem areas, and gifted/exceptional students are allowed to progress at whatever rate they're capable of. This doesn't need to cost more, either, this is not a matter of setting up an exponential number of schools/classes. Technology can easily do most of this, but a large number of sacred cows would need to die.
Ultimately IMO this boils down to the fundamental problem facing our society right now--vested interests controlling the political process to maintain the completely outdated status quo. You see this pretty much everywhere you look.
But it always awesome to see gifted kids like this young woman overcome the system to do incredible things. I'm looking forward to seeing what she does next.
To me it was obvious this was bad for both, but especially the disabled students who could be served much better in a specialized school.
But then once I learned more US history regarding segregating different groups of people... well I still think it's a bad way to go, but now at least I understand why it is that way.
In other countries disabled students attend specialized schools who provide them with a much better level of services. The concentration of students with disabilities allows for the concentration of people with advance and specialized skills. This not usually possible in a standard school, where only a very small number of students is disabled.
My mother was a special education teacher - her students had emotional and cognitive disabilities. While she taught inside of a normal elementary school, she was really in a school-within-a-school. All of her students had emotional disabilities, and they had a separate staff and reporting structure than the rest of the school.
Some emotionally disabled kids can go into general education later on, but not all of them can.
Now, physically disabled students is a different matter entirely. They have the same emotional and cognitive abilities as everyone else. I think they should be in the same classes, and the general educational system should accommodate them.
I recall there probably are even some researches indicating that if you treat a student like genius, he or she will most likely turn into genius. We can't reliably measure what we call "natural abilities".
In other words, what you need IMO is not only spending more money on talented students, but also considering more students gifted and talented. Although this is probably slightly out of scope here. =)
Obviously there was a time cost involved in having someone do that instead of other duties, but that would not have shown up as extra budget.
It may seem completely insensitive to argue against helping disabled students, but it seems to be happening at the expense of the gifted students. When you read articles like this one, you realize that the people who move society forward in leaps and bounds, the ones who create great businesses, create new products, discover new medicines are predominantly the talented and gifted ones.
If we as a nation are making a decision to cut funding to these gifted students, are we at the same time making a decision that jeopardizes the advancement of our society as a whole.?