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Gifted Issues
WorryHurry411
950 replies162 threads Senior Member
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Replies to: Gifted Issues
"Despite their remarkable success, researchers concluded that the profoundly gifted students had experienced roadblocks along the way that at times prevented them from achieving their full potential."
This article was posted on FB by a friend who is facing difficulties in finding good programs for his gifted child. His kid's IQ is 160 so far ahead of peers in his school's "G&T" program that's basically a hideout for special snowflakes of white PTA moms. Do you agree or disagree that "extremely" gifted ones suffer from lack of opportunities?
I would have liked the article a lot better if it focused on what[s best for the children rather than the author's idea of how they could best be exploited to meet society's needs.
Using my own kid as an example, she was not in any GT programs. She is not gifted, but she is very intelligent. She is also shy and quiet. Not at all the typical GT kid, at least in our district. She was not recommended for the accelerated math track in 5th grade. A decision made about my kid when she was 10 had repurcussions that have lasted for the rest of her school years. Her math grades in 6th grade were always near 100%. By the time I realized we could have petitioned for her to be moved to the accelerated track, she was in 8th grade and it was too late.
Because of the math issue, she ended up all through high school having to petition to take classes such as H chem, AP Stats, and H physics. Now as a senior, she is probably in the top 5% of kids in our high school, certainly in terms of AP classes, AP test scores, and SAT test scores. In our district, it is easy to see how kids progress because all kids move through school together. Quite a few of the kids that were in the GT program in grades 4-5 have in fact just been "regular" students since entering high school. And yes, the kids who are gifted (3 or 4 in my opinion) are very obviously gifted. Some kids excel in a particular area such as math or language arts. They are "gifted" in those areas.
GT programs in younger grades are great because kids are being stimulated and they are in an environment with other motivated kids and energetic teachers. Wouldn't it be great though if most kids were taught this way all the time? This could devolve into an entirely different topic, but because teachers have to teach kids to take tests, kids who really could be moving at a faster pace are constrained. My main point here though is that some kids need more time to mature and it may not be apparent unitl they are in middle school that they are capable of learning much more than what they are being taught. Gifted kids need more, and so do really intelligent kids. IMO, teachers need to cultivate the kids who aren't just outgoing and enthusiastic. They should also be looking for the quiet ones who are listening and observing.
The problem is that in many schools it's considered too politically incorrect to teach some kids above grade level, especially the younger they are. Somehow this magically becomes a non-issue around 7-8th grade when it's finally acknowledged that some kids are ready for algebra and others aren't and the idea of separating kids into different classrooms and teaching them at the level they are ready to learn at is now ok--generally unquestioned and uncontroversial. Unfortunately for the kids at the high end this is way too late--the differences were probably apparent in kindergarten but the usual kinds of testing they do simply measures whether the kid knows what they are supposed to know at the end of the year and ignores the fact that these kids already knew it at the beginning of the year and spent a year being "taught" things they already knew. The ceilings on these tests are often too low to measure progress. No one is taking responsibility for making sure they learn appropriately and despite our testing happy culture, no one is taking responsibility even for documenting the progress of these students because they aren't being given appropriate assessments. Administrators pat themselves on the back when a kid gets a perfect test score but they don't ask whether that kid could have gotten that perfect test score in the beginning of the year and whether the instruction was appropriate and whether the kid learned anything.
@WorryHurry411 Don't know what grade your friend's kid is in, but if he's not yet hit the 7th grade, check into the Caroline D. Bradley scholarship program - it's highly competitive but recipients get private HS tuition covered anywhere they can gain admittance, and that includes boarding schools. Kids apply as 7th graders. If your friend can afford boarding school, that might be one avenue. Another would be to enrich curriculum with on-line courses offered by CTY, Duke TIP, Stanford, etc. Dual enrollment at a local college might work - but that might merely mean that the students are older, not necessarily smarter.
ETA: there was a thread in the boarding school section of the forum authored by a NY city based parent who was seeking boarding schools for his/her PG daughter. Might be worth a look over there.
The gifted program (just for math and English, just 4th and 5th grade) was a pretty good fit for kid number two. The older one was still bored. The older one got into computer programming, is in his dream job and is not particularly ambitious to go further. He is unlikely to change the world. (Though he's making your searches at Google faster and more accurate.) The younger one, with more social graces, I think might end up accomplishing more.
High school was a different matter, largely because there were always AP courses, and students who were especially gifted in math and had exhausted their options in the HS could enroll in a course or two at the nearby university.
So how did we handle this? Our oldest had hobbies, ones that deeply involved him. Fantasy baseball, statistics. But he was good enough in math that in 7th grade he finished 2nd in statewide math competition -- and never prepped for it or had any special courses.
Even in HS he was not very stimulated by his courses, but he found satisfaction in his hobbies, in particular (again) fantasy sports, but also in some EC's: debate and journalism. When he ran out of math courses at the high school he did not want to take additional coursework at the university. So we didn't push this.
When he got to college, there was no college debate team but he did write for the school newspaper, and he graduated with honors in a mathy subject (economics). In life after college, after deciding he didn't want to pursue an advanced degree, and after working for a few years for a consulting firm, he has had great career success as a very mathy journalist. I think in retrospect our school district's working philosophy wasn't wrong. Gifted kids will succeed.
Our schools don't really have a gifted program other than a few hours of pull out in the elementary schools, which was politically unsustainable, so it became push-in so that all kids are now included in the gifted program. My kids were in classes with kids who flunked the grade or the kids who arrived in class with their own special teacher who according to my kid, spent most of her energy trying to keep them from disrupting the class. Usually unsuccessfully.
It measures reasoning skills like inference, classification, and deduction skills.
Our district tests using the CoGAT in kindergarten and then again in 2nd grade. After successfully scoring in the top 2% on the CoGAT, kids are given the SOI. If they score high enough on that as well, they are invited to a pull out program in k-2.
Kids have to test again in 2nd grade. If their scores aren't at a qualifying level, they are not invited back. So if you had a 98% in K and then a 96% in 2nd, you don't qualify for 3-5 gifted instruction. The gifted instructor said that is the worst conversation to have with parents. Also, if too many kids qualify, they end up just taking the tippy top qualifiers. It means having to tell parents their kid who was identified as gifted in kindergarten is no longer identified as such in 2nd. Not fair and not a conversation I'd like to be a part of on either end.
The kids who score in the top 99th %ile are invited to participate in a full time gifted program within the district from 3-5th grade. They usually end up starting middle school in Algebra or higher.
The kids who score at 98% are invited to do the pull out program from 3-5.
Everyone has the option when choosing classes for 6th grade to accelerate or not (even if they were not in any gifted program). Our choices are Common Core 6th grade, CC 7/8, or CC 8 as 6th graders. They can also choose accelerated science and Language Arts.
They also have the option for kids to push ahead after 6th if they want.
I'd say we have about 70% of the kids follow grade level math standards in middle school, and start Geometry in 9th grade (that is our basic track here). About 25% finish Geometry up in 8th grade and do Algebra 2 as freshmen, and about 5% (15-20 kids a year?) finish Algebra 2 as 8th graders and start high school in Pre-Calculus.
When the school needed at make cut backs, they wanted to end the one day pull out. The parents of those "gifted" were outraged. How could they?
Where was your friend looking? We had a kid who was musically talented. We were fortunate that our schools had awesome music programs, but we also looked ourselves outside of school. We had no difficulty finding quality programs for our kid.
There are tons of resources to tap into...community colleges, continuing education programs. The key is to find an area of interest for the kid. There has to be at least one...and then look for opportunities that mesh with that.
One of my kids was asked to play in the middle school ensembles as a 5th grader (our MS was grades 7 and 8). We declined the offer. After all...even though put kid was a fine musician, the kid was 11, not 13.