VickiSoCal, I think that the statistics for your area’s school district that you referred to back in #7 may give you an inaccurate view of what is possible for many students, with appropriate acceleration in math. In the local school system, with about 400 students per class (so less than a fifth the size of your district), acceleration was possible in a pattern with 1 year acceleration into honors pre-algebra and then honors algebra in 6th and 7th grades. In 8th grade, 5 students took geometry, algebra 2 and trigonometry. Of this group, 3 took AP Calc BC and 2 took AP Calc AB in 9th grade. All 5 had scores of 5 on the AP exams and grades of A in the class. A larger group of students took AP Calc in 10th grade. It is possible that the difference is the timing of the acceleration, the quality of preparation prior to the AP class (which can vary a lot), or the receptivity of the teachers.
Math is different from literature in terms of the need for acceleration, in my view. Adults do not spend their time repetitively factoring quadratics, though they might factor one on rare occasions. When a student has learned to factor quadratics including the possibility of complex factors, there is not much left that is engaging, until the student comes to Galois theory (see above), or is as inventive as Galois. Typically, Galois theory is taught in second-semester college abstract algebra, though at Caltech, Harvard, and other schools, it may be reached in the first semester.
In literature, even if the classroom discussion is rather stifling, and the questions to be answered are relatively low-level, students at some point start to read books that adults would read, if they had not read them before. At this point, a gifted student can engage with the books at her/his own level, so the course material is much more suitable. (I don’t think a gifted student absolutely has to read Joyce in high school or before.)
I acknowledge that there are other opinions on the need for acceleration mathematics vs. the need in literature and other humanities.
As a humanities person, I generally agree with QM’s post above. Literature, taught right, isn’t content-based in the same way as math. That isn’t to say that being stuck in a class full of people years below your cognitive age can’t be maddening, but the threshhold for when it becomes an absolute waste of time is a lot higher.
Who would teach these super special geniuses? In what language? Where would the school be? Would regular smart people be allow to take classes also, or would they just slow down the class?
A gifted student is going to have the same issues whether it is math, science, literature or history. While it’s true that students can read books and therefore not be as stymied by a lack of information; They are still at a huge loss. Without their intellectual peers, they have no one to debate or learn from other than the material. Any person gifted in these fields will feel the same “otherness”.
In terms of a university for all the gifted. I think it really is a utopian ideal. First, where to put such a place. Second, the gifted can round out more colleges and universities tather than being stuck together. Often the best ideas are formulated by one and brought to light by another. I also agree with another poster that the entrance to such a place would be sought after. Much like the best private schools and universities, you would have many legacy types trying to get their sons and daughters in. And of course, that would narrow the field of excellence. Today we have too few ivies and the like compared to the number of people able and willing to fo the work. This can only lead to frustration.
There are numerous alternatives in the US system. For example, some stats about Caltech are below. Admission is not just about giftedness, but it’s closer than HYPSM. You cannot realistically expect a college to only care about giftedness and not things like academic preparedness and chance of academic success, or whether the student will make the university a better/worse place while attending. Caltech obviously isn’t free for all students, but top stat type kids generally do have other options that wold be free, including places with honors college type classes. One more realistic option would be private scholarships for gifted students, many of which already exist.
25th/75th Comp ACT: 34/36 (likely highest in US by a good margin)
25th/75th Math ACT: 35/36 (likely highest in US by a good margin)
~40% of students get PhDs (likely highest in US by a good margin)
~47% of undergrads are Asian, and only ~1% are Black
Athletics have little influence in admissions, some teams have had losing streaks lasting hundreds of games… no football team.
Caltech is also not that suitable for students gifted in non-math/science subjects but not gifted in math/science subjects.
But then there may be other schools suitable for students gifted in other areas (would elite music conservatories be analogs for musically gifted students?)
Happy me times -"A gifted student is going to have the same issues whether it is math, science, literature or history. While it’s true that students can read books and therefore not be as stymied by a lack of information; They are still at a huge loss. Without their intellectual peers, they have no one to debate or learn from other than the material. Any person gifted in these fields will feel the same “otherness”.
While I wouldn’t claim to be profoundly gifted, I was reading high-school level novels (aka, ordinary literature written for adults) by fourth grade. I don’t remember feeling great distress in IRLA classes - I was capable of reading at a far higher level, but the books we were reading still had interesting stories, and I was developmentally still enough of a child that it didn’t occur to me to consider myself above most discussions or activities (I did hate artwork and super cutesty “write a letter to your favorite character” assignments with a passion). When we had free reading (and, of course, at home), I read my own, more advanced books, and when we had to answer comprehension questions, I could turn my answers into more sophisticated, essay-style responses, which gave me enough opportunity to self-differentiate that I wasn’t perpetually bored.
I do remember being frustrated by the time 8th/9th grade rolled around that tracking in English didn’t start until 10th grade, but I still largely enjoyed English class.
I’m sure there are a few kids out there who are so gifted that they would feel tormented by a non-accelerated humanities curriculum, but, at the risk of arrogance, I don’t think there are all that many.
I would think that not being allowed to progress to higher level math would be more like telling an advanced reader that she has to stop in the middle of her current novel and not read anything else by her favorite authors for three or four years. Now that would have been unendurable!
@twoinanddone, FBOFW, my younger son played on the football team!
Both kids were tested at the request of their schools (we tested privately) in the hopes of unstringing the spaghetti between very high ability (3+sd) and other aspects that seemed way out of whack.
One had a 42-point differential between verbal and performance – he ceilinged highly indicative of LDs, and he wound up with executive function, fine motor and NVLD diagnoses to go with a max verbal score. He still struggles with that disparity. A lot.
The other one’s testing confirmed what we had known since he was two. Way, way out of the ball park.
We didn’t do SET, CTY, Davidson, etc. – they were both in HG+ programs and frankly, they relished the summers to pursue their own interests independently. We didn’t have the same kind of screaming need that other families who live in other areas that don’t offer GT programs have. We were lucky to have public schools that could accommodate their academic needs alongside age peers. They didn’t take the SAT until midway through junior year.
Not every student who’s involved in Davidson or SET does special summer programs. My sons used summers to work (as musicians and tutors), play sports, and do local (and cheap/free) summer chamber music festivals/camps. My eldest did research at the local state uni, as well. But neither ever did summer programs.
“The best we can get to in curriculum-centered US school systems is either full or partial home-schooling. We opted for partial as our schools were pretty OK at lab science, great a social studies and good at art, but could not help my kid at Math or English. I suspect that in a curriculum-centered system, the best one can do is pick and choose…”
I don’t understand how one parent at home can teach all the hs subjects with some level of competence. Maybe the other parent helps out when not at work or both parents are in a work from home/flexible job. I’m assuming that there is some sort of parent help or association where other parents help out in teaching. How can one person teach calculus ab or bc, and also apush, world lit, a language past tenth grade?
Second what about electives like band, cooking, wood shop where you need a facility, how are those taught? If there is someone that can clearly explain the primary themes of Macbeth and the Kite Runner, along with teaching how to do a Taylor series, well I tip my hat. I seriously do, because that is considerable knowledge.
My younger son (1992 birthday) got an IQ test at school along with a bunch of other tests because he seemed to be both gifted and to have strange deficits. His sub-scores were all over the map - ranging from 11 to 19 and he was what I’d call vanilla gifted. (130-140 IQ) the 4th and 5th grade enrichment program served him very well. My older son was another matter. (Like others he figured out multiplication on his own - at 4 he looked at the clock in his bedroom which had the numbers for minutes listed in multiples of 5 and said, “12 times 5 is 60” and then looked at the bigger picture. In elementary school one of his favorite books was about number series and combinations. He did a French project about Pascal’s triangle in 3rd grade. He got the computer programming bug when he was six. He read 400 page books under the desk in 4th grade and could always also answer the teacher’s questions to her amusement. He never had his IQ tested because no one who met him disagreed that he was highly gifted and precocious. I don’t think getting a formal test from one of the people in the NYC area who gave the old form of the WISC would have made any difference to his schooling. Every teacher he had tried to do some sort of accommodation. I suggested homeschooling many times, but he actually did have several friends in school and didn’t want to lose them. In the end school was six hours to get out of the way, then he went home and did what really interested him. We did get him +2 grades accelerated in math with lots of foot-stomping in middle school. High school was quite accommodating, but there were never any nearby colleges where he could take classes.
I remember realizing why he had so few intellectual equals even in our very large high school when I saw the CTY Hopkins tables. His scores were way way over on the right hand side of the bell curves and that’s already within a group of kids who have been identified as in the top 10% of their schools.
As far as I’m concerned for math at least there were never any downsides to grade acceleration in math - he went to a 3rd grade classroom in 1st grade. The 3rd graders treated him like a cute little mascot and were always very friendly to him outside of the classroom. It was way better than the 2nd grade experience of doing work sheets all of which seemed to be “How many permutations of this are there.” He got so bored with them, I taught him how to use Excel to solve the problems. One of them was darts in a dartboard - the person who put that sheet together must have been an idiot there were hundreds, if not thousands of combinations.
All my kid wanted was to learn something new every day in school. I get why that’s hard when you are 1 in a thousand, but it would have been nice if they’d figured something out.
“as @intparent mentioned, the bigger problem is what they have to do for too many hours everyday at school. Because after that, and sleeping and eating, there are not enough time and energy in a day to do what they need to become developmentally healthy.”
That would be a handful of people at most in a given generation, much less a year. There may be one or two people in a graduation class that can be on the level of Einstein in theoretical physics, Jefferson in government, Euler in mathematics, Keynes in economics. But to have one person be all these and be bored in all their classes would be a once in a century or millennium type individual.
My gifted kid will not do academic summer programs any more. We made a mistake last summer and did and will not do it again. She will work outdoors as a life guard and swim instructor and take at least two backpacking trips with Girl Scouts and I may feel comfortable with her doing some short trips alone with a friend this year. She needs to be outside and moving as much as possible. She’s miserable otherwise.
I don’t dare tread into the gifted discussion except to add a few thoughts on humanities vs. math. There’s this notion out there that it’s appropriate to accelerate math education but that everyone can benefit from the same education in history and literature. I see it in some of the responses here and I respectfully disagree. I say this after having had a child struggle through an inadequate humanities education to the point that it was always a worry and a problem.
I am not about to categorize my children’s cognitive levels and for all I know they are not gifted. All I can say is that my eldest was and is a voracious reader and writer from a very early age and it caused problems in school from the start. I think it was in first grade when I was first cornered by a teacher about her. Her writing was taking too long and she was not reading with expression. I think that was the complaint anyway. It only got worse. Like the time she wrote a murder mystery in 5th grade and I got a call carefully asking whether the school should be looking at her risk for violence.
In elementary school, I suspect she was not unusual in managing her elementary school classes by reading the textbooks ahead while others followed along and then by slipping her own book between the pages of the textbook so that she could read on her own. My sense is that many of these classes are pitched artificially low-there is this idea that it allows everyone to feel successful-to the point that the bulk of the kids in the class are bored.
By middle school she was about to drop out. You can’t really engage with the literature on your own level if you are required to follow strict templates and where the discussions do not encompass the depth and breadth of reading that she had done. The school didn’t know what to do with her and I worried that she was headed down a dangerous path. I changed her school.
And even then… By high school, she hung out with the English teachers and they were kind enough to engage with her. One of them commented at one point that she wished she could send my daughter in to sub for a class. AP English classes were open to most everyone in the school. By contrast, entry to higher level math meant passing a strict gatekeeper and standards had been established back in 5th grade. It’s really not fair to the kids who bring higher level skills and background to tell them that they can learn from anyone because the content is accessible to all. It just isn’t.
@3girls3cats I would guess at least one of your kids is gifted. My kid had the humanities issues as well.
@theloniusmonk, very few of these kids are bored in every subject. But often they are well ahead of their age group in 2-3 areas. No kid should have to twiddle their thumbs through most of English class for years while their peers struggle to remember the parts of speech, or read/analyze material years below their reading level.
3girls3cats: I wholeheartedly agree with you. Humanities has an equal level of giftedness as math or science. To be told to just read more books and self analyze stifles the kid as much as doing math facts hurts a math kid.
Thelonius Monk: As a person who is about equally gifted in both humanities and language arts, I can tell you that the schools met my math & science inclinations before they ever met the humanities side. I have seen the same with my own kids. Today, online learning can fill the humanities gaps for the kid who is self motivated. Again, there are limitations based on the financial resources of the family as well as local resources. However, you get back to some of the issues raised earlier-there is just not enough time in the day. And why should kids be bored in school for years on end?
As a society, we need to raise the bar for individualized education for all kids. It should not be tied to some parent’s need to have their kid be in the highest level class. Instead it should be focused on test scores only. To hold one person back because of someone else’s notions of education is not ok. I think a lot of the highest level colleges are filled with more worker bees than gifted kids. And that is fine. But the gifted should not miss out based on their local school system.
I just realized that why I didn’t like the OP article! Because it is a misleading title.
You see, the title says, “Encouraging ‘gifted’ students to branch out …” and then actually talking about forcing them in the grade level without chance to go up.
There is some freaking difference between encouraging and forcing.
You can “encourage” them to branch out, as most of gifted parents already do, while still allowing them to skip grade and/or subject level. They are not exclusive.
"As a society, we need to raise the bar for individualized education for all kids. It should not be tied to some parent’s need to have their kid be in the highest level class. Instead it should be focused on test scores only. "
I don’t think there is anyone who creates, studies, or uses standardized tests for a living who thinks that test scores only tell the story. Using test scores as the only criterion for advanced educational opportunities is both a perverse use of scores (they aren’t designed to do what you think they do) AND make for terrible public policy.
"@theloniusmonk, very few of these kids are bored in every subject. But often they are well ahead of their age group in 2-3 areas. No kid should have to twiddle their thumbs through most of English class for years while their peers struggle to remember the parts of speech, or read/analyze material years below their reading level.
I could understand a few kids, that’s it though, a few kids, being bored in middle school in every class, but once you hit a class like APUSH or APLAC where you have to put in hours even if you’re an Einstenian genius, you’re not bored.
I assert again there may be one or two people per the 15M or whatever number that could have the 200 IQ of Einstein and Jefferson and be able to understand government theory and physics as well as those two. And I agree that a public school is not going to serve them well.