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Or both? ;)</p>
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<p>The nuances of the logic of this entire (and still MIT-focused) discussion are completely lost on me. A cursory glance at the mathematics department at #43 Michigan State, for example, show a number of faculty from top-5 programs, including MIT. These are people MIT deemed worthy enough to be granted a PhD from its program, who are now teaching students at “lesser” institutions. Are we now suggesting that MIT PhDs lose their superior abilities by virtue of teaching “lesser” students?</p>
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<p>They have to slow down for the poor dears, apparently. Michigan State students must still be at the 1+1=2 level. OK, maybe they’ve graduated to x+3=5, solve for x, but still. How you can ask our poor misunderstood genius to slum with these people is beyond me. Don’t you have a heart, Sally?</p>
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Well that can happen. I have a married couple pair of friends who got their PhD’s at Caltech. (One happens to have been an undergrad at MIT, but that’s another story.) They have been teaching at various colleges ever since - mostly LACs. With high teaching loads they have done little research, don’t attend a lot of meetings and aren’t doing grant reviews. They confessed that the work their current MIT kid did was stuff they didn’t know, because they simply are no longer really up to date on the material. This isn’t everyone’s trajectory - they were always more interested in teaching - but it just illustrates that if you aren’t doing cutting edge research, and you’re doing as lot stuff like teaching the non-majors biology, it’s hard to keep up in the field.</p>
<p>BTW today is a big day at MIT: <a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/breaking-news[/url]”>http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/breaking-news</a></p>
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<p>Some MIT courses really are taught at a faster pace than similar courses at other universities. Let me quote a poster who is actually informative:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14820452-post46.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14820452-post46.html</a>
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<p>Don’t really think we’re talking LACs. More like research U’s where these kids could end up. What’s wrong with Mich State?</p>
<p>Bel, maybe ucbalum is watching this thread- but I thought he was one who suggested kids don’t always need AP calc cuz many colleges require it of freshmen anyway. (Skipping the IMO here.)</p>
<p>But we’re talking geniuses who are well beyond mere freshman calculus (hair toss).
We’re talking people whom, if they don’t squeeze every last little bit of knowledge out of every day, will just up and DIE. It’s not enough for them to learn 10,000 new things … what if there were 10,010 and they missed that last ten?</p>
<p>My s’s measly lowly top 20/top 50 schools had what I think was called “accelerated” calculus or something like that, where 2 semesters of calc were taught in one. Both had AP calc in HS too. I guess they would have been slackers at the “tippy top” schools, since (oh no, embarassed to admit) they chose to take AB rather than BC calc in HS, and they knew they’d be expected to repeat it anyway as STEM majors.</p>
<p>Can’t believe the best argument that MIT should [fill in the blank,] is that some 50-100 school teaches at a lower level, to a less competitive peer set, doesn’t have the facilities, etc.</p>
<p>“They have to slow down for the poor dears, apparently. Michigan State students must still be at the 1+1=2 level. OK, maybe they’ve graduated to x+3=5, solve for x, but still. How you can ask our poor misunderstood genius to slum with these people is beyond me. Don’t you have a heart, Sally?”</p>
<p>This mocking is so unbecoming.</p>
<p>“Look, I like smart people. I don’t do well hanging around vast quantities of not-smart people either, and I “found my tribe” in college in a way I couldn’t in hs.”</p>
<p>Why the double standard, Pizzagirl? I think it would behoove you to educate yourself on the needs of truly gifted kids.</p>
<p>It must be so terrible for the MIT grads in my top ranked PhD program to know that a graduate of a lowly 50-100 school is lurking among them. Or maybe they don’t care…</p>
<p>^Not to mention an important irony of this whole conversation: the majority of MIT faculty got their PhDs at institutions OTHER THAN MIT.</p>
<p>And yes, I know it is the general rule in academia to not hire your own graduates into faculty positions. But doesn’t this blow the MIT-above-all myth out of the water?</p>
<p>What does society owe truly gifted kids? What does a private institution owe them? Flesh it out for us. What is the state role?</p>
<p>And gifted in general? Or productive in ways society might benefit from?</p>
<p>^ Yeah, avoidance of academic incest is an issue. To me, getting into MIT for undergrad just means you are not going to get in for grad school. This is less of an issue for some, but still worth thinking about.</p>
<p>I was thinking of all this giftedness/talent thing just yesterday after seeing the new Oz movie . My kids breezed through things like multivariable calculus, differential equations and physics in college . No thanks to me. I was a sociology major. They also had very good athletic and social skills. However, neither are “creative types” in the sense of musical ,writing,or artistic ability. They both played an instrument in high school but were certainly not gifted in that area. I was very impressed by the way a movie like Oz had to come together -the writing, music, visual effects,etc. What do we owe talented/creative people of any type? Access to education to advance their skills, support,etc. I think there are many colleges that can get a truly gifted/talented kid on their way.</p>
<p>May I suggest that when posters are tempted to mock and or berate the topic of “gifted” learners that you substitute disabled for gifted and see how clever it sounds.</p>
<p>Unless you see giftedness as an impairment, that analogy doesn’t work.</p>
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<p>Indeed. </p>
<p>Some of the mocking reminds me of some activist Education folks and politicians in the '80s and early '90s who felt all above-average academic performers and especially geniuses can thrive even if the general K-12 curriculum is watered down/slowed down to the LCD and the classrooms are literal battlefields because separating out the violently disruptive kids who threaten others with violence is “violates their educational rights” while they ignore the educational rights of the rest of the class who can’t learn because of the violent chaos. </p>
<p>What’s more ironic is many of those activist educators and politicians would then turn around and send their kids to expensive private/boarding schools or well-off publics in all/nearly all-white suburbs.</p>
<p>We are not mocking gifted students at all. We are mocking 1) the entitlement attitude that they are “owed” an acceptance at MIT, and 2) the arrogance that only MIT will do, that they are just oh-so-sadly under served at other schools.</p>
<p>For your disability analogy to work, MIT would have to be the only school in the country to have ramps or other access for disabled people, and all other schools were impenetrable forces. </p>
<p>What I see hear, frankly, is that some people have so much personal empathy with brilliant and (often, but not always) socially awkward students that they can’t conceive of any situation where they might have to deal with rejection, or that their feelings of disappointment over not getting into a dream school are somehow more important to indulge.</p>