There were a large percentage of non-white students at CTY-Hopkins the two years when my daughter attended. I am surprised that wasn’t the case with you.
I suspect SocioEconomic Status (SES) generally is NOT very diverse for a lot of gifted programs. That appeared to be the case in our state.
My son went to TIP. In the pre classes, there was a lot,of diversity.
Interesting points about diversity. We live in a majority minority school district with a GT program at every school. Every school. I suspect it is tougher to qualify at some schools than at others, but we do offer services to a broader range of kids and perhaps pick up some who would otherwise fall through the cracks. Some of the kids who qualify seem groomed to make it, for example, while others are bewildered to have been chosen.
By non-white, do you mean a variety of races, or do you mean Asian? I would not be at all surprised if there was a large percentage of Asian kids at CTY-Hopkins.
Many families that can try to opt out and place high achieving kids into private schools where they can take a range of AP courses and generally have a more homogeneous grouping of bright to gifted kids. The private schools do offer financial aid, if you qualify and complete forms. My kids found private school much better than the public school “gifted” pull out options.
@Gtalum, why do you equate doing research, math or some other STEM field as the only ways in which a gifted person can do any good? Gifted people who are allowed to choose their interests can have a positive impact in every sphere, including as parents. Both of my kids are gifted (as measured by IQ), but neither is planning on a STEM career. They’re both very good at math and science, but like other things more. I don’t consider their intellects a waste.
It was a full range of skin tones. I didn’t bother trying to discern where everyone was from.
There are many different types of intelligence. For example, people may think Taylor Swift to be dim-witted, but she had to have been business savvy to change her whole image from being some teen country singer to becoming a pop sensation. I’m sure there are many Taylor Swift’s out there with many boyfriends and such, but why did THIS one rise to the top? Intelligence.
I say this because it seems all too common to only recognize book-smart intelligence. But there are more ways of showing you’re smart than being a total Hermione :p.
Taylor Swift’s parents were successful people in their own right, and as such Taylor had much easier access to highly competent managers than than a random singing sensation. Her parents were very supportive of her singing career, even moving to Nashville when she was 14. This was very much a collaborative effort.
Garland #36. He is not frugal, just not interested in buying anything except maybe video games. His gf, on the other hand, plans experiences. They are going on a cruise in Nov. for example. So he spends most of what he makes.
He does have retirement savings through his job. He is also saving, yet does not know it, because we deposit his rent checks to us into his savings account ( which was started when he was a kid). He never bothers to look at his statement, so he doesn’t know he’s “saving.”
Oh, and I do not think he is brilliant. Just performs in very top percentiles in standardized tests. Always has.
I’m skeptical.
First of all, it may be true that most profoundly gifted people make it to positions of influence in society. (I’m not sure if it is, really; the article only names a few people in that group.) But it’s not true that they dominate those upper echelons, almost by the definition of being profoundly gifted.
But secondly, socioeconomic status also plays a huge role in this. The kids who are getting tested and guided into these programs are parents who have the time and resources to ensure it happens. CTY and the Duke TIP cost thousands of dollars a summer. What they don’t mention is that Terence Tao’s father was a physician and his mother was a teacher of physics and math; Lenhard Ng’s father was a professor of physics at UNC; Mark Zuckerberg was the son of a dentist and a doctor and went to Philips Exeter; Sergey Brin’s father is a professor of mathematics and his mother is a NASA researcher; and Germanotta/Lady Gaga grew up in an affluent family on the Upper East Side and attended a private girls’ school and a year at Tisch.
A struggling public school teacher with 40 kids in her low-income class may not even have enough time to test a possibly gifted student, so that student goes unnoticed and unconnected with special services to embrace their intelligence. Or a parent who knows her student is smart may not know that there are gifted tests and programs that she could get her child into, or even if she does learn about them, she may be unable to afford them. And giftedness is a trait that must be nurtured and cultivated, otherwise the student goes nowhere with it.
Dweck’s research on fixed vs. growth mindsets was exactly what I was thinking of as I read through the first part of this, too, and I was wondering if they would get to it.
And thirdly…I don’t buy the line that this top 1% are going to be our scientists and leaders, not all of them at least. The vast majority of PhD-level scientists are not profoundly gifted people. They’re intelligent, to be sure, but they are largely people of above-average but still normal-range intelligence. Science - especially the modern practice of science, what with running a lab and writing grants - requires perseverance, grit, and some marketing skills more than it requires profound genius.
My #1 was always ahead in everything. A numbers fanatic. A very early reader. In Kindergarten he tested at 5th grade reading level, but as the teacher said he could well be more advanced but they didn’t have word lists beyond 5th grade to use for the test. Our local public schools made minimal accommodations, partly trapped in their own ideology: gifted kids will do fine on their own; we need to give extra resources to kids who are in the bottom sector of students.
The boy had his own interests and hobbies that filled his time, even if much of his school work was boring and repetitive. At some stage the school allowed him to accelerate, for example in 5th grade taking his math with the middle school students just down the block. In 6th grade, he finished second in the state in the Council of Teachers of Math competition – a level he achieved without any obvious special preparation out of school. As his parents we only learned he was in the competition a week before it happened.
On a one-year leave-of-absence (sabbatical) that I took in Stanford, CA., my son had his first real chance to jump ahead in math studies. A 7th grader, he enrolled in a “high” 8th grade math section in the local middle school, essentially working 2 grades above his nominal level. He also competed in math competitions in a region that really did care about gifted students and has a lot of them; and he won one of those competitions. In high school, he pursued journalism and debate as his EC’s. He was a state champion debater, and he won statewide awards for his writing.
He did not want to pursue math as a subject leading to a career. To him it was a tool, for his hobbies and other interests. He was more interested in applied statistics than in formal or theoretical work. He decided to major in economics in college. In summer after his first year of college, his mother asked him whether he was interested in an academic career. “No,” he said. “But certainly you must have read some things written by academics that impressed you. Who did you find interesting?” she asked. “Well I really liked Durkheim,” he said. “Suppose you could be Durkheim,” she said, “Then would you want to be an academic?” “Yes,” he said, “IF I could be Durkheim.” But he did not pursue an academic career, nor did he seek an advanced degree, though he flirted with the idea of law school.
Today he is a very high achiever. He parlayed his gifts and his interests into a career that allows him to be creative and be well paid for it, without being trapped in the structure of an academic career. He has published a very well received book. He is a public intellectual in the information age. A very good outcome.
Where I live, identification of giftedness includes more than just intellectual abilities: one option is eligibility in three of the four following areas: Mental Abilities, Achievement, Creativity, and Motivation. And I don’t know if they still accept outside, private evaluations.
Also, programs like the Duke TIP program have scholarship opportunities for students who cannot afford the tuition. This is not just a “pay to play” program.
Some kids have obvious intellectual curiosity. My DS#1, at a very young age, would find and watch science shows , the history channel etc. I recall one time on vacation he was intently watching a show on, if I recall correctly, Greek history and an architectural dig. He was around 4 or 5. This isn’t something , IMO, that is taught. It is ingrained.
And forgot to mention, both my s’s attended TIP. There was plenty of diversity. And we get requests from them to donate to their scholarship fund.
Yes, and this is apparent very early. Our pediatrician recently retired, but was working when S was born and had seen thousands of children by then. At his 6-week checkup, he said regarding my son “You don’t need to save money for his college. He will get in everywhere for free.” We laughed of course, but he was completely serious and commented about how intently S was watching everything. He had made no such comment about my older D that he had seen for a few years, who is also quite bright but not in the same league as S.
The level of intellectual curiosity really hit home in 1st grade when we gave him money for a book fair, and instead of buying something on sports or cars (my hobby), he brought home “Algebra for Dummies”, and taught himself the topic in a few weeks.
Very interesting.
I probably would have been considered gifted – don’t know if I was ever tested. But I skipped two grades, went to three of HYPSM for undergrad and grad degrees with a PhD in a STEM field and began my career teaching at one of them. My undergraduate thesis was published in the (My dad was clearly gifted – he apparently read the NY Times each day at age 3 and became a brilliant theoretical physicist).
First, given my experience, I wouldn’t recommend skipping. The material wasn’t particularly more difficult and the students weren’t appreciably smarter than in my original grade, just a little bit older. So, it wasn’t really intellectually challenging. And socially it was not great. I really didn’t have friends until I made one at a NSF Summer Program and then in college. I didn’t have the social skills to relate (some others might have). So, I frequently didn’t fit in. Although I’m 6’2" (and played minor sports as a HS and college athlete), I was the shortest kid in my HS freshman class and didn’t really have a date in HS and didn’t know how to relate to girls. Eventually (and fortunately), I figured it out.
My parents offered to send me to a private school. I declined. In those days, the private schools were largely the province of WASPs and I perceived that they would look down on a middle class Jewish kid. Probably an unwise choice nonetheless.
Second, both of my kids tested well, but ShawSon is clearly gifted. (Trivial examples at an early age: We read him the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in first grade and he had perfect recall of details. Before he entered kindergarten, he was making change in Monopoly. I would do algebra problems with him in 2nd grade. I remember teaching him about multiplying x^a and x^b and we worked out how that was x^(a+b). To test his understanding, I asked him what was x^a/x^b. He said, “if multiplication gives addition, then wouldn’t division give subtraction.”) So, I have some experience raising a gifted kid. In our egalitarian state of Massachusetts, all kids are special and the budget for gifted education is, wait for it, $0.
But, skipping wouldn’t have worked for him either. He is also severely dyslexic and was having real difficulty learning to read and write (both activities were not just confusing but were physically painful). So, in the early years, I supplemented the school on math and my wife on art. We sent him to a private school which was great for grades 4-5 and poor for grades 6-8. Given the dyslexia, we didn’t push on the math/science but just let him focus on the stuff that was hard. We sent him to a public HS but at their suggestion, organized partial home-schooling so he could do math in an accelerated fashion and lean writing in a fashion that would work for him, while doing lab science, art, and history/social studies at the school. We used tutors, students from local universities, even a summer course at Harvard.
Partial homeschooling would have been a superior plan for me as well. But to do this, the parents either have to have the intellectual or financial resources to make it work.
Third, Jonathan Wai’s study does not ring true.
.
I don’t have his study, I now run a consulting firm that works at a high level with a number of companies. While a number of CEOs are quite bright, quite a number got there because they are serviceably bright and very good at corporate politics. The brightest kids (certainly in STEM fields, more on this later) sometimes want to want to work on intellectually challenging problems and would prefer not to run things (although there are some brilliant founder/CEOs). I can’t comment on judges and am confident that high academic achievers are likely to be those with high test results.
Finally, where does the apparent attitude that giftedness is limited to STEM come from? One of my friends attended a Gifted and Talented program in Louisiana. One of his program-mates there was Tony Kushner, who wrote Angels in America, which was pretty extraordinary.
Just a word of caution. Early reading alone does not necessarily indicate that a child is highly gifted.
Early readers tend to be advanced for their age in the first years of elementary school, when learning to read is the most crucial part of the curriculum, but they may or may not continue to be advanced for their age afterward. I mention this because it’s unfortunate if the family of an early reader is disappointed if it turns out later that the child is not particularly unusual. Kids pick up on this sort of thing.
Very interesting read! I whole-heartedly support the gifted and talented identification programs, mainly because of how helpful it has been to me. I went to a large public middle school and currently a large public high school who both had gifted and talented programs. Coming from overseas we had no idea such a program existed, but we decided I should take the test for just because I had tested highly on standardized tests in Europe and done well in elementary school. I ended up getting in (I think it was an IQ test where you got a score for lang/hist/reading and another for math/spatial reasoning with those above 130+ being identified), and it truly was a life saver.
During middle school we got to take math 2 years above the normal grade level and all of our other classes (until 8th grade) were composed of just gifted students, so we moved at a much faster pace and went more in-depth. I really thank these classes for keeping me interested in school, for I no longer almost fell asleep from boredom. Socially it was also really helpful, for I got to be surrounded by students similar to me and more mature. Also, it created a little microcosm in a large setting so it made making friends much easier. Sadly by 8th grade and high school (except for a couple classes) we no longer had separate classes, so we now had teachers catering to the “middle” due to costs and availability, but we continued to get to take math classes 2 years ahead.
I do believe that socioeconomic conditions definitely cause many qualified students to be overlooked, but at least in my area they did a good job of making the testing accessible to all.
I have had friends do the Duke TIP programs and they all really enjoyed them, but I never took any of them due to cost.