Yep, was a typo, wasn’t even using my mac keyboard lol. It should have been designed not to pave over kids into the same flat surface, but as you say, with all their bumps:)
One of my kids is in the top 2 or 3% - he qualified for CTY, but was just to the right of their bell curve. (We know his IQ because he was tested for LDs and is in the “2 norms above average” range. The other kid was far over on the right hand side of the CTY bell curve. We never had him tested because no one who met him from age 2 onwards had any questions about him being gifted. That said, it wasn’t until I looked at the CTY data that I really appreciated why he never found any one like him even in a very large school system. Anyway, I doubt most people posting here are in the top 1%, though I’m pretty sure most are “above average”. One thing about taking those SAT tests in 7th grade was that it made it a lot easier for the school administration to understand what they were dealing with. He was given a lot of opportunities for weekend science programs (a Saturday program at Columbia and a lecture series at IBM among other things). Luckily we did not experience teachers treating him as a threat - except possibly the fifth grade teacher he luckily only had half the day.
What specific statistics course? Introductory non-calculus-based statistics courses in college often cater to the weakest-in-math students at the college who need some math-ish type course to fulfill a graduation requirement. An advanced-in-math high school student may find such a course to be taught at a much lower level than is suitable for him/her.
It was an intro to stats course but it was the one his HS counselor recommended out of all the courses he was eligible to redeem for the scholarship, as the one the U would most likely offer him college credit for completing.
We went to visit a specialist in upstate NY once when the kids were teens. The MD was very interested in our kids and diagnosed both of them with the condition that we had thought they had been suffering with for years. While examining our kids, the MD mentioned that he wished he had a program that would diagram the test he performed on our kids so he could use it for presentations when he gave talks. That night, S designed such a program and we drove over to the MD the next day to give it to the physician, who was astounded. S offered to tweak it as the MD desired but he was speechless and very grateful.
His SR year, S took all APs & marching band. Sadly, due to his chronic health issues, he missed about 1/3 of the school year but was still able to graduate and get 5s on all the AP courses, including a few AP exams he decided to take “for fun,” even though the school didn’t offer them or provide any coursework or preparation.
A little off-topic, but I had my youngest sign up for the SAT when his sister took it, thinking he might qualify for CTY by scoring in the top 5% on each if the sections. I thought his 1930 total was just outside the qualifying limits as he didn’t get top 5% in any of the sections, instead in the 80s and low 90s. I found out a year later that it was supposed to be the top 5% of 7th graders, not the college-bound juniors and seniors. Total fail on my part.
That test, and taking the PSAT twice, turned out to be the sum total of his test prep. He may own the world, or be in jail, or something else entirely. It’s hard to tell with him and the kids like him.
In our state, the CTY folks compared the kids who took the SAT in 7th & 8th grades with the other 7th & 8th graders who took the test. They ID’d the kids in HI who scored the top 3 for each grade in verbal & math, I believe and had a little ceremony and talked about CTY. Neither of my kids voiced any interest in CTY, as both said they thought it was too expensive. I believe both qualified based on their test scores.
For CTY my son took the SCAT test (unfortunate acronym) in 7th or 8th instead of the SAT test. It was lots easier to schedule, only took an hour, and the test center was around the corner from his favorite laser tag place.
They sent us a booklet with bell curves that had his scores him on the far right of their bell curves. He got some sort of “Grand award” in both verbal and math, but we didn’t see any reason to travel all the way to Baltimore to get an award for taking a test.
I don’t think there’s really a way to figure out what that meant anyway, since I think the only kids that take the SCAT test are testing for CTY.
He didn’t ever do any CTY camps or online classes though. So, I guess we didn’t particularly benefit from the program. Probably I could have done more to take advantage of it. The camps and classes just never seemed to be the right thing at the right time.
My son used the CTY online courses this summer. He wanted to take pre-Calc over the summer so he could into Calc 1 early but his sports schedule wouldn’t allow him to take summer course. CTY had a good self-paced course. was not easy and he learned a lot. It was expensive, however.
We considered that. S decided to use the Art of Problem Solving precalculus course and textbook to be able to take Calc BC early. I can’t recall the details of why that choice, but I think AoPS is less expensive than CTY.
The only reason the D took the test for CTY in 7th grade was that she found the “History of Disease” course description online. We blithely told her to figure out what she needed to do to qualify and that would be her X-mas present. Honestly, we didn’t expect anything to come of it, especially because she needed to get passing scores on both math and verbal for the only course that was of interest to her. But she did. I think it was the first time she defined herself as more than just “average B+ bright.” She went to other programs in subsequent summers on infectious disease and epidemiology. And, six years later, she’s in college double majoring in microbiology and public health.
I do think it was the change in self-definition and the discovery of a passion rather than anything special that the courses provided that was most beneficial for her, though.
@ Juillet, My son was tested for free in the 3rd grade at a California public school. He was listed as gifted. Unfortunately due to the stupid “No Child Left Behind” programs, the school had no money available to spend on their gifted students. Such a waste !
It’s great that I stumbled upon this discussion because I am currently a high school student already part of the John’s Hopkins Center for Talented Youth program. I was able to get in by taking the SAT standardized test. The reason was to be able to get into an advanced geometry class in 8th grade. I know many high schools offer this course to many students and even have higher courses, but my school wasn’t like those schools and geometry was considered a very advanced class.
Anyways, after studying quite a bit (which my parents pushed me to) and taking the SAT, I received a score of 790 on the math section. For some reason, all of the questions were easy to me, but I am by no means a genius. I actually ended up moving to another school district (ranked high) and they were so many smart people there. There I was able to skip the geometry class (because I felt I studied all that stuff for the SAT) and get into an Algebra 2 BC class. That’s not even the highest math class.
So I got into CTY, yeah you already know that, but they put me into another program call Study for exceptional Talent. Here’s the website description for the program:
The Julian C. Stanley Study of Exceptional Talent (SET) was created to help extremely talented students achieve their full potential, and, through its research and advocacy initiatives, to enhance the educational opportunities available for all academically advanced students.
Since 1980, SET has assisted students throughout the world who exhibit extraordinary mathematical or verbal reasoning ability by scoring at least 700 on either the Mathematical or Verbal (Critical Reading) part of the SAT before the age of 13 (or score an additional ten points for each additional month of age).
This was really great and exciting for me but I am hardly a genius. In my new school, I almost feel like an idiot many of my classes. There are so many people who are much smarter than me, yet this program is meant for the brightest of kids. I feel like CTY and SET offer many great programs, no doubt about it, but I think many people have the ability to get into the program without being among the few smartest people in your grade or school.
My oldest’s in SET, too but doesn’t really get the point either. I mean, okay, so she broke 700 on the SAT-Verbal (or whatever it’s called these days) and came close to that on the math side back in middle school—that means she tests well. She’s always interested to get the newsletter, though, to see how many (read: very few) new kids are in it are, like her, from unusual-for-that-program states, so that’s fun, I suppose.
It is interesting programs will use SAT scores for admission to these programs (and I am not saying that is wrong, I am agnostic about how these programs decide), most of the G and T programs and the like use IQ as a determining entry, and the modern SAT’s, for the past 20 years or so, don’t have a direct tie to IQ (the old SAT did, Mensa allowed SAT scores for admission back then, they don’t any more. Whether IQ is a good determinant or SAT scores are I don’t know, just interesting.
The original idea of the CTY program was to see how well you did without studying for it. The real geniuses are the ones who get over 700s without studying.
I kinda wonder what my son would have scored on the SAT if I’d had him take that instead of the SCAT in 7th or 8th. There’s no prep available for the SCAT, so maybe that’s closer to the original idea for CTY. My recollection was that he enjoyed the test because he learned some new things about math. SCAT isn’t a SET qualifier, but I didn’t know anything about that then.
You and your son should feel blessed. My d also scored in top 1% in the Midwest Talent Search in 7th. grade, but had a different experience with school.
You indicate “One thing about taking those SAT tests in 7th grade was that it made it a lot easier for the school administration to understand what they were dealing with. He was given a lot of opportunities for weekend science programs (a Saturday program at Columbia and a lecture series at IBM among other things). Luckily we did not experience teachers treating him as a threat - except possibly the fifth grade teacher he luckily only had half the day.”
I only wish that was the experience my d had in school. Her school had a higher ability program and I honestly think the average IQ for that program was pretty low compared to other school’s gifted programs. On more than one occasion, I talked to school personnel about my D not being challenged and they admitted there was a difference between their program and a gifted program. We live in an area that used to be rural and I found that the school personnel seemed to think that white males were inherently smarter than others. The composition of the higher ability classes reflected their beliefs.
They seemed to resent how well my D performed at school. She was not a favorite of the teachers because she would question them and correct them. She was very creative and would find short-cuts to get things done; they didn’t always appreciate the short-cuts. She was so bored in middle school, she read about 200 online books. She also poured herself into dance; she had lots of free time since she really did not have homework. While bored in class, she would pull out her homework for a different class and complete all assigned work at school. Of course, the teachers were offended because she was not paying enough attention to them. Perhaps if they gave her challenging work she would pay attention??? She has a great sense of humor and enjoys irony and goofs off and acts silly while telling jokes that connect the work in school in quirky ways- kind of like a play on words. The teachers did not like that either because she was not serious enough…
Her senior year her test scores came in and we started to get multiple scholarship offers. At this point, I think she was actually viewed as the top student that she was. Prior to that, in their mind a gifted person:
does not act completely silly and goofy at times
is serious in demeanor at all times
does not react with high intensity (trait of gifted) because they can see things from an adult perspective
is not a girl who has very curly hair and whose race is not noticeably Asian…
would not be interested in something like dance
would pursue being first in her class regardless of having to put aside any and all other activities (D was unwilling to give up social and dance to study for 7 AP classes/ yr)
Although she did not fit any of their stereotypes, I think in the end she did change the way they viewed gifted students.
@momofsmartdancer:
Thank you for that post, I think it illustrates the problem with gifted kids and what schools often do with them and how they are viewed. The program in your school sounds like what they do in my local district, they have a ‘talented program’ (in mine, it is a one day a week pull out enrichment program that spans several class periods, so the kid misses something like health class, shop class, etc), but the reality of it is that it often is a perk for academically achieving kids rather than a program geared towards kids who are out there (think about it, you can be of relatively bright intelligence and get straight A’s in classes, doesn’t mean they are gifted).
The early SAT to me is a classic way of false testing for programs, it can be gamed pure and simple. Yep, gifted kid can take the SAT in 7th or 8th grade and blow it out score wise, but as someone else pointed out that is supposed to be where the kid takes the test cold and it shows where they are at. However, as has been documented, you can study for the SAT, get tutoring in it, and blow the test out. I know for a fact there are tutoring services and community groups (usually associated with an ethnic group) where to help kids get into programs that use the early SAT score, where kids start prepping for the SAT in 6th grade (prob earlier). Instead of creating tests that highlight how a kid solves problems, where how you solve it is more important than the solution, they rely on standardized tests that can be horsed through, done by rote, and score high, when that is what these programs are not supposed to be, a notch on the way to getting into an elite college or whatnot.
Part of the problem is that people look at the symptom of gifted kids and assume that is who they are. Gifted kids often blow out test scores and do well in school with little effort, so they assume that is what giftedness is about, high academic achievement, taking SAT’s early, doing calculus early, and that is just a symptom, not what it is. It isn’t that gifted kids are bright, a lot are, but the reality is that gifted kids often don’t fit the box in one or more things (IME, gifted kids often are gifted in multiple areas, though not all, lot of kids gifted in music are also quite gifted in areas like math, writing and even other arts areas). One of the things that gets gifted kids in trouble is they grasp things fast, but then more importantly, it gives them insight into other things which leads to questions and observations, that drives many teachers nuts.
I think the classic description of this is in the book “Cryptonimicom” by Neil Stephenson. One of the main characters, Waterhouse, is this gifted mathematician, who was forced to study electrical engineering which he hated, but on an exchange program with Princeton was working with Alan Turing and another guy on advanced mathematics …anyway, he ends up being thrown out of school because he hates engineering, and ends up in the Navy. They give him this aptitude test to take, and the first question is the classic rowboat problem (current is 2mph to the south, guy is rowing north, can do Y MPH rowing, how long will it take him if the distance round trip is Z)…Waterhouse looks at the problem, and can’t believe they want the idiotic going north speed if Y-2, going south is Y+2…), and looks at the picture of the river, visualizes the flow and comes up with a new problem and the proof to solve it (which he later publishes in a math journal), but that is all he worked on. The Navy, of course, seeing he didn’t solve any problems, made him a glockenspiel player on a battleship…
And it comes back to the reason for these programs, these aren’t about hashmarks for an elite college education, they aren’t about blowing out test scores or a kid taking 15 SATs, it is about a program that rather than discourage new ideas, ways of doing things, manages to encourage it, while making sure the kid also learns the other things they need to. School administrators will tell you, as the local schmuck who was supposedly the gifted coordinator told us, that ‘gifted kids do great on test scores and with grades and such, with very little effort on our part, so we love having them’ (really nice, right, it serves them well so they can show 100% on the State exams, X SAT scores, etc, without having to work, wonderful)…but the dark reality is that many of those who are gifted end up the opposite, bored, tuned out, never achieving what they could, often labelled as troublemakers, and there have been follow on studies that show that the kids in this range have higher percentages of later on ills like depression, drug abuse, alcohol abuse and the like, besides not achieving to their potential.
Sadly, the attitude I often hear is one I have heard in other dimensions as well, that 'well, they need to get used to the fact that not everyone is as smart as they are, and learn to deal with real life, that they will be dealing with people slower than them, and in the ‘real world’ they will be living that, that isn’t true. Had one woman (whose son was a talented defensive lineman in football) tell me that, and I said if that is true, then maybe her son should ride the bench while another kid less talented got a chance to play so he learns what ‘the real world is like’.
While obviously you deal with a lot of different people in the world with different abilities in the real world it isn’t everyone is the same, if you are more talented you tend to get promoted to higher positions, different positions, your skills and knowledge and intelligence puts you ahead of other people (other than seniority based jobs, like unionized jobs). I have heard arguments like this in music, that kids who are musically talented should play, for example, in their school orchestra because they need to learn to play with musicians of different levels of ability, and that is ludicrous, because musicians are not union positions where you get into the NY Phil because you have seniority, it is all about your talent and as a working musician, given the competition, the difference in level of talent is going to be small…the problem is with gifted kids this attitude translates into "they should go along with everyone else, do the same things they are doing at the sam pace and the same way’ as if that is getting along, when that rather is forcing the gifted kids to slow themselves to be doing the same thing the same way the other kids are…that isn’t learning to deal with people of other abilities, that is the world of Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, where everyone is forced to be equal, the pretty have to wear hideous, disfiguring masks and ugly clothing, the bright have to have their intelligence handicapped (literally), the athletic have to wear 100 pounds of extra weight to slow them down, etc.
Jumping in here to clear up a few misconceptions.
1 - Wealthy parents can’t “game” the system. Your child either has a qualifying IQ or consistently performs at the top.
2 - Kids identified early “even out” and the rest catch up. Nope. Kids identified early are gifted and will
remain so. They may not get A’s or a perfect SAT, but they are still in the top 3%.
3 - High IQ kids don’t need special programs. Actually they do. Imagine sending your high school senior to 8th grade
every day.
4- An overwhelming number of whites and the wealthy are “identified.” Sadly this is probably true, but IQ is hereditary and crosses all socioeconomic and ethnic boundaries.
In Oregon, Talented and Gifted is defined as the top 3%. A qualifying IQ is 129. A child can also be identified if they
consistently perform at the 97th percentile, pass the Cogat and/or the Wisc.
“your skills and knowledge and intelligence puts you ahead of other people”
Heh. Sometimes!