Are We Failing Our Geniuses?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653653,00.html

by karthikv • 19 years ago

22 48 19 years ago

motoko4• 19 years ago

My mother is the director of gifted education in a major midwestern city's public school district. She doesn't believe in evolution.

There are quotas for minorities. Many otherwise qualified students are denied acceptance because their places are reserved. And not just a few... many.

Logistically, kids need to be bused from other schools, but transportation is uncooperative and the schools resent the hassle. There is also an additional bureaucratic and testing cost. These costs are in addition to running the programs themselves, but _these_ costs specifically antagonize other political entities in the school district.

And of course... unlike special ed, teachers resent busing away their best students. They fight over dumping the worst, of course.

Politically (within the district) gifted education is a career for pariahs. They create hassle for the "normal" (aka "real") teachers and they have no power to deter neglect or abuse. The teachers and staff in the department are paid less than require more education than "real" teachers. This drives away the best teaching talent and firmly entrenches the some least ambitious teachers within the department.

The curriculum is a petri dish of all sorts of inane pet political agendas. Especially in science and math, the teachers don't know the subjects themselves, so these subjects simply aren't taught beyond a pre-packaged lesson plan.

The consequence: the most qualified students leave the district (if they can.) Instead of integration, communities become more and more segregated. Fact is, if you don't "segregate" special resources for the best within a community, the best will leave. School districts only have incentives to reduce segregation with their local district. But segregation is inevitable, and failing to deal with it merely bubbles the segregation to higher levels.

Hence, I'm writing this from Silicon Valley and not the midwest.

Update

So nerd education is the nerd of education.

If you were a nerd in school, and you remember how _you_ were treated, doesn't that seem like a plausible extrapolation?

palish3• 19 years ago

Religious belief is orthogonal to the ability to teach well. You just have to leave beliefs out of it.

motoko4• 19 years ago

Maybe, but teach what?

Also, director means choosing curriculum and teacher selection.

And I'm not trying to derail the conversation, I'm suggesting anecdotal evidence about educational priorities (or lack of them) in public schools.

Caligula2• 19 years ago

The article is not about evolution.

I hope your mother has nothing to do with the science curriculum. This city wouldn't happen to be Kansas would it?

dfranke2• 19 years ago

Can we please not turn this into Reddit quite so quickly?

palish3• 19 years ago

Assertion: The American K-12 school system is broken in huge ways. Let's talk about it!

gibsonf16• 19 years ago

When accountability to the customers (students/parents) is removed, and the ability to select from alternatives is removed (choosing between schools), you get what we have - a complete chronic mess. The only solution I can think of to solve the problem is to completely deregulate education.

Imagine - a large market open to innovation - education startups!

(We send our daughter to private montessori)

rms4• 19 years ago

Imagine what would happen if all the local police and fire departments were deregulated overnight.

A basic level of education is something that needs to be provided free for all people. It's even in the UN Declaration of human rights. If we go to to a free market education system, every child will need some sort of grant that they can use to attend some school for free.

nostrademons3• 19 years ago

I don't think complete deregulation is a good idea. Problem is, the results of education don't show up for about 10 years. Capitalism gives you what you want now, not what you need 10 years down the road.

As a general rule, markets are good when they transmit information (like the relative scarcity of goods) and bad when they hide information (like the chance of default on subprime mortgages). I think it's far more likely that a free-market educational system will behave like the latter than the former, because it's much more difficult to ascertain the quality of an education than the quality of a laptop.

I do think more choice and accountability is necessary. I went to a public charter school, and it was the best decision I (well, my parents) ever made.

motoko4• 19 years ago

"And for reasons that no one understands, African Americans' IQ scores have tended to cluster about a standard deviation below the average--evidence for some that the tests themselves are biased."

sniff sniff

Like evidence "for some" that the tests work when you like the results ---but don't when you don't?

rms4• 19 years ago

Do you think African Americans are a standard deviation dumber than average? Or just that this proves that IQ tests are useless?

motoko4• 19 years ago

I have no comment regarding the color yellow.

BrandonM4• 19 years ago

This probably won't be a popular opinion, but from a truly objective standpoint, I think it's possible, for the same reason that non-blacks are a standard deviation worse at athletic endeavors. Two factors of evolution point me to this conclusion. Europe became civilized long before Africa, which I would guess leads to a natural selection for intelligence in Europe (as opposed to physical abilities in Africa - hence better athletic abilities for them) starting longer ago than in Africa. The second factor is Africans' earliest days in America, when they were actually bred for physical ability while the intelligent dissenters often were killed or not encouraged to have children.

See, I told you it wouldn't be a popular opinion. I don't think it's something that should just continue to be ignored, though. Turning a blind eye to possible facts just because we don't want to believe them doesn't make them go away.

patrickg-zill• 19 years ago

Isn't it obvious that the answer is yes? No disrespect to the many people who have Down's or other syndromes, as many of them are wonderful human beings; but the current attitude is that they would rather spend $100K on special assistants so that little Danny can be taught to use the bathroom by himself by the time he is 14, rather than spend that same money encouraging 100 smart kids.

davidw• 19 years ago

And here we go with the politics...

trekker7• 19 years ago

All these smart kids should just do startups, get rich, and skip school entirely, provided they can learn the basics themselves, and their social lives aren't too screwed up by this. If college students can start companies, why not brilliant high school and jr. high students?

jsnx2• 19 years ago

That has much to do with connections as it has to do with ability.

AdamG• 19 years ago

So Time thinks that not letting an already arrogant kid skip two grades is "failing" her.

The most important thing for a school age kid is to become well-socialized.

The correlation between skipping grades and turning out well is just a correlation - it may be that those who were not allowed to skip were so messed up socially already that they were less likely to convince their schools to let them skip grades. In contrast, if you're well-adjusted and smart, it's more likely that you'd be able to convince school administrators to allow you to skip a grade. And, of course, Time misses that distinction, making it into a clear case of "the more grades skipped the better."

mark-t• 19 years ago

I actually have experience on both sides of this issue. My principal would not allow me to skip 3rd grade, despite my teacher's and parents' requests. On the other hand, in junior high, I was allowed to test out of three years of math.

I can assure you that any negative effects of skipping grades are far outweighed by the effects of holding students back. The latter fosters resentment and frustration, which doesn't help social aspects much. For the former, as long as you're sharing classes with advanced students in higher grades (and why wouldn't you be?), the older students are very welcoming.

Also, arrogance isn't a negative quality in talented math/science students -- it's essential. You just can't get really good at math unless you believe you can figure out difficult problems yourself. Maybe you don't have to admit it, but there's a point where denying your abilities looks foolish. The "I've played a lot of Number Munchers" line only works for so long.

BrandonM4• 19 years ago

'The "I've played a lot of Number Munchers" line only works for so long.'

I don't often make comments like this, but LOL, for real :-).

nostrademons3• 19 years ago

"So Time thinks that not letting an already arrogant kid skip two grades is "failing" her."

Kids tend to become less arrogant when placed among intellectual peers, even when those peers are several years older. It's because people naturally compare themselves to the folks around them. If they're always smarter than their peers, they'll assume they're smarter than everybody. If instead they're always younger than their peers - well, they'll grow out of that. ;-)

Going to Amherst and majoring in physics was perhaps the most humbling experience in my life, because it was the first time I wasn't the smartest one in the room. I suspect this is the real point of the university system - by bringing all the smart kids together, recursively, you teach them that there's always somebody smarter than them.

BrandonM4• 19 years ago

I think modern society's damning of "arrogance" and pride is also a bad thing. The fact that we aren't all as self-confident as some of the brightest doesn't give us the right to try to strip them of their own self-confidence.

sanj4• 19 years ago

I'm embroiled in parts of this debate with myself. By most measures, I'd be identified as a smart person. Perhaps even "really, really" smart. But back in the 4th or 5th grade, I wasn't selected as "gifted".

The practical upshot is that instead of going to a different school and being surrounded by teachers who were in tune with my needs, I stumbled through a public suburban high school replete with all the drama that Judd Apatow can fit onto the screen.

I consider this a very lucky occurence.

Why? Because it forced me to keep myself occupied rather than expecting anyone else to do so. It freed me from a mindset of educational entitlement.

By spending this years in a regular school, I was able to learn take on a host of other activities that I found interesting at my own pace and at my own behest. My intellectual development and curiosity drove me forward.

And it forced me to learn how to navigate elements of the "real world" that end up being speedbumps along the way. Isolation from that is a mistake. I've many friends who've learned that the hard way.

Now I'm a happy adult with a precocious son. I'm getting worried about his teachers in kindergarten are going to deal with a child who happily decides if numbers are primes and points out square roots.

How do I teach him to learn for himself. To realize that his school gives him a starting point for his education, and not the entireity. To help him end become a ferociously curious individual who gets stuff done, not in some isolation chamber gifted bubble, but in the real world -- omplete with alliances and politics and emotions and conflicts.

It's hard. It was hard to live through as the student, and I expect it to be hard for me to live through as his guide.

But it is absolutely the right place to end up.

gibsonf16• 19 years ago

Compare a bright kid with an excellent education to one with a poor or absent education - the difference is profound. I agree that any bright kid can figure it out on his own eventually if the desire to learn isn't killed, but think of all that wasted time. I would much prefer to have my PhD at 20 than at 30 (note: I do not have a PhD - just an example). I think I wasted at least a decade learning what I should have been taught at school.

jey• 19 years ago

I agree that it's very important to learn how to navigate the real world, but I really think there's a comfortable compromise between destroying the egos of a significant fraction of gifted kids and sending them to some exclusive school with an artificial environment. I stopped doing homework in the third grade, and scraped by for the rest of my time in the school system. I somehow managed to get admitted to university, but was kicked out after two tortuous years for failing too many classes. I pretty much had 11 unhappy years, from third grade until I got kicked out.

I always enjoyed learning interesting things, but school had nothing to do with learning. School was a place you went to maximize your GPA by doing rote busy work, and any learning done was just an accidental side-effect while pursing grades.

I never considered myself smart while in school; I saw myself as a worthless slacker with an unhealthy programming obsession. This was the image instilled in me from my teachers, school administrators, and parents constantly chiding me to do my homework. I didn't have the perspective nor the self-image to seek out the kind of help I needed. I also don't think an 8 year old should be expected to come up with theories of why he's failing in school.

The theories that the school administration came up with were just based on one observation: Jey doesn't do his homework. Solution: make Jey do his homework. There was no thought given to root causes, nor any experimentation with different strategies. It always just came down to keeping a notebook of homework assignments and making sure I did them that evening. All this bullshit just made me consciously give up on the educational system and write it off as worthless and ineffective.

I still don't know how exactly I should have been helped, but a huge problem is that the educators themselves are not aware of the pattern I was exhibiting. It's well documented that many "gifted" kids exhibit the same symptoms: extreme abrasive cynicism, defiance and hatred of authority, lackluster school performance, and depression. Part of the problem is that these kids will be pretty rare; gifted kids are rare to begin with, and these kids form a fraction of the gifted population. There should be some effort to educate educators of this pattern, and research on what kind of help works for this population. I think any solution that would have worked for me would've had to capitalize on my high level of curiosity and harnessed it in some way. Assigning more bullshit busy work (a la AP and Honors classes) wasn't the solution. If I had a teacher who engaged me in the material, and presented material as interesting and challenging rather than as work, I think I could've done better. AP and Honors classes seem to make the classes harder mostly by increasing the volume of work. On the other hand, this could just be wishful thinking and maybe there is no strategy that could've made me get through formal education. I don't know, but I think it's worth doing the studies to find out, as I'm not a one-off oddball case.

Getting kicked out of university was the first step to recovery for me, and it's the best 'disaster' that has ever happened to me. I'm now a happy person, and really enjoy who I am and what I do. I just wish there had been a less painful way to get here. Going to public school and suffering through the crap did help me develop socially and form healthy friendships, something that I would've completely missed out on if I had been homeschooled.

"How do I teach him to learn for himself. To realize that his school gives him a starting point for his education, and not the entireity. To help him end become a ferociously curious individual who gets stuff done, not in some isolation chamber gifted bubble, but in the real world -- omplete [sic] with alliances and politics and emotions and conflicts."

Engage his natural curiosity in the learning process. Make learning fun and a process of discovery, not a process by which a bunch of facts are memorized to appease some authority figure. My dad did this by using the socratic method, and encouraging me to ask questions. Feynman tells a similar story about his experiences with his dad in the first chapter of "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Finding-Things-Out-Richard/dp...

sanj4• 19 years ago

I have made a pact with myself about my son. I answer his questions (as appropriate for a 5 year old) until I just can't. And then I say "I don't know." So far, he believes me.

The only time I ran into a hitch was when, while having to turn off a portable DVD player because the aircraft was landing, he loudly asked:

"But Daddy, why does the movie interfere with the nabigational [sic] equipment?"

It didn't seem like a good time to talk about that particular topic.

palish3• 19 years ago

sanj, Offtopic: I can't find your email and I'm not sure this tip is listed anywhere, so I'll point it out here :)

If you surround a phrase with asterisks, you get italic text.

sanj4• 19 years ago

Much obliged.

Sadly, it appears I've gone past the edit window. I'll have to hope the editors fix it up. Or risk looking like a dork forever.

I poked around for a few minutes trying to find the ML, but had no luck (where is it?!). And I wanted to write while it was an itch I had to scratch.

Alex3917• 19 years ago

In 4th grade my teachers decided there was something wrong with me, but they couldnt figure out exactly what. They put me in both the gifted class and the special ed class at the same time to see what would happen. I donXt remember exactly what happened, but I eventually ended up getting kicked out of both.

gojomo• 19 years ago

Ironically, one of the ways to "fail" a genius is to label her so:

"The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids" http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

But, you also can't hide from someone that they're not being challenged by the same academic work as their age-peers, so you'd better be ready with some special challenges for them.

auferstehung2• 19 years ago

One aspect that bothers me about the educational system is the educational system's education for educator's. Educational "theories" seem to follow fads that wax and wane in popularity every decade or so. (Reminiscent of the latest "Quality System" fad: the nuts and bolts remain the same but they are arranged differently.) One would think that educational techniques would converge over time rather than bouncing around. An educational degree strikes me as largely a waste more suited to a minor.

auferstehung2• 19 years ago

Reason's for public education:

1. An educated citizenry is critical for a functioning democracy.

2. An educated citizenry is critical to the economy of a nation.

Are We Failing Our Geniuses?

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