The gifted are different.

No Gravatar
Young Gifted and Talented 15
Young Gifted and Talented 15 (Photo credit: Thwaites Theatre Photos)

I don’t write about education often.  Not because I don’t have opinions (come on- you know I have opinions about most everything)- but because I don’t consider myself an expert.  And, that would limit my ability to add to the discussion.

But, I DO know about the need to provide our gifted kids more opportunities. Because these are the kids that will develop new products, new processes, new ideas that will propel society forward.  And, many folks, in today’s age of engineered scarcity (it’s engineered because a certain party thinks that all taxes are bad- whether they are needed to provide better infrastructure, better education, better health care- because they have theirs and too bad about yours) worry that spending money on those better able (I know, I am not being politically correct) means less for those that are always lagging behind.

But, this week, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post hit a raw nerve.  He intoned that he was “among those people who think gifted education classes are usually a waste of time and money.”    Now, I agree that many of the so-called gifted and talented classes fail miserably.  But, I also know that regular classes fail these students more vividly than do those special programs.

Mathews’ “proof” was a discussion he had with four talented writers- Michael Barone, Michael Kinsley, Robert Samuelson, and Gene Weingarten.  To be honest, I only consider one or two of these to be among the elite, but that’s just my vote.

One of the four went to Bronx Science (I wrote about this school) – and he said that he was disappointed that he was not in the top 10% of his class- which precluded him matriculating at Cornell even with a 92+ GPA.  But, that wasn’t Bronx Science’s fault- it was Cornell’s for using a ridiculous criteria (a quota for each school).

I went to a school that ran programs that were advanced.  Advanced enough for me to leave without really finishing high school.  (Oh, I graduated- just not in the conventional sense).  We had two classes- clearly marked the smart and the dumb class… but to be in the dumb class, you needed an IQ of 120 or more.  (Want to know what labeling does to kids?   Two of my close friends never finished college, because they still thought of themselves as dumb- even though the high school they attended had no clue what they could offer them, since they were clearly ahead of the rest of the students in their grade.)

No, that was a bad experiment.  But, the ability to let kids learn things they could handle- without regard for the conventional concept of what should be taught in elementary school, junior high, and high- that was priceless.

And, when I went to grad school, I found myself with others of the same ilk.  You know many of those folks- not intimately, but you know their reputation, because they are the leaders and shakers.  (OK, we are now old enough that I should say- we were the leaders and the shakers.)

We need to insure that our gifted kids get opportunities to learn, to be stimulated, to be kept interested.  Because they will return their talents to society manifold.  In fields ranging from the arts to science, from math to engineering.   Our society needs those souls- and their ideas.

Share this:
Share this page via Email Share this page via Stumble Upon Share this page via Digg this Share this page via Facebook Share this page via Twitter
Share

2 thoughts on “The gifted are different.”

  1. My brother, a teacher, believes that we should be grouping kids by progress in each subject, not by age. That would mean a kid gifted in math and science might be studying those subjects with kids a year or two older (and some much older, if they are math- or science-challenged), but might be with kids his own age or even younger in language or social sciences where he is not as advanced. On the playground, he would tend to play with kids his own age, or whichever kids he chooses. But academics would advance at his pace. Instead of advancing annually through grades, students would advance through successive modules at whatever pace they could handle. I actually like this idea.

    No smart. No dumb. Just “This is where you happen to be right now in the process of going from module A to model M in this subject.”
    David L. recently posted..Why we NEVER ask for testimonials

    1. I’m with your brother, David. I was lucky enough to have chemistry and biology as a tyke, along with algebra, topology, and a few other subjects that rarely appear in grammar school. No need to have G&T classes- just get the folks to where they need to be, perhaps with some counseling so they can deal with the age differences.

      Thanks for those great observations and suggestions!

Comments are closed.