“Gifted” oder Gift?
I think giftedness should be done away with. I don’t see what good the label is doing for anyone besides parents who like to one-up their PTA-mates.
I know, there are some G&T programs out there that let a handful of kids get a better education and this seems good, but
- The skills tested and thresholds defining “gifted” are arbitrary
- Kids who don’t make the cut pay a high price
- Kids who do make the cut tend to think that they are “done” and get lazy
- The gifted programs are a little ridiculous and there are other ways to give kids a good education
As usual, this is my unscientific anecdote-based opinion. So let me get to the anecdotes.
Watching my kids
We haven’t tested our kids and we have no plans to. All of our kids are in the special program at our house. But they are developing differently and it is hard not to notice how other people react to them and how they counter-react. I’ve mentioned before that S has figured out how to read and now he is reading everything he comes across — books, cereal boxes, street signs, or anything with lettters. G is not interested in reading, but seems fascinated with science and storytelling. When other adults interact with G and S, they tend to make a huge deal about how great it is that S can read, how smart he must be, blah, blah, blah. And G is another boy who likes rockets.
S is “lucky” that he’s interested in reading, one of the few skills that people care about and can quantify these days. Being educated means knowing how to pass a few tests and how to keep quiet so you don’t bother people. S is showing promise in the test-taking department so he must be “smart”.
All of this has a very sad effect on G. Whenever people start fawning over his little brother, he sulks out of sight. Sometimes he’ll come to my wife or to me later and show us things he can read or write. Sometimes he’ll start saying that he doesn’t want to read. I don’t really know what to do, so I just tell him “reading is not such a big deal — you’ll figure out how to read when there’s something you want to know.” But he can tell it is a big deal to other people.
The funny thing is that G is interested in, and knows a lot about, real subjects like astronomy, physics, and biology. At some point, S will be able to use his reading to learn about things like this too but he’s not there yet. I guess I’m trying to say that reading is a means to and end, but it is not the end itself. G is pursuing the “ends” without the means. In the process he is developing a rich vocabulary that will let him read at a high level whenever he figures it out.
Looking back at my education
My worry for S is that he’ll think that knowing how to impress other people is enough. I worry about that because that is what happened to me. I wasn’t as quick as S is, but I did test well and ended up in the gifted program at my school. By the time I was in high school, it seemed like our whole purpose as gifted kids was to become National Merit Scholars so our high school could have more than everyone else.
All in all, the program was pretty ridiculous. In GT English, we had a slightly different reading list than the other tracks and I ignored most of it — the books seemed boring and reading them didn’t have much impact on my grades. In GT Math, we took exactly the same courses that other kids did 2 years earlier. I don’t know why we couldn’t just take the class with the other kids, there was nothing special about the GT class. Oh, and they gave us SAT test prep classes so we could be National Merit Scholars. And that was all there was to it.
The effect of this program was that I got a mediocre education, I learned that I was “special” and that I must have been born this way so I don’t have to work. I was a National Merit Scholar, my high school had more than their rivals, and I had fulfilled my purpose. It wasn’t until I got out of school and started working that I realized how unimportant test-taking is in life.
What happens when you are not gifted
The other day I ran into someone I knew from a Physics class in high school. He was a smart kid, but he needed to work after school and that made things hard on him. He was not labeled as “gifted”, but I couldn’t tell the difference. When we were talking he told me a bit more about his high school experience and I was horrified. When the “gifted” kids were getting free SAT test prep classes and hand-held through the college admissions process, my friend did not even know that you had to apply to go to college. He figured that out on his own a few years after high school and ended up being a Math major and becoming an actuary.
While resources were being wasted on a few of us, others were being completely neglected.
There are other costs to labeling some kids as gifted, and I’ve been seeing G deal with them — when some kids are celebrated (for unimportant things like test-taking), the kids who aren’t feel like they’ve failed and may give up or reject the thing they’ve failed at.
More modern problems
I’ve been out of school for a while now, and from what I’ve been reading there are new problems for gifted programs — some teachers are hostile to gifted kids. Now I’m just working on hearsay I picked up over at Cocking a Snook, but it sounds very plausible to me. In the interest of “equality”, some feel that the non-gifted kids should be favored in the classes that still aren’t segregated. I’ve also heard arguments that children learn better when they are around other kids that are more advanced, so we should put the gifted kids in slower classes to “help” everyone else. Intentionally slowing kids educations to do the job that our talented and certified teachers should be doing seems unconscionable.
Solutions aren’t that difficult
It seems obvious to me that every kid could have access to a better education if we just scrapped the age segregation in our schools. The one good thing my GT program did for me was let me take Math 2 years “ahead” of schedule. If we weren’t grouped by age, this would have been pointless. I would have just taken the courses whenever I was ready for them. I probably would have pushed myself more, failed more, and been better off for it.
Without age expectations, kids could take their time too and learn things as they are ready. We could try to make every class the best it can be, and any student who wants can take it. Kids will naturally be around others with different abilities in different areas, it won’t be forced on them.
I know, it’s not going to happen any time soon. That’s one reason why we’re taking matters into our own hands and unschooling.
Very interesting insights into people’s different reactions to your boys! And there’d probably be an even greater disparity if G’s current interests were in arts rather than sciences.
I think I’ve also read that those labeled gifted not only tend to rest on their laurels; they tend to take fewer risks.
I never took school (or grades) seriously until I got to college. At the point where it began to look like I might graduate “with highest honors,” I started taking easier classes in order to keep my GPA high. Pathetic, huh?
Great post!
Lynn
September 9, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful post. I had a similar experience in school – they gave us one extra art class (not a class really, just hang out and doodle) and earlier access to certain courses that really still weren’t hard enough to be a challenge and I never had to really try. I felt afterward that I missed out on actually working or developing any kind of interest in anything.
Now it’s my daughter who’s ahead in certain academics and I cringe sometimes when a parent will say things, right in front of their own child, about how smart she is and rave about her reading. It’s too bad we humans are always falling into the trap of comparing and measuring each other and ourselves.
I enjoy your blog
Ellen
Ellen
September 10, 2007 at 6:28 am
You’re right Lynn, I think kids who are interested in the arts are even less appreciated. For one thing, there is no test out there that can let a parent definitively say “my kid is a better poet than yours”. That makes the arts seem like a nice place to retreat. They are much more civilized.
It’s interesting you mention that kids called gifted take fewer risks, because that was one of my problems through graduate school. I was trying to be safe and build a career, and the result was that I never did any interesting research. I’m not saying that I would have done great research if I had taken risks, but I’m sure the path I was on would never work.
Being labeled as gifted sort of feels like having undeserved authority. People tell you you are great, they give you the benefit of the doubt and don’t scrutinize your work. If you are halfway aware of what is going on, you won’t want to squander your position. What they don’t tell you is that your authority vanishes once you leave school.
Rolfe Schmidt
September 10, 2007 at 8:33 am
Thanks for the comment Ellen, and thanks for the complement. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed my blog. I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier — it got lost in the filters.
This is too bad. Somewhere I heard someone say that people are only happy when they feel like they are doing better than they were yesterday, or when they feel like they are doing better than their neighbor. I have a higher opinion of people than that, but there is some truth to it. I feel it myself, and try to use it as a motivation to improve myself.
And the things we can measure don’t seem to be the really important things in life. Yes, you need to be able to read these days. But you’ll never get a “reading” or a “long division” job. You need to do something productive that other people value. But we don’t seem to test that.
It’s funny, going back to Lynn’s comment it seems like the kids who are interested in the arts and are actually producing painting or music or poetry are closer to being productive than the “gifted” kids who are acing tests.
Rolfe Schmidt
September 10, 2007 at 3:54 pm
With that custom-made intro, you guys, how can I resist posting this?
Such Sweet Thunder for Favorite Daughter’s Bus Ride”
I was the test-acer kid. Now I have the arts kids. There’s a cosmic justice to that somehow . . .
JJ
September 10, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Very well said, Rolfe!
As a former gifted kid with many of the same experiences, I can honestly say I wish no one had ever told me they thought I was gifted. As the mother of a child who did not test gifted, I wish that no one had ever made her think about the difference — she was doing just fine without the gifted program, thank you very much. She did eventually test in — not because we requested that she be re-tested, but because teachers kept recommending her and she wanted to test in so she could go to gifted class with her friends.
As a math teacher, I think you are spot-on with the age-grouping idea. How can kids “master the curriculum” if they can’t have a chance to try, fail, and try again? But the way things are set up now, kids just seem to get swept along with the current. I understand why it is set up this way — I just wish there were a better way.
Great post!
Alane Tentoni
September 11, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Nice JJ – I was a little slow to follow the link, but I enjoyed it.
Thanks Alane – I’m glad to hear that you and your child have navigated the waters well. I’m just now realizing how tricky that can be (one of the reasons I think of homeschooling as our “easy” option).
Wouldn’t it be great as a teacher if kids could take courses when they were ready, and there was no stigma of failure? Your students would be ready for what you had to teach and you could make sure they mastered the subject before moving on.
Of course, I have no idea how to make that happen. But I can dream, right?
Rolfe Schmidt
September 12, 2007 at 1:11 pm
[...] who can read, but don’t pay much attention to his older brother who doesn’t. This has caused some heartache, to be sure. But if I’m ever going to be an over-protective parent, this is the sort of [...]
How we homeschool « Rolfe Schmidt
November 14, 2007 at 3:35 pm
I really like your site, and I suspect that we will largely agree on many of these types of issues. I’ve been working on something that will definitely be of interest to you, as a way that you could teach dihedral groups in a fun and hopefully interesting way.
I mostly agree with your philosophy, with a few caveats. First and foremost, you are in an exceptional position to attempt this kind of homeschooling.
For example, I have serious doubts with regard to the general competence of my Aunt with regard to higher math, despite having a postgraduate degree and having taught basic algebra at a community college. She’d get too absorbed by the “wrong” way of doing things, whether it be rainbow mathematics or your place-value experience, to ever be bothered with the real, “hard” mathematical ideas.
You are right to point out to G that the relative strength of his younger brother in reading isn’t as meaningful as society believes it to be; however, I think you are doing him a real disservice if you are in fact suggesting that it isn’t important.
You should use his feelings to motivate him to learn how to read better. You should point out that it’s ok, and that he doesn’t need to read as well as his brother, but part of life is learning to do things that one doesn’t always enjoy doing.
In agreement with your philosophy, the goal here is to praise accomplishment, and I don’t think that making excuses because of his natural interests and talents really does him any service. You should emphasize that while reading might not be fun, it will be richly rewarding once he can do it better, and then he can read about science and math and whatever else he’s really interested in.
I’ll probably send you an email later, especially once I finally get my materials on symmetry groups online.
lpsmith
April 2, 2009 at 2:14 am