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"Gifted" programs are so fucked up.
They separate kids out for being "smart", put them on a pedestal, endlessly gas them up with wildly unrealistic expectations and then only teach them how to be good students at the expense of all social development.
All these kids go into the world thinking that being good at math or memorization is 95% of what it takes to be successful when in reality it's like 10% intellect and 90% social ability.
The worst part is that these kids usually aren't even extra smart, they just have more involved parents.
It always ends up that the kid with infinite potential lives up to none of it and has a massive ego complex because they got gaslit into believing their parents pipedreams were realistic and that it's their fault for not living up to them.
Edit: It's really funny all the former gifted kids are taking this as a personal attack.
This is such a horrible take. Gifted programs offer accelerated offerings for children who are so goddamn bored in normal level classes. They allow people who to get ahead, give additional opportunity for faster advancement, and really don't even separate kids that much.
Literally everyone is bored in normal level classes. Most of us just express it by getting bad grades so we're excluded from the gifted stuff.
Everyone is goddamn bored in school. It's school.
There's a difference between bored by the monotonous structure we've built up for schooling, and bored that you already understood the material a week ago, but are stuck listening to the teacher try to get the class delinquent to pay attention so the Republicans won't pull funding from the school for bad test scores
To put it longer "bored and taking a year of schooling in an already fully understood subject where the teacher spends 3x as long as necessary on each topic".
'That much' is a sliding scale. A kid can be removed from class for a few hours a week, or per day, or altogether and put in programs at special schools.
1000x this.
I'm not going to mess up my kid the same way I got messed up.
I'm going to find a new and novel approach that will despite my best intentions mess him up in new and novel ways
Hey, that level of self awareness is way more than what the people who forced these shit programs had.
Nobody gets out of childhood unscathed or unscarred but having parents who actually listen goes a long way to reducing the pain.
Ehhh, to each their own. I was in those classes, fully separated streams. No idea why you'd assume having a more interesting class would nix social development. (You can't learn to socialize if the teacher doesn't have to slow down?)
Fully wide range of outcomes but a lot of the kids with the potential went and realized it. Sure, not all of us did but from my small circle one's on the second highest court in Canada, one's set up a reasonably famous company, one's a cardiac surgeon etc.
When do you talk to to other kids if not during class? Lunch was for study group, where we didn't talk, and we didn't get free periods or anything because it was just more class.
But the gifted class also has kids in it who talk to you.
Wild, maybe Canada does ours differently? I was in 2 different programs over the years but we still had lunch, free blocks and still shot the shit a bunch in class. And then sports and other extra curriculars too.
Yeah, it sounds like my school took it a lot more seriously. There was always this cloud of "If you fuck this up, you'll be one of the poors forever, so don't get out of line" hanging over us.
That, and going to the library to study didn't cost as much as extra-curriculars.
I don't think that it's just the gifted kid programs that are causing these issues, I think it's more foundational than that.
So much of school is focused on rote memorization, test scores, and grades that kids who do well end up having their entire sense of self-worth tied to their grades. Then they get out into the real world and no longer have those academic scores to tell them that they have any value.
It's how we get stuff like this:
There's so much more in this discussion like how kids who never are challenged by schoolwork don't actually learn how to learn and therefore give up on something at the first hint of difficulty or challenge because their brain is conditioned to believe that either you're instantly good at a thing or you're a failure forever, or how there's a real lack of teaching collaborative work in school despite that being like 90% of work in life, but that's all too much for my tired brain to try to piece together into a comprehensible message. So instead I'll just end with my usual meme on the subject: Beware, the "gifted kid to burnout trans girl with a praise kink" pipeline is real.
Im not sure you are correct as no one was telling us we would be successful because of these classes when I was in them.
What we DID miss out on was seeing kids learn how to do things we already knew. This would have been very helpful when I got to the point where I didnt immediately understand the lesson and found myself having to learn how to do things years after most kids learn how to be taught to.
The real problem IMO is watching others learn is useful to the process of learning and taking the kids who know the lesson out of the room deprives them of this experience which in the long run creates other problems.
That’s only fair until you consider you may be depriving the accelerated kid of opportunities just for the point of keeping them in the class to inspire others.
In my case being in the accelerated class meant I never learned how to learn and when at 13 I suddenly didn't immediately understand literally everything in class from the get-go I didn't know what to do. I never experienced that before. I could read and write in paragraphs at 3 I didn't watch my peers learn and it was a rough go for a while.
It was cool to have my critical thinking skills developed earlier, as that's what we did with accelerated students in my town, but IMO I personally might have benefitted by remaining in the class to see how kids learned.
They kept threatening us with the whole "if you don't learn how to properly study, you're going to find yourself having a lot of trouble in college"
That... Never came to pass.
I gotcha. The program I was in had us go to a different class once or twice a week (varied since I changed schools a few times) instead of separating us entirely from the rest of the students, which we still did our regular classes with. I can definitely see how isolating a select few into "ivory towers" could cause some issues.
Personally, I can't say I experienced any of that. Especially the "extra involved parents" part.
I was in gifted programs from K-12. Turns out hyperlexia is now a well known indicator of autism.
From what I remember it was like 30% autistic kids, 60% helicopter parents and like 10% kids from international schools who were just light years ahead of everyone else.
I think it can be done right but not in an education system that's so fundamentally shit to begin with.
Hey now. Some of us were smart but predated ADHD diagnosis. So we got put in there, did some fun higher maths, but still didn’t finish our homework and then barely graduated.
Instead of all these random gifted programs that are all or nothing, we need to start treating earlier grades like high school where some students take advanced classes and others do the bare minimum.
My school did that. We had separated reading groups in like 3-4th grade (there were like 3 levels within the grade, effectively behind/expected/advanced), and same for math starting in 3rd.
By 7th, we had accelerated science classes available to us.
Our whole education system needs a rework. Between the dogshit structure and the universally low pay for teaching we are going to end up far far more ignorant than we are now.
I stand by that every class-year should begin with an explanation of why you're expected to learn the topic and what skills you're expected to develop in the class, along with a paragraph or two sent to the parents on it. It won't fix everything, but it will encourage students to quit thinking of their literature classes as a waste of time because they're going into STEM or that their science classes are a waste because they aren't.
I hated civics class and thought it was boring, but my mom made clear I was inheriting this country and I needed to know how it worked so I paid attention and by the end I was the sort of person who doesn't avoid jury duty and who doesn't resent paying taxes, just what's done with thst money. Similar for learning to write and speak from my father who made clear that a stem job involves a lot of writing and public speaking.
I agree 100%
I absolutely hated school until I got to college and took a C++ class. Suddenly I was having a blast because I could see purpose in what I was doing.
The reality of it is some people are good little drones who can work on pointless tasks because they were told to and people who aren't and need to see why they're doing what they're doing.
Imo the gifted programs didn't reward people because they were smart but because they were obedient.
That may be true for some lines of work like sales, but something like software engineering is closer to 10% social ability and 90% technical ability.
If you want to ever move up in your career that'll have to change because engineering advancement inherently means becoming management.
The unfortunate reality is that we live in a collaborative world and if you can't collaborate then you will not go far.
It doesn't matter if you're the smartest person in the world if you're also the most easily ignored.
One person can only do so much especially when they're competing with people who aren't alone.
Not necessarily, at the company I work for, they have two advancement tracks for engineers: management and individual contributor. The individual contributor track goes something like associate engineer -> engineer -> senior engineer -> principal engineer with a bunch of different sub-tiers in those with raises associated with them. Yeah, you cap out at principal engineer, but at that point, you have a good salary and equity and would be considered a success by most metrics.
Yes any work is going to require collaboration, but that doesn't necessarily require a lot of social skills. Even the most socially awkward person can explain technical requirements to a colleague and ask them to implement them. There's a difference between communication skills and social skills, and success in academics requires good communication skills.
I'm not saying social skills aren't valuable, I'm just saying they aren't required to succeed in this current capitalist economy.
It was a long time ago but our gifted kid program was not about being a good student, since we had accomplished that already. it was random stuff life skill enrichment like making phone calls to a hotel to book a room (hotel had headsup we were actually booking). Or being a recess buddy to a kindergarten kid, to get their winter wear on them, etc
You're experience must be an anomaly based on other comments and my anecdotes. When I went through school, the gifted courses were just advanced level classes that you had to meet a minimum threshold to be able to join. By highschool for us, you were picking which classes and electives you wanted to take plus the required classes each semester, so everyone one of my classes had different people in it. Everyone had to take biology, gifted or not, but the gifted could take algebra earlier than the rest of us.
I was not in the gifted classes, but one of my best mates was. He graduated with honors, graduated from university early with a double major in Biology and physics and never paid a penny in tuition. He got accepted to a very reputable medical school where he graduated with honors, and didn't pay for tuition because he joined the military which paid for his med school, granted him guaranteed residency, and paid him an extra 40k a year during his residency. He's now the chief of cardiology at his location.
I also graduated with another kid that graduated highschool as a junior in college with all of the college courses he took. He did not participate in the gifted kids classes but he was extremely smart. He never graduated college and last I heard he was a manager at a local theater.
Point being, your comment is a major generalization that I don't believe is supported by fact. I don't doubt that some places did handle gifted kids poorly, but I'd argue that wasn't the norm.