Denying our geniuses....

[kushali]

Time magazine has an interesting article about how badly our school system serves some of the most promising individuals. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653653,00.html

Comments

[midnitepheonix]

It's interesting to hear that other people were "kicked out" of their classes at well. I spent about half of my time screwing around with the computers in the library in middle school after backing being booted out of english, science and social studies. Can you imagine the storm that would come down if teachers started kicking the special ed students out of class for being too slow? People would be fired and there'd be a big national inquiry about what went wrong...yet they assume that, because you're smart, it's fine to just sit you in the back somewhere with a book to teach yourself

[firstfourisee]

We talked about skipping grades though I never actually did so. They handed a few of us 4th grade math books in 1st grade and that worked out.

Gifted programs rock, though I felt a bit guilty being called out to go to ours. It seems like there could be an alternative hour of teaching here and there, where it's divided by level (and the gifted kids go off and do their thing) and everyone else gets some modified version of the same types of activities.

I had older siblings and never quite fit in with kids my own age until about college. I'm intrigued by the social development questions this raises, where we don't advance kids too quickly so they have a chance to grow up a bit, to be a bit like normal kids. Rarely do exceptionally intelligent kids enjoy much of being around their own grade anyway, but we always say that college is as much about growing up as the knowledge you gain and we must be gaining some kinds of useful social awareness in 5th grade, yes??? In some fantasy world, it would be great to ask the advanced grade

[cuzsis]

....

And to cap on another point here. I also noticed that my creativity took a dive in school. It's slowly coming back, thank goodness, but it really ticked me off to lose it that badly.

And of course there's a question on what you're learning in school, and if it's worth your time or not. Sadly, a good portion of it does seem to be wasted time. Pity.

[killercanary]

very interesting

[iguanawow]

In a lot of areas, having a school for the "smart kids" wouldn't really work. My high school had two tracks for most classes - honors and regular. The difference between the students in the two tracks wasn't actually intelligence - it was whether or not the student was willing to work hard (or cheat, and then have their rich parents threaten to sue the school if they did anything to punish the student). If someone tried to open a public smart kids school nearby, it wouldn't end up being the smart kids that went there, just the kids whose parents were willing to do/spend whatever it took to get their kids into the best college