Originally Posted by playandlearn
I agree with you again. I personally value hard work more than "talent".

I don't. I value talent a lot. I also value hard work. It's not like they're mutually exclusive or that people with very high IQs sit around talking about strategies for succeeding without working.

Honestly, I get tired of PC dismissal of talent. Talent matters. Talent is huge. When we dismiss it, we risk ending up with crazed tiger parents who make their kids miserable and distort...oh, wait. frown

Originally Posted by playandlearn
So it's fine with me to value high achievers over high IQs when resources are distributed.

There are really a lot of holes in this statement.

By this logic, we should toss aside kids with IQs past the 99th percentile because they haven't achieved according to a cookie-cutter definition created by someone who may not have been as smart as they kids being tossed aside (by a wide margin). And what about low and low-ish SES kids whose parents don't how to work the system? Should we ignore them too because they haven't "achieved?"

Originally Posted by playandlearn
But the point should really be to accommodate each student's need and unique learning abilities and styles, instead of having a few cookie cutters, each for a loosely defined group. Is IQ 119 really that different from 121? Yet a line is drawn somewhere and each group is given a cookie cutter.

Yes, 119 is effectively the same as 121, but both are very different from the 99th percentile and above. People with very high cognitive ability think differently from pretty much everyone else, and the rarer your talents get, the more you need a different kind of learning environment in order to develop properly (more depth, move more quickly). I agree that IQ tests aren't perfect, but they're reasonable and are pretty good predictors of different thought patterns.