Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education NY Times: does lockstep pacing hurt top students?

The New York Times has a Room for Debate topic about the effects of heterogeneous classrooms on top performers. You can read and comment on the various points of view here.

It just allows you to stay up until 2 am, sleep through calculus, and still get the best grade in the class.

It wasn't until I started working, though, that I eventually realized the the reason I was falling asleep all the time was because of sleep deprivation.

It's nice to not fall asleep during the day now.

I have to agree.

When I moved between my 9th and 10th grade years, the new school had three levels - basic, normal, and honors tracks. I did not know there were tracks. The counselor put me in the "basic" track - maybe because I was so quiet.

LOL

The next day I went to him and told him I wanted to be in the Honor's track and he laughed and moved me over.

The Basic classes were pretty basic. And the students were pretty basic, too. I was very fortunate to be in a school with levels that had the same expectations for each.

I work with a lot of Chinese and Indians. Their kids are not exceptionally bright. But they work very hard at studying even if the school program is easy. A lot of Anglo parents of bright kids don't like the Asian kids taking all the top honors and NMSF, but OTOH they do not want their kids to put in the hours studying.

Of course, most of PG kids are mostly either in private school or are home schooled as none of the Tier 1 publics cater to them. Its interesting to watch the reaction of the public schools "top" teenagers who are just now in calculus being upstaged by a 12 year old who is taking Analysis in college in local extracurricular academics.

A few "top" public school kids could be on the faster track if the school system was designed to pipeline them into it, but PG is PG. They just learn SO much faster.

When I was in college, we had two kids from Eastern Europe in our math program. They were exceptionally well prepared and had the equivalent of a BS in math from their HS in Europe because they had been in a special program for mathy kids. Everyone in the program was PG so most of us caught up with the Europeans and in some cases, did better.

After getting to know them and the program they loved back in their hometown, I came away feeling cheated by my school experience. Here I was, proud of testing out of all this stuff, and they had done it all by the time they were 14. And they had not even started school until they were 7.

Well, at least they don't have to go through the severe shock of transitioning from school (where you don't have to do much of anything) to the world of work, where you actually are expected to *do* something as opposed to simply *being* intelligent (which works just fine in school - skip classes and cram).

I think that this is one of the most important arguments for allowing gifted kids to move at a pace that's sufficiently fast that they finally have to study. I cannot recall ever, ever having to study anything before I started Algebra 1 in 8th grade. Up until that point, I just took the test and got a high score. When I started algebra, I was a teenager who had skipped pre-algebra with no concept of what study skills were. I did well in the end, but still had to work hard at learning a skill that many others took for granted, because they'd been developing it since early elementary school.

For me, the decision to let gifted kids coast through school is a big failing in our education system.

I got through the engineering weed-out classes before my grades started really getting shredded. Math didn't really hurt me until differential equations. I never did get around to actually trying to understand them.

Eventually I started throwing out C's and D's. Some classes I actually gave up on and just failed. In hindsight, I should have developed some sort of study skills and organization. Also, attending class on a regular basis and doing homework would have been a plus.

My grades in college actually follow an excellent descending linear slope. Starting out with a 3.75 and ending with 1.75 (on a semester by semester basis - not cumulative).

At the time, I noticed that people seemed most concerned with grades in your major or grades in your last two years, which were actually my worst grades. I guess for most people, they are the best grades.

Although, I also wasn't sure what I was doing in college, having actually no desire to be there. At the time, I was just doing what my parents instructed me to do.

At least two of my kids will finish high school early, and we won't encourage them to start college immediately, though we'll probably let them if they want to. The idea is to give them time to explore the world a bit before they have to start thinking seriously about what they want to do with their lives.

This will mean any of the following or a combination of things:

• Get a job (part-time or full time)
• Enroll in a local community college and explore courses there (Astronomy? Physics? Pottery? etc.)
• Do an internship at a company or in some exotic place
• Start something up by writing some software or whatever
• Study overseas at another high school and learn/improve other languages.
• Other?

FWIW, my eldest has skipped two grades (and is at a new school), and socializing with classmates isn't super-easy for him right now (this is a kid with very good social skills). We've made it clear to him that delaying college will fix this problem. It'll be up to him to decide what's most important for him: college immediately or the other options.

The age-gap problem is, for me, another big problems faced by gifted kids in American schools. The lack of choices in the vast majority of schools means that staying with agemates or near-agemates and being challenged appropriately is rarely an option.

Law school's always a good place to spend $150,000 while having no idea what to go do with yourself.

Sadly, that requires a college degree first.

I second both of these comments.

A problem with college scholarships is that you sometimes get locked into a major or area of study, so if you change it, you lose the money anyway.

The new school is probably part of it, as are the reactions of some other kids. The latter thing is probably the hardest on him right now.

I spent my Freshman year as an Econ / Math major, for just that reason.

There are lots of weird restrictions in the scholarship world, and you're no worse off declining a scholarship that restricts you unacceptably than you would be not having applied for the scholarship in the first place. But you have far more options in scholarships if you're applying as a high school senior planning to attend college as a freshman the following fall.

If my kid wanted to take a gap year, I'd recommend she apply, be admitted, and defer, rather than waiting to apply.

I think that in a gap year, you could do some really cool stuff in a country, learn the language and be more appealing to some of the upper end colleges.

Ren

I agree; he's also toying with the idea of staying for two years, doing the national exit exam, and matriculating at a university overseas.

The uproar about "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" was not about classical music, although that's what Amy Chua's book is mostly about.

Some Chinese kids go to Chinese schools on the weekends, which have classes on Chinese language but possibly also on algebra for 6th and 7th graders. When they take algebra in 8th grade, it is material they have seen before, giving them an advantage over less-prepared classmates.

Oh, I have a friend who went to college at 15 and did just fine. Dated lots of girls, joined a fraternity, graduated from college as a teenager, married one of his college sweethearts, and got a PhD from Yale. Seems like he had a double major, too, in two very different subjects. Has been working for several years as a professor at the college he considered his top choice. He went to ours instead because it offered him a better merit scholarship.

Every kid is different, but many gifted kids find that their social lives in college are much better than they were in high school. I say let the kids choose some college campuses to visit and weight their input very heavily, if not let them make their own decisions.

But our alma mater was one where freshmen were much more likely to get in than transfer students. I think the odds were something like 1:2 or 1:3 for freshmen and 1:20 for transfers. I'm not sure I ever heard of anybody getting AP credit there, either, though plenty had done well on the AP exam.

I used to teach in a cram school in Asia. Traditionally, these were a way for teachers to earn more money. The usual schools had classes all day M, Tu, Th, Fr and half days on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were when most students went to lessons at the private cram schools, where they sometimes learned from the same teachers as their regular schools, they were just paying more for it. Some students might have private lessons at the cram schools on other days after school, but those were more expensive.

The reason parents did this was that the exams to get into an academic junior high, high school, or college were very competitive. Everybody knew the rankings of the schools, and your family would not let you attend less than the best school you could get into.

In the old days, exam scores also sorted students into majors. The students with the best scores, got into most highly demanded departments. You might end up in architecture school, for example, because your entrance exam scores were in a certain range, not because you had any aptitude for architecture.

Family expectations do play a big role. In many Asian families, getting good grades and good exam scores are almost the only way to be a good kid. Teenaged girls aren't even given household chores or allowed to get jobs because it would take time away from their studies. Besides, they will learn to do housework the way their mother-in-law wants it done some day.

Every time somebody mentions Amy Chua, I think about how often I skipped her class and the time I went to a party at her house.

She's a pretty nice person.

The only thing that ever irritated me about her was the fact that she was a academic social climber who seemed bent on getting to Yale.

I'm with Beckee on this one. It's a Chinese old-time culture thing.

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Thank you,
Mark

It really depends on your level of emotional maturity, I think.

In my case, the best years of my life, socially, were some of high school (and middle school). I wasn't able to adjust (socially) to college and was never able to reconstruct any sort of social life that meant anything to me since I was 17 or so. Even though there was little academic challenge for me in high school.

Which is why I understand when people say that high school was the best time of their life.