I was able to attend a screening of Race to Nowhere last night at the local middle school. I had heard of it and seen clips, but I was surprised by how much I didn't realize was going on. Anyone here see it and have any thoughts? Especially since we seem like a 'pushy' lot...parents of gifted children.

I was thinking about stress- a lot of the source of stress in the film was not only not being able to do the work but the sheer amount of work (even if its easy). Wouldn't this be an issue with acceleration...3-4 hours a night is mind boggling.

Overall, American students are NOT working hard in high school, in part because it is so easy to get into a college. The highly selective colleges are exceptions. A survey from 2005 found that only about 10% of college-bound students spend 15 or more hours per week preparing for class.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-05-08-high-school-usat_x.htm
Survey: High school fails to engage students
By Alvin P. Sanoff, special for USA TODAY
A majority of high school students in the USA spend three hours or less a week preparing for classes yet still manage to get good grades, according to a study being released today by researchers who surveyed more than 90,000 high school students in 26 states.
The team at Indiana University in Bloomington calls the findings "troubling." The first large study to explore how engaged high school students are in their work, it adds to a growing body of evidence that many students are not challenged in the classroom.

Just 56% of students surveyed said they put a great deal of effort into schoolwork; only 43% said they work harder than they expected to. The study says 55% of students devote no more than three hours a week to class preparation, but 65% of these report getting A's or B's.

Students on the college track devoted the most time to preparation, but only 37% spent seven or more hours a week on schoolwork, compared with 22% of all high school students. Among seniors, just 11% of those on the college track said they spent seven or more hours a week on assigned reading, compared with 7% of all seniors.

Surprisingly, 18% of college-track seniors did not take a math course during their last year in high school. That could help explain why studies show that 22% of college students require remediation in math.

The Indiana study also found that 82% of students said they planned to enroll in some form of post-secondary education, and most said they expected to earn at least a bachelor's degree. But the study says "a substantial gap exists" between what students do in high school and what they will be expected to do in college.

<end of excerpt>

I like Caitlin Flanagan's mockery of the Good Mothers who like Race to Nowhere:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/the-ivy-delusion/8397/

...

'You should know that the good mothers have been mad�and getting madder�for quite a while now. The good mothers believe that something is really wrong with the hypercompetitive world of professional-class child rearing, whose practices they have at once co-created and haplessly inherited. The good mothers e-blast each other New York Times articles about overscheduled kids and the importance of restructuring the AP curriculum so that it encourages more creative thinking. They think that the college-admissions process is �soul crushing.� One thing the good mothers love to do�something they undertake with the same �fierce urgency of now� with which my mom used to protest the Vietnam War�is organize viewings of a documentary called Race to Nowhere. Although the movie spends some time exploring the problems of lower-income students, it is most lovingly devoted to a group of neurasthenic, overworked, cracking-at-the-seams kids from a wealthy suburb in Northern California, whom we see mooning around the enormous kitchens of their McMansions and groaning about sleeplessness and stress. It posits that too much homework can give your child stomach pains, chronic anxiety, anhedonia.

The thesis of the film, echoed by an array of parents and experts, is that we can change the experience and reduce the stress and produce happier kids, so long as we all work together on the problem. This is the critical factor, it seems, the one thing on which all voices are in concert: no parent can do this alone; everyone has to agree to change. But of course parents can do this individually. By limiting the number of advanced courses and extracurricular classes a child takes, and by imposing bedtimes no matter what the effect on the GPA, they will immediately solve the problem of stress and exhaustion. It�s what I like to call the Rutgers Solution. If you make the decision�and tell your child about it early on�that you totally support her, you�re wildly engaged with her intellectual pursuits, but you will not pay for her to attend any college except Rutgers, everything will fall into place. She�ll take AP calculus if she�s excited by the challenge, max out at trig if not. It doesn�t matter, either way�Hello, New Brunswick!

But the good mothers will never do that, because when they talk about the soul-crushing race to nowhere, the �nowhere� they�re really talking about (more or less) is Rutgers. And more to the point, while you�re busily getting your child�s life back on track, Amy Chua and her daughters aren�t blinking.'

<end of excerpt>

I'm on Chua's side. If a child is overwhelmed by taking too many A.P. classes, she should take fewer of them.

That is missing that...Over forty percent of the students who apply to Rutgers are not accepted. And, those who are have to figure out a way to pay for it. Maybe a nonissue to the snobs, but for us regular folks $28,000 instate (or $37,000 out of state) is nothing to sneeze at. Saying it doesn't matter a bit what your kids do in high school is not a luxury afforded to middle class families who are worried about paying for college. Good GPA and test scores do matter in access to merit scholarships. So, no many of us don't have the option of just ignoring the realities of college admissions and financing.

And, I'd like to see gifted students having more choices. Your only option to be with bright students shouldn't come with a gigantic homework burden that destroys your options for having a good and interesting life with time for extracurriculars, daydreaming, etc.

They screened the movie for parents at my D's private high school. Unfortunately, the movie is long, so we didn't have any parent discussion afterwards. Having had two kids go through the school, I can say that my perspective has changed over time. The highest stress periods for us came from:

- Pressure on our less gifted kid to stay on the "most challenging" academic track. She is the one who wanted to do this (because her friends were), but it added a lot of stress. Her homework load was huge. Second D (much higher IQ) is having a fairly easy time with exactly the same course load. In fact, coasting a little too much for my taste

- Extra curricular activities - Too many of them, and too big a time commitment from some of them. Some chosen by the kids, some I blame the school (why does every middle school kid there HAVE to start an instrument? My kids already had piano, and were in choir. For 2nd D, we opted out of band/orchestra in spite of pressure to do otherwise. She is happy now in choir as a hs sophomore, and no worse for missing out on the instrumental experience).

And the pressure from athletic coaches to practice every day/play tournaments on weekends/join offseason teams, just to maintain a spot on the team, is crazy. Would LOVE to see more high school athletic options that were more like college intramurals -- a couple of days a week, scrimmage type games, no cuts, etc.

We were MUCH more savvy with our second child in avoiding the pitfalls that lead to too much pressure.

The idea that lots of students aren't doing enough homework, doesn't detract from the fact that some are doing way too much. Do we ignore the minority because of a characteristic of the majority?



You're assuming that the only choices are AP classes with tons of homework and no AP classes. Where is it written that there can be no middle ground?

You're also assuming that turning a child into a homework drone is a good thing. If the goal is to turn him into fodder for industry or an academic who churns out paper after paper, and if the child is suited to that life, fine. Many of these people are very good at perfecting old models and their work is important.

But these people represent only one part of the picture of innovation. They're very good at honing ideas, but they aren't typically original innovators. That job goes to quirky types who don't do well in a hyper-competitive, work-work-work environment. Work-work-work is anathema to creativity. When everyone has to become a homework drone just to get into college, we lose the quirky creative types who come up with new ideas.

Creative people respond poorly to a hyper-competitive, hyper-worked situation for the same reasons that gifted kids respond poorly to moving at the same pace as non-gifted age-peers. Re-read that sentence.

If you aren't a super-creative kind of person, try to see this idea in terms of gifted kids who wither when they're forced to "learn" material that they mastered long ago. Very creative people wither when not allowed time or mental space to let their imaginations roam. Three hours of homework after seven hours of school and required extra-curriculars leaves no time for imaginative thought.

If you're having trouble understanding how this could be so, you're in the exact same position as teachers who think that gifted kids are fine in the regular classroom, doing the same thing as everyone else, provide they get tossed an extra worksheet now and then or get a half-hour pullout on Wednesdays.

Not to derail the thread,but D (age 16) did drop out of her high school team sport this year, and joined the local fencing club. Practice 2 times per week, only internal matches during practice for the first year, she can skip practice without even letting them know if she has a conflict (or too much homework). It has been perfect... we just keep saying how glad we are that she quit her other sport because of the reduced pressure & time commitment. As a bonus, she LOVES fencing, far more than she liked her other sport.

I couldn't agree more.

The workload (as in VOLUME) is soul-crushing-- not the difficulty of that work-load. (I say that with respect to the expectations that are standard in my DD's virtual high school curriculum. It's insane-- even a reasonably competent and diligent student could easily spend fifty hours a week on just academics.)

In other words, all kids are being asked to do 25 math problems each night because some of them can't learn the material any other way. But what about my kid, who is ready for that level of mathematics instruction, but who is absolutely incapable of producing the volume expected of her?? What about kids that are ready to discuss literature critically... but don't see the point in ALSO writing a four page essay on the same exact subject (or don't have the ability/time to do so)?

I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that Bostonian is right, on the one hand. The movie is right, on the one hand. We are giving students way too much work. And it's way too easy. As in the other thread (the one about struggle/difficulty teaching more than edutainment does), it's not just quantity that matters here. But that seems to be lost on most administrators.

IMO where it also goes wrong is that not all of these concerned parents have kids that are appropriately placed to begin with. When the failure rate on AP exams in this country is now nearly 45%, that tells me that there are a lot of butts in those seats that probably don't have any business being there.

It's a problem, all right. But the problem is mostly with parents that WANT their kids to be... well, <blushes> like our kids.
Not all kids are like that. Why shouldn't they be allowed to be who they are? ALL of them, I mean.

Did anyone hear Donald Trump today? He said he would deal with China by imposing a 25% tax on imports and make them free float their currency.

China owns the US. They own our debt and the US can keep the government going because China buys our debt.

Yes, I am talking about the Race to Nowhere. We had a screening at our school. The US has fewer and fewer options for our kids. If you have a solution, perhaps you might have a solution for our unemployment problem too because the president and his advisors don't have one.

I am willing to put my kid in the race because I want her to go somewhere. Somewhere she wants to go and I am fearful that she won't have options because of where this country is heading.

I asked her if she wanted to take Mandarin because China was going to be the world power when she grew up. And she decided she would so she would have options.

To me, the title Race to Nowhere is really telling. Our kids have nowhere to go. I want my kid to end up somewhere.

The world has changed.

Ren

Yes, I agree. Again, I think this goes back to the everyone-should-go-college mentality and the everyone-should-be-able-to-try mentality.

No, everyone should not go to college.

Yes, everyone should be able to try calculus, but only after they've proved they know the prerequisite material with at least a B. How can you do calculus if you still don't really understand the quadratic formula or unit circles? It's one thing to have to look the formula up when you're doing an optimization problem because you forgot where 4ac goes, but it's something else altogether to have no clue about factoring and hence what the quadratic formula is even all about.

Plus, if people can't master calculus at the speed of an AP class, the schools should offer a slower paced course (say, spend a year on differentiation and applications). Educators are the ones who say that we should "give everyone a chance;" therefore, they have a responsibility to follow through and either fail the kids who can't keep the pace or provide a slower-moving course.

NB, HowlerKarma, what you said mirrors my thinking on why all that homework gets in the way of developing creativity. Too much volume = too much mental clutter = too little time for the imagination.

You nailed it!


I don't think it's written, but in our experience we were given no alternative: If a GT kid wanted any hope of learning anything at their level, they had to take AP classes, but due to ability level of the majority of butts in those classes, AP meant tons of homework.

The only way teachers could justify passing the majority of kids in these AP classes was to base the class grades on mass volumes of homework - rewarding activity over accomplishment. The straight A students were mostly the ones that couldn't pass the AP Exams(!) I don't know why the teachers couldn't just exempt the higher ability students from the homework if they made above certain scores on the tests.

I take that back, we did find an alternative: DD1 graduated 2 years early, DD2 quit to be home-schooled. Grrrr. I should ask for a refund on my ISD property taxes.

PS Val, I agree with everything you said. Just venting

OMG. You have just explained something that has had me completely befuddled.

Since my eldest started middle school, I've been at a loss to understand why homework counts equally with tests toward a semester grade. Now I get it. Homework is a way to compensate for slower students (especially because they get help from aides during homework club).

I spent a lot of time in a university system where the most important grade was the one you got on the three-hour essay-style final exam (NO multiple choice). The idea was that you spent the year learning, and the big test at the end measured your knowledge of that particular subject as a whole. What we would call "mid-terms" were for measuring your progress. They didn't count much (if at all) toward a final mark/grade. History/English-type subjects did use graded essays (but only one per term, usually), and the final was still super-important. Ditto for homework assignments, which were intended as learning tools and, as such, had almost no impact on the final mark. Why should they? the thinking goes. The whole point is that you're still learning and are expected to make mistakes.

The same idea applied (still does) the end of secondary school. Everyone takes a big exam (A Levels, Leaving Cert., "Le Bac.", etc.). The points on that exam are the sole determinants of what you study at which university. You get the points, you get in. It's that simple. No essays, extracurriculars, no legacy students, no nothing but points.

This really strikes a nerve with me today.

WE are seriously thinking about the consequences of pulling DD out in favor of homeschooling. But it complicates matters significantly in a couple more years when she's 13 and needs college level material but doesn't have a HS diploma. <rubs temples>

I'm just getting pretty tired of whipping my very capable kid through the sheer VOLUME of repetitive crapola the school seems to want, while I pretend to think it's actually caviar. <nevermind, total rant>

Not to date myself but everyone was taking Japanese when I was in college because they were going to rule the world. I think I have 1 friend that ever used it. Not saying it is a bad idea to take Chinese- just that things change.
Race to Nowhere was also shown at my kids' private school and one of the biggest things I took away from it was the lack of real learning and the do anything mentality to get a grade. Put the info in enough to regurgitate it then forget it. I was particularly struck by the statistic that was given that a high percentage of college freshman at one of the selective CA state schools needed remedial math and reading because they had never really LEARNED how to do these things. There was also mention of employers stating new hires sat and waited to be told what to do- they couldn't figure it out because they had never had to.

Anyone that went to Japan knew they would never stay long at the top. I had to go visit automobile companies during the 80s, in Asia and in Europe and here. Japan was a bubble. 100 million people in land the size of CA. But it was a good model of bottom up input in manufacturing.

China owns our debt. Without them buying our debt, we cannot maintain. We do not have job creation. We created jobs in he 80s by rebuilding manufacturing plants, redoing union rules. But even then, it wasn't enough because union workers want a certain level of lifestyle. Workers in Mexico expect a lot less. And we have NAFTA. The US peaked in the 60s. Many nations have been world powers, peaked and gone down. Spain, Britain, France, Russia under Catherine. Happens.

Not to say China won't have mishaps. But DD is learning Spanish also but that is part of her curriculum at school.

Anyone listen to our Fed Chairman the other day? We will have high unemployment for a long time. That is not good. I think many of our kids will have "nowhere" to go if they don't have options. And even if I am wrong, I think DD will be better off knowing Mandarin than not.

Ren

This conversation is moving into an area in which I am frustratingly naive, but I really want to understand this better:

A friend was recently telling me about the "imminent collapse of the dollar" and advising me to buy silver. He said that the price of silver would escalate and bring down one of the biggest banks and he said the Chinese were advising their citizens to buy silver. I asked why the Chinese would want to expedite the collapse of the dollar since they owned our debt.

He then told me that the Federal Reserve owns the US debt and the FED is actually privately owned by the a few wealthy families. If you Google "who owns the FED?" some really interesting stories come up, implying that the two US presidents to challenge the constitutional existence of the Federal Reserve System were assassinated. There are references cited for most of the claims, I haven't had time to check them all out yet but I am fascinated. If true, this is really alarming, if not, it would make the best conspiracy theory of all time I cant believe no one has made a movie about it.

I think this forum is made up of some of the most thoughtful/intellectual folks I know so I am hoping someone here can enlighten me further on this.

Markets are self-correcting. The U.S. currently has high unemployment and a trade deficit, and the Fed has responded to the former with an easy money policy that is pushing down the value of the dollar. (Gold at $1500?) As the dollar weakens, it will encourage companies to produce goods here for export, creating jobs and reducing the trade deficit. This is already happening. Foreign car manufacturers are opening plants in the U.S., at least in the right-to-work Southern states.

Policies such as a higher minimum wage (it went up about 10% in summer 2009), unemployment benefits lasting two years, and welfare benefits such as food stamps unaccompanied by work requirements are discouraging and in some cases restricting people from working. Deregulate the labor market and scale back the welfare state and more people will work.

You friend is misinformed. The Federal Reserve is part of the federal government . It does have the power to effectively print money by creating bank reserves, and it does earn interest on its government bond holdings, but it is required by law to send that interest to the federal treasury (after deducting operating expenses). I don't agree with current Fed monetary policy, but it is more open than it has ever been. Bernanke gave a news conference yesterday, a first for a Fed chief.

I think learning Chinese is too hard to make it worthwhile for non-Chinese . I have not tried to learn Chinese, but there is an interesting essay "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" by David Moser, who has: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html .

Thanks, any idea where I can find that law? It would certainly refute the claims and save me a lot of unnecessary research time if I could start and end there.

No, but I can cite a news story "Federal Reserve Sends In Largest Earnings on Record for Treasury Securities" http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...est-earnings-record-treasury-securities/ consistent with what I wrote.

Our neighborhood public high school has an option for students to graduate after 11th grade if certain requirements are met. It's worth investigating if one's school district allows this.

Yes, even a long time ago when I was in HS and homeschooling was not so common I was looking at leaving HS early and going straight to college. I didn't find any that I was looking at that required a diploma, but most did require certain prerequisites and, obviously, the appropriate ACT/SAT scores. If I remember correctly, the state university was willing to take me on a probationary status. But it is worth getting an idea of the application/entrance requirements of your local colleges so you aren't surprised down the road.

Yes, I should clarify-- the problem is just how young DD is. (Currently 11 and already at college readiness level in many subject areas, but developmentally... eleven. )

Local CC basically has admission contingent upon: HS diploma, dual enrollment via accredited high school program, or GED-- or upon instructor permission. State rules prohibit anyone younger than 16 from taking GED exam.

In other words, individual instructor whim/permission is what this would leave us with, at the end of the day. Not ideal as an educational plan for the next three years.

The good news is that one can take AP exams as a homeschooler, and there are no age restrictions on those, so she could at least produce AP scores as "proof" of college-level readiness. The bad news is that she'd be doing AP coursework as independent study, which isn't ideal in terms of preparing her well for a variety of teaching styles and increasing her flexibility as a student.

I realize this is a touch off-topic for the thread, and my apologies for that. It's just that this is, ironically, also what is driving US out of mainstream education-- the output expectations in this data-mad microcosm run by education bureaucrats are frankly insane. As I noted elsewhere in the high school courses being dumbed down thread-- washing machines. I don't see any point in running my own kid through the heavy-duty, fast spin cycle just to prove that my cheetah can keep up with the current pack of wolves. If you'll forgive the mixed metaphors, that is.

Anyway. We're crunching the numbers and running cost-benefit analysis on the entire situation.

The cost of materials is a real concern, as is the loss of social interaction via the virtual school intranet. No easy answers, I fear-- at least not in our case.

I still think at least part of the problem is that some students are overloading on AP classes, under the perhaps mistaken notion that a profusion of AP's will impress colleges. The article below suggests this is the case.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/06/AR2007020600738.html
Too Many AP Courses? It's Possible, Official Says
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

How many Advanced Placement courses are enough? Here in the Washington area, a hotbed of AP mania, the College Board provided an answer for the first time yesterday: Five is plenty in a high school career. Any more, the official response suggested, might be just showing off.

Trevor Packer, executive director of the AP program, said he had spoken to a number of college officials about how many of the college-level courses were needed to impress admissions officers and prepare for the rigors of higher education. They told him that "three, four or five AP courses are sufficient" in a high school career, he said. Under that scenario, a student could max out with one AP course as a sophomore and two each in junior and senior years. "Beyond that, they are interested in seeing students participate in other activities."

Many college-bound students in recent years have been spurred by parents, counselors, admissions officers and other advisers -- as well as peer pressure and self-motivation -- to pack their transcripts with tough courses. Many believe the more, the better.

Yesterday, Packer addressed AP overload for the first time at the College Board's annual release of its AP Report to the Nation in downtown Washington. The report once again showed Maryland, the District and Virginia among national leaders in participation on the three-hour AP exams. About a third of graduating seniors in each jurisdiction took an AP test last year, higher than the national average of about a quarter.

Although area students who take a dozen or more AP courses or tests might be overdoing it, Packer and College Board President Gaston Caperton said, the national problem is not that high school students take on too much college-level work but that they take on too little.

Two students on an expert panel convened to discuss the AP report acknowledged that they were guilty of exceeding the five-exam mark. Kyle Daniels, a University of Maryland freshman who graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George's County, said he took at least six AP exams. Celina Guerra, a Harvard University freshman who graduated from Edinburg North High School in south Texas, said she took at least nine. Both said that they took so many they could not recall the exact number.

College Board data showed that only 2.7 percent of AP students took six or more tests in the past three years, as Daniels did. But he said he was glad he did. "College is a competitive place," he said. "Competing in high school is good preparation for college."

College Board officials reported that 2.3 million AP tests were given in 2006 in 37 subjects. Among 2006 high school graduates, about 24 percent took at least one AP exam, up from about 16 percent in 2000. About 15 percent got at least one grade on an AP test high enough for college credit (3 or better on a 5-point scale), up from about 10 percent in 2000.

<rest of article at link>

Sorry if I'm a bit skeptical that a full 25% of high school students are at a readiness level to be taking AP coursework.


At least if AP coursework still means 'college level' material, that is.

I am somewhat pessimistic that 25% of first-year college students are at a readiness level for college coursework. My wife reports that many of her second- and third-year nursing students don't know words like "subsequent" and "analysis", and the first-years are worse. (A big shout-out to Val, with the understanding that I still believe that these same kids could learn tensor calculus if taught correctly earlier in life.)

Well, extend that shout out to me, too.

Yes to not knowing what I considered basic English vocabulary.

Flashback moment: <thinking> Wait... I'm pretty sure that English is not your second language... I'm just trying to decide whether your grasp on it qualifies as a FIRST one...


I once had a college sophomore in a gen ed course indignantly retort (not kidding): "How am I supposed to know whether or not this Anne Frank person is alive or dead??!! Who the **** is ANNE FRANK, anyway??"

Many of the second and third year science majors I taught had no clue what the quadratic formula was, or how to isolate a variable using techniques they should have learned in middle school pre-algebra.

So, yeah, I'm guessing that AP stats wouldn't have gone well.

I wish this was true. I really do. But I don't think it is. I don't think that most people can even learn differential/introductory calculus (and this is okay. People have different talents). I wish they could. But I just don't think so.

Here's why:

Some people will never be able to be starters on the college varsity basketball team. Some people will never run a mile in under four and a half minutes or 100m in under 11 seconds or do a triple axel, no matter how hard they train. Not everyone can make the cut for a pro baseball team (which is why starting salaries are over $300,000 a year). They might not have the right kinds of muscles or the right body shape or enough strength (or all of the above).

Why should cognitive achievement be any different?

I understand the desire to include everyone (or not exclude them because of the circumstances of their births). It feel elitist. But being honest isn't elitist. Doing calculus requires that you know your geometry and algebra (I&II) really well. Plus it requires a lot of reasonably difficult arithmetic and an understanding of functions. You need You need to be able to work with these things without thinking too much so that your mind is able to focus on the bigger picture (the calculus) instead of its component parts (the lower math that you use to make the calculus work).

People who can't retain all of that stuff and keep it running in memory at the same time will have a serious problem with just the computational aspects of calculus (never mind applying concepts to word problems or real-life problems). And that's okay.

The problem, I think, is our society's ruthlessness and its attitude toward academic pursuits (get a degree and you'll earn more money!) rather than on being honest about identifying people's talents and steering them toward them.

(HOLLA! @ HowlerKarma.)

Cognitive ability is different because it's not subject to such hard physical limits, and in addition because, in my opinion, we're not nearly as close to the limits of what people can learn as we are to what people can be trained naturally to do with their bodies. You can't double your height, so a very short person will be at a serious disadvantage for all time in the long jump. But people can greatly increase memory, for instance, through training. I don't think you can draw very many valid parallels between current limitations on intellectual abilities and athletics. Intellect is limited by teaching a lot of the time today; I guess that the closest I can come would be a child denied vitamins growing up, and turning out to have stunted growth. We've figured out nutrition to a greater degree than teaching and learning.

A long time ago, people weren't trained to do much intellectually compared to today; reading and writing was considered a big deal. Learned people of those days would likely have been astounded by the algebra skills of a fairly ordinary high school math student of today. And if you had tried to teach someone ordinary algebra in adulthood, perhaps a person with above-average IQ for that time, but dulled through lack of teaching that would be ordinary today, you would have had a much tougher time, perhaps an impossible one, much the same way a child raised by dogs can't learn much human language in the end.

I don't know what would prevent an ordinary person from learning much more than ordinary people learn today. I see no reason to think we've figured out optimal ways of teaching people. It just seems impossible to me. We all gripe here every day about ways in which schools are failing our kids, but they routinely fail most kids IMHO.

Are you sure of that? I'm going to have to ask for evidence for your entire first sentence.

Brains are physical things. They run via biochemical processes. As far as I'm aware, this means that they have physical limitations too, just like muscles.

Increasing your memory for static things (like the order of some playing cards) is very different from (and much easier than) remembering a bunch of different rules, understanding them in context, applying them as needed, and combining them in new ways. Or discovering new rules.


I believe that a person who isn't cognitively talented will have an equal disadvantage in a subject suited to people who are much brighter.

Developing talent is essential. Being honest about limitations and recognizing them is critically important. These ideas are two sides of the same coin.


I agree. But I think they fail most kids because they don't respect individual abilities. The pace is too fast for some, too slow for others, and right for another group. A huge part of this is the fictitious idea that everyone can or should go to college. To me, it's disrespectful of individual non-collegey-talents to push everyone into college.

My original point was that talent and limits to ability are acknowledged in literally every other area of life: vision, athletics, ability to mimic an accent, ability to play the drums, ability to hit a target with a dart, ability to drive a racecar, art, etc. etc. etc. Why would cognitive ability be any different? I'm not saying that people can't improve. I'm saying that everyone, literally, reaches a barrier that can't be crossed. Those barriers are different for every person in every area of endeavor.

This is actually one area where I completely fail to understand why educators don't get it. I've taught (classes of students and my kids). I still teach. Whenever I'm teaching, whatever the subject, and regardless of the ages of the students, it is immediately and abundantly obvious that differences in talent exist. Most people I meet who lack talent for <whatever> (including myself) tend to be pretty good-natured and realistic about their/our limitations. "I'm not good at this. If I practice, I might get better, but I'll never be as good as <insert name of really good person, who could just be sitting across the room>.

People tell me I'm a good teacher. I always, always encourage the students having trouble to persevere. I really enjoy helping people improve, but I can't give them something they haven't got, any more than a good teacher can turn me into, say, a highly skilled artist or a highly skilled politician. It'll never happen. And that's okay, because I like science better anyway.

So I don't understand why other people (especially educators) can't accept that limitations exist.

Agreed. And, adding to that, even if the website has requirements that sound overly restrictive do not assume that is the final word. The general rules on paper or on the website, often aren't written with these exceptional students in mind. And, if your student approaches the college/university with SAT or ACT scores that are extremely strong those general rules may not apply. By extremely strong I mean not just good for their age but significantly above the average incoming student.

Also, I would keep in mind that "ready for college level work" doesn't have to mean enrollment in college. May homeschoolers are ready for college level work years before they start taking college classes and they still find challenge.

The movie gives the impression that most high school students are doing a lot of homework. They are not. Here is a quote from the 2009 High School Survey of Student Engagement
http://ceep.indiana.edu/hssse/images/HSSSE_2010_Report.pdf :

'In 2009, 77% of the respondents reported
spending five hours or fewer per week (translating to one hour or fewer per day) �Doing written homework� and 87% reported spending that same amount of time �Reading and studying for class�; 39% of students report spending one hour or fewer per week �Doing written homework� and 50% of students report spending one hour or fewer per week �Reading and studying for class.� On the other hand, 30% of students reported spending six hours or more per week �Watching television, playing video games� and 26% reported spending that same amount of time �Surfing or chatting online.�'

I agree.

Science has been politically against the idea of nature side of the nature vs nurture argument. People have gone as far as to threaten scientists discovering evidence in favor of the nature side. A lot of the support for the nurture side was based on a very famous twin study. In 1997, a reporter uncovered the truth about this study (google search for David Reimer, Money, Diamond).

Pretty much every psychology book written before this time and many after this time have sided on the nurture side and have often referred to this single twin study as the basis of proof. Studies on the nature side have been finding a lot of evidence showing talent is more often a result of inheritence than upbringing.

I read the book written by the same reporter who uncovered the story. The book is called "As Nature Made Him, The Boy raised As A Girl".

Steven Pinker has some interesting comments about the politics of the nature vs nurture sides of science in this talk about his book "The Blank Slate".



People like to believe ideas like the Earth is the center of the Universe. Science often finds the truth is not always what most people would want the answer to be.

I'm with Wren. �I'm trying to give my kids Chinese. �We already live in a Spanglish town. �But alternately I am not disbelieving in the future of America. �I liked a comment someone made on one of the wsj or nyt articles linked to from here. �So what America's jobs are being outsourced. �Americans are strong and healthy we'll survive, but will we be prepared when the jobs wave flows back.

Sorry to pick out the political tangents here. �Just went to a town hall meeting and afterwards decided I really need to find a good civics books cliff notes so I can quickly learn and be sure what these people's jobs are I'm supposed to be voting for. �It bothered me hearing people in town who are involved enough to go to meetings sounding like they don't know either. �I just lurked there this time. �

Uhm. �Schoolwork. �Haven't seen the movie. �And lucounu I think most people could be taught (fill in the blank) from whatever age they start, provided they �have enough free time to learn whatever prerequisites, if they're stubborn enough to take as long as it takes. �I'll credit Val with this following thought: but everybody needs to allow for failure. �It is reality. �How can you really advance if you can't acknowledge the reality of a failure when you see it? �I'm also with Val saying, not everybody needs to learn (fill in the blank), why would they want to? �
Heck, not everybody even wants Their cognitive components tuned to peak performance, much less trained beyond their natural inclinations.
I'll try to get back to thinking about the school system and nature vs nurture now.

Uh oh!!

I really do think there are physical differences between different brains. That's what I've read anyway; number of connections, etc...so that you can say that some folks really are capable of things that some other folks are not.

for instance, one quick google leads me to this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8983488

I shouldn't be posting this early in the morning, and no offense intended lucounu, but my brain can't handle both of those frightening thoughts in one post.

I think you are correct about the nutrition analogy, which makes the hair on my arms stand up straight.

The raised by wild dogs comment seems to be such a perfect, a perfectly horrifying, description of my son's encounter with K-8 education. I don't know if it's like that for ND kids, and looking back to a time when algebra was a big deal I think we can be pleased with how far we've come. But you maybe right.

I remember dropping my son off at school in 2nd grade (his 'bottom' year) and the only way I could make myself do it was to remember all the English Novels I had read about heart-broken parents sending their boy-children off to work in the coal mines. I had no idea why dropping him off for 2nd grade felt like such a tragedy. But I would have felt about the same dropping him off to be raised by wild dogs. All my instincts were screaming that I was doing the wrong thing, day after day, but I had no sense of having any alternatives, and couldn't imagine why our 'very good' public school system might be a bad fit for our 'ordinary to me' seeming boy.

((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity

I've had a very brief experiences teaching other people's kids, and I think that there is a world of difference between what a single teacher can do for a child or children in a given period of time, and saying that the technology of teaching will advance over time and make huge differences to a child throughout their years as a student, starting in preschool.

When I did teach, 2 3 hours sessions to 13 year old religious school students, one of the boys told me at the end of the year that I was the best religious school teacher he had ever had. This made me want to cry, because it was my first year trying it. This sweet boy was super fidgety and I think mostly what I did right was give him some non-distructive fidget avenues without humiliating him. His read aloud skill were also very far behind the other students, and I went to great lengths to give the impression that when we went around the room reading from the book, he got short paragraphs with easy words, or that we ran out of paragraphs a few students before him just 'by accident.'

His thinking ability seems just fine to me, but I wonder if in the hands of a teacher who was less of a divergent thinker by nature, if his remarks would have seemed 'off base.' I had a slot in my brain for 'just because I don't readily understand where this comment is coming from doesn't mean that the student isn't logically making sense internally but just not able to share fully.' I came understand the great charm of sweet kids who appear to be making a lot of effort to make wins in their level of accomplishment and how much fun that is for the teacher. I don't however think that that child deserves more teaching energy than my rather-less-reinforcing son, nor more kindness.

I'm hoping that as teaching technology improves, then all kids can spend more time in the 'sweet spot' of their readiness zone. My experience shows me that working with kids in the sweet spot if very emotionally reinforcing for the Adult learning partner.

I'm hoping that I've bumped into a small piece of that new puzzle in this:
Amazon.com: Notching Up the Nurtured Heart Approach - The New Inner Wealth Initiative for Educators (9780982671429): Howard Glasser with Melissa Block

Love and More Love,
Grinity

I didn't back to this and where I was posting seems divergent from current posts.

The Fed is lending money to the banks at 0%, remember our near collapse in 2008 where they made them take the bailout money? But then they never lent the money to Main Street?

Hence the brokers have 0% loans where they can make money. Hence, why there is so much money still to be made, though investment banking is way down, trading is way down (volume is very thin).

Ed Schultz said it well on an ad for his show. The bottom 95% are paying for the top 5%. Although there is a great case to go after Goldman Sachs since they profited from the money we gave to AIG to hold it up but neither party will go after the guys that donate money to campaigns. That last was from Spitzer.

I do not think American is going to disappear,neither England, France or Spain disappeared after they peaked in power. But there are less options in those countries after the peak.

And if China is not a super power, perhaps my own native country, Canada will emerge

They do have a great number of resources, fresh water for half the earth and only 30 million people. I vote for Canada. Good thing I got DD Canadian citizenship when she was born.

Ren

Our experience was virtually identical to this. It worked well to start with at the department level. They only cared about talent - age was a nonissue. And, just like CFK said one opportunity seamlessly led to another. You could even start with auditing if a course for credit seems like it would be hard to arrange.

What I'm thinking Wren, and I'm just a thinker not a economics expert of any kind... I think the difference is this time the local fall out is from globalization, which means when the dust settles It's not going to be Canada, Spain, or England that gets everything. Technology and transportation has made us into a global community. Each person has become their own little independant corporation. Nobody stays at their job their whole life. There's still niches. My brother keeps learning Japanese because he's in video game design. It depends on what you're into. If you're going to be a doctor you gotta learn Latin, right.


I'm a "planetary native", I've got the button and the patch.
http://woodstockearth.net/thisCategory.asp?ProductTypeMain=16

Interesting perspective La Texican. And I think you have a good idea there but that then assumes no safety net. Medicare, social security. What about public schools etc. Each man an island.

Greece got 98 billion a year ago and didn't do the stuff it was suppose to and now could default. Gone are social programs like that. You could see rapid changes across Europe with those kinds of things. Ireland, Portugal could be next in line.

Which means the dollar probably goes up against the Euro, which isn't so good for our capturing back some manufacturing jobs.

And going back to the Race to Nowhere. This whole discussion diverged into early college entrance. Although we (and I put myself in to the guilty party) justify acceleration because our kids learn faster and we don't want them to get bored, where are they heading to? We are more guilty of racing our kids than the average parents.

Because I couldn't get acceleration in DD's gifted program, I do horizontally offer her options, like the science at the museum, like Chinese, like CTY for her math -- to allow her to go at her own speed. And yes, she can get get bored with her classroom math -- though her teacher is great with teaching them report research and writing. Skills that work and don't bore her since her research is done at her own level. She does love being able to play with her age mates. Being one of the younger ones in her class -- late birthday, and small for her age, a head shorter than most of her classmates, this works. She can give a good run playing tag -- she would be too small to compete with second graders in many sports during gym, even though she is pretty athletic. And that would make her feel bad.

Sometimes I want her to accelerate, sometimes I think of her 15-16 in college and think of myself, drinking way too young, because of 2 skips. And I also think that she doesn't have to enter the workforce early. She deserves the time to grow emotionally and physically.

We just got back from Egypt. It was a great time to go, empty so no standing in hot lines to get into tombs. On the plane, we were talking about where to go next. She has been to 12 countries and she is 6. She has whale watched and snorkled, gone to see volcanoes, 2 thousand year old Mayan pyramids and 5 thousand year old Egyptian pyramids. Stood in a gymnasium for gladiators and then walked across to the Colliseum itself.

There is so much to experience, whether it is working with wolf reserchers in Montana, space programs with Nasa, seeing the Amazon and swimming with piranhas.

I think there is so much to offer a child without necessarily rushing them through college. Totally understand the need for acceleration, in math particulary -- since I was several years ahead. But there is other stuff. A lot of other stuff before they race off to somewhere.

Ren

I haven't read every post in this thread -- has anyone brought up a gap year as a way of delaying entrance to college?

Ds11 and dh and I really like the sound of it, from what we know so far; and the options seem only to be increasing, as the idea catches on in the US.

Ren discussed the pros and cons of acceleration. Some articles about Julian Stanley and his work with accelerants are

http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0697web/whiz.html
Yesterday's Whiz Kids:
Where Are They Today?
By Melissa Hendricks
Johns Hopkins magazine June 1997

and

http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0400web/16.html
What Brilliant Kids
Are Hungering For
By Dale Keiger
Johns Hopkins magazine April 2000

I think overall radical accelerants have been pretty successful, but one doesn't know if they would have been just as successful if they were not accelerated.

Early college for our child has been the exact opposite of a race - more like a leisurely stroll without the stress of high school. Maybe that's the ultimate revealing illustration of the problem with the AP system, that many kids find college much less stressful with more time for open ended exploration.

Our kids are all different. Going "horizontal" works great for some kids. It is what we initially hoped for and tried hard to make work, but it wore thin quickly. Our child didn't want more enrichment with agemates, he wanted to be going forward in his education with other people ready to learn at the same level. Early college was the best way to provide it and still provide plenty of leisure time for pursuing interests in arts, sports, etc. etc. etc.

How is it letting an advanced kid "be a kid" more by leaving them behind to tutor other kids because nobody wants to teach them? I should really read the movie, I'm just responding to the title. If it's a "race to nowhere" then is it on a road that leads to nowhere? Would anybody say that education leads you nowhere? They're just complaining that everybody wants to go at their own pace, or what?

On the tangent Wren I think we'd still have roads and schools and taxes to pay for them. Where I live there's a lot of businesses, even restaraunts, that do business in "the two Laredos" because it's considered a Laredo-Nuevo Laredo Metropolitan area with the Mexican city right across the bridge. There's a lot more local business, it seems, between these two international cities than between Laredo and San Antonio which is two hours away. There's still US and Mexico. I just think, like people here call everything international I imagine universities will become more international, maybe our world can work togeather on global warming, and space exploration, better medicine... A big hi-5 to who ever decided to de-salinate ocean water for consumption. Nice.

I just mentioned the "every man is an island" because I think historically you could expect to learn a job, work for a company, be loyal, work hard and stay there until you retire. The Net says that's history. Besides that everything seems to have become very global. Wren, If I ever win the lottery you're going to be my travel agent. You have the best vacations outlined.

They have physical limits, sure-- and I've referred to them before on the board-- but ones like electrochemical transmission rates etc. are pretty much irrelevant in my opinion to discussing ability, in a non-disabled human, to learn to think abstractly. Vague mentions of memory limits also prove little to me, and certainly not that we have reached the limits of humans to learn. Muscles are completely different; muscles move through a predetermined range and have an easily understood physical functions and limits. Brains and minds are not nearly as well understood, and we don't know their limits; we can only observe how brains and minds perform on tests after being taught with methods that continue to change with each passing generation.

Since we teach better than we did hundreds of years ago (I hope we can agree on that), and more people think at a high level than hundreds of years ago, and our limits haven't been shown to be discovered, I don't see value in assuming we've reached limits.


Sure. I don't understand why you assume that those things can't be learned to some extent too. AFAIK there is a pretty healthy industry around teaching people to think divergently. To at least some extent, you can learn rules about learning rules. See the Creative Whack Pack and similar ideas, going all the way back to divining solutions to problems in animal entrails. In addition, as an ex-software developer, I can tell you that a person can definitely increase (and I mean greatly increase) an ability to memorize rules too, in terms of total capacity and speed of learning.

Why does it make more sense to think that those things are not learnable? I mean, I wouldn't assume that evne going back to the tensor calculus example. We humans didn't evolve brains to do calculus-- except maybe in Soviet Russia for a while there, where they were pretty hard on their engineering students. We mutated to have better language facilities, which allowed the development of logic, from which everything else flowed.


I think that cognitive talent is part biological, and part environmental. Stimulation increases intelligence. A biological advantage is an advantage, but that doesn't mean it's the only possible advantage.


I firmly believe that I could take any ordinary baby and turn it into one heck of a college applicant, starting early enough. I agree with you anyway, but more because the world needs garbage people and only has so many research positions to give. That means, to me, that the ones who show the most intellectual achievement should get the best chances to continue doing so, but it doesn't imply to me that we do an optimal job of optimizing talent today-- for anyone.


I agree that every person has a limited ability to take in new information in any situation and do something useful with it, and that those limits are different for different people. I just don't think we are all that close to optimizing development. Limits at any point in time are just a snapshot of a person's developed potential. I also think that not enough is done for most kids very early on, when stimulation is probably most important.

Anyhoo, it seems like we don't disagree much on the college issue, just on the reasons. I really think anyone could go to college if they were taught correctly, and that in a perfect world, everyone would. It's not a perfect world.

Still waiting for hard scientific evidence.


I didn't mention rates specifically. I just said "processes," which also can include the amount of a particular neurotransmitter. There may also be anatomical considerations, such as the amount of white matter, myelin thickness, placement or number of synaptic connections, and on and on.

Again, you're going to have to give me hard scientific evidence for your ideas in order to convince me.

Also, and this is something I didn't mention in my last message --- much athletic ability also depends on brainpower. Aspiring pro athletes, for example, have to take the Wonderlic test, which is a test of cognitive ability. There are minimum scores for different positions (e.g. quarterbacks need higher scores than most other positions). This makes perfect sense: to be a good quarterback, you need more than muscles. You also have to make a rapid assessment of conditions on the field and be able to make a correct split-second decision about the best person to throw the ball to.

Your basic argument is that teaching affects intelligence. It's a nice idea and I wish it were true, but I don't believe it is. Good teaching can have a huge effect on comprehension, but understanding something because someone explained it well isn't the same thing as getting smarter because someone explained something well.


Studies have shown that permanent environmental effects are modest and more striking effects are temporary. Scientific studies support this point. For example, JamieH mentioned the discredited twin study and provided references.

Here's an example of a large and very well-known study. It showed that intensive interventions between the ages of 0 and 5 in low premature children had an obvious effect at age three that started to peter out after that.



Another study called the Abecedarian study showed real but modest gains: the average IQ in the intervention group was around 4 points higher than the controls. I don't know the statistical significance of this difference.

That said, there were other real gains, as the Wikipedia entry shows. Yet they were modest: fewer criminals, fewer teenage pregnancies, and more people in college at age 21 (no mention of how many graduated and what they studied).

If the treatment group (but not the control group) had produced, say, a theoretical physicist or a neuroscientist, the people running the project would have plastered this fact all over the place. I can't find anything along these lines. The study subjects were all born in the early to mid-1970s --- making the oldest ones are 39. We would have heard by now if this had happened.

So yes, there were gains, but no, they didn't turn people of below average intelligence (the average IQ at age 15 was in the 90s for both groups) into very smart people. They just made them less below-average. See page 44 of this report for IQ scores. Note that IQ scores in the control group went up while those in the intervention group went down. What does this mean?

Everything I've written goes back to one idea: talent exists, and it's real. It would be nice if we could make individuals more talented, but we can't really. We can make them a bit more talented, which is great. It's too bad our society doesn't put more emphasis on free pre-natal care, high-quality school lunches and other critical social programs. If we cared more about poor people, we'd try to ensure that they get medical care, food, and safe housing. These interventions would probably go a long way toward raising our society's average IQ and making life better for the poor.




You're assuming that going to college is part of a perfect world. Yet some people have no interest in college. Why should their aspirations be considered less worthy than some arbitrary ideal just because of this?

Val

(Sorry if someone's said this, I haven't read the whole thread in detail): to my mind, the best evidence for the mutability of IQ, i.e. for the importance of the whole environment on it, is the Flynn effect. It's obviously impossible for genetic change to account for anything like the magnitude of that effect, so those increases have to be environmentally caused, for the broadest possible definition of "environmentally". Of course, the observation may be of limited use (because, as the limited effects shown in intervention studies suggest, we are talking about the effect of the entire environment, i.e. growing up in today's world, not just about formal education, for example) and even of limited interest (because it's questionable how much the increase in what IQ tests measure reflects increases in what we really care about), but at least this shows that the idea that IQ cannot be affected by environment is wrong - the same sperm and egg combining in 1900 and growing up there would on average have a much lower IQ than that sperm and egg combining in 2011 and growing up here, if 1900s freezing technology had been up to it :-) [I'm saying sperm and egg, not baby, because one of the things that may be important is prenatal environment. I suppose I haven't accounted for sperm and egg quality issues other than genetics, but you have to start somewhere!]

I looked up the Yesterday's Whiz Kids article and read it.
One of the people highlighted was a woman in my Harvard Med School class. She was very weird and socially isolated. She became a surgeon but is not married and has no children, perhaps because of choice.
Nobody else in my class was a "Whiz Kid," yet we all made it to Harvard Med. I guess my point is, there are many roads to success.

And, many definitions of success. If your definition is being NORMAL, then yes, many prodigies will fail and that is the case whether they go to college early or not. It is not going to college early that makes these kids weird - they are extreme outliers who will by their very definition not be normal. Some research suggests most people who go to medical school are in that "optimal" zone of intelligence - they tend to moderately gifted people. If this individual was such an extreme outlier she likely would stick out in the environment no matter her age. Do you believe giving her four years of unhappy high school first would have made her just like everybody else?

For me the much more important definition of success is will the person be well adjusted and HAPPY. To take a person who cares deeply about intellectual pursuits and confine them to an environment where they have no access to appropriate intellectual outlets is not the foundation for a happy well adjusted individual. That same individual skipped to college may find much more possibility of acceptance. Our child has happy positive experiences every single day in college and that most certainly would not have been the case in middle school.

That said, I think very little is accomplished by trotting out anecdotal stories and attempting to extrapolate from them. What makes more sense is to look at the research on radical acceleration and it is clear that when it is carefully chosen it can work very well. There was a good quote from Julian Stanley in the whiz kids article posted earlier...

"It depends a lot on the parents--whether or not they get the kids motivated and involved and encourage independence, and if they're facilitative, not exploitative. That is, they're not trying to 'create' brilliant kids. They have brilliant kids, and they're trying to help the kids use that brilliance"

I am back to respond to the comments.

Rushing: When I was in high school, I had a lot of extra time to make a national team. I remember my history teacher telling me that I missed 56 days of school that year. Yet, was still top of the class and 3 years ahead in sciences and math.

I think the acceleration, and I do have DD accelerated with CTY math, can create a momentum of acceleration within the child of "you are able to do this and move ahead" and I remember getting in my head, that after a year I could get into medical school and within 5 years I would be done. DH's good friend did that. He went to Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia at 16 and by 20 was an MD.

DH didn't accelerate. In high school, he won a bunch of science competitions, did boy scouts activities, went to Chile for a semester and then went to Harvard. He really enjoyed Harvard, didn't rush. He spent some time down in DC working as an intern.

I still feel like I am racing to nowhere.

Which makes me truly ambivalent. Because I want DD to have challenge, good work habits yet I don't want her to feel like she is racing to get things done. It really is part of my psyche.

Her science program is accelerated, her math is accelerated yet she isn't acclerated in school. And I struggle with that. I also struggle with the social aspects since I partied too much and didn't always make the right social decisions. I was hoping more for nerdy but I can see now that my extrovert could go easily over to my experience. Not so keen for that. There is part of me that fights to get her accelerated.

And part of me that wants to give some space and not make her feel like she should rush.

I am sorry that horizontal diversification didn't work. I am finding that there is so much more for her to experience. Now being highly competitive, like I was, does eat up a lot of time, but I am not that keen to pursue that as everthing else has to go eventually to make room for that.

I am not sure. I am more on the fence that my diatribe suggests.

Ren

I went to a rural public school where there was a policy against skipping grades, limited social choices and no internet or any other access to the outside world. A number of times I made attempts to get them to make exceptions to this no skip policy, but without success. I could also hardly wait to finally become part of the nerd crowd I felt I belonged with.

Looking back, I am happy I never succeeded in both the grade skipping and a desire to find the nerd crowd early in life. Having seen the world outside of a world I would have choosen is the most valuable education I have had to date.

The delay in education helped me see the world before being taught about the world. When I did finally have the opportunity to pursue the areas of study I was most interested in, I realized much of what I was being taught was inaccurate. Rather than study my field of interest, I choose to avoid education in this area until I was confident I had seen more of the world. I came to the conclusion that there was as much danger in education as there was benefit. This may not be the case in all areas of study, but I feel my area of interest hasn't matured enough.

As to my social desires, I now realize making these choices based on preconceived notions would have been a big mistake. By the time I did find the nerd crowd, I realized they were not as into their interests on average as I had originally suspected. The odd person was, but most of them were people who merely skimmed the surface of the subjects they were supposedly interested in.

Cities offer the opportunity for us to place ourselves into a box with a very limited view of the world around us. Even a lot of people who travel the world confine themselves to a very similar world to the one they live in locally. I sometimes feel I have met a greater variety of people in the small community I grew up in than most people who travel the world will ever meet.

As the population in my home town increased, the coffee shop went from having tables consisting of a very mixed crowd to tables with very similar people. You now find tables exclusively consisting of farmer, teachers, mechanics, similar ages, same genders, etc. When the population was smaller, the tables were of mixed ages, genders and areas of interest. The level of conversation in these mixed crowds was far more interesting and in many cases had greater depth.

I don't think anyone would argue that there are not environmental influences on IQ when you consider the impact that lead exposure or malnutrition, for example, have on brain development, and it seems clear that the gains that we have made in many countries in improving maternal and infant health and in decreasing toxic exposure to materials like lead (by banning its use in paints and fuels, for example) have had a beneficial effect on average IQ.

It is important to note that, because of the nature of standard scoring, decreases in the number of people scoring at very low levels shift the center of the curve to the right - which means that the population level IQ goes up. It is also important to understand that children with high "genetic potential" are not immune to the deleterious effects of poor nutrition and toxic exposures: an environmental insult that depresses IQ by 30 points leaves what would have been a gifted child functioning at an average level, and decreasing the incidence of such insults increases the proportion of the population able to function at a high level, again raising the average IQ. The Flynn effect over the course of the 20th century is a paean to the relatively steady progress that we have made world-wide in improving living standards and nutrition, improving pre-natal care, and decreasing pollution and childhood exposure to known neurotoxins.

There is also no question that deprived environments, those where children have few opportunities to explore or interact with their environments in novel ways, or where they have little exposure to language, depress IQ. But that is a far cry from indicating that IQ is infinitely elastic, as some (not you) have argued.

Maybe that's the key. If it feels like rushing then the acceleration probably isn't appropriate. Radical acceleration has never felt like rushing here - it feels like going at a reasonable pace that finally isn't way too slow.


I'm not. The desire for going horizontal was all about me. It wasn't about my child and the person he is. So, to say that it is sad that going horizontal didn't work for me feels like saying we are sorry he's the person he is. And, that doesn't make any sense. I'm grateful we've been able to find an academic plan where the child is challenged, happy, and developing needed lifeskills like handling frustration and having a strong work ethic. He's getting what he needs and that's something to be happy about.

The reason I think a few of us are talking about these limits in potential is due to our experiences in the workplace. In every technical workplace I have worked in, there seems to be only a handfull of people who really seem to know what they are doing in their field. I think some of the more intuitive educators are also aware of these limitations in people.

This small group often find themselves having to document the technical work and procedures to such a detailed level, it is likely a lot of uneducated people could perform the work. It is often also necessary to direct these people to what document or procedure to follow for each task they are assigned to perform.

A lot of the people having to be effectively babysat in their work are often the ones who had very high grade point averages in the field they are now practicing. Having seen some of the tests given in University and finding they often adjust the test scores to match some predetermined end result, I wonder if this is the cause of the rather poor performance in the workplace.

I have also seen cases where someone with what appears to have talent suddenly hits a dead end in progressing further. In some cases I have even seen some people lose some of their former talent. I have seen this happen to people in their 20s and much later. This is something I think happens to everyone to some degree. I suspect this may be a result of many different factors and may in some cases be temporary. In the movie "Proof", a math student mentions how if you don't accomplish something big by the early 20s, it may never happen. Given what I have seen in the workplace, I wonder if the writers are also aware of this happening.

Whether these people are aware of their lack of talent in their field is not readily apparent. I am not entirely sure if this is necessarily a lack of talent, a lack of interest or a lack of having to be concerned as management is often unaware of how much hand-holding these people appear to require.

I think you missed the point. I was referring to my own acceleration and the result. Maybe I am an anomaly. Because I could do the work easily, quickly, it was move on. Attempting to find the challenge. And I think that was the problem. Accelerating to the point of finding the challenge.

And the result was: (drum roll please) that when I hit the workplace, and the challenge was too easy, there was something wrong. When I could get the job done, quickly and easily -- and I am not talking about jobs defined as easy, but ones that are somewhat rare and difficult to get -- but I got bored and wanted to move on -- which was disastrous for my general life.

That is the point. The lesson you are teaching is tha child needs to push to the point of challenge. Wait until they get to the workplace and they can do it easily and the challenge disappears. What do you think they should do?

In my experience, the results of attitude and inability to deal with the average person in the workplace -- who could be the boss, may not be so good.

I once sat in a meeting and said this is the situation to the people in charge. The other guy, said, that is not true. The boss knew me and asked again. I said, that if you believe him, I want off the project and no responsibility for the result. They went with him, and in 3 months came back to me carte blanche to fix it. And then after it was done, I was gone because I was a reminder of the mistaken choice they made and I was vocal about it above these guys. I fixed the problem, as best as it could be fixed but it was too far gone and a mess.

Typical of the workplace your children will face from the in the box average guy.

Ren

I do think you are making an excellent point, Wren. As a child, you are praised/encouraged for doing your work quickly. Acceleration is a good thing.
In the workplace, at most jobs, you have to work with other people who may be- not as bright as you, not as gifted, or even jealous of you. And unless you have incredible luck, you may have to stay in that job and learn to deal with it.
I really agree with you.
It took me a long, long time to realize that life isn't a big IQ/other test. It's interacting with people on their level. In many jobs, if your coworkers (or boss) are uncomfortable with you, you will not be successful, no matter how gifted you are. Or you will not be as successful as your potential dictates.
My son is bright, probably MG. He learns easily and is not learning lots of new things right now in second grade. We tell him- "this is the real world, kid. Learn ways to occupy yourself when you are done with the work and everyone is still catching up. Don't bother the teacher or the other kids." He isn't depressed or bored silly, as some kids are on this chat site. The other kids seem to really like him, and his social skills are good.

To me that doesn't speak as much to acceleration as to the importance of highly gifted people receive good career counseling and to find work they find intellectually fulfilling and personally meaningful. That typically isn't work that is "done" or assigned by someone else. It tends to more often be work that is never entirely "done" - such as science research. There is always another part of the puzzle. If you are intellectually fulfilled by the process there is always more available to you. I'm sure we can find many examples of prodigies who were radically accelerated who have found work they find enjoyable and fulfilling.

Also, I would keep in mind that many talented people will not just have one career or one hobby for a lifetime. They may become highly competent in more than one field and them combine their interests in new and creative ways.


I don't believe denying a child acceleration solves that problem. Spending years totally out of step with your peers doesn't promote positive social skills and in some cases can encourage the development of a really condescending attitude. People who are comfortable with themselves tend to have better ability to be kind and considerate toward others. It is hard to develop consideration if you don't receive a lot of it.

I wonder: was your workplace problem due to acceleration or was it due to the fact that you don't think the way that other people think? To me, this story seems so typical of just being different.

I've been in situations like that: the problem is obvious, the solution is obvious, but only me or maybe two of us can see that. No one else is interested, and the group is going to approach the problem the way it has in the past. You try to explain what's wrong and how to fix it and you end up in trouble.

High intelligence means that you don't think like other people (I mean the general you here, not just YOU, Wren. ). A person is born that way, and I don't think that something like acceleration can change the fundamental way that his/her thought patterns form in a situation like this. You can lower your expectations and/or stay quiet or go along with the group, but that won't change what's going on inside your head or make you any happier. Added: and more me at least, it's frustrating feeling as though I could help improve something, but get rebuffed.

It's such a hard and horrible problem. Humans are social animals and we tend to want to fit in when we're in groups. So when someone who thinks differently expresses an opinion or operates in a way that's very different from the group's, I expect it's hard for the group to get that person as it is for the person to get the group. Creative people and arty types probably face this same issue because they think differently too.

I have to stop now; more later I hope.

Val

This is the kind of statement that makes me wish this board had a "like" button: thanks, Dottie!!! I truly believe we're all just trying to do what's right for our kids.

I think everyone made good points. And obviously I realize a problem otherwise I wouldn't have DD in CTY to accelerate her math. Or put her in the science program.

And being different is part of it.

Choosing science is not so easy. I remember my Physics prof approaching me in lab one day. I missed class constantly and was totally shocked when he suggested I pursue physics at the graduate level. I thought about it for 10 minutes.

My very PG friend actually did physics for undergrad and then did her doctoral in nuclear engineering. She was shocked when I went to Wall Street (this is a friend since we were toddlers) and said how could I choose business? Two years after she went to work, "now I understand why you chose business" and went into plant management and 7 years later went into project management and etc. Always with the power utility. They gave her the flexibility. Though she is introverted and better at people skills than I.

Choosing science doesn't always work and being a risk taker and pushy gave me more points overall. But it comes with the roller coaster.

There is a father from a little boy in DD's K class last year. He has a PhD in biomechanics or something. Worked at Bell Labs for a while. Started a company that did well for a while then hit the dust and now is unemployed for a long time.

There is a nanny for a girl in Wila's class. She is a chemical engineer. Burned out as chemical engineer and told me many of her friends also switched careers. My father did R&D for a synthetic rubber company. Worked there for decades, retired with a nice package and benefits. That is what people did. They did their jobs. Got benefits. Benefits are gone, loyalty to one company and the mindset you can do this job for a lifetime doesn't work all the time. I think when you look at the path you lay out for your child, I mean educationally and extracurriculars, you have to look at your child. If your kid is going to be great in a research situation, great.

My PG friend's brother did college and medical school in 5 years, got great job offers after residency. Had a nervous breakdown when he was 40. He has a beautiful house on the river, a nice family. But he feels like he did everything right, it looks right but his life continues in a monotone. No heartaches, but without heartaches you cannot feel real joy either. Just steady, limbo.

Not easy making choices either way.

Ren

See what I get for jumping in so late in the game... lots of posts to respond to but where to start? [sigh]

First, Wren's idea of not accelerating her DD and trying to fulfill some of her needs horizontally. Why did this get a negative response? Wren and I are both in the early years of our DDs and we are both (like many) trying to figure it out and find the best solution for our individual child. Just as we hear from so many all the reasons why you shouldn't accelerate, perhaps we (on the board) should be accepting when one says they are not comfortable with accelerating. Clearly Wren is speaking from her own personal experience and she is using that as a part of why she doesn't want to with her daughter. What parent doesn't use personal experience? I find nothing wrong with stretching outward before going upward, so long as we, the parents, watch for telltale signs. I, too, am using the horizontal approach. DD has the added bonus of many languages from her school but she also does piano and is now doing enrichment work from home. DD is not ready to be accelerated because she is 'content' to be with her classmates. When she does show signs of frustration and boredom then we will consider it.

As for the conversation about jobs and interaction with coworkers, yeah ... sounds so familiar. Wren's example could have been pulled off a page of my own life journal. I never really considered myself gifted but knew I was different from the typical worker in the corporate world. I was great at my job but found myself soooo bored, especially when I wasn't moving up the chain as quickly as I had in the past. I was able to complete tasks in a fraction of the time that others could. I'm also very analytical and was able to see issues clearly when others hadn't a clue. I really did not fit into the corporate world, not because I wasn't capable of doing a great job, but because I was always frustrated with how everyone else couldn't do the same.

Hmmm ... I'm sure I have lots more to write but I need to go back through and read some of the posts.

I did not choose not to accelerate. I accelerate what I can. But I am restricted by the NYC lottery. I posted in another place that I am trying again for an accelerated school. But I don't think I will op for across the board multi-year acceleration. First, I don't think her IQ warrants starting college at 12. And secondly, I look at the social issues. Starting college at 15 could happen, based on the path she is taking with math but I am not sure it is necessary based on the options.

And so I post the debate that goes on in my own mind.

And secondly. The jobs I was talking about were hard to get, seriously challenging jobs that paid very well. So it wasn't the job. It was the attitude. And they were exciting jobs where I got to fly around the world and ask questions of CEOs. I remember being 22 and sitting in Conrad Black's office. He gave me 15 minutes -- which I stretched out to 25 because I asked good questions. He really didn't say anything to me but I got something out of the nothing he said. I came back to Merrill Lynch and told my boss he was going to sell this iron ore company to the grocery store company to get the cash. He didn't believe me. No one believed me but I told some portfolio manager clients. 10 days later he did it. This was a cool job, not a boring one, which science research would have been for me. But because I could do it, it wasn't challenging after a while. That is the point.

Ren

I admit I read through this thread quickly, but it is the above one that made me do a double glance. Through her whole post this was what was pulled out and focused on. I don't think she is saying children shouldn't enter college early just that her own personal experience makes her ponder this choice for her daughter. Again, both our daughters are young and we are still trying to figure it all out but I agree with the horizontal approach. Saying this, I also know that with the enrichment that we are doing at home, we just might have to accelerate because the risk is DD becoming bored with the curriculum at school. Time will tell.

Have you ever been accused of pushing your child? If someone in the context of responding to your discussion of the needs of your gifted child "well I don't believe in pushing my child" - how would you react to that?

Wren,
I think entirely missed my point. It wasn't that you should have studied science or been a scientist. Rather, that I don't think it is a widespread problem that radically accelerated students grow into adults who are bored or unable to enjoy life in the workplace. Or, that keeping people with same age peers makes them have happier careers. Your story to me is an argument for good career counseling and for encouraging self awareness of what makes a person happy so they can make appropriate choices.

POP,

Good career counseling? I had career counseling up the ying yang. I scored way off the charts in risk taking. There is no career counseling for kids like this.

And besides anecdotal comments, does anyone really know how radically accelerated kids do? Lang Lang spoke about prodigies in music and how very few survive in musical careers.

There is that one case of the girl I wrote about who finished Stony Brook at 14 and went on. She seems happy. She also got really into karate and had a black belt at 14. But I do not know what happens to most of them long term.

The only people I know personally that are in Nobel track in science didn't accelerate actually.

Ren

It seems to me that there are confounders here that can't easily be disentangled. People who radically accelerate are likely to be those who are far outliers in a number of dimensions of personality, not only intelligence. They are those who simply can't tolerate the lack of inputs. Forcing them to endure it does not make it less intolerable, it just tortures them.

I think that when such people get into the work force, they almost certainly will still be unhappy in an environment where they don't have intellectual peers or where they are under the authority of people who are less competent and who can't grasp what they are saying or understand its importance. I speak from experience. My parents had the opportunity to radically accelerate me, and refused to do so. If I hadn't managed to finagle a situation where I could just sign myself out of my high school and go to the local college library, I would have left school just to escape. My experience in the work force has been one of unending frustration. The only work situations where I have not come home ranting and raving at day's end have been ones where either I was the ultimate decision maker or where I did not have to answer to people who were not at my intellectual level.

I think that in most fields there is an optimal level of giftedness, where an individual's ideas might be ahead of or different from the rest of the group, but not so different that the group can't comprehend them once they are explained properly, and where the gifted individual is close enough in cognitive functioning to the rest of the group that he or she can understand what the rest of the group is missing and why and find a way to bridge the gap. If the gap is too large, then everyone in the situation is frustrated.

Modern science is collaborative, and modern scientists have to do a fair amount of persuading others to go along with their ideas. I am not at all surprised to hear that those on the "Nobel track" are not the people who radically accelerated as children.

First, you'd need to start with defining what you mean by "how they do". Some people seem to have the expectation that anyone prodigious needs to change the entire world or win a top prize or they have failed. That is unfortunately the standard that to often is put on prodigies and there is no need to repeat that on a forum that is supposed to be supportive of gifted children. Similarly, I don't find a lot of value in trotting out "I once knew a kid who was accelerated and he was a weirdo who killed himself" type of stories.

As far as career counseling there has been more written about this recently I would suggest Googling gifted career multipotentiality and you will probably find a bunch. I don't at all agree there is no possibility of getting career advice and that's one reason why we've worked to connect our child with PG adults with similar interests. Along the way we've met quite a few who are happy - all of them academics.

Of course there aren't large groups of prodigies to study because they are rare. The book I found most helpful is by Miraca Gross: http://www.amazon.com/Exceptionally-Gifted-Children-Miraca-Gross/dp/0415314917 The real takeaway message I got from this book is that outcomes are not good when prodigious children's academic needs are not met.

If you want an anecodotal example, one of the children in the book is Terence Tao. He went on to have a great career in math including winning the Field's Medal (equivalent of the Nobel for math). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao

More generally there is quite a bit of research on grade skipping and acceleration. http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/nation_deceived/ http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/acceleration.htm http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/grade_skipped.htm

I think this is the main problem. I read her posts to be about her struggles and her daughter and I think others are reading it as 'soapbox' talk directed towards them. But to answer your question, if someone stated the above comment in reference to hearing what my DD does, I would probably laugh and say something along the lines of "I'm glad to hear it. I certainly am not telling you what to do with your child just as I would ask you for the same respect."

Really? If somebody observed your daughter's precocious development and commented that they aren't going to push or encourage their kids to race you wouldn't in any way find that to be a negative comment? To me words like "pushing" and "racing" are the sort of negative assumptions that parents of gifted kids hear a lot and they don't reflect a good understanding of the development of gifted children.

So, I'll say it again, if it would feel like racing or pushing to radically accelerate that is probably a sign the child doesn't need it. For me having an 11 year old in college felt no more like racing than having a 3 year old reading or doing multiplication. It felt like going at a totally normal pace because for this child it is normal and nonrushed development.

Yes, really. And I've heard it already. I guess I don't take things so personally. I also fully believe that we all have to find the right path for our own child and unless that person has walked a mile in my shoes they really don't understand it. Now if they ask me why and really care to understand then I will take the time to explain it. I do believe it is important for us to educate when we can. I have a group of friends that all have MG kids and we get together a lot and the conversation always circles back to the kids. I was hesitant to say anything at first but they knew quickly that DD was different from their girls (all the same age). Through our lengthy conversations they have accepted and even encouraged us. We live in a highly acclaimed school district with lots of gifted children, yet they were the first to comment on how DD would never be challenged if we put her in our local school. And we haven't. She goes to an academic school which is 2 years ahead of public school but even this isn't enough for DD, yet her personality is the type where she will patiently wait for the teacher to introduce something. When she entered the school she had already mastered all of the curriculum up through the 4 year old class which equates to 1st grade but she had the cushion of learning it all new in Spanish. We no longer have that cushion and now we are back to what now? We don't want to move her out of the program because we have already invested in foreign language and don't want her to lose it. So we have a few options: push to accelerate her which we might have to but we will see during this next year or provide enrichment at home. We are doing the later and she is excited to come home and do her 'homework'. She is now asking to do more math, but only at home and only with us. I don't know if she will ever be the type to ask her teacher or even show her teacher her full potential but I do hope she does at some point.

I love hearing about kids, like your son, where he wouldn't be happy just sitting in a class being bored and needed the acceleration to survive. I'm not saying it is easier by any means but from my perspective it would be a lot easier for me if DD was more like that. It would really help me gauge what she needs. Hmmm... I'm getting longwinded here but I guess what I'm trying to say is there is a gray area with these kids. The idea that if a child isn't acting out or isn't screaming about boredom than they clearly aren't in need of acceleration isn't one I agree with. My DD is the type that won't but she is still PG and way out of the box, but because of her personality I don't see us accelerating her anytime soon.

Yes exactly. Each student should be able to move at a the pace most appropriate to his/her needs.

I agree that the working world is hard (as I mentioned in another message), but I think that the problems encountered by HG+ people at school and work are two very different things.

Val

I agree if your child is like Kit Armstrong or Terrance Tao, it isn't a choice. The system will rapidly accelerate them. And I said that in my case DD's IQ wasn't PG+ that warranted super acceleration. Though I do recognize she needs some and I image it will increase but I am not sure how and when and how much.

I want her to be challenged and have good habits as a result but as a mother bear, I don't want her to have to rush. And I use the word again. Rush.

I do want her to enjoy being a child as long as possible.

Ren

Terry Tao's acceleration was anything but automatic. There are various articles, e.g. this one I like this quote:

I don't see why grade skipping = rush. Just because you finish high school when you're say, 16, doesn't mean that you have to go straight to college. Here are options we've tossed out to my eldest:

* Do a year overseas via AFS or one of the other programs for teenagers. Learn a new language or improve the one you already speak! Meet new people! Have fun!

* Get an exotic internship (e.g. marine biology on Andros Island in the Bahamas).

* Focus on that sport/that instrument/your art/whatever.

* Get a part-time job and attend a local community college part-time. Take cool courses that you might not have time for when you're in a four-year college (Ceramics! Astronomy! Biotechnology! History of western Africa!). You might discover that you really want to major in astronomy instead of going the pre-law route.

* Thinking of med school? Do an EMT course and spend some time in an ER and on an ambulance.

* All or some of the above.

To DH and I (and our son) this stuff sounds great and is a universe away from "rushing." For us, it's anti-rushing.

I'm assuming every single parent here wants their child to enjoy childhood. Different kids demand different approaches to achieving that goal. For our child, radical acceleration has been the road to a happy childhood. It is weird to even entertain that anyone would consider it rushed as it feels totally the opposite of that.

I would not at all assume "the system" will take care of kids who are extreme outliers and need something different than the traditional path. Plenty of highly gifted kids don't get their needs met and many end up dropping out of high school.

Both Terrance Tao and Kit Armstrong were identified by the system. Your quote by Tao's father illustrates that. I am talking about PG+. Kids that can do calculus in their heads by 5.

There are big differences in levels even in PG.

Val, those are options we are trying to enjoy now. Part of her life as part of horizontal diversification. We just went to Egypt and did a unit study on ancient Egyptian history. Last year we went to Europe in April and did a unit study on the Roman period and in Feb it was Hawaii and she whale watched, snorkeled, went into a submarine and saw sharks eating on the reef and saw volcanoes and we did the whole volcano national park thing. Polynesian cultural center and history of the polynesian islands. I expect her to finish high school by 16 but it doesn't mean you cannot do those things now.

But getting into a sport is not a viable option. I was into a sport. You start early and let it consume your life by the time you are 16. You don't know about getting into a sport.

Ren

What? Terry was identified by his parents. The quote is referring to his parents mistaken assumption that the system would identify his needs and that in putting him into the school system early they'd done their bit. His first school failed him utterly. Later, he was accelerated because his parents carefully chose a school that would do this and took part in the decisions throughout.
You're surely not excluding Terry Tao, the youngest ever IMO gold medallist, the Fields Medal winner? He's as PG as humans come. (He was very sensibly not exposed to calculus at age 5 - but maybe I'm taking you too literally. I'm confused about what your point is here.)

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted-education/ read and scroll down for interesting links about Tao's childhood development. I agree with ColinsMum on the history.

I dunno if Terence Tao is as PG as people come, but that might be because I don't know enough about math; his main achievement so far seems to be a joint theorem with someone else, based on the other person's prior work, and I believe I've read that great mathematicians can go downhill as they get older. Val said it pretty well recently about great geniuses generally having a large dollop of creativity that sets them apart. My favorite example of someone in that vein is John von Neumann; I don't know of anyone more PG than him off the top of my head, as he was intensely creative and also about as maxed out as we come on processing types of abilities. The whole package.

[ETA: this may be a misunderstanding, come to think of it; when I say "as PG as people come" I mean something like "so gifted that it doesn't really make sense to think you could reliably define a class of people who were more gifted" - that is, if you had a practical instrument [i.e., not just someone's opinion on greatest achievers] which claimed to identify the most gifted people on the planet and Tao wasn't one of them, I can't imagine what you could do that would convince me your instrument was any use. I don't mean "the most gifted person on the planet bar none" - if you argued that Shelah is more gifted than Tao, for example, I wouldn't want to get into an argument about it.]

Err... splutter... no really, trust me on this, or rather, trust the community of mathematicians :-) You're referring to the Green-Tao theorem, perhaps, but Tao's reputation does not rest on that alone. And some, but by no means all, mathematicians go downhill as they age; the same is true in any walk of life. You're perhaps thinking of the adage that mathematicians often produce their best work before the age of 30, but even that is not always true. Tao certainly shows no sign of going downhill yet; see the work that was awarded last year's Polya Prize for example.

Incidentally I think there's a real danger of rating people based on what we can understand of what they do, rather than on what they do. I don't remember even who was involved let alone what if anything you said on it, but there was a thread recently where I was spluttering too hard even to join in, in which people were opining that physics hadn't seen anyone as clever as Einstein since Einstein. That's IMNSHO total rubbish. Which people end up thought of as geniuses depends on how easy their work is to popularise, as well as on how important it is or how hard it was to do - with odd results, sometimes. (Of course, if the person who claimed this was an active researcher in theoretical physics, I might possibly have to stand corrected, as I'm not one!)

You commit an online spluttering, and hope to wash it away with an emoticon, ColinsMum?? But points taken. Mr. Tao does seem to be at the very least HMG++. {wink} The work he did which won the Polya prize looks pretty interesting, and of obvious immediate practical application.

:-) I'm glad someone got to appreciate my edit comment before my next edit accidentally deleted it!

Actually...it's not that there hasn't been anyone as clever as Einstein, so much as that there hasn't been a major breakthrough in theoretical physics since the 70s.

And I will now start a new thread on this very interesting education topic so as not to further pull this thread away from its original ideas (which have been lost in time at this point....).

Val

John was also a Polymath. You should read his bio. He was not educated in the traditional way.

http://www.amazon.com/John-Von-Neumann-Scientific-Deterrence/dp/082182676X

Some schools are trying to keep even more students in the Race to Nowhere, removing the off ramp I suggested above:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...p-courses/2011/05/05/AFl67g8G_story.html
School districts move away from honors classes in favor of AP courses
By Kevin Sieff
Washington Post, May 21

Not long ago, honors courses were considered a hallmark of student achievement, a designation that impressed colleges and made parents beam.

Now, those courses are vanishing from public schools nationwide as administrators move toward a more inclusive curriculum designed to encourage underrepresented minority students to join their high-achieving peers in college-level Advanced Placement classes.

Fairfax County�s public schools are at the forefront of the movement, nudging would-be honors students toward more-rigorous AP courses, despite criticism from some parents that eliminating honors will have the reverse effect and lead some students to choose less-demanding �standard education� classes instead of AP.

Honors courses are generally taught from the same lesson plan as regular classes but at a faster pace and in greater depth. An AP course contains altogether more-challenging material � charting a path that coheres to national standards, which are heavily endorsed by the Fairfax school system.

This fall, Fairfax will discontinue honors-level courses in subjects where an AP class is offered, drawing the ire of parents who want to restore what they call an academic middle ground. They have formed a group called Restore Honors Courses.

Prince William County took an even bolder stance about 10 years ago, doing away with the honors track. There has been resistance to that in other school systems � including Montgomery�s and Loudoun�s, where the honors option has been scaled back.

Considerable opposition from Fairfax parents has prompted the school board to review its decision to do away with high school honors courses that for years served as an alternative to basic and AP courses. But it remains unclear whether local advocates of honors courses can resist a national trend to reduce the number of �tracks� for students.

�Honors courses are drying up in many districts across the country because of the push to democratize Advanced Placement classes,� said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some schools in Illinois, New York, Oregon and several other states have begun phasing out the distinction.

That trend has reduced the number of levels available in a given subject area. A decade ago, nearly all school systems offered at least three tracks in high school � usually regular, honors and Advanced Placement. Now, many have shifted to two options, as Fairfax will in the fall. Some have gone even further, placing all students in a single track.

�We�ve found that traditionally underrepresented minorities do not access the most-rigorous track when three tracks are offered. But when two tracks are offered, they do,� said Peter Noonan, Fairfax�s assistant superintendent for instructional services.

Increasingly, educators are using AP test data to measure the disparity between white students and their black and Hispanic peers, revealing a profound achievement gap in high-level courses.

African Americans, for example, represented 14.6 percent of the total high school graduating class last year, but they made up less than 4 percent of the AP student population who earned a score of three or higher on at least one exam, each of which is weighted on a five-point scale.

<end of excerpt>

Honors courses are lacking off around here also. While, AP, dual-enrollment, and career academies (high school programs with hands-on real world electives) are on the rise.

Dual-enrolment has become the new higher middle ground around here because AP is more rigorous than the regular community college classes.
I liked honors classes because they had more depth than the regular classes, but not as much work as AP. They are a great compromise for the smart and unmotivated.

As I have written in another post, the movie wrongly implies that a large fraction of American high school students are spending an excessive amount of time on homework. Reading a recent article

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-homework-20110627,0,2416846,full.story
L.A. Unified's new homework policy gives students a break
By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
June 27, 2011

is a reminder that for many students and their families, doing homework is simply not a priority.

Interesting article and sorry I did not see "Superman" yet. When I taught math, one student did the homework and the others copied it. I got frustrated and starting making them come to the board and answer the (given) homework and they started doing it. I know - I know - I am a horrible teacher - but they learned it.

"They learned it" -- you don't sound like a bad teacher to me.