Right-- but a photo in the yearbook suggests that this is a status thing, at least potentially. Like being on the VARSITY team. The difference is that all of the other things are optional and elective, and kids CHOOSE whether or not to participate in the first place. If this is that kind of picture, then fine. Good, even. But why on earth is it called "GT" then?
If gifted ed were truly about serving gifted students, very few bright-but-not-gifted students would be in those programs, because ordinary in-class differentiation and challenges would be great for that group of kids. But that is absolutely not the way that most of them operate; most schools seem to operate on an 'either-or' strategy with respect to differentiation approaches. So either they have in-class differentiation and tracking, or they offer self-contained GT. Very seldom both.
Ideally, of course, the one thing would serve bright-and-motivated and MG kids pretty well, while the other would serve kids who-- well, those who cannot be easily "mainstreamed" with other kids because of the huge gap between their cognitive needs and the norm.
Maybe living here has made me cynical, but I think there is a pretty big difference between the two things, and I tend to agree with Cricket about that subject.
While I don't think that there is anything wrong with noting the GT class, I also don't think that-- if you're going to do that, I mean-- there is anything wrong with identifying the kids who are in self-contained classrooms for other reasons, either. In a perfect world, I mean; one in which genuinely inclusive thinking means that all children are equally valued. We're still a long way from that reality, I think, which is why noting the "Life Skills" kids probably wouldn't be considered acceptable (and probably not legally okay, come to that, since it identifies kids by disability).
It does kind of seem strange in the first place. You would NEVER call out kids whose physical development was beyond (or behind) normative. Would you identify all of the high school sophomores who SHAVE? Why not? Okay, so why is this different, then? (In my mind, not so different-- except that in this case, you're "outing" hidden differences.)
