Hi Catherine,

How awful. So sorry.

(Part I)

The idea that other kids "catch up" to gifted students eventually is a major fallacy in education circles. While I expect that some catching up does occur, it's because the bright kids are HELD BACK, not because the others start to go faster. Bright kids don't run out of cognitive steam when they're 7.

A way to respond to this statement is to say that a child can't run down a road if someone puts a fence in his way. Teachers and school systems can be experts at erecting fences. My 5 year old's kindergarten teacher told me that "silent E is damaging at this age" when I asked if she could help him with his reading! Talk about erecting a fence. No wonder everyone else "catches up"!

> I was very interested in this discussion.
> Was this my kid?
> Am I over-involved?
> I have a 2.9 year old kid who is reading.

You are not being over-involved. You are responding to something your child wants to do, that he enjoys, and that is good for him. My 3 year old daughter loves reading lessons. She also loves making sand castles, and she's NOT missing out on childhood because she's learning how to read at 3.

A toddler can't learn to read because some "obnoxious" parent forced him to. It just doesn't work that way. If a kid isn't ready to read, he isn't ready, and you might as well try to teach your cat to read. At least she'll sit on your lap and purr the whole time.


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(Part II)

The US educational establishment has some deeply wrong-headed ideas, and you came up against them during that breakfast.

The two worst offenders are 1) everyone must move at the same pace with age-mates and 2) gifted programs are "elitist". This is garbage.

These ideas are products of a philosophy of phony egalitarianism that's rampant in US education right now. The basic idea is that doing everything at the same time is good and accelerated programs for top learners are bad.

Many of these ideas come out of teacher education programs, which spend too much time on ideas like "diversity" and "promoting equity," whatever that means.

Take a close look at the syllabi for the courses for an M.Ed. at Stanford (see link below). For example, the titles of the math/science courses look good, but if you read the syallabi, you'll see that a lot of focus on how students feel about math and science and what it means to be a *teacher*. Where is the content here? This stuff strikes me as glossy yet lacking substance.

http://suse-step.stanford.edu/elementary/curriculum.htm

I'm writing about this to help you see where your friends and other teachers are coming from. It might help you when you have conferences with teachers.

Unfortunately, (certified) teachers have had these ideas drummed into them and many accept them without question. Far too many are taught that "socialization", whatever that means, is more important than mathematics and science and reading. There's a lack of understanding that socializing happens on the playground, not during math class.

I think most Americans are unaware of how abysmal our teaching training programs are and how much damage they do. I don't want to sound like I'm an angry raving fruitcake here. I just think it's time for this stuff to be debated openly.

Cheers,

Val