Hmm. I suppose that 1:1000 or even 1:500 people are extremely rare in individual environments, but if you look at the population as a whole, there are a lot of them (~300,000 of the 1:1000 group in the United States alone).
From where I sit, that's a LOT of people, and schools of education should be addressing this group, not allowing their graduates to pretend they don't exist. These programs devote time to the severely disabled, who are the other side of the 1:1000 groups, right?
Val
Well I do think they "should" but I don't know that they will. If you consider that any one teacher with 25 kids in a class could teach for 40 years straight and end up with, on average,
one 1:1000 kid... while at the same time having probably a kid every other year that the parents said was gifted.... First it's potentially a good long time between the Education degree and the eventual sighting of the one kid, and second she has people coming in regularly to tell her that their kid really is the one and time and again he isn't. Not that he isn't gifted, but that he isn't 1:1000. And she gets 24-25 kids every year who are all within a good solid middle band of average, reinforcing her image of what the range of possibilities is for that age of kid.
I'm not sure that we can really make a straight comparison between the 1:1000 at the top of the bell curve and the 1:1000 at the bottom just for the reason that the severely disabled kid will never be able to "pass" as average, where the HG kid very well might (and nevermind that he might be 2E, or might have other complications that affect how he presents himself). So now you have a teacher who might find one kid in her whole career, but with the twist that the one kid might not want to be found, or might look very different from any one model of "what HG kids look like" that the teacher might have been taught 20 years ago.
So I guess what I think would be reasonable is if schools of education taught our future teachers that HG/HG+ is a possibility, just as a bunch of other things are possibilities, but I don't actually hold out much hope that it will change things in general. Some teachers (no matter what they're taught at college) will be wonderful, adaptable and accepting. Some just won't. And as much as I'd like them to be required to accept that their model doesn't include my kid, it is the fact that he is unusual that makes it an issue to begin with... kwim? If they saw kids like him all the time they wouldn't be able to pretend they don't exist.
