Well...since you asked, I'll maunder on a bit.

The US has problems that create a gifted education gap. One problem is the conflation of high achievement with giftedness. Another one is that competition for college slots and good jobs is increasing. The result is that "top" colleges tend to look for high achievers, and parents and high schools naturally try to produce them. So we get a situation where everyone is supposed to look highly gifted. We also get an arms race: once upon a time, we had a limited number of older high school kids achieving like college kids via AP classes. Then AP got too popular and the stakes got raised, and now we have differential equations classes in high school and science fairs or internships or what-have-you in which teenagers look like graduate students or postdocs. We have spelling bees in which 12-year-olds memorize words they will never, ever use, like synecdoche and ingluvies. Focusing on spelling rules and Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit roots isn't good enough anymore (even though it may be way, way more beneficial to the kid). No, today's winners have to study the dictionary for 4-6 hours a day, every day because that's what winners do . Welcome to the new childhood. And no, a person with an IQ of 150 will not be competitive while studying for 60 minutes a day.

Plus, we get test prep for kindergarten and damaging pseudo-philosophies like Amy Chua's being taken seriously by too many people, many of whom are probably terrified that their kids will "fail" (i.e. get Bs or Cs, which means the same thing these days as far as college admissions are concerned). We also get things like algebra-for-many in 7th grade, which is presumably a response to algebra-for-all-or-most in 8th grade.

It's not about learning. It's about winning.

So the parents of extremely intelligent children can get stuck in a trap. We're trying to do the best for our kids, but are making decisions in a whirlpool made of conflicting messages, half-truths (or lies), and the loudspeakers of fear, dialed up to full volume.

It's hard enough to make good decisions that will affect a child's future, regardless. For the HG+ crowd, the difficulty is compounded by schools that frequently refuse to recognize high levels giftedness and see high achievement wrung out of studying all summer and every weekend as being its equivalent. In other words, the schools don't generally provide appropriate alternatives for HG+ kids and we're stuck. Here's another division worksheet, Lisa. There, I differentiated. grin

This leaves us making least-worst decisions on behalf of our kids (e.g. grade skips, subject acceleration, after-/homeschooling, etc). If schools organized themselves so that kids could go at their own pace, the problem wouldn't be as bad. But they don't. If they hired math specialists who truly understood both the subject and how to teach it, the problem wouldn't be as bad. But they don't. If we got away from industrial metrics like scores on high-stakes tests, the problem wouldn't be so bad. But we don't. If the colleges would reform their admissions practices and stop trying to push down their percentages of admitted students...etc.

So, of course you're second-guessing. It means that you're paying attention and that you care. We're all stuck in a situation that's designed not around learning about important ideas and how they fit together, but around 1) multiple choice tests that evaluate the teachers rather than the kids taking them, and 2) winning the college admissions race.

Last edited by Val; 03/16/15 06:57 PM.