Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Race to Nowhere- any thoughts?

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.