Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Gifted teacher ideology sound check

I think the root of it stems from the view that a subject has a list of check boxes for a given grade. Some teachers only know and feel comfortable teaching those items. You then get a kid that learns them in x amount of time where x<(whatever ridiculous long amount of time the curriculum states) and you need to do SOMETHING with the rest of the time. Option 1: enrichment, depth and breadth, insert eduspeak buzzword here, etc. Option 2: accelerate and move on to another set of check boxes.

Now I'm not opposed to option 1 because frankly I think most of their check box lists have a lot of room for expansion. The problem is that you need a teacher that is actually willing and able to teach outside of the curriculum. This works even better if they actually know a bit more about their curriculum than most of our elementary generalists seem to and if they have a bit of a passion for the subject themselves (which I've yet to see but there has to be some elementary teachers like this somewhere). The second problem with this occurs when teachers are perfectly fine doing this as long as it doesn't turn into option 2 at which point they all of a sudden freak out that they can't do that! What will they learn next year? Dear me! Seriously though, with the way that the curriculum spirals it is pretty hard to completely avoid option 2 in many cases (take math, 1 digit addition... wait a year.... 2 digit addition.... wait a year.... oh look kids now there are 3 digits.... wait a year....kill me now).

The flip side of this as has been highlighted is the accelerate at all costs just to appease the tiger parent that wants their 12 year old in the local paper because they are going to University (never mind that the kid clearly wasn't into this plan). Only focusing on option 2 without any of option 1 I also see as a problem. I mean not all HG+ are going to be ready for the rest of what comes with attending college/university when they've finished whipping through the standard K-12 curriculum if they haven't spent a little time slowing down to explore things outside of the basic checklists.

Either way, uggg.

ETA - I guess what I'm trying to get around to saying is that I view them both as something that should go together. Unfortunately they often get presented as an either/or option.