So the musical children are already grouped together, and the proposal is to add the mathematical children to that group? If there's an advantage to having either group together, this sounds pretty sane actually, even though it's obviously not true that *all* children gifted in one are gifted in the other. (I've personally seen the two occur together often enough that if research showed no correlation I'd disbelieve the research!)
You could look at it several ways. Assuming that grouping the musical children together is working well and they want to continue that, they have two options:
- have two separate groups, a new one for maths and the existing one for music. Perhaps impractical, and the thought experiment would probably yield lots of cases where they'd think "but what about X who is gifted in both; which group does X go in?"
- continue to have just the musical children separately. If many of them, in practice, need extension work in maths, it would be very natural to provide it in that group [even if not everyone in the group needs it, having a concentration of children who do need it in one class broadens options], and then to think "hang on, how about X who is gifted in maths but is not in the music group - wouldn't it make sense to have X here too?" (Particularly true if X is also fairly good at music, just not enough to make the cut for the music group.)
Any grouping system is obviously a compromise, and could never be seen as a complete answer to all the children's needs, but I could believe that this might be an arrangement that worked well pragmatically, based on what I've seen.
