Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Rising scholarship funds to rising college costs

Right. The current situation simply seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people-- greed, self-promotion, callous indifference, and out-and-out selfishness.

I think this is difficult to truly understand on an emotional level until you are actually living it with your own child/their cohort.

It's very much like an amplification of the phenomenon that so many of us are already familiar with by the time our children are preschoolers-- the one where you don't talk about ______ with other parents, or they give you THAT look. Or the obnoxious parents that want everyone to treat Little Lord/Lady Fauntleroy as the budding genius that s/he obviously is when s/he meets developmental milestones days ahead of schedule due to endless parental "oversight" and "assistance."

An awful lot of the kids in the top 10% of their high school classes are in that latter group. It's one long arc through childhood. THOSE are TigerKids. Some of them are bright, and some of them are MG, but very very few of them are more than that. It's just that mom and dad careful engineer things so that they LOOK as though they could well be HG. It's pretty evident that they aren't, when you meet them in person, but man they can sure look like HG/EG on paper. This is the cohort that is featured in films like "Race to Nowhere." They REALLY don't like EG/PG kids, believe me. Because they know that those kids can do things that the MG ones can't possibly actually do. Of course, some of them aren't above doing it for their kids and lying about it. I wish that I were kidding. Truly.

My impression is that the rate of increase in scholarship funds has grown at about the rate of overall inflation, and that college costs have grown at about the rate of healthcare in the US (several times the rate of inflation). So the gap between the two things has been widening since the 1980's, making the current competitive atmosphere all the more fierce-- and toxic.

Reducing college costs is the only larger solution, I fear. The problem is a fairly significant one, though, when you dig into what is driving those cost increases. There are a lot of structural problems to solve there.

To clarify, the seminars are not made available to the public, but the handouts often are, such as the scholarship handout you linked. DITD may post some materials for the upcoming seminar after it happens, but the seminar discussions will not be released.

Or working two part-time jobs (say, one at Wal-Mart and one waiting tables) without benefits because you can't get a full-time job offering a single ten-hour shift. On top of that, you have to find child care, get to different places on time (but your car is acting up or the bus schedule makes it difficult), and deal with a medical problem you can't afford to fix. There's barely time to help your kids with homework, let alone ferry them to after-school enrichment programs that you can't afford anyway.

I think it's easy to lose perspective when you don't have to face these kinds of circumstances.

It's also easy to assume that lower-income people have low IQs and that their kids wouldn't get much out of the Russian Math School anyway. I recently spent some time with a large group of PG people, and they weren't all in a position to afford expensive extras. Being PG is no guarantee of earning a high income (it may work against it, in fact).

That is correct. "Seminar information... resource-rich content... summarized". Apologies if I confused anyone. Thank you for clarifying.

Well said. Giftedness and opportunity are two different things. Withholding appropriate academic instruction/stimulation from children* may lead to underachievement, brain-based changes, and pronounced lack of opportunity. Each child benefits from an education which "fits" their present state of development: A good fit does not restrict but offers a bit of room and flexibility for movement, stretching, and growth.

* Side note: Some parents may do this either intentionally or unintentionally (neglect to read to or talk with children; not understanding parenting; not addressing child's questions; not encouraging curiosity; not understanding typical development vs gifted; understanding giftedness to a degree but not wanting child to be gifted or stand out; not wanting to allow younger sibling to surpass older sibling; not wanting to allow child to surpass parents, etc.) Some schools may do this by benign neglect of the gifted or by trying to close the achievement gap or excellence gap by capping achievement of gifted and/or high-achieving pupils. Some in the gifted community may do this by artificially treating the number of seats in gifted programs or services as a finite, limited number to be competed over; by making psychologically damaging comments about high or low SES or cultural preference for hot-housing. At some point it would be lovely to have all children learning and growing academically/intellectually/emotionally.

Pretty sure that it isn't parents of gifted children who want limitations on the numbers of participants in anything.



TigerParents care about prestige. Good gifted parents care about appropriate learning environments, and (in general) are not so concerned about the terminology being used to describe them.

The issue there is that any learning environment that is appropriate for HG+ children immediately attains a certain prestige, making it a gatekeeping problem, which then turns it into yet another barrier for families who lack resources to overcome the gatekeeping mechanism.

I can't speak for them, but I assume that neither the GT nor the Honors track students would feel discrimination because the point of AVID in our district is to improve those students who couldn't qualify for the GT or honors tracks so that despite their "low beginnings" they end up taking an honors course or two or even an AP course by their Junior or Senior years.

Dude, I do get your point. It is relative. However, I have to say that there have been times working as a professional when I would have preferred to do menial labor BUT FOR the low pay, which I think is the main problem with menial jobs. I have had a couple of jobs waiting tables and while it can be tough physically, it didn't have the do or die (not literally) stress that I experienced in my profession. Although perhaps waitressing doesn't count because the tips were great and I was very young (and in good shape) then.

I think the main problem with menial jobs is the menial treatment. The pay is just insult to injury.

For instance, I once had the misfortune to overhear a woman at the next table berate our young waiter because apparently it's his fault that the English language does not contain a proper plural form of the word "you," and this man chose to use the locally-accepted colloquial form, "you guys." Apparently, a good waiter travels back to the 1750s and asks Mr. Webster to address this oversight with a gender-neutral form, and keeps the drinks full.

And sometimes menial labor adds injury to injury, too.

Having performed in more professional settings where there were literally lives on the line, I have to say I actually like that kind of pressure, because it means you're doing something important. Nowadays, I have to settle for the fact that there are only billions of dollars on the line. Ho hum.

I think the low pay is a huge part of the point. Some people have no choice but to take those jobs and to try to survive on what they pay. Sure, office jobs can create horrible stress. But it's not the same league as the stress that people experience when they have to decide between paying the rent and buying a necessary medicine.