Gifted Education Exists for a Reason; Don't Water it Down

Montgomery County, Maryland is considering replacing gifted classes with magnet classes for everyone.

I am not alone in thinking that this is a bad idea.

Classes for mentally gifted children exist for a reason.  Gifted kids are bored and frustrated in most regular classrooms.  I know I was.  It was like a breath of fresh air during the years when gifted classes were available.  I don't talk about my own background much, but in this case it's unavoidable.  It's hard to describe what a child is missing when education is not at his or her appropriate level. 

Try this:  Imagine how your child would feel if you put him or her back two grades and made him or her stay in that classroom all year.  It would be fun for about two days; then it would slowly begin to grate.  On the surface things would be O.K. because your child would be getting good grades, but your child would not be learning much, would not be enjoying the excitement of growing academically, and would often be frustrated and discouraged by the slow, daily repetition of things your child already knows. 

In my case, I was reading sixth grade books when kids in my class were working on "See Spot run."  I was constantly raising my hand to answer the teacher's questions and being mostly ignored in the interests of including the rest of the class, understandably but to my continual frustration.  Thank God for the opportunities I and other kids in some of my classes were given during some of those years to study at our own level.  When I was in gifted classes, it was a blessing.  It was fun.  It was challenging.  It was inspiring.  I was like a sponge soaking it up.  I know that my experience is not unique.  Ask around; many adults will tell you about their own similar experiences.

You might think that the solution is just to move the gifted kids ahead a grade level or two, but that's no answer at all in most cases.  Kids moved into classes with more mature peers often suffer from social isolation and even ostracism.  They are forced to grow up too fast.  I've seen it cause emotional damage that was probably more harmful in the long run than letting the child suffer in silence in a classroom below the child's learning level. 

Gifted education, like special education, exists for a reason:  it's needed.  Devoting at least one class per grade level to gifted education is not asking too much in most schools of normal size.

We all want our kids to be learning at the gifted level, and it can be discomforting to realize that our own child whom we dearly love and would give the world to is not at the top of his or her class.  But not every child can be, or needs to be, a star at everything, every year.  Every child has different combinations of talents, strengths, and aptitudes, and kids don't all need to excel at the same thing simultaneously. 

What kids really need is to challenged and excited and taught at whatever academic level they are at, from special ed to regular classrooms to gifted ed.  That is the true meaning of excellence.

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More at La Shawn Barber's Corner, Discriminations and joannejacobs

Comments

[dick]

I agree with you totally. I was in the same position. My freshman English class was an example. I was the top English student of my grade by a huge margin. My English class consisted of one other good student and 26 who did nothing but act up in class. Total loss. The only type of gifted teaching I received was in French where the teacher devoted half the class to the group as a whole and half to those of us who were advanced. I went to college and qualified for 3rd year second semester French. This was a long time ago, before Sputnik. After Sputnik the high school set up a program with the local college (Kenyon) to permit some high school kids to take college classes in exchange for allowing the college community kids to go to our school. How I would have loved that when I was in high school but I had already graduated.

The problem as I see it is that there are students who have been bored all through school. How do you handle the situation with limited funds. I know that at the time my school worked out the deal with Kenyon, there were cases in the news of parents suing schools that had instituted a track system of classes and there were also articles about how we needed to make the experience the same for everybody. We are still paying for those missteps today.

There has to be some way to raise the level of classes overall without losing the top and bottom students as a result. If tracking is the answer, then let's track the classes. If AP classes are the answer then let's have AP classes. Doing nothing is a fool's solution. That way leads to losing the top and the bottom and ending up with a middle that is of middle quality as well.

I keep remembering problems I had all through school. In the 3rd grade I was doing my brother's Latin homework because he couldn't do it and I was studying his algebra problems. When I started school I knew the alphabet in 3 languages and could read, write, add and subtract. In the 3rd grade I had already read all of Shakespeare and Bullfinch's mythology. I had no problem with that at all. My grade school teachers were all older and we learned the parts of speech and the multiplication tables by the 4th grade. Then my parents bought a business and we moved to another town. The schools could not have been more different. The other students didn't even know what a noun or a verb were and their math skills were almost non-existent. I learned nothing new in English until my senior year and that was by accident. That school now is very different. They have all the AP classes and you can get a good education there. Then if you got a good education there it was strictly by luck.