Gifted and Talented

~ Clarissa

I detest the fellow but here he’s right. The words gifted and talented should be eliminated altogether from elementary schools. Teachers who mention these words in school around such small children shouldn’t be working in education.

I’m saying this as somebody whose favorite author in elementary school was Theodore Dreiser and who could read him and write about him fluently in three languages. The absolute last thing I would have wanted at nine was to be called gifted and talented and streamed away from my very few friends into a freak class.

Thankfully, even my narcissistically afflicted mother was lucid enough to realize that it’s not OK to do that to a child and refused all attempts to gift-and-talent me into skipping a couple of grades.

“Yes, but what if she’s bored in class with regular kids?”

I was deathly bored in class. This helped me develop a rich inner life and now I’m never bored.

So yeah. Elementary school! These are tiny kids. They don’t need to prepare for the competitive workplace just yet.

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Published by Clarissa

22 thoughts on “Gifted and Talented”

  1. I don’t know, I was in a gifted and talented class as a kid and I enjoyed it since we went on cool field trips and did a lot of neat projects plus I was around smart kids. Plus Mom got off my back for reading too much and bragged that she had a smart daughter, for once she didn’t think I was an anti-social weirdo.

    As for the friends and adjusting thing, I was already a socially maladjusted weirdo to begin with and hated the kids in my class so being in a gifted and talented class didn’t mess me up socially since I was already messed up. For the first time in my school career, I was around other weirdos and nerds and smart kids and actually got along with them. Personally, I think socialization for kids is overrated, all they learn from other kids is dumb trendy stuff and bad behavior in the name of “being cool”. I am a lifelong misanthrope and autodidact and very DILLGAF about being cool, I can get along with people for professional reasons but prefer books to people

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  2. Agreed it’s kind of horrible to put a “g&t” label on kids. My mom was like that too– I took an IQ test in elementary school. Not because anybody wanted to know my score, but because mom’s teacher friend was getting certified to administer the test and needed guinea pigs. My entire life, she steadfastly refused to say how I scored. State secrets. She thought it was unhealthy for kids to know that sort of thing.

    That said, from what I understand the “gifted” programs in NYC schools have long been the only way for kids from functional families, who are possessed of a modicum of intellectual ability, to escape being herded into classrooms with all the ghetto kids who don’t want to be there at all, and actively prevent any teaching from happening… but can’t be expelled or put in sped classes to make the place functional for normal kids because that would be discrimination or something. Because of course, most of the kids sh***ing the bed in mainstream classrooms are black, and most of the kids in the g&t programs are white and asian. So obviously racism. Definitely not ghetto culture, lack of parents, etc.

    The strategic thing to do there, for the school system, is to keep the program and just rename it something boring like “track B” and attach some mumbo-jumbo about “different learning styles”.

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    1. I agree, I went to school with a lot of dysfunctional idiot kids and the program probably stopped me from going crazy and stabbing someone. Being a smart kid going to school and being surrounded by lazy idiots is hell, that’s why I loved the show Daria because I could relate to the smart, snarky girl surrounded by dumb, lazy shallow kids.

      I’ve seen that too in my substitute teaching career, smart white and Asian and immigrant kids dumped with lazy, dumb black and Hispanic kids and getting bullied and picked on. The gifted and talented programs would be great for these kids so they can actually learn something and not get bullied by dumb lazy kids, the latter ought to just go to work instead of wasting time in school when they don’t want to be there

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      1. The ideal solution here, of course, is *not* G&T programs, but expelling large numbers of kids who prevent functional classroom environments.

        But since nobody is going to do that… it’s as good a workaround as anything. Mainstream is the babysitting track. G&T/AP/IB/etc. is the college track.

        My parents sacrificed probably half their income to send us to little church schools, for exactly the same reasons. Older sibling had to be pulled from public school because of bullying—>suicidal ideation. School knew about the bullying and declined to do anything about it. The church schools had no academic advantage over the public schools, but their ability to uninvite behavior problems made them a zillion times better. I still didn’t have any friends at school, but nobody ever threw lit cigarettes into my clothes in the bathroom stalls. Not once.

        -ethyl

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        1. That’s precisely why my child is in a private Christian school. That and the absence of woke dogma. But yes, Normal children of normal parents. We have 90% of parents turn out for every field trip. Everybody has fathers present in the home. I couldn’t begin to care less about their academics. All I want is my kid to hang out with normal kids, preferably outdoors.

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    2. In the USSR, we were more honest about this kind of thing. And it’s a sign of how far gone we are that I feel compelled to say something nice about the USSR.

      My mother taught at a school for children of the worker barracks. It was understood that neither I nor my sister should be anywhere around such a school. In my mother’s class, there was one girl from a perennially distracted hippie family and my mother tried endlessly to get the parents to move her to a school for normal kids. Even in the USSR it was possible to say it openly. Also, stupid kids weren’t allowed to continue in school past the 8th grade by redirected to professional training for the trades.

      If even the Soviets managed to figure it out, what are we doing?

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      1. A friend (an immigrant, of course) had her kid skip 2 grades because she’s “gifted” by virtue of spending every free second at Kumon. Poor kid, even at 8 she’s already skipped for every team and game because she’s tiny compared to the other girls. Imagine when everybody hits puberty while she’s still a child. A 12-yo girl in a class of 14-year-olds – how is this a good idea? And for what? What is the big rush? Is the goal to get her into the workplace a lot earlier? It’s weird.

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      2. This, exactly. Separate schools, and different tracks after 8th grade, would be a much better solution.

        It’s not a solution you could sell in the US at this time. In the absence of separate schools, “gifted” programs are kind of the only option parents and students have for getting their kids out of the same classrooms as the ghetto kids. Great effort has been put into bussing those kids into better-performing schools to “equalize” things.

        -ethyl

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      3. Pretty much, Clarissa. Eastern European classrooms tend to be far more homogenous, there’s a lot of preselection going on so that you end up with 30 kids who are from similar environments. I was totally in a gifted-and-talented stream, albeit it wasn’t called such – I got into one of the top schools in my city, and they had an unspoken policy to split their top graders into one class for the private-tutoring upper-middle-class tiger-mom kids (these were all kinda rich), and one class for the future intelligentsia (a mix of Olympiad kids, artists, kids of very-secure-in-their-social-status actors, professors etc and kids of factory workers and taxi drivers that nevertheless ended up scoring way high in the national exams). Being in the intelligentsia class pretty much saved me. I was the sort of poorly socialized kid with an overbearing mother that ends up a classical bullying case. However, in that environment bullying wouldn’t quite gain traction – we were 30 contrarians in a room, so ganging up simply wouldn’t work, and for the first time I had the respect of people around me (she’s weird, but she’s better at math than us and not stuck up about it). I thus grew up with the expectation that my social circle would protect me and keep me safe, and while this isn’t quite the superpower you get when you have that relationship with your mother, it still ends up pretty good.

        Of course, though, this was an age-appropriate group. I can think of nothing stupider than skipping grades, all my friends who ended up doing that had major socialization issues because of it.

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        1. “Olympiad kids, …and kids of factory workers and taxi drivers that nevertheless ended up scoring way high in the national exams”

          Weirdly, communist Poland was better at finding the latter than post-communist Poland was (I think things are better now). I have a very close friend who’s from the countryside with an unremarkable family (good people but not intellectually inclined) but he was obviously smarter than other kids and so by the age of 12 or so was in state boarding schools in cities that had appropriate facilities.

          That kind of thing stopped after communism and educational opportunities were much more about proximity to cities and better schools and parental income….

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  3. “These are tiny kids. They don’t need to prepare for the competitive workplace”

    Most of the time I think it’s not about the kids at all but about clout chasing by the parents….

    I’m also okay with doing away with AP courses in high school for similar reasons. America is the land of second and third and fourth chances…. why try to track kids so much?

    Another thing is that I’m pretty sure the effects of ‘gifted’ or ‘advanced’ courses don’t last beyond the early 20s at most.

    I do think that schools could/should do a better job with finding places for weirdo misfit kids (speaking as a former weirdo misfit kid). But that’s a separate issue from trying to turn kids into corporate drones….

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    1. I agree completely. I went to a crappy Soviet school. Which forms of academic achievement did I miss as a result? None.

      People dramatically overvalue the importance of schools. As long as kids are from normal families and there’s a nice playground/ outdoor area, who cares about anything else?

      On a related note, asking elementary school kids what they want to do when they grow up all the time is annoying. How are they supposed to know? They all want to sell ice cream at this age.

      Nobody needs to be thinking about jobs this early.

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      1. You’re a smart person who was taught English at a young age by her father. I would think a great school would have made more of a difference to someone average.

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        3. “a great school would have made more of a difference to someone average”

          Why? A great school can’t learn the material for the student any more than a cruddy one can.

          And for the most part schools can’t make children interested in education when the parents don’t much care.

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          1. A great school can’t learn the material for a student. That’s true. And our abilities are predetermined genetically. There’s a small chance of a great teacher making a difference to a student from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background who has he ability to do well.

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      2. Mine had a 15k-volume library where everything but a couple books from the 17th-19th centuries was open shelves. Spent grades 7-12 reading under my desk the whole schoolday 😀

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