It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I never broke a sweat. I never developed study habits because I didn't need them. One semester my junior year, my friend and I just spent one week in early November doing the entire semester's work, some late, some early. The rest of the time I could spend doing dumb shit and also hacking away on my computers.
I did so well I got into a college where I was annoyingly average. By the time I developed some semblance of study habits and realistic sense of my abilities, it was too late to get my GPA much above 3 (this was before grade inflation was much of a thing). In graduate school I finally got my shit together and learned to just work, but I wasn't in as elite of an environment anymore thanks to my performance in undergrad.
I had wanted my whole life to be away from the normies in high school and once I got there, I didn't love it. It was humiliating. But that was good for me. Realizing you're 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in a million is probably much more realistic. And also annoyingly, this is exactly what testing when I was like 7 years old told me, but the illusion of being in an exurban high school made me think otherwise.
Now I read we are shaped more and more and more by our experiences at around age 18. That's the music you hang on to and even, I read this week, the politicians we hang on to. I love to think I'm different, but I really am part of Generation Clinton. I really am not 1 in a million or 1 in 100,000 even.
I think a lot of the kinds of people drawn to tech had similar experiences in their formative years. You see a lot of posts here with ideas about reforming education, but schools need to get everyone through, not just the 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100 types. In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
So my interpretation of what you're writing is that people just get used to being the smartest guy in the room. Some may like being around others like that, but if they're honest I bet most people don't. They should!
The lamest possible source turned me around on this. I was listening to Howard Stern (not my parents, not my friends, not my teachers) rant about how when he did his movie he found the movie people interested in building stars up, but his background in radio was all about burning people down and recycling them. I decided I liked building people up more. The karma didn't take long to pay me back.
When you're anonymous on the Internet, nobody knows if you're full of shit or really pack the gear, so we see a lot of bullshit words to add the kind of credibility you might see from a resume.
The 1 in a million are either screwed over worse than you were, or are recognized early and perennially challenged to further their development.
> In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
Programs for regular and exceptionally gifted students do exist in the US, but this varies state-to-state and district-to-district.
The best "reform" I've thought of to address almost everything you've mentioned is to teach kids, early on, about failure. That it isn't the end of the world, what they can do to try to identify it happening, and how they can recover from it. Though like anything else this has to be done in moderation, as people who keep failing eventually give up entirely.
GATE programs are underfunded and to the extent they exist they only make it worse most of the time because they basically are telling you: you are elite! and in your school you probably are, but you're usually still in the same school. Most of the time it's just pull outs.
Also, I wasn't screwed over. I live a charmed existence that I am thankful for every day. (=
eta: 100% agree we need to teach kids about failure. I understand the concerns about too much, but right now I don't think they are exposed to enough.
But yeah, the situation for regularly gifted students is often as you say. And any school program that truly held them to higher standards would also end up penalizing them with lower grades that would make them look non-competitive to highly selective universities.
> but right now I don't think they are exposed to enough.
Except those in the bottom 25%. They are human too, and deserve a good, well-tailored education.
Actually, in my college dorm we had a guy who was only 16 who'd been accelerated. I wouldn't exactly say he was "bullied," but he didn't have a very easy time of it.
For me it was a bad choice to only take one year of community college in lieu of high school, instead of two. And being mainstreamed in math at the beginning of middle school instead of accelerated a year was particularly painful.
True story: one of my neighbors went to University of Chicago High School ("Uni High" as it's called). It was (and probably still is) a school for the extremely gifted. (I suppose they have some Reverse Imposters there, too, but I wouldn't know /s )
My dad was against my going there; I wouldn't be able to talk to ordinary people if I was only ever around those "gifted" kids.
I suppose there's something to that; I cited this article:
by a guy who didn't know what to say to the plumber standing in his kitchen, whereas I'd much rather be around people like that than the Reverse Imposters.
Acceleration (universal or subject-specific grade skipping) can help with this. It challenges the gifted student appropriately while still allowing them to socialize with regular people.
Naively it might seem that this could lead to bullying, but from what I read it tends to work really well. The older students aren't threatened by the prodigy.
I took geometry as a freshman in a class full of juniors and seniors. The bullying was frequent, and the teacher strategically refused to show up on time so I had to either wait around outside the classroom like a coward or go in and be hazed.
I skipped mid 3rd to mid 4th. I wasn't really that much younger, but it was not good. It wasn't just that they were bigger or whatever, but at that age what you're going through is still pretty tightly coupled to your age. I didn't feel normalish until well into high school.
I don't recommend it. I recommend letting kids accelerate, but right now the consensus seems to be accelerate most people who need it at 9th grade, not 7th, and definitely not before. As with most of these things the consensus goes back and forth, but that squares with my lived experience.
I wonder if skipping in the middle of the year was particularly bad.
The recommendation you cite conflicts with Miraca Gross's recommendation for exceptionally gifted students, but they will be a minority of those who can grade skip.
i took algebra 2/trig as a freshman in a class full of juniors and became friends with pretty much all of them. i was a pakistani dude at a title 1 school. it just depends on the class
As adults we're constantly interacting with people younger and older than us by multiple decades. Even as college students we're in classes with those younger or older by multiple years.
The modern age-cohort school system is the historic exception. Prior to it single-room schools were common. And prior to those apprenticeships in which some of the apprentices or journeymen were older and younger were common.
Heck, in my neighborhood kids were older and younger. I remember getting advice from an older neighborhood kid when beginning elementary school (the part I remember is that lunch boxes weren't cool, and to use a paper bag instead).
You're right in that being the single odd-ball is unusual. But I think it would be better to just make partial and full grade skips more common than to make them rarer.
It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I never broke a sweat. I never developed study habits because I didn't need them. One semester my junior year, my friend and I just spent one week in early November doing the entire semester's work, some late, some early. The rest of the time I could spend doing dumb shit and also hacking away on my computers.
I did so well I got into a college where I was annoyingly average. By the time I developed some semblance of study habits and realistic sense of my abilities, it was too late to get my GPA much above 3 (this was before grade inflation was much of a thing). In graduate school I finally got my shit together and learned to just work, but I wasn't in as elite of an environment anymore thanks to my performance in undergrad.
I had wanted my whole life to be away from the normies in high school and once I got there, I didn't love it. It was humiliating. But that was good for me. Realizing you're 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in a million is probably much more realistic. And also annoyingly, this is exactly what testing when I was like 7 years old told me, but the illusion of being in an exurban high school made me think otherwise.
Now I read we are shaped more and more and more by our experiences at around age 18. That's the music you hang on to and even, I read this week, the politicians we hang on to. I love to think I'm different, but I really am part of Generation Clinton. I really am not 1 in a million or 1 in 100,000 even.
I think a lot of the kinds of people drawn to tech had similar experiences in their formative years. You see a lot of posts here with ideas about reforming education, but schools need to get everyone through, not just the 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100 types. In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
So my interpretation of what you're writing is that people just get used to being the smartest guy in the room. Some may like being around others like that, but if they're honest I bet most people don't. They should!
The lamest possible source turned me around on this. I was listening to Howard Stern (not my parents, not my friends, not my teachers) rant about how when he did his movie he found the movie people interested in building stars up, but his background in radio was all about burning people down and recycling them. I decided I liked building people up more. The karma didn't take long to pay me back.
When you're anonymous on the Internet, nobody knows if you're full of shit or really pack the gear, so we see a lot of bullshit words to add the kind of credibility you might see from a resume.