rays of hope for despairing nerds

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1653653-1,00.html

WARNING: atypically long rant follows. Read the article instead if you're not up for it.
As the picture indicates, people who can balance books on their heads are super smart.

Getting the picture more readily, successful schools should be set up to push the intelligent as well as provide something for the more mundane basics we all need. I've argued with people all over the place about this, but the point of fact is a school set up to teach to a test is going to fail. Not because assimilating the knowledge from that test will fail, but because the best and brightest will grow bored with academic pursuits, seeing them only as a putrid series of regurgitations. In any society I suspect it's more important in the long term for that society to worry more about failing it's best than failing it's worst. It's worst can and should be attended to. That can be done, often with difficulty or resistance. It's important too, don't get me wrong because the worst are often numerous and can cause a tremendous drain on society without some resources invested for self-sufficiency. But without it's best, society slowly freezes and dies. Anyone familiar with history knows the line that a society is not conquered from without until it has been conquered from within. We're fast approaching that critical mass point and it starts to become clear that this failure emanates from this particular failing above any others.

"The school is a rejection of the thoroughly American notion that if most just try hard enough, we could all be talented". This is indeed truly an American notion, and a throughly idiotic one at that. Talent can be developed yes, but it also must be discovered. Not everyone has some sort of educational gift, be it music, math, or writing, waiting to be tapped and start to shine. This doesn't imply everyone else is worthless (human worth seems to be independent of intellect anyway, many of the Nazis at Nuremberg were of high intelligence for example). But it does mean we're not doing very well by those that do have the intellect. IQ tests are a semi-measure but they have their own flaws. I'm mostly referring to anyone with a gift and a real hunger for learning, not simply those people who happen to score well on particular tests. People following sports often hear about 'upside' during drafts for example. Brainiacs have the same upside in need of development to put to work those rare gifts in the real world.

"If so, is the answer to segregate the brightest kids?". My experience says yes. I saw about the same 20-30 people my last two years of high school in every class. In college, the brightest kids will tend to pick harder classes or at least actually complete them (in part because they'll tend to skip/test past the fluff courses that are 'required'). They're also going to keep moving through to pursue advanced degrees. I'm not saying the rest of the 'commoners' are a corruption. Some of them are actually fairly smart themselves, just as neglected by a system that shelters the weak and ignores the power that can be created and fostered otherwise. And there's sometimes use in associating with people who're normal but tolerate the weirdo habits of a 'nerd'. Most kids do not, in fact they're actually pretty cruel about it. "The academy provides a home for them and also functions to check their self-regard since they finally compete day to day with kids who are just as bright". That's why I stuck to the higher path so much, I went where the competition was because I couldn't have cared less about having the trolls like me.

"But since at least the mid-1980s, schools have often forced gifted students to stay in age-assigned grades--even though a 160-IQ kid trying to learn at the pace of average, 100-IQ kids is akin to an average girl trying to learn at the pace of a retarded girl with an IQ of 40." If we want anything useful, it makes no sense to educate a genius in the same way one educates an imbecile. We don't have a system in place to make this work, but it sounds like someone wants to try. Kudos to them. I might suggest very small classes. Like no bigger than 15. This can be achieved in middle or high school anyway if we cut down on the chaff by realizing most of the 'required' education we impart is supposed to be done by elementary schools.

"Currently, gifted programs too often admit marginal, hardworking kids and then mostly assign field trips and extra essays". I knew a lot of these kids in high school. They appeared smart through hard work and study. There's a difference though between someone who's able to ace test after test and someone who's really smart and only someone who's really smart notices it. I don't remember getting field trips (at least not until I did some jeopardy style extracurricular stuff), but the extra essays were ok by me. I hated homework assignments and multiple choice tests simply because they were boring. I would have liked to bring a pillow on some days and in college, I'd simply show up late or leave early (throwing down a gauntlet by being done with the first test in less than 10 minutes and still acing it tended to get the professors to stop arguing with me really fast). So essays made sense because they require some levels of intellectual processing and allow for creative license. But they're not for everyone.

"Advocates for gifted kids consider one of the most pernicious results to be "cooperative learning" arrangements in which high-ability students are paired with struggling kids on projects." I always hated these. Just because people are smarter does not mean they want to teach. They end up doing all the work themselves and nothing is accomplished. I wouldn't mind doing some teaching now (partly why I'm trying to work in the field I am, it's like teaching but with better pay), but certainly not as a social inept child or teenager.

"Truly gifted kids are almost always autodidacts". This is true. That insatiable thirst for knowledge and thought almost requires that intelligence be fed, or exercised as it were. That does not mean that a school cannot give it direction or fields of exploration. I seriously doubt I would have bothered to investigate the fields of biology or chemistry on my own as my tastes were more of the other trees of learning. I can't say I enjoyed it (or that I have much use for it otherwise), but at least I was exploring different places than my mind was comfortable with. Exposure to a different type of learning is something a mind needs as a form of exercise. One cannot add more muscle by benching the same amount of weight the same amount of times every day. I was also annoyed though that a school tried to take credit for the achievements of its students. I had an English teacher who was smart enough to realize that when scores came back on proficiency tests that she didn't take any credit for my score. She knew that was mostly me. The overall scores try to attach themselves like parasites to the successes of their 'children' as though they crafted a work of art themselves.

"The curriculums are individualized and fluid--some students take college-prep English but core-level math.". I like the idea of getting rid of grade levels. They didn't really have them before when everyone's kids were at the same schoolhouse regardless of age (that must have been hell on the teacher though). It's also important to allow people to do what they excel in at a level they can excel at it. So I love the idea of fluid curriculum. One of the major problems with college has been the 'required' coursework. Gen ed classes are usually a waste of time for intelligent people, especially very directed and driven people. A biologist doesn't really need to take political history in college. They can if they want to. But it's hardly a requirement.

"You know, I would love to be equal to Michael Jordan in my basketball talents, but somehow I never will be". I agree there's a problem with any system that wants people to be equal in result. I suspect that Davidson didn't think it through enough to wonder why a system would even want people to be equal in result. Because that might be problem one on the list of things to do.

"Some successfully traverse society's pitfalls (for instance, Albert Einstein); others are less successful (for instance, Theodore Kaczynski)". GWH made this analogy several years back. I'm somewhere in the middle in case anyone has noticed. I haven't made any pipe bombs yet. I'm hoping my madness is simply a side effect of high intelligence.

"Today most of the 33 students who were not allowed to skip grades have jaded views of education, and at least three are dropouts". Maybe that is my problem with schools.

One other note from all this. The lead girl in the story, her parents (well her mom) moved just so she could go to school. That's school choice. In other countries, school choice works in something like this. Money follows the student around and the students can go to better schools instead of whatever was available in their local area. In America this happens instead by the wealthy either sending their children to private academies or moving to better school districts (in this case over 1700 miles). Nobody else has a choice in the matter. That's the kind of inequality we shouldn't want. Inherited opportunity is fine because parents want their children to succeed, but simply because someone wins the genetic lottery and is born to wealthy parents does not entitle such a person to grander things. They must be earned on some merit of their own making. People who are poor can be clever and bright too, but the star never quite makes any shine when it's in a black hole of the suffering clods of our society. That sort of inequality is something to be dealt with. Making everyone the same by educating them same, not so much. Offering everyone a decent and meaningful education, that's fine by me.



I'll agree IQ isn't the best determinant for all this. It's an indicator, but it's not totally reliable. It's a test just like any other. Some people simply aren't good at tests (these would be the people I mocked before a test, I can hope it helped). I've seen studies where simply by identifying a person's race prior to taking a test can influence the scores, perhaps explaining some of why blacks historically trail on IQ scores. The tests themselves tend to emphasize spatial reasoning, something I've not known many women to excel at. They're not terrible at it either, but to get off the charts high (like say Mensa2 high), one has to be pretty damn clever at anything the test throws at them. Many child prodigies seem to be pattern learners, ie,math and music. Again, math has been a field dominated by men historically (this is changing, but the stereotype has its own powerful inhibitor effects). I've known some very smart women, but I seriously doubt they'd have outscored me on an IQ test simply because the test is on things I do very, very well. They had me beat on other things. I knew they were smarter, but the tests wouldn't. A system has to be in place to recognize and foster intellectual growth, regardless of whether a test picks up on it or not. This is a start.