I recently read in the New York Times about a little girl genius whose parents tried to their public school to skip her to the grade at which she performs. The public school. Her story is as follows-
"Any sensible culture would know what to do with Annalisee Brasil. The 14-year-old not only has the looks of a South American model but is also one of the brightest kids of her generation. When Annalisee was 3, her mother Angi Brasil noticed that she was stringing together word cards composed not simply into short phrases but into complete, grammatically correct sentences. After the girl turned 6, her mother took her for an IQ test. Annalisee found the exercises so easy that she played jokes on the testers--in one case she not only put blocks in the correct order but did it backward too. Angi doesn't want her daughter's IQ published, but it is comfortably above 145, placing the girl in the top 0.1% of the population. Annalisee is also a gifted singer: last year, although just 13, she won a regional high school competition conducted by the National Association of Teachers of Singing...
The system failed Annalisee, but could any system be designed to accommodate her rare gifts? Actually, it would have been fairly simple (and virtually cost-free) to let her skip grades, but the lack of awareness about the benefits of grade skipping is emblematic of a larger problem: our education system has little idea how to cultivate its most promising students. Since well before the Bush Administration began using the impossibly sunny term "no child left behind," those who write education policy in the U.S. have worried most about kids at the bottom, stragglers of impoverished means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted students drop out at the same rates as nongifted kids--about 5% of both populations leave school early. Later in life, according to the scholarly Handbook of Gifted Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the gifted range. Earlier this year, Patrick Gonzales of the U.S. Department of Education presented a paper showing that the highest-achieving students in six other countries, including Japan, Hungary and Singapore, scored significantly higher in math than their bright U.S. counterparts, who scored about the same as the Estonians. Which all suggests we may be squandering a national resource: our best young minds."
Does anyone have a reaction to this story? Has anyone heard of a similar story?
It is my opinion that we teach to the middle of the class and leave the remedial and the enrichment students behind. All of the state testing that is our solution to complying with NCLB has created such a panic in educators and administrators that we tend to pay the most attention to the average students because those are the ones that we can get to improve their scores.
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2 comments:
I too have found this NCLB disconcerning. My daughter was above average in grades, but had problems with testing anxiety.
When it came time for the testing, I had one (new) teacher tell me that the school was under the gun for the ratings with this and they were counting on the kids with above average kids to did very well.
My daugther stopped wanted to go to school. When I finally got to the bottom of it, she told me that this teacher was telling her she had to do well for everyone. Maybe the teacher did not mean that exactly, but that's what my girl thought and she did not like being saddled with such a huge responsiblity. I did find out more and it was much the same.
Another teacher was very angry at this (new) teacher and was aware of how it was affecting the kids.
I went the Assistant Principle and again, I got the "well, that is pretty much how it is now".
My daughter's friend was over one night having dinner and playing. Their discussion at dinner was about my daughter not wanting to go to school and the other girl said she didn't care. Her comment to me was that she was not good at school, and so teachers left her alone.
Weird, or what? I know kids take things a little differently, but after my investigation, I understood my daughter and quite honestly did not blame her for feeling so overwhelmed.
That's wrong about your daughter, cybertalk; that teacher is obviously too preoccupied about their own personal standing to understand how they're affecting their students. That girl owes nothing to anyone but herself, in the face of all her achievement.
As for the article itself, nothing less of a crime was done to Annalisee Brasil, a girl who is not only insanely bright, but has proved to have the social skills to be able to cope with people older than her (to talk with such confidence to a journalist!). Many people have already explained that accelerating kids to higher grade levels simply because they can do the same level of work can hinder their social and emotional maturation, but what about kids that don't have that problem? In Brasil's special case, there's nothing wrong with doing such a thing; in fact, not doing it can harm the types of kids in that same situation. These are kids that are already avoided by their classmates, taunted and teased; they're not being helped by keeping them in the same place - at least with promoting them, they can interact with people on their same intellectual level.
TIME does raise a very good point: the rationale behind the No Child Left Behind Act is to put all kids on the same playing field, but that directs all the time and energy on the struggling and mentally-impaired kids; what about the gifted kids? Funding for gifted programs has been cut dramatically since the passing of the act, although gifted kids drop out at the same rate as stuggling lids. There does seem to be some type of love-hate relationship between Americans and smart people. We usually tease them for being "geeky" or "nerdy," or even resent them either because of their perceived arrogance or our insecurity over our own intelligence and achievement, but also, like in the case of cybertalk's daughter's teacher, turn to them to use them for our own purpose. It's really disgusting how extremely bright kids are being left in the dust; I'm sorry, but sometimes, there's just no way to help someone who's made it clear they don't want it. This is going for people who resent education in general (i.e. morons).
We should be focusing our energy on those that need it most; those that are obviously going to change the world someday. Because many people (and almost all Americans)tend to hold themselves in rather high a regard, they can't bring themselves to admit that someone is more gifted than them (or in some cases, truly better than them), and that's why gifted kids often get chuffed or set aside. Everyone wants to think their child is perfect, and although it's normal, not every kid is going to grow up to be Albert Einstein or Wolfgang Mozart. It's just not fair to shut out those that are.
Kids with exceptional talents have "special needs" as well -they're not normal. That doesn't mean they can't have friends and enjoy themselves, though that seems to be the message we give to them. American education does need a complete overhaul; we need to reassess who we're trying to help: the kids, or to state legislatures and our own self-image. It is just a representative of the country at large - we have no goddamn idea how to do anything right: that's how morons get elected to office who pass fallacious acts, we worry about petty issues that truly don't have any real importance, and we divide ourselves with brick walls over them.
LITEACHER, you're quite right in saying that we teach the average kids because we can improve their scores, but what about the kids that don't need such help? They still can't do everything by themself, and it hurts them in the long run to make believe that they can - even Einstein built walls between himself and the world to the end of his life.
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