Well sort of.
This article in Popular Science on line is pretty interesting. I’m still wading through it, but it struck me that this is one very smart kid.
While it’s interesting to read about this young man’s activities, the article points out a much larger problem. While various state and federal laws require extra services for children (and adults) with special needs, there is nothing that requires schools to do anything for extremely bright students who aren’t challenged by the lowest common denominator approach most schools take these days. There’s just no money for it, so a lot of very bright kids sit in classrooms and get bored. Some of them get in trouble as well.
It’s sad and an indictment of the public school system.
I think we’d all be better off if more schools devoted resources to “gifted and talented” programs.
I know it’s controversial, but maybe it’s time we reconsidered our approach to funding all of these programs.
Yeah, that only makes sense… sigh… but then we’d be PROMOTING some kids above others…
And political correctness knows we can’t do that. It might hurt the self esteem of those less gifted.
When I was in high school, I was acquaintances with a girl who was so incredibly smart, she almost couldn’t graduate. In middle school, the math classes weren’t hard enough for her, and she was getting extremely bored. So they let her come up and take high school classes, but for 0 credits. In her freshman year of high school, she passed AP Cal-Phys with a solid A. That was the highest level math class our school offered. Because she couldn’t go any higher, she couldn’t earn any additional math credits. So she would have been ineligible to graduate. It took over a year of fighting for it, but they finally were able to figure something out where she could take these impressive math classes online through a college…something like astrophysics. Our high school made an exception so that those courses could work as high school credits.
She was lucky. Most high school administrators aren’t willing to put that much effort into helping a smart, but bored student. It’s easier to label them as trouble makers and discipline them because they have a procedure for that.
I got one of those kids too. Not quite that bright, but getting screwed by the public school system.
Hi guys,
We have a different problem in the UK.
The top 5% of students in a year group have to be entered onto a ‘gifted and talented’ register. Even if that year group doesn’t display either of those attributes. The government can then say, look at our gifted and talented population. We also have the problem at the other end of the scale where those less able have a mountain of resources shoveled at them, even if they’ve got hat’s arse chance of passing junior school tests.
Beauraucrats…
Tj
@meditude