A couple of items piqued my interest today. In the Wall Street Journal (print edition) there was an article talking about how test-driven schools were squabbling over gifted students as if they were commodities. Some gifted students' scores 'count' not where they go to school, but their local neighbourhood schools, even if they never set foot in the local ones. Some gifted students may be held back in a school without programmes designed to challenge them because of fears that the schools' scores will fall. This is just wrong--it's bad for the child, and bad for the system, and smacks of the same sort of creative bookeeping you'd expect from high-profile accounting scandals.
I had the good fortune when I lived in Louisiana to be selected for a gifted/talented programme at Rusheon Junior High in Bossier City when I was eleven. It was a little different, I suppose, because it was a programme within the same school I otherwise would have attended. Also, GT was just becoming popular at the time (it was 1978).
We had a more loosely structured environment where certain classes were taken as normal but then we had part of the day devoted to creative, analytic, and more challenging assignments. But the best thing about the programme, for a kid who was growing up pretty much in isolation were some of the cultural activities. I went to see the movie 1776. I went to museums for the first time in my life. I saw my first operetta, Sousa's El Capitan. I remember each experience vividly in an otherwise dearth of childhood memories. My mother does too. We were a family that, despite our travels, never really went anywhere, didn't do anything together, and were culturally stunted. I didn't watch movies. I didn't go to museums. I couldn't go on my own--we were in a housing reservation on base miles from anything but pine woods, and my parents were either busy with their own lives, or just not inclined. The GT programme was my first taste of the humanities and arts I've come to love so much.
Later in the year there were trips planned to look for diamonds in Arkansas, visit war sites in Mississippi, and go to Washington DC, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and New York. We were washing cars to pay for the trips, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
Unfortunately (as is often the case in the military) my dad was transferred two months into the school year and I moved out to California, where we out in the middle of the desert and again isolated. I never got to go on the trips. I still haven't been to those places, and I at some point when I get a little money to travel or have a library convention to go to I definitely plan on making up for it.
The idea that such an experience, which was so important to me (and every gifted person I know had something similar, whether going to a special summer programme or having a tutor who was a challenge, or taking AP classes--something that brought out the spark rather than just going along without effort and being bored) would be denied a child because of such shenanigans concerns and angers me. It's one of the reasons I don't have much faith in the education system and would prefer to supplement standard education with just that sort of stimulation with any child of mine, even if we had to do it on our own. But I'm lucky--I have a wide range of education and cultural experience. Some parents don't, and they're raising kids who don't know anything about their past and care less about their future. And the sad thing is, schools aren't necessarily there to help, when it all comes down to dollars.
Another article I saw was in our local paper where they're trying to decide how to cope with the new technologies that allow you, for example, to take pictures and therefore violate privacy or download info during a test with your phone. Technology, despite all its wonderful benefits, opens a whole can of worms in terms of policy-making. Granted, cheating is covered and it shouldn't matter how they cheat, but it does make it harder to trace.
It's a far cry from our TRS-80s, hmmm????
I'm not sure I'd want to be an educator in this day and age, to be honest. I admire those who stick by it without burning themselves to a cinder or selling out all principles. It's a daily dance on a fire and I don't know how they do it.
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