How many of you have been in GATE? - I heard that a bunch of creepy shit happened in it and would like to hear your opinions.

Crunchy Leaf said:
I'm surprised a high school would have a GATE program. Wouldn't a gifted kid in high school just be told to take AP classes or whatever?
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Well GATE was targeting kids younger than junior high school. AP classes have technically existed since 1955 but having a $100 test discouraged many students. Until 2013 AP classes weren't really implemented or available in the first place. IIRC GATE was provided freely by schools.
Buster O'Keefe said:
The fact that it took 16 fucking posts to find out what the fuck the acronym stands for shows that both gifts and talents are severely lacking in this rather gay thread.
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To be fair I always heard Gifted and Talented program over education.
 
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dark_lob1111 said:
Well GATE was targeting kids younger than junior high school. AP classes have technically existed since 1955 but having a $100 test discouraged many students. Until 2013 AP classes weren't really implemented or available in the first place. IIRC GATE was provided freely by schools.

To be fair I always heard Gifted and Talented program over education.
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I’m glad Japan’s education involves yelling at your students and making them stand in the hallway if they mess up.
 
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dark_lob1111 said:
Well GATE was targeting kids younger than junior high school. AP classes have technically existed since 1955 but having a $100 test discouraged many students. Until 2013 AP classes weren't really implemented or available in the first place. IIRC GATE was provided freely by schools.

To be fair I always heard Gifted and Talented program over education.
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That’s what I remember it being called. We were given IQ tests I’m pretty sure to get in... it didn’t seem like a choice to be honest but rather a cattle call so yeah they were throwing a wide net. but other than that I can’t remember anything particularly weird about the whole thing.

I know that the kids who got in were sub divided into a further 3 tiers/classes according to academic performance. They were also segregated from the rest of gen pop ( my junior high was a like a fucking prison) both at lunch and in class.
You moved as a class from Room to room which meant socializing outside of your tier and non Gifted and Talented was curtailed.
 
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This thread is interesting considering I avoided my school's equivalent of it by dumb luck. From what I understood, it was primarily focused on just drugging kids until their test scores improved. There was a lot of helicopter shit involved, social workers, house visits, etc, but really the program was just a front to make the school look better. Getting formally diagnosed with any kind of mental issue before you were 18 might as well have been a death sentence. Everyone I knew who interacted with it came out worse than how they were beforehand, it was pretty much just a threshing machine designed to churn out high grades.
 
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dark_lob1111 said:
Well GATE was targeting kids younger than junior high school. AP classes have technically existed since 1955 but having a $100 test discouraged many students. Until 2013 AP classes weren't really implemented or available in the first place. IIRC GATE was provided freely by schools.

To be fair I always heard Gifted and Talented program over education.
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Are you saying most high schools didn't have AP classes until 2013? Are you from some really shitty rural area or something? Damn, my dad's public high school in a falling apart city had AP classes in the 70s.

My school district had a version of this called 'Advanced Work' that was for grades 4-6, but it wasn't offered at every elementary school, so I would've had to go to another school and I decided not to. The appeal is to increase your odds of getting into one of the academically selective high schools. I can see the benefit for a kid whose parents are poor/immigrants/don't have college degrees, but for kids whose parents are college educated middle class white people it doesn't seem to make a huge difference. It might actually hurt their chances because half of the high school entrance criteria are grades and they'll get better grades at the easier school.
 
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I got tested for GATE in 3rd grade, didn't make it in because we just came back from a family trip. Tested again in middle school and got in. I was put into honors in high school because of it but got kicked out because I got depression and stopped giving a fuck. If that hadn't happened, I think I wouldn't be here today, reading about lolcows. I don't remember much about it other than being told it meant I was smart.
 
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I was in the gifted program growing up. They test you in grade 3 then if you do well they start pulling you out of classes for interviews. They ended up taking the top 1% from all the areas schools and we were all sent to a separate gifted school and bussed in from all over. My classmates were the exact same people from then on until the end of high school. Kinda weird growing up with the exact same people every year though, my class was pretty much a family and everyone knew everything about each other and everyone had dated each other by the end at least once. There was a lot of freedom in the gifted program though and you could get away with a lot and teachers were told to let students explore their creativity.
I still have most of them on my social media and I cant think of one who has done anything exceptional in life really. Half of them became high school teachers themselves or dropped out. Some are on welfare now or working for minimum wage still in their 30s.
Also people treat you differently when they hear you were in the gifted program and not in a good way. Sports teams at school were always separated as "gifted vs non" and so forth... Teachers mostly hated us cause we would challenge everything they would say and the fact we all knew and studied with each other for years made us that much more difficult to control. If there's anything else you'd wanna know about Canadas gifted program ask me
 
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I was in a GATE program.

All it amounted to was that once a month or so we'd be taken out of school for the day to go to Krelboyne class. If we did actual work I don't remember it. It was mostly bullshit games and crafts projects, the kind of stuff that's supposed to make you smarter.

Honestly, it was more like getting rewarded with a full day of recess once a month (with other smart kids) as a reward for being born smart. I wonder if they didn't also intend for the Krelboynes/their parents to network there. Although I don't remember any coherent benefit, all the adults involved seemed to think it was a good use of time/effective.

We also once took a field trip to the Tennessee Holocaust museum, which is a real thing.
 
I got tested for GATE around third grade as well, got in pretty easily too. I would have stayed in, but thanks to some moving around I slipped out of that program and never really got back in it. Still easily got in higher level classes in high school, but there's something to be said for just having kids be kids (including allowing bullying, that shit is needed) and not poisoning them with the idea that they're better just because they're smarter.
 
I was in GATE in Mercury, Nevada. They would take us down to underground hangers and have us stand near big floating metal disks and then ask us a bunch of weird questions, tell us to read some symbols in a foreign language that I never learned the name of and haven't been able to find since, and occasionally have us stare down into a deep pool of water with something blue glowing at the bottom. Some of the kids would be taken to extra sessions where they would be asked to envision objects moving, or be asked read cards without being able to see them. I was put through one of those sessions but the adults apparently weren't happy with how I did and I was put back with the regular group. Other kids didn't come back though.
 
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My son went to GATE for a while when he was in the 4th or 5th grade. Too many kids, not enough resources. Just about all the money went to teach the illegal alien kids English and provide the "special needs" kids with an education - God knows why, one GATE kid would probably make more money in a real job than five illegal alien kids or at least ten "special needs" kids. My son got bored and left GATE.

Some personal opinions - fast-track the smartest kids of any and all colors, let them skip grades, keep pushing them and fuck what the parents of the other kids say. We need the smart ones. Face it, just a waste of time trying to provide an education to those who don't want to learn - they're heading to jail and/or welfare anyway. Also believe high school should be two years max. I got about six months' worth of useful stuff out of four years of high school. Learned how to cook and how to drive, all I really got out of it. Believe high school is three or four years long only because the system doesn't want a bunch of 16-year-olds hitting the job market and/or entering colleges. Do YOU remember anything academic you learned in high school? Likely not much.

More jolts from Uncle Joe...so you weren't the best in math in high school. No sweat. Got news for you...if you can add, subtract, multiply and divide you can do any college math around. A little powerlevel - started with Basic Mathematics in fall 1978, worked my way to calculus by the time of university graduation in spring 1980. Have never used any advanced math after that, just a little algebra, at most. If you enter college with some common sense and the willingness and self-discipline to learn, you'll do just fine. The primary difference between undergraduate and graduate work - as an undergrad, you learn how. As a graduate student, you learn why. A bachelor's degree from most colleges/universities these days is about the same as a high school diploma was fifty years ago or so. So you know how much most high school diplomas are worth. Big discriminant now for many good jobs is the master's degree. Sometimes the employer doesn't even care what that degree is in. I know the US military doesn't. But you must have it to be competitive for the higher officer ranks.
 
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I was technically in it during like 4th grade, and we had to go to school an hour early for it.

I always ditched to go skateboarding or play Nintendo at a friend's place.
 
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Dizzydent said:
I was in the gifted program growing up. They test you in grade 3 then if you do well they start pulling you out of classes for interviews. They ended up taking the top 1% from all the areas schools and we were all sent to a separate gifted school and bussed in from all over. My classmates were the exact same people from then on until the end of high school. Kinda weird growing up with the exact same people every year though, my class was pretty much a family and everyone knew everything about each other and everyone had dated each other by the end at least once. There was a lot of freedom in the gifted program though and you could get away with a lot and teachers were told to let students explore their creativity.
I still have most of them on my social media and I cant think of one who has done anything exceptional in life really. Half of them became high school teachers themselves or dropped out. Some are on welfare now or working for minimum wage still in their 30s.
Also people treat you differently when they hear you were in the gifted program and not in a good way. Sports teams at school were always separated as "gifted vs non" and so forth... Teachers mostly hated us cause we would challenge everything they would say and the fact we all knew and studied with each other for years made us that much more difficult to control. If there's anything else you'd wanna know about Canadas gifted program ask me
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The first part is also what happened to me. The latter was not, because the school apparently embezzled all of the funding and there were never any extra programs.
We also got a bunch of shitty teachers because everyone assumed that smart kids = lower teacher effort required. Like, the ones that had a school-wide reputations for being awful.
 
I don't remember any weird tests in GAT, just some fun stuff 1 day out of the week. I remember they had us build towers out of dried spaghetti and gumdrops and our team's was so high we had to take the ceiling panels out before it fell under its own weight while we were at lunch. It was strictly an elementary school program when I attended (grade 4-8 iirc) but they bussed in kids from the schools around the county to the HS, whereas since mine was connected to the HS by the cafeteria I just had to walk to it.
 
InvertedDickEnthusiast said:
I don't remember any weird tests in GAT, just some fun stuff 1 day out of the week. I remember they had us build towers out of dried spaghetti and gumdrops and our team's was so high we had to take the ceiling panels out before it fell under its own weight while we were at lunch. It was strictly an elementary school program when I attended (grade 4-8 iirc) but they bussed in kids from the schools around the county to the HS, whereas since mine was connected to the HS by the cafeteria I just had to walk to it.
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You didn't take tests in it, you tested into it.
 
The only test I took to get in was what I assume was an IQ test, it was all geometric pattern recognition, no weird psych questions, no Rorshach blots.
 
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