Were you ever in the GATE Program as a child?

[NoBueno]

Heres a short summary:

 

[Gede labah]

^^ Do you guys want to buy some land somewhere and build shipping container homes?

 

[NoBueno]

^^ Do you guys want to buy some land somewhere and build shipping container homes?

We'll just end up in a Waco situation

 

[Acoustic Virgin]

Ah, a fellow gifted-kid-turned-homeless-alcoholic. How do you do. I wonder how many of us ended up down a similar path.

Teaching gifted kids remains one of the least understood concepts in education. Teaching anyone who falls in the middle ~80% of the intelligence bell curve is easy -- almost anyone can be trained to do it. Teaching special ed / remedial classes / learning disabilities / whatever they call it today is harder to do, but at least there's a good general consensus on how to do it effectively. But teaching that top ~10% is much more difficult.

For that group, everything intellectual comes easily -- at least at first -- things just make sense. They barely need to try throughout much of their academic careers. If they're not being challenged, then they don't develop study skills the way that others their age are. Eventually, they get to the academic levels where they can't just intuit their way through and begin struggling. And because they've been so academically successful to this point, the expectations are set very high. The sudden drop-off in performance is often inaccurately attributed to laziness or "not applying themselves" when in reality they were never given the tools necessary to learn how to learn.
And that's not even addressing the emotional toll that all this takes on the gifted student.

I don't have the answers, but I don't work in education. I hope that someone who studies educational paradigms and developmental psychology is working on it, but based on the quantity of gifted kids who have struggled later in life who I've encountered, I'm not so sure that much progress is being made.

 

[NoBueno]

"not applying themselves"

My mom kept all my report cards, thats all they said lol

 

[Tenshi Eating A Corn Dog!]

It was just GT (Gifted and Talented) when I went through. It was great and got kids out of classes they'd otherwise be incredibly bored with and dragged down by.