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What is the goal for gifted students?

Skip a grade and teach them stuff ahead of time (No, their social skills cant handle it apparently)

Teach them extended topics... aka waste their time on stuff they can already do.

I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell me about it and I got it in my head.

I don't really understand pacing of US K12. In Retrospect, its basically teaching people math and reading skills. If we are just looking for daycare, sure the status quo is fine. Otherwise it seems school should be built around those fields rather than arbitrary ages.

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influx 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The factory model of education made sense in the industrial era, but it's increasingly anachronistic in an age of personalized technology. We have the tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty and pacing based on each student's capabilities - similar to how modern video games seamlessly adapt to player skill levels.

Instead, we're still forcing students into rigid cohorts based mainly on age, effectively optimizing for the statistical mean while leaving both ends of the ability distribution poorly served. This is particularly wasteful with gifted students who could be advancing much faster if the system accommodated their pace of learning.

The tech to deliver adaptive education at scale exists today. The main barriers are institutional inertia and perhaps a misguided egalitarian impulse that confuses equality of opportunity with enforced uniformity of outcomes. We should embrace the natural variation in human capabilities and build systems that help each student reach their potential, rather than constraining everyone to march in lockstep.

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SpicyLemonZest 11 hours ago | parent [-]

We have tools to dynamically adjust curriculum difficulty for students who value education, whether because they're self-motivated or because their parents make them. The challenge is what to do about the large number of students - at many schools the majority - who don't. When you where dynamically adjust to a student who doesn't particularly care to study, or doesn't have the support to do it properly, you end up with the recurrent scandals where a high school is found to be graduating people who can't read.

Extracurricular studies are always possible for the students who are furthest ahead of the curve, and good schools usually do accommodate that. For the rest, I would argue that a fixed number of tracks that insist on pulling students along is the only practical solution.

	▲	logicchains 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>The challenge is what to do about the large number of students - at many schools the majority - who don't. The solution isn't just to keep throwing money at the problem, because empirically that's been completely ineffective. If a large segment of the population are effectively learning nothing in e.g. the last 4 years of high school, they shouldn't be forced to attend, wasting resources that could be spent educating people who actually want to be educated. Instead there should be stronger support for people who come back to complete a high school diploma at a later age, as many of those students will come back with real motivation for study once they find their career opportunities without it are limited.

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JoshTriplett 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Help them learn to the full extent of their ability, at the full pace they can learn. There are many different paths that could achieve that successfully, but it's well-established that "have a uniform class grouped by age and punish anyone who stands out" is not a path to success.

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variadix 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ultimately it’s appropriately paced education. Some people need accelerated education and some need decelerated education, and it might vary between subjects for an individual. Not having opportunities at either end of the spectrum is bad for the student because they’re can be left behind or not challenged enough.

Very few people take issue with providing resources to someone falling behind. On the other hand, enough people take issue with letting someone get ahead that it has become a political issue, and has lead to regressive educational policy.

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bachmeier 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I was able to skip 1 grade in college due to my insistence on taking college classes in high school. Everyone from parents to teachers were against it. Had a random adult I met working tell me about it and I got it in my head.

I don't know your circumstances or when you were in school, but my son is in high school in Kansas, and he's taking university classes with the encouragement of the school. And not easy classes, either. One of them is a proof-based Calc III. I'm working with a high school student to give them a research experience (they obviously can't do much, but they get exposed to the research process, which is pretty exciting). The high school gives them credit for doing it.

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kccqzy 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The goal should be to allow them to self-study topics ahead of time. For example, if a third grader has already demonstrated mastery of third grade material, they should be given textbooks from the fourth grade to study on their own. And if they can do fourth grade topics, go to fifth grade topics.

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AstralStorm 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Teach them more skills and/or use the extra time they do not need on their strong sides to boost weak ones with extracurricular activities.

Yes, you cannot skip a grade, but nobody is stopping a kid from going to a later grade for some classes really. The school social atmosphere has to be right for it though.

But nobody wants to pay for it.

	▲	JoshTriplett 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> nobody is stopping a kid from going to a later grade for some classes really Nobody should be, but many people are. At a minimum, the college-style model of subject-based classes and prerequisites for those classes should start much, much earlier, in elementary school. There are elementary-school students who should be in calculus classes, and there are high-school and university students who should be in remedial arithmetic classes. (Though in some cases the latter would be less true if K-12 hadn't failed them so badly thus far.)

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bagels 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My gift for learning ahead in high school was to sit in the office for an hour each day, not learning, but instead helping with administrative work against my will, lest I get a bad grade on "we don't know what to do with you" time.