What to Do With Gifted Students?

Nokesville

Here is my response:

In a happy footnote, you told me that Virginia Commonwealth University just offered your son a four-year, full-tuition scholarship. Virginia Tech's associate provost and undergraduate admissions director, Norrine Bailey Spencer, told me her office highly values Cambridge courses, but also emphasizes grade-point average as a measure of persistence and responsibility. "When you go to Virginia Tech, you have to go to class and fill out your lab reports," she said. I am more interested in hearing from readers about the standard high school educate-by-the-numbers system that for very quick students seems to condone busywork. I have a friend whose ninth-grader suffered under this system this year and became much more engaged with his studies when they switched to home schooling, just as you suggest. Isn't there something schools could do to save such students from so many hours of what is to them useless drudgery?

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Here is a selection of the letters inspired by Klimavicz's story:

I found this article very interesting for so many reasons. I also have a child who is very smart and spent the latter part of her teen years in a public high school per her request. She was bored a lot, but we understood that rules needed to be followed, assigned work turned in on time and completed. She graduated high school with a high GPA and SAT scores, which allowed her to gain entrance to the school of her choice. She attended community college during high school to take college level courses on her own time, plus she took several AP courses and received 5s. As parents, I think we need to understand that whether or not our kids are gifted, they do need to learn to follow rules like everyone else. Kudos to the parent for finding ways to keep her child stimulated, but in school all kids need to learn to follow guidelines and follow through on assignments.

In life, and especially in the workforce, no one cares that you are gifted. Every organization has rules to follow, and unless you want to be fired, you will need to conform. It's life. School is a great place to start learning this lesson.

-- Cheryl Williams

This is a great article, and Ms. Klimavicz is getting at the heart of one of the big problems in the education system. In California, where I've been a math teacher for 15 years, and in most of the world, we sort students by grade level according to their age, not by their ability. I am not so sure that this is good for the individual, our culture, or our nation.

In my experience, very intelligent children who can do arithmetic in their heads when they are very young often don't see the point of useless homework in the early grades and develop a habit of not doing any because it wasn't necessary.

My son read "The Hobbit" in the first grade. As a senior in high school, he earned the highest grade, of two classes, on the physics final, and flunked the class. A girl in his class, who was one of my students (I taught at the same school), had trouble with logical thinking, problem solving, and was earning a generous D in geometry, but earned a B-plus in physics, even though she never passed a test. However, she did all of the lab assignments with, of course, a lot of help from her lab partner ("cooperative learning").

The difference between my son and Ms. Klimavicz's son is, even though my son earned 1550 on his math and English SAT, he decided not to go to college because he had seen the flaws in the education system and didn't like school. He instead studies and learns what he is interested in.