Wasted talents - Comments

Tell me about it!! I have a six yr old boy who is making cardboard space rockets at school and getting removed to a chair for talking...yet at home he watches documentaries and waffles on about theories of how the moon may have been part of some planet which crashed into the earth (??you'd have to ask him as his general knowledge is way more advanced than my own??). On one hand his school have recognised that he is extremely clever, however, because of 'number's of pupils' his yeargroup was split and he has spent the last year being taught in a class of younger children. I am a single parent on a low income and havn't a clue how to ensure that his school is working alongside his potential and not just dragging him through a dull, standard curriculum until he reaches eleven yrs and isn't their problem anymore! This story was published over 10 yrs ago...it doesn't seem as if much has changed!! Actually..one thing has changed...my son's school is over-run by 'teaching assistants'. Where did they come from? and where have all the qualified teachers gone??

This sounds terrible! I was one of those kids who had a real rough time at school because I got stuff - I ended up with a whole raft of strategies to pretend I didn't know things and lost the ability to work towards goals because I didn't need to work to know more than many of my classmates. In fact I viewed working as cheating because I believed that exams were there to test your innate ability and not the amount of work you did. I was also removed from desks for 'talking', for arguing with the teacher and for debating as to why I should obey an order if it was morally unsound (when I was 7) and teachers often bullied me - one teacher trying to block the award of a prize to me because he thought I didn't deserve it.. despite mine being the only 100% result in the class on an externally marked exam. You need to a) get him out of there and into a school with more provision for intelligent kids b) get him to reflect on deeper learning fromsimple tasks (i.e. add some teaching to what the teachers miss out) - (eg I met an Art teacher who's 6 year old son was interested in the solar system - they made solar system out of papier mache then worked out how far they would need to be from each other to be to scale properly, why the way the sun rose meant that the earth had to be spinning around N-S axis (not W-E etc etc.) .. c) get him to view school as somewhere he can learn to participate, but home as where he follows what he really likes to learn. C) has the risk of more behavioural challenges, unfortunately. I would have two campaigns - phone up other schools in the area and ask for gifted provision (all of them will tell you they are excellent but go and meet the gifted 'expert' with your child and see if they click) - secondly call the fee-paying schools and see what they offer in terms of scholarships - fee paying schools need bright kids to make sure that their self-positioned statements about the quality of educattion aren't watered down with the 'stupid-but-rich-kids' they inevitibly take, so it is in their interests to treat an application seriously - the main advantage of fee-paying schools is not so much the better education and facilities (but this helps) but there is much less of the 'don't get ideas above your station' that is in state education - and more of the 'if you want to be a doctor, here's what you do' type thinking. Teaching assistants are (unfortunately) too often people who are either too stupid to be teachers - even with some of the low standards that are around - or cheap inexperienced teachers who the school is trying to get on the cheap and who are resentful, disloyal and not rewarded adequately for any extra contribution - no matter how much they fight it. Teaching assistants often REDUCE grades not increase them. The other option is to keep developing him anyway, get good grades by reminding him that although schools are a pain Unis are the thing, then appy for the top unis even if there are some weak grades, and explain the dfficulties schooling. An example - I was recruiting recently (lost to industry) a candidate from a care background with 3 GCSEs, 3 grade D A-Levels.. and a First from a top uni! so grades can increase dramatically for those with innate abilities no matter how much circumstances and education let them down.. as long as people don't block ambition, say 'you only got... x.. so you are not as clever as you think'... or say things like 'start at the bottom' (not true - bright people should apply higher straight away.

I'd like to see this topic revisited (hint to editors) as I notice the original article is from 1996. I'm very sympathetic to C.Nebbet's comments, and observe that some quite bright children find the constraints of school frustratiing - the iron hand of curriculum, designed to ensure certain minimum standards can have the unfortunate effect of enforcing maximum standards, too. Nevertheless, from experience, those bright children still do need inculcating in some of the basics (even if they think those basics are 'boring' or 'beneath them') and so accelerated progression could neglect that. And yet - there is a significant number of students who feel that schooliing is taking up time that they could use to do more interesting learning. So that time issue won't go away. However, there might be a partial answer in this weeks edition, where HE organisations such as MIT and the OU are offering open access online materials to quite advanced levels. If it could be formalised so that some school students could work through some of these materials (and have the actual time to do so), then some unconventional pupils could still be engaged in challenging learning. This answer would require some kind of provision of tutorial help from HE back into schools - which might be a funding issue, but actually, it's not necessarily incredibly expensive. It does seem as though a political initiative is needed, unless some HE provider is rich enough(?) to pilot something - that would probably be one of the older UNiversities, I suppose.

I vividly recall cruising through primary school, becoming resentful of the pointless, unrewarding work I was being asked to do which fed me interesting, usable information in tiny spoonfuls amongst a swathe of repetitive garbage (weekly spelling lists even after 6 years?). All the way till year 10, all my assignments were whipped up last-minute, i just kept one ear open in class to see what they were attempting to hammer into our skulls and i knew enough to make the grade. The end result was that by the time I came to my final years at the end of highschool where you could no longer intuitively understand everything without putting some work in, I was unmotivated, resentful and spiteful of the system and my work ethic in regards to schoolwork was terrible. lazy. Even in the abstract, it was being taught without a context or a practical application, absolutely nothing to create an interest or an understanding that "this knowledge could develop me personally"... now it has it's uses... pity, that we didn't get to learn any.. My final marks were mediocre I think the time when I utterly lost all motivation was around a time when I was in 8th grade maths... and somebody asked what decimals were.. somebody else repeated the question... and this was in a private school.. no child has endless patience.. and when it runs out.. they will no longer have respect for the school system.. so while nothing is being done, students with far greater or different capacity than the system allows them to show or attempt to build upon.. are becoming fed up.. and are giving up... and the irony is.. the abilities the students WOULD have been developing.. would have been invaluable in finding their life path and excelling at what they would probably have been best at. I would have much preferred spending my younger years learning languages or world geography than the weekly spelling list. I read a lot of books, it was no big deal. yet it formed the base for a good portion of homework for year after year and that, along with simple arithmetic was all we were regularly tested on... it was hardly increasing the boundaries of ones aspirations if the only results they were allowed to get and the only ability they were allowed to see in themselves were the ones the school decided were important

I could have written Morsachi's post myself, though I would have to have added in the stones thrown at me for having any form of creative intelligence. It seems so ironic now, given that I have a PhD and many published works. I taught myself the languages and literature that I deeply craved at a school that failed me. I recall one patronising mediocrity telling me to attend the session on how to fill in dole applications as 'I would be needing it more than most.' He went on to become a Chief Examiner, which just goes to show what the nasty education system rewards: obedience, rote learning and endurance. As for student applications, I no longer work on undergraduate programmes, but certainly when I did I felt nothing could be read into GCSE or A level results in my area, and disregarded them. I suspect a large number of my colleagues do too. The irony is that I work in an area nowadays decribed as the 'cultural industries', that is expected to provide the economic development of the local economy now that the banks have followed industry down the swanee. Given the education of most, it is impossible to believe that education could become of fulfilling, creative process, so we are all really screwed.