This is an interesting example of reaching the right answer for atrociously bad reasons.
i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.
Of course kids who are struggling might really just be stuck on one issue, and once they get past it they'll be fine - i.e. when I was in around Year 2, for whatever reason my reading-level reports for somewhat low. Post that of course, I shot ahead (I have no idea why or how, in that case the metric probably just was mis-measuring whatever my interest was at the time).
Which is an example of exactly the issue with the idea of "gifted kids" - they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults.
After all: plenty of gifted mathematicians, certainly people smarter then me. If they're working as mathematicians though, the lifetime earning potential of my average career in IT is going to be higher though.
>>> they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults
That's a shocking claim to make. Feynman, Von Neumann, Turing, Einstein, Gauss...I think I could go on all day naming people whose contribution to society was outrageously disproportionate and who were all stereotypical "gifted children".
Of course they exist. You wouldn't be having this conversation on a computer on the Internet if they didn't.
> i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.
Can sooo relate to that... That's essentially the thing where I took my top-3% highschool-degree (spending presence-hours+30min/day on school - the day I grade-overtook a person spending 4h/day by final results was fun) to a "mediocre" uni degree.
EDIT: back then, around 30% of people attended that kind of highschool.
What did I do with time: read prose of my native language and America (leading me to optimize highschool finals by dropping english for even less work old greek...) - I guess someone making me learn for 2h/day would have not really hurt my (very underused) culture knowledge and helped me a lot the uni years.
Idk man my public elementary school gifted peers all went on to be pretty successful - head dramaturge at a Broadway playhouse, doctors, poker champion, etc. I manage software developers at a dev shop with a bunch of ivy and prestigious euro university grads.
Some people are smarter than other people, and being smart gives you myriad advantages in navigating the world. This seems pretty uncontroversial.
i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.
Of course kids who are struggling might really just be stuck on one issue, and once they get past it they'll be fine - i.e. when I was in around Year 2, for whatever reason my reading-level reports for somewhat low. Post that of course, I shot ahead (I have no idea why or how, in that case the metric probably just was mis-measuring whatever my interest was at the time).
Which is an example of exactly the issue with the idea of "gifted kids" - they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults.
After all: plenty of gifted mathematicians, certainly people smarter then me. If they're working as mathematicians though, the lifetime earning potential of my average career in IT is going to be higher though.