11:29pm December 22, 2013

I was in a program as a kid.

I think it was either a gifted program, or something else with entrance requirements that were academic.

It was not in school.

Parents in the area would either teach the kids things they knew, or help kids sign up for being taught things they knew by other experts in the area.

My parents taught kids how to make crystal radios, and decorate hats.

Some parents took kids on nature walks and taught us what all the different edible and poisonous plants were.

One parent taught us how to make model landscapes out of foam.

Anything you could think of.

It makes me really angry.

It makes me really angry because programs like that shouldn’t have entrance requirements of any kind.

It shouldn’t be just ~gifted~ kids who get things like that.

In fact, kids who have trouble learning the conventional things that can get you called gifted the most easily? Need those programs more than many ~gifted~ kids do.

My brother, who was considered “both gifted and re****ed at once” (the exact words he was told, probably meant that like me, he hit both ends of the test), went to a very different sort of class.

In his class, they didn’t accelerate students or keep them behind.

In his class, the students who were better at a task taught the students who were not as good at a task. Every single student had things to teach and every single student had things to learn, and nobody was put ahead or behind anyone else.

I so badly wish I’d been in that class if I had to go to classes at all. That’s how you handle differences in learning.

There are countries where that kind of cooperative learning is the norm, as opposed to the American style of competitive learning. Students who learn cooperatively learn more than students who learn competitively, overall.

Reason #389 that I am a Hufflepuff, not a Ravenclaw.

I don’t believe in singling people out as better and then teaching them they’re better and teaching them that they’re totally different from other kids and teaching them differently than the other kids.

I believe in teaching everyone, and enriching everyone’s learning, not just those who have proven themselves good at certain academic type tasks.

I believe in giving everyone the interesting stuff that we got in that outside of school program I was in, and also in my first year of GATE.

Why is making sculptures out of straws and pins something only ~gifted~ kids can do? I was supposedly gifted and I was horrible at it, I mostly poked holes in my fingers. There are kids who would thrive on that who score very low on IQ tests. There is no connection between IQ tests and straw and pin sculptures.

Everyone deserves all the high quality learning they can get. Everyone.

“Said Slytherin, "We’ll teach just those
Whose ancestry’s purest.”
Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose
Intelligence is surest”
Said Gryffindor, “We’ll teach all those
With brave deeds to their name.”
Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot
And treat them just the same.”“

I’m with Hufflepuff all the way 100%. She’s not saying she’s taking all the leftovers. She’s saying she values including everyone, not singling people out and treating them as special and better than everyone else. And treat them just the same doesn’t mean teach identically, it means treating everyone with the same fairness, kindness, and respect for who they are and who they aren’t. Which in practice means varying how you teach people according to what they need, and cooperation rather than competition when it comes to learning.

I really hate the elitism of gifted programs where they teach people wonderful things but only if their IQ score or other test score is higher than a certain number. It’s made me very angry for a long time.

I also don’t understand, if gifted is IQ, then why do people still call me gifted after my IQ dropped to 120 age 15 and then 85 age 22, and now treat me like some kind of frigging exception to the unpersonhood of people with lower than average IQs. That’s when they’re not treating me like my IQ ought to be 30. IQ should never have existed, it should never have become a term people use synonymous with being smart, it should never have become a belief in people’s heads that everyone has an inherent quality called an IQ that may or may not be properly tested but always exists.

My brother once said the smartest kid is a kid who says they refuse to take an IQ test because they refuse to have their life determined by a number.

Of course, when is got my huge IQ score at the age of five I didn’t know what the word test meant. Go figure. I heard the words "testingwithJulie” as one long word that had no meaning at all in my head.

But regardless.

Nobody should have their level of learning enrichment determined by a test score.

~Gifted~ kids shouldn’t get all the best learning opportunities.

Kids should be taught in a cooperative manner, where each has something to bring to the process of learning. Not in a competitive manner where there’s winners and losers.

Are these such hard ethical concepts?

I find gifted programs, as I’ve seen them, offensive and harmful both to the kids inside them and the kids outside them. They hurt everyone and the help they do is outweighed by the hurt.