Comments:

Zuzu - 2005-10-31 13:20:43
One thing I've wondered/noticed. It seems like gifted kids get all these special programs and resources - computer labs, mensa courses, special field trips. These kids are gifted and generally things come pretty easy for them - they do straight A work with half the effort. The special/challenged kids, on the other hand, they try twice, three, four times has hard to focus, concentrate, study and despite themselves they don't achieve it seems. While resources go to them, it's often in the form of additional resources for behavioral counseling and higher teacher/student ratios if their parents dilligently push enough for diagnosis to qualify them for services (diagnosis that the school seems to have a vested interest in not meting out.) They never get special trips, it seems. And the "regular" kids - neither gifted nor challenged, they seem to set the bar for "normal amount of resources" so one might say the regular class, by definition, never gets anything "special." Doesn't it seem wierd that the only group that really seems to get anything "special" is the gifted class, and they likely need it least re: motivation to excel? Just a thought... - Zu
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Zuzu - 2005-11-14 23:16:34
Okay.. so I'm picking up from the note you left.. and sorry it's taken me awhile to respond/engage. I'm not a childhood education specialist.. but I lived with a woman who has a child with special needs, who has a learning disability - whose IQ is perhaps normal or above normal, but who is functioning at quite a low level - which I think is really different than a kid with a lower IQ functioning at the level of his/her IQ (problems with IQ tests notwithstanding.) Anyways.. she also has a second child who is a "gifted" child.. a mensa student. So the "gifted" kid got computer labs, special after school programs, a variety of perks. The kid with the learning disability, the one whose ability to learn doesn't really match his/her IQ, got additional resources... but for the most part no one really knew how to teach him to read, how to address his special needs and at the age of nine he still can't read. It seems like teachers don't really know how to teach children learning disabilities and very few have additional training, it seems, to teach them. Most of the teachers in the school this boy went to simply said that they didn't have the resources and/or skills to teach him - and on the side many of them noted that the schools get $$ based on test scores the mensa kids, frankly, do more for the test scores then the ones with learning disabilities. Interestingly, the one with the learning disability was/is rather gifted in music and art.. but it seems there aren't test scores that matter in those areas. Are the kids that committ suicide the gifted kids, or are they kids that have high IQs and learning disabilities? According to studies I've seen, the majority of all men in prison have some kind of learning disability... how does all this fit together? - Zuzu
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