Reviving Sputnik (or making math matter)

Every once in a while, there's a new wave of stories about how Americans are losing our edge in math and science. These articles usually talk about what happened in the wake of Sputnik. Suddenly, the story goes, Congress found money for training young mathematicians and giving young academics grants and the like. And we did wind up beating the Soviets to the moon. Maybe, the stories say, we should do the same now.

We're in the midst of another wave of such stories at the moment. President Bush is expected to talk about our competitiveness in these fields tonight in his State of the Union address. The Business Roundtable and US Chamber of Commerce are also lobbying on the matter. One proposal floating around is to pay math teachers more than other teachers, though this is vigorously opposed by the NEA. You can read about the push in an Associated Press article here.

Paying math teachers more is one solution. I'm a little wary of various proposals to "make math fun." These are noble in intent, but occasionally make math fun by watering it down. Don't get me wrong -- I hated doing worksheets of 90 single digit multiplication problems. But I recall reading an essay in O magazine last year about a young woman who hated math growing up, and then wrote that she was thrilled to see that some young people in her neighborhood now had a math program where they talked a lot about math, worked in groups and shied from the pure quant problems. Maybe that's an improvement, but I'm not sure. Some kids do like numbers without the fuzzy stuff.

I realize math is collaborative -- but I'd like to see collaboration follow after kids learn the basics individually. Here's my idea for improving America's math competitiveness. All classrooms could have a computer program (and enough screens) where kids work through math lesson plans and problems. If you get enough right, you move forward in the computer program. If you seem unsure about a concept, you or the machine summon your teacher. The teacher helps, and the computer program has tutorials as well. You move on when you master something. There are programs that approximate this now.

But the key part is that there should be no "end" of the program to correspond with the school year. If you master arithmetic, you move on to pre-algebra concepts. Master those, you move on to algebra, trigonometry, calculus, etc. One sixth grader could be stretching herself learning calculus while her classmate next to her is brushing up on her arithmetic. Both will be learning to the extent of their abilities. This is doable in a field like math (at least up through the calculus level or so) in a way it isn't in English or history. I bet you'd see a lot of kids learning a lot more than they do now. And gifted kids would be challenged. Maybe one of the tech companies pushing Congress to do something about math education could produce such a system.

Distance Learning

I attended Northwestern University's summer programs for gifted middle schoolers many (many) years ago. I just learned the university now offers similar programs online during the school year. If you're looking for another distance learning option, see the LearningLinks program webpage. You can also read a story in the Daily Northwestern about the program.

These programs are ideal for kids in small high schools that can't offer many advanced courses. You simply go to the library and log into AP Statistics instead of showing up in class for Math 9. At about $550 a course, it's not cheap, but if you've only got 2-3 kids who need such work in your school, it's cheaper than hiring a teacher.

Of course, my favorite part of Northwestern's "nerd camp" (as such programs are affectionately known among attendees) was hanging out with other kids like me. I liked the academics, but I really liked the social aspect. Being online isn't quite the same. Still it's better than nothing. A lot better.

Not-so-literate College Students

This is a "reforming education" post, not so much a gifted post, but I thought it was still an interesting topic.

The American Institutes for Research released a study last week on the skills of soon-to-be college graduates. They weren't too encouraging. I'm always suspicious of tests sprung on adults (those Jay Leno man-on-the-street interviews come to mind. Hey, sometimes we're busy with work and don't have time to follow current events!). But this study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, asked simple skill questions. Can students who are about to finish their degree programs understand a table about exercise and blood pressure, compare offers from credit card companies with different rates, and understand the arguments in a newspaper editorial? According to articles about the results, more than 50% of students at four-year colleges and 75% of students at two-year colleges could not perform these tasks.

Again, another study showing Americans are dumb. So what?

The reason we should care about this one is that the skills tested closely track skills that have long been bandied about as the point of free, compulsory public education. These students experienced such education for the full 13 years before they went on to institutions of higher learning. For the bulk of students, education should:

1. Give the student the skills necessary to hold employment to provide for his/her family and take care of his/her family and
2. Teach the student the skills necessary to participate in civic life.

If you can't understand interest rates, you'll have a hard time climbing beyond paycheck to paycheck living. If you can't read charts, the bulk of data-oriented jobs are off-limits to you. If you can't understand a table linking increased exercise with lower blood pressure, you'll have a hard time figuring out what works to safeguard your family's health. And if you can't understand arguments in an editorial, how will you understand the different arguments political candidates make, or lawyers make in trial when you serve on jury duty?

The question always raised in homeschooling cases is whether families can guarantee that they will teach their children the same skills that public education provides. If I were trying to launch a case, I'd clip this article. It seems the bar is pretty low.

Gifted Immigrant Kids

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a fascinating story about the representation of minority kids in gifted programs, though it's not fascinating for the reasons spelled out in the article (read it here).

The Birdville School District in Texas, the article notes, worries that minority students may not be represented at the right proportions in school gifted programs. Notes the article, "Birdville has identified about 8.3 percent of its students as gifted. But the district’s Hispanic students represent about 6.9 percent of gifted students while making up about 22.3 percent of the district’s 22,000 enrollment. Officials said they believe that Hispanics are underrepresented."

But then the article goes on to illustrate this point, not by profiling a gifted young Hispanic student who was passed over for the program, but by profiling a gifted young kid who immigrated with his family from Saudi Arabia -- and had no problem making the cut.

Young Khalid is in 6th grade. His father drives a taxi. His mother works at a department store. Both parents are trying to climb back up the economic ladder to the levels they occupied before immigrating (the father was a professor, the mother a tutor). But, tough circumstances or no, the family values education and has nurtured their son's gifts. The school noticed how well Khalid did in math and science. The article notes that he'd been an academic stand-out since first grade, despite his originally limited English. So he was invited to participate in the gifted program.

End of story. The article says kids like Khalid might fall through the cracks if Birdville wasn't looking, but it's not clear how. Which brings me to a different point than the one the article was making.

Those of us who've done a lot of research and interviewing in the field of gifted education soon notice that the families we're working with are as likely -- and sometimes more likely -- to be named Chang or Wzlovsky or Hussein as Smith. The biographies of Davidson Fellows show that children of immigrants, or immigrant children themselves, are far over-represented compared to their proportion of the population. Certainly, the group photos are more "diverse" than your average high school class! Immigrant families often come to America to prove themselves. They value education, nurture their children's gifts, and preach the gospel of hard work. That's a combo that's tough to beat.

Which is why I'm less worried about the proportion of minority gifted students than some educators seem to be. Sure, nets should be cast wide. Selection should be made on more than one test score. And schools shouldn't make their gifted programs so big that they become an excuse to segregate all white students from their peers. But if you look at the true top 1% of students, you'll see as diverse a group of faces as anyone could want.

Gifted Adults

The Davidson Institute reports that they get a reasonable number of queries from grown-up gifted kids who say they never knew that was what was "wrong" with them. (See this article by D. Lovecky for a round-up of the personality characteristics -- positive and negative -- many gifted adults display.) Some schools are simply uninterested in figuring out why the quiet kid in the back is bored with school, or doing anything about it. If parents don't know how or can't nurture their children's gifts, and if the child doesn't speak up or find mentors or teacher that do understand, then the kid can grow up thinking "learning isn't for me."

That's a sad situation. Fortunately, adults can control their lives in ways children can't. That means that adults who realize that maybe they weren't dumb, or weird, but just weren't being challenged, can create situations where they can feed their brains. Many, as the Lovecky article notes, become entrepreneurs. When you create the work rules, after all, you don't have to play by the ones you never liked in school. You can seek out creative fields and workplaces, especially ones that tolerate difference. You can create environments with intellectual peers by joining organizations such as Mensa and participating in their forums and activities. You can form book clubs and philosophical societies that draw people with intellectual interests. And you can always seek out activities like crosswords and auditing college courses or taking them online to keep your brain buzzing.

I'm curious if other people have suggestions for adults seeking to nurture their gifts.

How do you measure intelligence?

It's that time of year again, with thousands of high school students sitting for the SAT. It's a different beast than most of us took; now your score is out of 2400 points, not 1600. There are no antonyms, you can use calculators, quantitative comparisons have disappeared, and you need to write a 25 minute essay. USA Today has an article about the test, and various student angst problems with it here.

These changes, instituted last year, are just the most recent in a long line of reforms since the Scholastic Aptitude Test was introduced in 1926. The College Board says the test has "evolved to remain aligned with classroom practices." As such, the math section has started covering more advanced work, the word "Aptitude" has been removed, and the letters SAT now don't stand for anything.

I'm quite torn on this. On one hand, the SAT has always been about determining your ability to succeed in college. One's performance in the high school curriculum is usually the best predictive measure in this regard. A standardized exam that tests the high school curriculum helps colleges compare students across schools (when straight A students get "1750" at one school, and get "2100" at another, you have a pretty good indication which school is more rigorous). And I'm thrilled that schools now have to teach writing (the most neglected "R" in the past).

On the other hand, one of the original marks in the SAT's favor is that it didn't cover the high school curriculum. Before the early 1900's, few people beyond the sons of wealthy, WASPy families attended college. Before pursuing higher education, these young men attended a handful of northeastern prep schools. The SAT provided a way for young people from high schools that hadn't aligned their curricula with Harvard to prove they were just as much Harvard material. After all, if the SAT didn't test knowledge of the high school curriculum, nothing prevented a brilliant working class kid from a bad school from outscoring a privileged, but not so bright, boy from Exeter.

Or at least that's the theory. It's hard to design a pure intelligence test. As kids have started being exposed to more logic puzzles and games like mazes, their ability to solve such puzzles has risen. The old SAT covered subject matter such as geometry; my math score (but presumably not my intelligence) rose 140 points on the old test after taking a summer class in the topic.

The fine line between innate intelligence and subject matter exposure is one reason many educators are wary of using intelligence tests alone to select kids for gifted programs. The National Education Association website has an article on a math program in Connecticut that tries, explicitly, to expand the pool of kids identified as capable of doing advanced mathematical work, by moving beyond IQ tests.

"Kids are selected based on multiple criteria, including a special assessment of nonverbal math ability, which measures such things as spatial sense and reasoning, and standardized tests when available. Teacher recommendations and prior grades also factor in. Opening up the selection process (gifted programs in the past often selected students based on IQ scores alone) has allowed students with less obvious talents to benefit," the article says.

Yet at the same time that teacher recommendations and grades are being used, the NEA article warns teachers that "Sometimes actions speak louder than words. A kid who seems bored or disinterested (even acting up) may, in fact, need more challenging work." Since such students are less likely to be earning high marks and teacher praise, opening up the selection process might miss them.

Beauty and the Geek

So my husband has become oddly enthralled with this reality show called "Beauty and the Geek" (WB network) and to humor him, I watched part of it last night.

The show may take its place in the pantheon of pop culture salvos that create images of bright young people that stick in the collective mind. How many former gifted kids who are now about 30 can remember being called Doogie Howser? Yup, more than a few.

On one level, this reality show is better than most. It's redemptive -- we learn that the "geeks" are pretty cool, even if they do play Dungeons and Dragons or can fix a Rubik's cube behind their backs. We learn the unapproachable, glamorous "beauties" are nice girls who are eager for a project and are genuinely impressed with the geeks' intelligence (and that these young men tend to be nicer than the presumed studs most of them usually date).

But boy do we have to get through a maze of stereotypes to get there. The "geeks" are male. They're told they're chosen because they're highly intelligent, but really it's because they have certain trappings that people associate with the brainy. For instance, most wear thick glasses. Their clothing styles were not picked after religiously paging through Men's Vogue. The Dungeons and Dragons reference is just gratuitous (come on -- aren't gamers more likely to play Magic or one of the online games like Project Entropia now?)

One of the reasons many of us had a visceral bad reaction to the Prodigy Puzzle cover story in the NY Times magazine a few months ago is that the illustrations all featured stereotypes of gifted children. They had bad hair, bad glasses, weird clothes. But at least in the NY Times magazine pictures, geeks could be male and female. In the Beauty and the Geek universe, women cannot be both brainy and beautiful. That's trouble if that stereotype sticks in the public's mind.

The Life and Death of a Prodigy (The New Yorker)

The 1/16 New Yorker has a long, sad story from Blood Relation author Eric Konigsberg on the suicide of Brandenn Bremmer in March of last year. It's worth picking up a copy (the story was not available online when I checked).

Brandenn was 14. He liked video games, the Middle Ages and composing music. He had an IQ on the old Stanford-Binet Form LM of 178, though there's some controversy about that test and Linda Silverman, the educational psychologist who gave it to him. In 2001, an 8-year-old boy she tested who had scored "298-plus" threatened suicide and was found to have been coached on the test. An earlier test found Brandenn had an IQ of 146, but that was probably low, as he didn't like the whole testing process (small, gifted children, no less than other small children, don't necessarily hide their feelings!)

But the number doesn't matter. Nor, really, do the various fingers one can point in blame for why this young man decided life wasn't worth living. Konigsberg is careful not to throw his weight behind a particular thesis. Brandenn had a rough life, even if it didn't seem so from the outside. He was a social boy, but because his parents thought he was a prodigy who wouldn't do well in a standard gifted program (the article says Silverman told them this), he was homeschooled and took correspondence courses. Homeschooling works well for many kids. But extroverted kids who don't have brothers and sisters at home may need a lot of time with other kids if they are homeschooled. Brandenn's parents led a fairly monastic farm existence in Nebraska -- just them and the animals. In emails and conversations before his death, Brandenn said that he was lonely, bored and depressed. He was happiest at get-togethers for other gifted students. He was probably a perfectionist and quite sensitive, like many highly gifted kids. All these things together, coupled with the general angst of teen life, and the trials of being different, may have pushed him over the edge. His access to the .22-calibre rifle he'd been using to shoot skunks that got into the barn made it easier.

None of these factors would have been easy to change. The Bremmers had roots in that small Nebraska town that went back generations; moving so Brandenn could be part of a program for the highly gifted somewhere would have been difficult, even if it would have given him the peers he needed. Perhaps the family should have been more open about the definition of Brandenn's peers (as gifted prof Tracy Cross of Ball State says in the article, "I don't believe there's much difference between a person with an IQ of 160 and one with 170 or 180." Maybe that's not entirely right, but Brandenn likely would have made good friends with kids with IQs in the 150s, whatever his tested IQ was.) Maybe he shouldn't have had such easy access to a gun, but a rural child who's been shooting, without incident, since age 6, seems trustworthy. Maybe the boy should have been in treatment for depression. But teen troubles come and go quickly, and Brandenn was good at hiding any long term suffering.

Which leaves the reader wondering what can be gleaned from this horrible story. Maybe nothing. Not all deaths teach us something. Two years before I attended the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities, the school suffered through a spate of suicides and attempts. This was around the time of Kurt Cobain's death; researchers have found suicide can be "contagious." The school cracked down. We used to joke that any hint of depression could get you sent home. That was a problem because many students went to boarding school precisely because their home situation and local schools were intolerable. Going back really would make you depressed. Unfortunately, we live in a world where gifted children have trouble fitting in. They're different. And unfortunately, some people who feel different may find it's not worth staying on this planet.

But that's not unique to prodigies. A girl I knew at my first high school committed suicide as well. Perhaps the one lesson that can be taken from Brandenn's story is that gifted kids, like other kids, need to be with kindred spirits to feel like they have a stake on this earth. It's harder to find such friends for highly gifted kids. But it's worth trying.

Highly gifted in the Puget Sound area?

If you have precocious teenagers, and live near Bellevue, Washington, check out Bellevue School District's new high school program for highly gifted kids.

Bellevue School District (BSD) pledges to provide every student with a "top-of-the-line college preparatory education." There is some evidence that children who attempt difficult classes, even if they don't do stunningly well in them, are more likely to attend college.

When I spoke with Ronna Weltman, one of the new program's architects, she told me that a large chunk of Bellevue's high schoolers now take AP classes. All well and good. Except that, as Weltman points out, it's hard to bring in children of all levels into an advanced class without slowing it down. Good teachers are attuned to their classes; they know if people are on the right page or not. In the past, AP classes had also served as a de facto gifted program that allowed the brightest kids to be around kindred spirits. The push to involve all children in AP classes had diluted that aspect.

But Bellevue's superintendent recognized this, and wished to do something for children who finished the gifted "PRISM" programs at the elementary and middle school levels. So Bellevue is rolling out a highly gifted program at Interlake High School for ninth graders next year. Students who test at the highly gifted level will take their core academic classes with other students like them. These classes will follow the International Baccalaureate program. Students will complete the high school curriculum in 11th grade. For 12th grade, they can take seminars, participate in internships (or go to college). All during high school, they'll take the fun stuff (PE, electives, music, etc.) with other students at Interlake.

The University of Washington already has an Early Entrance college program where students can skip several years of high school and start classes at UW as soon as they are ready. But as even gifted education pioneer Julian Stanley took to pointing out toward the end of his life, early college isn't for everyone. The new Bellevue program will give highly gifted students another option.

Weltman wants to make sure parents know that you don't have to live in the Bellevue School District to attend. Anyone who can reasonably make the commute to Interlake is welcome to apply.

Twice Exceptional

Dani D'Spirit is a second grader who reads at the eighth grade level, loves watching CNN and learning about archaeology and history. Last year she took a few EPGY courses online from Stanford. In short, she's your average gifted 8-year-old. Except that Dani suffered a stroke slightly before birth and has never been able to walk or talk. She communicates by pecking on a computer. The Wilmington News-Journal covered her amazing story in late December.

I can't imagine the frustration of trying to communicate your ideas with the world through such awkward circumstances. But gifted kids with disabilities wind up dealing with a lot of frustrations. At least Dani's disabilities are so obvious that they can be recognized and accommodated. I'm always amazed by the stories of gifted, severely dyslexic children who don't learn to read, but are so bright they can hide it and come across as mediocre students. I suspect one of the reasons it's been reported that 18-20% of high school drop-outs test in the gifted range is that many have some sort of disability. The disability masks the giftedness. The kid gets both bored and frustrated. Bored, frustrated kids decide school isn't for them. Dani wound up "dropping out" of first grade because she didn't like it (her parents homeschooled her for the year and used EPGY). Hopefully her teachers and schools will be able to teach to her gifts and accommodate her disabilities better in the future.

The Problem of Achievement (part 349...)

I've been getting emails from various blog readers about this topic, namely, the problem with pushing for gifted education on the basis that "these children will be our future Nobel Prize winning scientists, literary novelists, composers, etc."

It's not a bad argument in the sense that movers and shapers of our society do generally come from people in the top 1-3% of intelligence.

The problem is that many programs that recognize gifted students for their early achievements don't wind up choosing the ones who actually will shape the culture.

I was reminded of this by a story in today's USA Today on the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the paper's All-USA High School Academic Team.

Since the late 1980's, USA Today has been choosing a handful of high school stars to profile every year. I have my own beefs with the selection process (community service, geographic diversity, an athletic side and some sleek marketing will get you on the list faster than pure smarts will). But regardless, these are the folks USA Today says are the best of the best. Now it's looking at the best of the best from twenty years ago.

The paper takes great care to say all these men and women, now in their late thirties, are successful. And by most definitions they are. They're doctors, scientists, writers, moms, moms who are doctors, scientists and writers, etc.

You also haven't heard of almost any of them. The paper surveyed the winners from 1987-1996. One, David Liu, is a Harvard chemistry prof who was recently named to the Popular Science "Brilliant 10" for his research. Another, Brooke Ellison, has continued to garner headlines for her disability advocacy (paralyzed in the seventh grade, Ellison went on to graduate from Harvard. Christopher Reeve directed a cable TV movie about her life, and Ellison and her mom wrote a book about living with disabilities).

Many of the others no doubt have the potential to do great things. But by age 38, we're getting out of the "potential" age and into the years where truly influential people start showing results. The All-USA team is presented as the best of the crop. The twenty years after high school are enough time to start a billion dollar company, or get elected to Congress, write a best-selling novel, compose a symphony that every orchestra in the country is itching to play.

If these All Stars had done that, USA Today would have written about it. And they didn't.

But unlike the Prodigy Puzzle article from the NY Times magazine a few weeks ago, I don't think that means we should throw up our hands and say, well, let's forget programs for gifted kids since we don't know who will do great things with their lives. I view the issues as entirely separate.

As a society, we don't devote a huge chunk of our educational resources to meeting the needs of special education students because we expect them to win Nobel Prizes. We simply view it as inhumane not to develop potential, however much is there. We think society is better off if people find learning to be an enjoyable thing, however much they are able to learn.

Gifted students deserve no less. No matter what they do with their lives.

A Nation Deceived, One Year Later

In late 2004, the Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa released the report "A Nation Deceived" showing how educational research supported accelerating gifted students. Written by experts Nicholas Colangelo, Susan Assouline and Miraca Gross, the report was designed to convince mainstream educators that skipping grades wouldn't cause children to became wounded psychopaths, wouldn't require anyone to stop worshipping that golden calf of "socialization" and would help kids learn better, to boot. (These are my words ... this is a serious academic report...).

A year later, the authors released a follow-up survey, which you can find in PowerPoint form here.

Let's just say the authors are a little tough on themselves. Of the 2500 respondents who were interested in the topic, 50% said the report had no noticeable impact. More said the report was not changing policies and procedures regarding acceleration in a positive direction than said it was. And while a majority said the report had a positive impact on educators in the field of gifted education, only 1% said it had a strong positive impact on educators outside the field.

The problem with this, of course, is that it does little good to have the gifted coordinator who travels between three schools conducting pull-out programs think acceleration is swell. You need the teacher of a gifted third grader to think it's a good solution, and the teacher of the fifth grade class where she'll be moving to, to accept it as well.

Advocates for gifted education are up against a tough wall here. A surveyed parent commented that she presented the findings to her son's district only to hear "Well, I'm sure there is just as much evidence against acceleration if we looked."

So what's to be done? Research alone can't change minds when educators have stuck in their heads the tale of "one child" who skipped a grade years ago and was miserable.

Families who've accelerated a child and had a good experience need to share their stories too. We need to trumpet these tales in the popular media. We need to talk about them at teachers colleges and conventions and portray grade skipping as a cheap way to meet kids' needs while lessening the headaches on teachers (dealing with vast differences in skill levels is tougher than dealing with a little difference in age). These stories will also help parents who wonder what to do for their kids, but fret that acceleration will harm them.

If anyone has some good stories of acceleration, please share!

Update on the Bomkamp Story

Two months ago, I wrote about 5-year-old Alison Bomkamp's saga with the Kenton County Schools in Kentucky. Since Alison had already mastered the kindergarten curriculum, her parents placed her in first grade. But since Kentucky only reimburses districts for half-day kindergarten for 5-year-olds, the school district sent the Bomkamps a bill for $3,000 to cover the difference.

This blog pointed out how ridiculous this was (young Alison is actually saving Kentucky taxpayers money -- she'll take 12 years, not 13 to go through school. If she skips more grades along the way, that's an even bigger savings).

Fortunately, Alison's mom, Shauna, reports that saner heads have prevailed. State Sen. Jack Westwood and State Rep. Jon Draud have introduced bills clarifying that school districts will be reimbursed the full-day school fee for 5-year-olds who place out of half-day kindergarten. The school district has stopped sending their bills to the Bomkamps. And Alison is doing great in first grade. She's in the most advanced math group, has been awarded for excellent behavior and has made lots of friends. "She is truly with her peers," Shauna says -- even if she doesn't turn that magical first grade age of six until March.

The Kentucky Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer have both run stories on this battle.

Gifted Girls and Legos

This story about an all-girls team of 6th graders winning a Lego robot-building contest just made me smile. Read the report from Pocatello, Idaho here.

Legos make great holiday gifts for kids because you can approach them at any level, and they require you to dream up ideas and then build them. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be a lot of toys on the hot-lists these days that encourage that sort of creativity. I experienced the joy of shopping in a crowded Toys R Us the other day for my niece and nephews and was struck by how many toys involved licensed cartoon or movie characters. Don't get me wrong, I love Dora the Explorer. But now instead of a kitchen set where you have to dream up the story line, you get a Dora kitchen set, with Dora's world already attached. I'm curious how people reading this blog go about choosing toys for their kids that don't take the imagination part out of play.

Obsessing with Outcomes

Last week's Christian Science Monitor has a fascinating story about an academically rigorous kindergarten program in North Carolina called "Einsteins at Five."

For the most part, the piece is balanced. Still, the author is a bit obsessed with waxing nostalgic for a time when kindergarten was about graham crackers and eating paste. That's disingenuous. All of us know kids who read The Chronicles of Narnia, or the Little House on the Prairie books in kindergarten and were horribly frustrated with the naps and counting lessons their teachers pushed.

But it's this paragraph that got me thinking:

"...while it's clear that young children have a large capacity for learning - research shows they learn faster at 5 than any other age - it's less certain whether all this early erudition has an impact in later years. The French have universal preschool starting at age 3, but Swedish children don't begin academic work until 6, sometimes 7. Studies show that both populations end up doing just as well."

This is the same issue that the Prodigy Puzzle in the New York Times hammered at for 10,000 words a few weeks ago. Yes, it's true that adult outcomes (however they are measured -- I have no idea how he's comparing the Swedish and French) are not necessarily dependent on what kind of enrichment bright children receive. We can't guarantee that a kid in a gifted program, or a kid allowed to skip 2 grades, will win a Nobel Prize while the unenriched child will not. There is a lot of luck (and other things) involved in achieving fame, or breaking new ground later in life.

But so what? You can't tell, looking at a group of babies, which will be professional athletes based on how fast they all crawl at 8 months. But that doesn't mean anyone should grip the ankles of the quick ones to keep them from scooting ahead.

Bright kindergartners want to learn as much as possible. They teach themselves to read better because they want to read better things than the tedious counting books on the kindergarten shelves. Keeping them in kindergarten programs that aren't academic, because of someone's notion of what the unhurried childhood should be, is like gripping a baby's ankles. I'm glad brainy five-year-olds are getting the chance to use their heads. Whether they become Einsteins later in life or not.

Small schools… small gains for gifted kids?

Bill Gates, by all accounts, was a very gifted young man. So it’s unclear why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is choosing to fund school projects that eliminate the classes bright children need most.

The Gates Foundation gave $11 million to the New Schools Project to develop 75 small high schools of no more than 400 students. Since this isn’t a capital building grant, these high schools tend to result from dividing existing schools into 3-4 schools.

By design, these split schools don’t have one school of faster learners, one of medium-speed learners, etc. Each school of 400 is supposed to encompass the whole range of learning speeds. Since that means there usually aren’t enough students to create full honors programs, many classes wind up containing all ability levels. You can read about some North Carolina schools’ experiences with this model here.

As the article starts out, “The days of the brightest high school students taking their own classes could be ending in the interest of helping slower students succeed.”

The consequences of mixed-ability grouping for quick learners are clear. As the article notes:

“If you want easy credit from an honors class, it's good,” said Lauren Hopton, 17, a senior at Southeast Raleigh High School. “But if you want a challenge, it’s not.”

Gifted children learn best in classes tailored to their speed of learning. It’s naïve to think even a very skilled teacher won’t slow down the class pace when children who are not capable of learning as quickly are added to the mix. In fact, skilled teachers may be more likely to slow down, as they are most aware of every member of the class’s progress.

Consequently, gifted children wind up with extra time on their hands as they wait for their classmates to catch up. Some enterprising teachers try to accommodate their gifted kids’ extra time by using them as teacher’s assistants.

This is exactly what’s happened in these new small schools. From the article: “Another benefit, Southeast Raleigh High Principal Beulah Wright said, is that the usual honors students are put in leadership positions as they help their classmates learn the harder material. ‘You learn more when you're teaching it yourself,’ Wright said.”

This is just not true. If both students are relatively unfamiliar with the material, the quicker kid may learn a bit more by teaching it to the slower one. But there’s only so many times a gifted kid needs to see the difference between “its” and “it’s” before she knows it. Explaining it three more times to other students won’t help her. It will bore her.

The saddest thing about these mixed-ability classes, though, is that for all the talk of raising the floor, de-tracking doesn’t help slower learners either. A major review of 23 ability grouping studies by James Kulik of the University of Michigan found that grouping students by ability in subject matter classes helps slower learners learn more. In Success for All reading program groupings, for instance, low-achieving fourth graders gained as much as two-thirds of an academic year over control groups in mixed ability classes.

If the Gates Foundation wants to fund small schools, how about funding schools that are grouped by ability? That will help slower and quicker learners a lot more.

Math vs. Verbal prodigies

The Siemens Westinghouse competition just announced its 2005-2006 math, science and technology winners, and the projects are stunning as always. You can read about them here.

One of the winners is a young man named Michael Viscardi, a mathematically gifted student who is also homeschooled. The press release says:

“Michael Viscardi’s project, entitled On the Solution of the Dirichlet Problem with Rational Boundary Data, develops exciting new approaches to a mathematical problem first formulated in the 19th century by the French mathematician, Lejeune Dirichlet. His research, in an area of mathematics called complex analysis, shows solutions to the Dirichlet problem which are, in many important cases, what mathematicians call ‘rational functions.’ Elegant, simple and useful, ‘rational functions’ are particularly amenable to computer implementation. …

"‘Mr. Viscardi dazzled us with his creative use of the mathematical language,’ said judge, Dr. Steven Krantz, Professor of Mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. ‘His research is profound, substantial and complete, with potentially important practical applications ….’”

The phrase “creative use of the mathematical language” stuck with me.

You see, while mathematical prodigies making creative use of the language are rare, language prodigies are even more rare. Plenty of gifted kids learn to read young. But almost no new, widely available literature is created by people under age 20. I was struck by Davidson Fellow Laureate Heidi Kaloustian’s comment in The Prodigy Puzzle (NY Times magazine) on whether she hoped to publish her work:

“I wouldn’t dream of trying” she said. “I have so much more to learn.”

I can think of a few practical reasons for this dearth.

New research in science and math often happens within the academic world. Sure, universities have their politics, but a proof is a proof, a result is a result. A real world implication is great, but not absolutely required.

Literature, on the other hand, is a commercial business. Books are published not just because they are good, but because acquiring editors could see a market and thought the author had a good “platform.”

Second, more people view themselves as qualified to produce literature than new mathematical or scientific findings. Few people would send in an article to a peer-reviewed science journal without being a working scientist in the field. But scores of folks are typing away on what they believe to be the next great American novel, even if they’ve never published a thing in their lives. This volume means the publishing industry has set up a more intimidating process of agents as gatekeepers. A gifted child is unlikely to have the connections to get an agent to read a manuscript, and a manuscript sent unsolicited to a publisher will not be read.

But there’s a matter of skill, too. Literature deals with the scope of human experience, and even a very imaginative gifted child will have trouble writing about the disappointments and wisdom that come with age. Stories by children often feature the most dramatic of life events – deaths, usually. It is the one thing they know to be momentous enough to justify a story. But this lends a melodramatic tone to student writing. Audiences prefer true tension to deaths.

I also think young children with writing talent aren’t nurtured the way mathematicians are. Sure, few gifted kids are nurtured. But on the margins, we recognize math to be a “tough” field, and so a child with talent there is more likely to be recognized as precocious and sent to higher levels. What are higher levels of writing? Because we believe math and science are “tougher,” winners of those contests get more press. We believe that anyone can write. So young writers are simply encouraged to be creative.

To make a living as a writer, though, that creativity needs to be honed and trained. Given how infrequently it is, and the commercial savvy a young writer would need to navigate the publishing world, it’s no wonder you read of so few literature prodigies.

Prodigy Puzzle, redux.

The NY Times magazine printed a number of letters on the Prodigy Puzzle (the cover story on "The Rise of The Gifted Child Industry") in their Dec. 4 issue. See the letters here.

Gender and Giftedness

Charles Murray wades into the waters Harvard president Larry Summers stirred last spring with a fascinating piece on the American Enterprise Institute’s website called Where are the Female Einsteins?

His thesis: For evolutionary reasons, men’s brains developed neurological pathways that elevate their abstract spatial reasoning capacities, relative to women. Consequently, men are more represented on the extreme ends of the spectrum in abstract fields. Math is abstract, hence there are more eminent male mathematicians. Musical composition is more abstract, hence there are more imminent male composers. Literature, on the other hand, is less abstract, and so even in times much more patriarchal than our own, women writers have been decently represented among important authors of the day.

He also hints at social reasons for the lack of women at the top of many fields, of course. As he says, “To put it in a way that most readers with children will recognize, a father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her day-care arrangement or full-time nanny may be. My point is not that women must choose between a career and children, but that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand.”

I like much of Murray’s writing. It’s usually thought-provoking. But this is rather a dreary explanation. For starters, writing fiction is quite abstract. You have to imagine a world that doesn’t exist; why this involves such different abilities than imagining a sonata that doesn’t exist isn’t clear. And second, Murray is basically saying that extremely accomplished men must, by definition, be lousy fathers.

But there’s another way of looking at gifted girls’ choices that doesn’t even go into the abstraction or motherhood bit.

Gifted girls are finally pretty much free these days, encouraged even, to go into mathematical and scientific fields if they so desire. And they are. But the funny thing is, they’re going into “biophysics” over physics, biostatistics over statistics, etc.

Gifted girls are more likely to be talented in many areas than “spiky” in one. They also tend to rank “helping people” and being around other people as high on their priority lists. As these girls become women, they seek careers that use all their gifts. Since the cultural image we have of an abstract mathematician is a man sitting by himself in a turret dreaming up stuff that is of no use to humanity, it’s no wonder that highly gifted girls prefer to choose other jobs. Biophysics sounds like it’s the human side of physics, and may involve more than just mathematical talent.

This is a personal interest of mine… I scored an 800 on the SAT math section in 8th grade, and thought maybe I should be a mathematician. But it later occurred to me that while I liked math, I always felt if I chose that as a career I’d be missing out on something. I preferred writing – especially since it allowed me to dabble in many interests (writing about science, medicine, engineering and math is thrilling to me). That has little to do with my spatial reasoning abilities or any plans for future children. I just like the varied life.

Parental chit-chat, and the PG kid

Kim Moldofsky, mom of two gifted children, sent me a link to an essay she has in Chicago Parent this week on Giving Up on Public Education.

Moldofsky highlights a side benefit she's found by sending her children to a school for the gifted: she now has fellow "refugee" parents to chit-chat with. Why is this important? Turns out, just as some gifted kids feel isolated in their regular schools, their parents can, too.

Talking about your kid, and how proud you are of her, comes with the territory of being a parent. But there's a quid pro quo. One dad waiting to pick his kid up from Girl Scouts can talk about his daughter's great grade in English, then the mom next to him can say what a great goal her daughter scored in soccer over the weekend. No one wants to hear that the next mom's daughter is taking college literature classes and has just translated a series of Italian sonnets into English.

It puts parents of gifted kids in a bind. You want to praise your kid, but our culture doesn't like praising people's intellectual gifts, particularly when they achieve things without difficulty at times.

At a school for the gifted, on the other hand, parents may nod and laugh when you say, throwing up your hands, that you had to enforce lights out last night when your daughter insisted on reading one more chapter in her math book. They won't think you're bragging -- they'll think you're parenting.

No wonder Moldofsky quotes another mom saying "This conversation feels like a hug!"