Bill Gates on curious kids

Fast Company's Anya Kamenetz interviewed Bill Gates for the most recent issue of the magazine. In it, Gates touches on ideas for boosting teacher skills, MOOCs, and the like.

But I thought Gifted Exchange readers might find this part most interesting. Kamenetz posed this question: "You've said that when you were in high school, you followed your own interests, taking on independent study, working on computer programming day and night. Is there room for that kind of student-driven learning in a highly rigorous, metrics-based environment?"

Gates answered that "People who are as curious as I am will be fine in any system. For the self-motivated student, these are the golden days. I wish I was growing up now. I envy my son. If he and I are talking about something that we don't understand, we just watch videos and click on articles, and that feeds our discussion. Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids."

What do you think of this? Will the brilliant and curious do well under any system? Are these the golden days for self-motivated students?

On one hand, there certainly are a lot of resources now, available online for anyone. If you're interested in learning advanced math, nothing is stopping you from watching Khan Academy for hours. My 5-year-old son is really into maps right now, and he's been studying Google maps, sometimes announcing how many miles it is between two random destinations, and exactly how long that will take by car, mass transit, or foot.

But I'm not sure that schooling is in a golden age for the curious. As Gates points out, the campaign to measure what kids are learning is not a bad thing. But some schools, obsessed with pass rates on grade level standardized tests, have decided that kids who easily meet the bar don't deserve any attention. One way to close the achievement gap is to lower the ceiling, rather than raise the floor.

What do you think? Are these the golden days for self-motivated, curious students?

Is ability grouping back?

A few weeks ago, the Brown Center released its report on education called "How well are American students learning?" This report looks in particular at the practice of ability grouping in 4th grade, and the acceleration of students into advanced math in 8th grade. The campaign to "detrack" schools -- vocal, if nothing else -- pushed the decreased use of grouping in early grades, and the idea that as many students as possible should take algebra in 8th grade. Some previous writings have labeled algebra as a "gatekeeper" course, and the idea is that if kids took the course in 8th grade, they'd then be able to fit all of college prep math into high school. Kids who didn't take algebra in 8th grade risked forever being left behind.

While grouping became something of a dirty word in educational circles, it never disappeared. According to the report, in 1998, 28% of fourth grade teachers were grouping students by ability for reading. Some 33% used some other grouping (like "interest") and 29% did not do grouping.

Now, it seems, ability grouping is experiencing a resurgence. In 2009, 71% of fourth grade teachers reported grouping for reading by ability, with 21% reporting some other kind of grouping and only 8% not grouping.

It's interesting to ponder why that might be. Between 1998 and 2009 there was increased emphasis on reading test scores. There have been small increases in reading scores in benchmarked assessments over this time. Certainly, teachers asked a few years ago about teaching mixed ability classes were quite likely to report that classes were so heterogeneous that they couldn't teach effectively. Grouping -- whether it is treated as an educational no-no or not -- may be done simply as a practicality. Theory is nice, but how do you actually help kids learn? You give them material matched to their level of preparation. How do you do that? You group by ability.

As for 8th grade algebra, the Brown Center reports that states with widespread acceleration into 8th grade do not do better on the NAEP than states that don't push as many 8th graders as possible into algebra. Earlier claims that algebra was a gatekeeper course suffered a bit from the correlation/causation problem. Stronger math students selected into 8th grade algebra, and these students were more likely to take and succeed in college prep math in high school. Students who wouldn't have selected into algebra in the past did not magically become stronger students by taking it.

It's an interesting report in general. What it reminds the reader is that moving the needle on education -- an undertaking that involves millions of students with very different backgrounds -- is hard. Various simple solutions (get rid of grouping! put kids in algebra in 8th grade!) can not, by themselves, change much.

Why do you think ability grouping is back?

Toy Story and blended learning

We spent spring break in DisneyWorld. We did this last year and had so much fun that we went again (thanks to my very generous mother-in-law).

One of the few "big" rides that we didn't do in 2012 was Toy Story in Disney's Hollywood Studios. When we showed up in 2012, the line was 2 hours long and the FastPasses (Disney's way you can commit to a specific time and skip the line) were gone for the day.

So this year I vowed to do it. We showed up at the park early, and got our FastPasses (which were already for mid-afternoon!) The line was already 90 minutes and would soon stretch to 180. Of course, when I saw that, I was definitely intrigued. What is it that makes this ride so fun?

The answer is that it's a combination of carnival games (think shooting at things that pop up) and video games. You spin in a little cart to the front of a screen, and start aiming your little toy gun at the bullseyes and such. You get points, which you can see on your cart, plus your accuracy rating and (good for competitive sorts) what your family members in the same cart are scoring.

This instant feedback is not only helpful in improving skill -- I realized that by slowing down and aiming I could do better on points and get a 58% accuracy rating -- it's kind of addictive. It's fun. That's why kids love to play video games. You know instantly how you're doing, and that instant feedback becomes a game. You're challenged and developing skills.

I've been thinking about that topic a lot lately as the Philanthropy Roundtable just released my short book called Blended Learning. While primarily aimed at philanthropists and people who work at foundations, the book gives an overview of the topic for general audiences, too. Blended learning might also be called "tech assisted teaching." The idea -- at least in the perfect form of it -- is that computers can gamify the rote learning of skills that is part of education. While part of education is about deep, critical thinking, you need to develop competence at certain skills in order to have space for higher-order thoughts. If you can read with ease, you can ask deep questions about the text. To learn to read with ease, you need to practice, and figure out what you're getting right and wrong. A computer can help with that. Likewise, math involves all sorts of skills that can be practiced (the reason teachers have long assigned problem sets). Why not have adaptive games that make this more fun?

The hope is that this frees up teacher time to tutor children, and the adaptive software challenges children to the extent of their abilities. There are few places doing this today, but the technology is getting better, and some places (which I write about in the book) are trying.

Anyway, the book is a free download if you're interested in checking it out. I've discovered that the more I blog, which has some instant feedback aspects associated with it, the more clear the logical order of an essay appears to me in drafts. That cuts down on the number of drafts I need to do.

Do your kids like educational software games?

Should gifted classes be open to all?

Slate magazine ran a story recently by Sarah Garland on who should be in gifted programs. Garland attended a magnet school in Louisville, KY, shortly after desegregation. Southern school districts (as mine did, in Raleigh NC) discovered that by putting a gifted magnet program at a school in a predominantly lower-income neighborhood, you could keep middle-class kids in your district. Indeed, you wouldn't just keep them in your district, you'd keep some of them in what might otherwise become the most stressed and under-funded schools.

Garland seems to have a problem with this. She notes that her gifted program had fewer African American students than her school at large (though certainly not zero; the numbers she cites are 11% vs. 20-40% in the school district). "The problem was that gifted programs tended to foster racial separation inside schools, undermining the very goal they were supposed to support." Maybe. In my school, the gifted classes were only for a few hours a day, and everything else -- including art, music, PE, lunch, recess, etc. -- was a non-tracked undertaking. All parents would be in the same PTA; the parents of more privileged students who wound up in these schools would still be advocating for better staffing, would be volunteering in the schools, would be noticing maintenance problems, etc.

Since I tend to think that was a smart move by these districts, I have to say, I did not have high hopes for Garland's article. But after she got the usual complaints about gifted programs out of the way, she raised a rather interesting question: what if parents and kids can simply self-select into them?

The upside is that this would remove all possible questions about testing bias -- about whether intelligence tests measure intelligence or are measuring other things. One could also imagine that open-enrollment gifted programs would have more political support. It's not a lifeboat strategy, really, if anyone who wants can get on the lifeboat.

The downside, though, is that the point of gifted education is to challenge and meet the needs of children whose needs can't be met in traditional classrooms. Teachers naturally instruct toward the middle of their classes. Good teachers are constantly assessing how many children have figured things out and how many have not, and if most are confused, the teacher will stay on the matter at hand until she or he gets a satisfactory percentage of students over the hump. The challenge would be to make sure that the rigor of such classes remained as high as they should be.

Garland discusses some pilot programs in Washington DC that take such an approach. There are two realizations that the pilot programs have involved: first, they have to be well-staffed, so if kids are struggling, something is done about that. Second, there also needs to be a lot of outreach and some explanation of what a gifted program is. Not all parents are familiar with the concept, and whether that would be something for their kids to try.

I'd also add a few other thoughts. First, such gifted programs should not be the only "good" programs at a school. You want parents and kids to opt into gifted classes because they think they need them, not because it's the only way to get a class with few discipline problems. Second, there also needs to be a seamless and non-judgmental way to transition out of them. Frankly, all gifted programs suffer from this problem. In districts that do have gifted programs, if you're identified once in an early grade, sometimes you're in for good, even if it turns out that wasn't the right placement. There should be some good way to move in and out of programs, evaluating every year what is the right fit.

What do you think of the concept of open-enrollment gifted programs?

Is boredom good for kids?

Gifted kids learn things quickly. Left in a class with their age peers, they spend a lot of time waiting for other kids to catch up. The result: boredom. Which raises a question: is boredom good for kids?

I was thinking of this while reading a post on this topic at the blog Grumpy Rumblings of the (Formerly) Untenured (blogger NicoleandMaggie sometimes comments here). Some well-meaning sorts acknowledge that gifted kids might get bored, but they tell concerned parents that learning to cope with boredom is an important life skill for kids. After all, not all of adult life is scintillating. It's like learning to cope with difficult people too.

But the problem is that as an adult, you have more choice about how you spend your time, and you also have other options for changing your environment. If you are thoroughly bored with a job, you do have the option to find another one. It's a bit harder for a 2nd grader to, on her own, remove herself from a boring classroom.

Adults also get to draw on more strategies than we tend to allow children in schools. Bored on a train? Pull out your iPhone. Bored in class? Often not allowed.

Furthermore, much of adult life is far more ability-grouped than school. I wrote a post several years ago here about an academic researcher who was vehemently against grouping...but whose university department bragged about how selective it was. So, there's that.

Personally, I think that one of the worst things we teach gifted kids in "regular" school is that learning should be easy, and also boring. Discovering new things is actually quite exciting! But it's also a lot of work. When children think they should be able to figure out anything required of them quite quickly, and then wait for the rest of the world to catch up, they miss an opportunity to learn how to stretch to understand something that seems just outside their reach. That's why we need to challenge gifted kids, rather than bore them.

How does your child handle boredom? What do you tell him or her about boredom?

The kid with his head in a book

My 5-year-old made a fascinating discovery the other day. He can read! Of course, he knew he could read words on signs and worksheets and in his picture books and the like. But the other day he discovered that, really, all books have words in them, even long chapter books, and if he wanted to find out what happens next in Peter Pan, or the Magic Tree House books (insert number here, we're like on 18 or something) he didn't have to wait for an adult to read it to him. He could just pick the book up and read it himself.

It's kind of a fun moment. I remember a similar moment when I was around that age and my parents had been reading me some book (I forget which, now). I wanted to see what happened next, so I kept reading. I soon learned that books had great stories, and you could become completely absorbed in those worlds. Once, I was wondering around outside reading a book and I stepped on something sharp. I was too absorbed in my book to pay much attention. When I finally put down the book later, I noticed blood all over my foot from a rock or some such. I was just too engrossed in the story to care.

My son seems to have inherited a bit of this as well, because we're now trying to establish a few reading rules:

1. No reading during family meals. I won't say no reading at the table, because I've been known to read the newspaper in the morning if the kids are doing something else and I'm sitting with my coffee. But if we're all there at dinner, it's not the right time for Dingoes at Dinnertime.

2. No reading while walking. Apparently the bus driver made sure my son got off the bus at his stop (I'm sure he would have kept reading to the end of the line, otherwise), but he was reading while walking down the bus aisle and down the steps. Not a good idea.

3. No reading while someone else is trying to talk with you. A difficult one to be sure, as no doubt 9 times out of 10 whatever is happening in the book is more exciting than whatever the other person is trying to convey. Nonetheless, we need to be polite, and put the book down and answer. That's why one learns to go hide away somewhere in the house if you want to read undisturbed.

What rules do you have for voracious readers?

Would you let your child blog?

At one of the blogs I read regularly, Modern Mrs. Darcy, Anne recently posed a question. Her 7-year-old daughter, who is homeschooled, loves to write. She sees her mom blogging. So she asked for a blog for her birthday. Should she get one?

On the one hand, blogging is a great way to practice writing. There’s also some evidence that people take writing more seriously when they know there’s a big audience (no kidding!) I’d add as a side benefit that many of us need a digital platform these days for whatever aspect of Brand You we’re promoting later in life. Building a blog readership is hard and takes time. Imagine if you started at age 7!

But, of course, there are downsides too. A blog takes a lot of time...for the parent, who will have to monitor what the child posts (e.g. not your home address), moderate all comments before the kid sees them, and so forth. There’s always the chance that a child will write things she’ll later wish she hadn’t written. I guess we’ve all had this experience, but as grown-ups, it’s easier to be rational about this than if you’re a kid. And the kid could get bored of the whole thing after you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up the website.

I suggested Anne give her daughter a regular guest-posting gig on Modern Mrs. Darcy for a year and see how it goes. That way, Anne would already be moderating comments, and the child would have a built-in audience. It’s quite possible she’d lose interest in a year, and then you know that there's no need to set up her own blog. If she keeps up the writing, however, she could get her own real estate.

What would you recommend? Do any of your kids have a blog?

Homeschooling, a la carte

Scholastic.com's Administrator magazine ran an article recently called "The Homeschool Twist." Aimed at principals and district leaders, the article encourages them to consider partial homeschooling for gifted students whose needs can't be met fully during the regular school day. The idea is that a child can take some courses at school (language, art, music, PE, electives, or any subject where the regular classwork will suffice) and then others elsewhere. Perhaps this is at home via online courses. Perhaps this is at home via tutors, or the parents, or perhaps it's through a local college.

There are all sorts of ways to structure such a program. My favorite example in the piece is a school district that lets high schoolers enrolled in online AP classes miss the first hour of the school day. You can take the class whenever you want (so 9pm works, too) but you get to sleep in! Not a bad deal.

As the article notes, "With partial homeschooling, gifted students still have access to other children and activities and parents can work or have personal time without paying for child care. Students can take advantage of master classes in a talent area, and spend time on individualized study or hands-on learning." This is getting at one of the main obstacles to homeschooling -- namely, that many parents need the school day as a form of childcare while they work (though we've written here about homeschooling and working).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of the school day being less set. Some districts -- and some parents -- view the school vs. homeschool issue as black and white. You're either all in or you're all out. If you're all out, there's no participation in anything -- which some parents, who might be homeschooling for philosophical or religious reasons, might be fine with. But if you're homeschooling for more practical reasons, then an a la carte approach to school has a lot going for it.

Frankly, there's no reason to limit this a la carte school choice to gifted students. Perhaps another child might want to take his core classes during the morning and run a business during the afternoon. Someone else might want to do a morning internship and take classes in the afternoon. As school changes, and as methods of content delivery evolve, there's no reason to have school mean what it has in the past. One can envision a system where schools are reimbursed per course, and if students take an online course while in the school building, the school could be partially reimbursed as "rent" for providing the computer, the broadband, and supervising adults.

Have you tried partial homeschooling? Is your district or school for it or against it?

How we discourage creative children (in 1963)

I’ve been reading a lot of women’s magazines from 1963. It’s the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique this year, and comparing consumer titles from the early 1960s and now show how things have changed...

...and in some cases haven’t. In March, 1963, Redbook ran a story called “How we discourage creative children.” The sub-headline noted that “This surprising report explains why teachers, parents and even intelligence tests fail to spot the real talents of seven out of ten of our most truly gifted youngsters.” The story leans heavily on the work of Dr. E. Paul Torrance of the University of Minnesota, sometimes called the “father of creativity.” He told writer John Kord Lagemann (yes, men used to write for women’s magazines, and not just as the guy’s-point-of-view columnist!) that “IQ tests do not measure creative talent. By depending on them we miss seventy per cent of our most gifted youngsters.”

Torrance noted that “creativity involves getting away from the obvious, safe and expected and producing something which -- to the child, at least -- is new.” This, the article says, “makes extra trouble for teachers and parents. The child’s constant questioning, experimenting and exploring can make him trying to other people.”

What’s most odd about the article, though, is that this constant questioning and experimenting is presented as something that high IQ children don’t do. As Torrance said, “Suppose the problem was to improve oil lamps...The IQ mentality would apply all the known facts about oil lamps to build a better model. The creative mentality would invent the electric light.”

This either/or mentality -- that what we’d think of as “book smart” people aren’t creative and vice versa -- is often present today too. Since Torrance is lionized by the gifted community, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. Reading a little deeper, it seems that the “IQ tests” being discussed -- at least as written about in Redbook in 1963 -- weren’t what many of us or our kids have taken. Sample questions include “How many weeks in a year? How many hours in a day? Where is Peru? If you start with ten newspapers and sell four, how many are left?” This is sheer factual knowledge, something that aptitude tests are supposed to lean less on. The creativity tests Torrance was proposing had such questions like “list all the uses you can think of for empty tin cans.” But, of course, there’s no reason such questions couldn’t be incorporated into tests for gifted programs (and often are). The article also seems to advance the idea that intelligence and creativity aren’t simultaneously present, which seems to be the author and editors’ attempts to hook readers. Torrance is known for the threshold hypothesis, which is that low IQ and low creativity are related, but that past a threshold (around IQ 120) they’re not necessarily related. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be both present -- and in many cases, are, as any parent who’s fielded questions from a 5-year-old on whether you can add and subtract from infinity, and whether you’d still pray to God if you lived on Mars? and what about Pluto? knows.

That said, the advice on how to nurture creative children is fascinating, with some interesting ideas:

Don’t discourage fantasy. “One of the qualities of the creative person, young or old, is his ability to move freely back and forth between the world of facts and reason and the vast realms of the mind that lie just below the surface of consciousness.”

Don’t hold him back. Let your kids try things and fail. “It’s never too early for self-initiated learning,” said Torrance.

Make creativity rewarding. “Sixth graders who are rewarded for originality and interest produce much better stories than children who are rewarded for correctness, but they also make many more mistakes in spelling and grammar.” (OK, I’m not so keen on this one -- there’s no reason you can’t check your spelling and grammar in a second draft! Then again, we live in an era of spell check and word processing programs, which no one had in 1963)

Avoid sexual stereotypes. “Sexual stereotypes are destructive of creativity,” Redbook noted (we’ll just ignore that this is in a magazine full of cooking and diet advice). A little boy who refuses to play with dolls because his parents criticize it is missing out on lots of forms of expression.

Don’t judge him by his reading and writing. “Creative children often lag behind the group in verbal abilities” -- well, they could, especially if you have a gifted child with dyslexia. On the other hand, there are plenty of gifted creative writers who do great on this front. I’d call this a wash.

Allow freedom to experiment. “Instead of laughing at him, encourage him to test his statements, imagine what the world would be like if they were true. Don’t pin him down to ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Parents and teachers both have a tendency to confuse getting right answers with being morally right.”

Help him use his creativity in social relations. “One of his biggest problems in life will be getting along with others without sacrificing the qualities that make him creative and ‘different.’ Help him use his sensitivity to be kind, his insight to be understanding and tolerant of those who don’t see things his way. Show him he can assert himself without being domineering, work alone without being withdrawn, be honest with others without being overcritical. Prepare him to accept the fact that anyone who has original ideas must be prepared to be a minority of one, at least for a time.” That’s good advice for parents of any kind of gifted child.

If not 'gifted,' what?

News flash: many people don't like the word "gifted." Even if they recognize the concept -- that some people have swifter cognitive processing power than average -- they dislike the word.

I was reminded of this while reading Stacy Hunt's column in a New Zealand newspaper (the Otago Daily Times) on how 'Gifted Should Be Retired For Good. Some of the column is just puzzling. Hunt writes that the whole gifted concept leads to separating a group of people off, which is news to me. If only modern gifted programs actually separated children into homogeneous groups for any real period of time! The reality is often small pull-outs which cause the problems of separation but give none of the benefits. Other parts of the column rehash the usual arguments (yes, motivation matters. And so does intelligence -- these are not either/or concepts). Others are a bit more sensible ("some children show unusual aptitude in specific areas of learning. Our society should provide support and resources to give them the chance to realise their potential.")

Anyway, this piece -- and the many, many others like it I've read over years of looking at gifted education -- got me thinking again about the word "gifted." Is it helpful or not? There are certainly other ways to describe the same idea of helping children who can learn swiftly be challenged and reach their potential. One can talk about talent development. One can talk about "readiness" for different levels of challenge. One can talk of being accelerated, or advanced. Or then there's the euphemism of "special needs," which could certainly be adapted to other contexts. Perhaps, if there is broad adoption of "personalized learning" then giftedness will simply manifest itself in kids moving forward in progression much faster than their similarly-aged classmates. She's in level 10 and someone else is in level 4. Ho-hum, just another day of personalized learning.

But here's a question for people who don't like "gifted" -- is there another word or concept you would use? Or no? "Gifted" is, of course, not perfect. But I suspect many people who don't like the word don't like the idea of gifted education in general, and so this is not an easily mollified problem.

Is there a word you like better than gifted?

My kid's other mom

Some children have an imaginary friend. My 5-year-old has an imaginary mom. He calls her “My other mom,” and regales us with all sorts of tales about her life. And she has quite a life! While I sometimes think I’m doing OK in my attempts to have it all, I have nothing on this woman:

*She works for McKinsey, the management consulting firm

*She has 18 children. Curiously, two of the other children are my 3-year-old and 1-year-old; I like that even in his alternate universe, my 5-year-old kept his siblings

How, you might ask, has she done all this? She’s 99 years old. My son isn’t aware of the dilemma of the biological clock, so in his mind, she had much of this time to build her career and family. She isn’t doing it on her own. She’s married to my son’s other dad, though we hear less about this gentleman than we do about the other mom. His other dad was, for a while, 33 years old. I think my 5-year-old picked up that we thought this was funny, and so now he’s started saying the father is 45. Not that that’s less cougar-ish, really. When my son got into watching Crocodile Hunter, he claimed Steve Irwin was his other dad for a while. We haven’t told him the story yet of what happened to Steve Irwin (who died 8 months before my son was born).

Recently, he’s decided that Steve Irwin is not his other dad. But his other mother has similarly crazy adventures. She’s taken my 5-year-old to Australia, to Africa, to Russia, to Hawaii, to the myriad other places he’s studied on his maps and his atlas. She’s patient with him on plane trips, though as he told me this morning “People thought she was crazy to take a 3-year-old on a trip to Australia!” She lived in Botswana for a while. This came out when my son once told me that “You’re my favorite mommy!” I thanked him and he clarified that “You’re my favorite mommy in the United States.” His other mother had sub-Saharan Africa covered.

Crucially, she lets him have a cat. This is a major point of contention between us. I am adamant that I can’t have another living thing depending on me -- I’m not even watering my house plants anymore -- and the kids aren’t old enough to take care of a pet. My son’s other mother doesn’t have such problems because hey, she can do anything. Remember the part about her big career and 18 kids?

The other mother ebbs and flows in the frequency of her mentions. I thought she’d stayed in San Diego this summer when my son didn’t mention her for about two weeks after the trip. This would be keeping with a fine family tradition of imaginary friends staying on the west coast. When I was growing up, my family lived in San Diego for three months when I was 8 and my little brother was 3. He had a friend called “Baby Crunchy” who did everything with us, but stayed behind when we moved back to North Carolina. Alas, after a few weeks, the other mother was back, and she’s been with us pretty steadily since.

Have your children had imaginary playmates or parents?

Cross-posted at LauraVanderkam.com

A new year, a new start (and silly mistakes)

It's been a while since my last Gifted Exchange post (OK, more than 6 weeks). We'll call it a long holiday break, and I'll try to dive back in.

Today's topic: small mistakes on assessments, and the outsized impact they can have. Many parents of gifted kids can sympathize with this problem. A child has moved far ahead in math on his own, and zones out during class. He makes some small mistakes on a test on grade level material because he hasn't been studying it. But then the take away is, well, how can he be advanced? See, he gets Bs on tests!

How should a parent address this? Is it worth encouraging a child to really pay attention during tests? To spend time studying what the child already knows? How should one explain this? (Yes, we know you know how to do this, but other people at your school don't spend as much time with you and don't know it?) How does one convey that a child is doing more advanced work at home?

I'm curious how parents have dealt with the problem of small mistakes.

Montgomery, acceleration and the Common Core

We've covered Montgomery County, MD a few more times on this blog than seems probable, but the issues there seem to reflect the challenges and thinking in many other "good" school districts around the country. So here we go again.

According to a Washington Post article, the district has revamped its math curriculum. Tied to the new Common Core standards, the curriculum aims to cover fewer topics in more depth. The curriculum should be more challenging at grade level, which means that fewer children would need to be accelerated in math. The article says the district claims they'd over-accelerated in the past, with high school math teachers needing to re-cover material that children should have been exposed to before, and with some families needing to hire tutors to help kids keep up in the alleged pressure-cooker.

Of course, the side effect of this, according to some parents, is that it's now harder for kids to accelerate at all. So kids who could zoom ahead are bored, and to add insult to injury, the tone seems to be that frustrated parents just don't "get" the new math emphasis. It is true that some people like to race through things without any understanding, but there are certainly highly intelligent kids who understand pre algebra concepts quite well and deserve to be challenged. This move away from acceleration is putting multiple issues in the same bucket.

I know I sound like a broken record about adaptive digital learning, but one of the reasons I do hope we move toward that system is that kids will ideally be able to move at their own pace (particularly in subjects like pre-algebra math, for which there is a lot of software already). Then acceleration won't mean scheduling issues and sending kids to different classes, which for whatever reason makes a certain proportion of educators go nuts.

Challenging the kids at home

My 5-year-old is really enjoying kindergarten. He's a social little boy, and likes being around other kids who are not his younger siblings. Riding a school bus turns out to be tons of fun, as are certain life experiences like taking money to the school book fair and choosing a book that fits your budget. Since he came into kindergarten reading and doing two-digit addition and subtraction, however, there hasn't been a lot of opportunity to move beyond that in the roughly two hours of daily instructional time that half-day kindergarten provides.

So we're working on challenging him at home. The first thing I thought I'd try was DreamBox, the adaptive math program. I'd heard good things about the program, and my son was initially interested in it. But he doesn't really like playing on the computer that much. When he gets computer time, he'd prefer to look at Google Maps and find photos linked to different spots ("Mommy, there's the Sydney Harbor Bridge!" and "Mommy, look at this village in Kenya!") So I'm not sure I'll be buying the program after the initial trial period just expired.

He will do math problems straight up, however. He spends a few minutes in the morning working with our sitter on math worksheets. In his perusals of map books, he's come across charts on precipitation, temperature, etc., and so he's been making his own graphs for fun.

As for reading, this seems a bit more straightforward. He is checking out books from the library to read, and is writing and illustrating his own. At the moment, they seem to resemble the Magic Tree House books pretty closely, but hopefully Mary Pope Osbourne won't mind the copyright infringement... :) We've tried to encourage him to tackle more challenging books, for instance reading the text in an atlas under pictures he finds interesting, and puzzling through what the words must mean.

I welcome suggestions on any other ideas for keeping the brain stretched. What books or software programs have you found helpful for early elementary school aged children?

At CNN.com last week, Carolyn Coil wrote a post on Ten myths about gifted students and programs for gifted. The list touches on many we've discussed here (like not ID-ing kids until 3rd grade under the misguided belief that everything evens out by then). But my "favorite" myth, if one can use that word, continues to be #9 -- that if a gifted child already knows a topic being covered, it's a good strategy to use the gifted kid as a tutor for struggling classmates.

I've often argued from the perspective that gifted children deserve to be challenged with appropriate work. They often already deeply know whatever topic they're being asked to teach to peers, and hence aren't going to learn it better. Time spent tutoring is time they could be working ahead. But while Coil mentions this argument, she also throws out another one: teaching is a skill. Assigning children to teach each other "assumes that teaching struggling students is something gifted kids innately know how to do. Most gifted students do not know how to tutor others. They often are frustrated that struggling students don’t understand what they perceive as easy."

Some kids like to learn how to teach, and want to get better at it. Some do not. This is a different skill set than having mastered certain math concepts.

Yet peer tutoring remains quite popular as a strategy. I think some educators see it as win-win. The more advanced child is given something to do and the child who is struggling gets extra help. But it may be lose-lose.

Have you or your children been in classrooms that have relied a lot on peer tutoring? What did you think of the strategy?

Raising the ceiling

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, writes of “The Suburban Education Gap.” Long-time readers of this blog know that America doesn’t have one education gap. There are really two. The first -- the fact that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to graduate from high school college -ready than children from more advantaged circumstances -- gets much of the attention. Education reform efforts are usually focused on raising achievement levels for these children, which is certainly a worthy goal.

When Americans hear that our children do poorly on international comparisons (like TIMSS and PISA) we assume it is because of high levels of poverty in inner cities. That’s part of it. But it’s only part. As Levine reminds us, “of American 15-year-olds with at least one college-educated parent, only 42 percent are proficient in math.” Even when you look at ritzy suburbs, only a few perform as well as students in Finland or Singapore. Evanston, Ill. does well. So does Scarsdale, N.Y. But places you’d think would be stellar, such as Greenwich, Conn., or Montgomery County, Md., or Grosse Point, Mich., do not outshine the international competition, Levine writes.

Why is that? I’ve been pondering this in light of some observations of my own school district. Lower Merion in PA is known for being very good. The high school students win various academic competitions, and in that nice marketing letter accompanying my property tax bill, I learned about all the wonderful colleges they are admitted to. My son’s kindergarten class has iPads! But looking at what my son is being assessed on, the expectations for being at benchmark largely center on being able to recognize numbers and letters. If you can do that, all is good.

In a world of many woes, raising the ceiling does not feel like an urgent educational priority. But it should be. As Levine writes, “The international achievement gap makes the U.S. less competitive and constitutes a threat to national strength and security. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has estimated that America would add $1 trillion annually to its economy if it performed at Canada’s level in math.”

So why aren’t we focused on raising achievement levels among kids who aren’t stuck in basket case schools? I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition, that by raising standards for such children, we’ll take our eyes off the ball for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. You can raise the ceiling and the floor. Refusing to look at how low our ceiling is amounts to sticking our heads in the sand.

The existence of the “suburban education gap” is why I get frustrated by narratives lamenting pushy parenting and how much pressure children in well-to-do suburbs are allegedly under. We need to relax and not push academic achievement so hard, the story goes. But while there’s no point in making children miserable, the reality is that we’re not asking nearly enough of kids. There is no kindness in failing to challenge a bright child’s little mind in the days when she still thinks learning is wonderful.

What to do if your kid wants to be an artist

Those of you who follow my other blogs know that I've been writing a lot, lately, about what sort of career advice parents should give children. Specifically, what should you do if your child wants to pursue a creative career? (see my post at CBS MoneyWatch, and over at LauraVanderkam.com).

I've been writing about this question after reading a guest post at the Motherlode NY Times blog from Dan Fleshler. His nearly grown-up daughter wants to make documentary movies. He debates what to tell her, with the shadow of his own career hanging over the discussion. He wanted to write novels; he wound up doing public relations. This question gets at one of the fundamental tensions at the heart of parenting. You want to prepare your child for the world. The world of creative careers is not known for being easy (and to a degree, these days, the academic careers that young mathematicians and historians and the like might pursue are not that straightforward either). On the other hand, you also want to encourage your child. The world is full of people who will stomp on his or her dreams. Why should you do that too?

Parents of gifted children face particular challenges in this regard in that sometimes children show prodigious talent in certain fields, or have very ambitious goals. Should one spend 18 years encouraging a child to be creative, and then zoom in with the practicalities? Should one encourage practicalities all along -- but hopefully delivered in a "this is possible" tone of voice?

My vote is for the latter. Musicianship, artistry, or research on the cutting edge of a field often involves years of practice and a discipline aimed at getting better. Hopefully as a child is working on the discipline of a creative calling, he or she is also meeting people who are pursuing this field, or have pursued this field, professionally. These people can show and tell what is involved, and explain the role of luck, timing, and being entrepreneurial. If you want to be a choreographer, it's important to know that there are very few organizations hiring people as full-time choreographers out of college just because they have a degree in dance. You'll need to be producing a portfolio, and being entrepreneurial about getting people to perform your works in visible places.

What advice would you give a child who wanted to pursue an artistic career?

In other news: I just read Practice Perfect, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi. The book consists of 42 strategies for "getting better at getting better" and has a lot of interesting ideas on how to practice one's craft. While the authors primarily train teachers, you can apply the strategies to just about anything.

I'm also going to two of my three kids' parent-teacher conferences this week and am mulling the concept of silly mistakes on assessments. Lots to unpack there, so look for that next week.

How to raise a prodigy

The New York Times magazine has a lengthy essay this week on "How do you raise a prodigy?" adapted from Andrew Solomon's forthcoming book, Far from the Tree. Solomon does a good job of introducing the topic of profound giftedness to the public, explaining that it is not an unalloyed positive. Such children do not fit into the normal mold of childhood, and so parenting such a child is a challenge. One has to walk a fine line between pushing too much -- the narrative of many a prodigy flame-out story -- and the less-told tale of not pushing enough. After all, a child with prodigious musical talent who isn't given access to good teachers and isn't given enough time to practice will not develop as he could. As one mother pointed out in this story, her child isn't normal. So why should he have a normal childhood? It's actually impossible. Solomon ends by saying that "I don’t think I would love my children more if they could play Rachmaninoff’s Third, and I hope I wouldn’t love them less for having that consuming skill, any more than I would if they were affected with a chronic illness. But I am frankly relieved that so far, they show no such uncanny aptitude."

That's a fascinating way to look at the issue. I wonder how often parents of children with profound gifts wish that things were more normal in their lives. I imagine it's not infrequent.

Handling a retraction well

Science is messy, and retractions of studies happens more often than we think. Indeed, there's a whole blog, Retraction Watch, devoted to such things! (One of its founders, Ivan Oransky, was my editor when I was writing at ScientificAmerican.com). Occasionally, retractions are a result of wholesale fraud, though usually the errors are more pedestrian: math mistakes, wrong assumptions, faulty methodology.

Recently, Oransky sent me a link to a Retraction Watch post about 2008 Davidson Fellow Nathan Georgette. This young man studied herd immunity. He had his first major study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2007, and then later published another study on a similar topic in PLoS One in 2009. After taking a class on "Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations" at Harvard, Georgette reviewed his old study and realized that an assumption he made in building a mathematical model for the second study was flawed, and undermined the study's conclusions.

He wrote to the PLoS ONE editors, and asked them to retract the study, which they did. Oranksy points out that there are two interesting parts of this story. First, that the peer reviewers who reviewed the study didn't catch the problem, but second, the "rigor and transparency" with which Georgette handled the retraction. He found the error himself; he acted quickly to solve the problem. It bodes well for a future scientific career for this careful and honest researcher.

The lesson question

At my 5-year-old's annual check-up the other day, the doctor asked if he was taking any art or music classes. I mentioned that he quite likes to draw (my office paper and pens walk off with regular frequency; I later discover when hunting for them that he's written and illustrated a book). She suggested that I enroll him in an art class at a local arts center.

I have to say, I am torn. I've been reading and writing about talent development for years. Many readers of this blog have children with prodigious math or music talents. Part of developing those talents has been exposing the children to adults who can help them learn how to get better, early on.

But I also suspect that most kid art classes for 5-year-olds will be about encouraging creativity, or telling him to draw certain things. And he doesn't need grown-ups encouraging him to be creative or draw certain things. He draws whatever he wants right now and comes up with rather interesting ideas. He's in the process of discovering the concept of perspective ("You can't see my legs in this picture, mommy, because I'm behind the elephant") and setting ("You can see I'm in Arizona because of the cactus.") Right now he's drawing because he loves it. I'm worried that turning it into something you do on Mondays at 4 will undermine this intrinsic motivation.

Yet, like I said, I'm torn. And classes might introduce him to other types of art (sculpture, painting) that we don't do a lot of at home.

How have you decided to enroll your children in classes or lessons? Do you think it was a good idea?

(Cross posted at LauraVanderkam.com)