I’m not surprised by the finding, but I’m surprised it’s being published in the NYT. Our sons were under-challenged throughout their elementary school years, and gradually picked up more appropriately demanding coursework in middle school. Our high-schooler now has honors courses and plenty of work to stay busy. Unfortunately, one great shortcoming I’ve seen with both of them is that they have not developed the study and project management skills I’d like to see. Their early work was so easy that they didn’t learn to work effectively with challenging material, and now are playing catch-up. The problems of gifted education are significant. Kids who are bored can lose a lot of the joy that comes with learning and become under-achievers despite their great gifts.
Yes, you see a lot of that, unfortunately. I've found that even some of the gifted classes don't challenge the students as they should...maybe because parents and teachers think that "gifted" students should always make A's...if they're working as hard as they should be, maybe there should be a bell curve in gifted classes too?
My husband was in various public and private schools for a number of years before his mother started homeschooling and that's exactly what he says. I was homeschooled all along, not allowed to know how gifted I was (so I couldn't complain about the work being too hard for me, or get too big an ego) and I was much more challenged and never lost a love of learning for more than a couple weeks at a time.
When we have kids they'll be homeschooled. If they're smart, we can help them excel, if they're stupid we can help them get up to speed. If they're totally normal - well, hey, at least they won't get beaten up for their lunch money, right?
The secret to successfully educating gifted kids is to correctly identify their abilities when they first start school. I was just thinking about that, earlier this morning. My brother and I never learned to study because school was just plain, too easy. All I had to do was read over a subject the night before, or even in homeroom, and go in a take the test. I mean read for the first time. I had a little more trouble with the essay portions, but the multiple choice and fill in the blank portions usually carried me through.
I remember when they first gave my brother an IQ test in fifth grade and found out that he had the highest IQ that the school district had ever seen. The superintendent and a contingent of others from the district came to our house to apologize to my parents for not recognizing his abilities and boring him to death. He was an underachiever his whole life. Everyone pushed him to go into math fields, engineering, but he didn’t enjoy math, he was just good at it. What he really should have been was a lawyer.