LogFAQs > #985645508

bachewychomp posted...

This is kind of true from my experience too. I do remember in elementary school they pulled me out of class once in a while for something called "Excel", which I recall was just a brief session where they did some slightly more abstract thought exercises. But if you were "gifted" they don't really do much to nurture that or find out what kind of track you should really be on. It kind of just ends up placing a "smart kid" label on you that ostracizes you from all the other kids who hate teacher's pets

We had something similar. Except it was called "ETC" for us.

It was technically two separate things - in kindergarten it was the "let's grab a few smart kids, throw them into a room, and get them to do abstract thought puzzles and outside-the-box stuff" deal. Then in first grade they basically had one day a week (mine was Monday) where they'd bus you to a different school (our district had like a dozen different elementary schools, and they'd bus all the smart kids from different schools to a central location) for half a day, and make you do higher-level logic and problem-solving stuff.

It also went a long way towards making me hate advanced programs, because it was run incredibly poorly, and generally felt like you were being punished for being too smart. They separated you from your friends, and threw you into classes with kids who were total strangers who you'd only see once a week (so you definitely weren't making new friends) - which is terrible and borderline torture for a shy introvert. You'd be expected to get on the right bus (out of a dozen or so) to go back to your original school (which was pretty fucking terrifying for a six-year old paranoid about winding up who the hell knows where if they made a mistake and got on the wrong bus), and once you got back you were forced into taking gym class with a different class than your own (because you missed your regularly scheduled gym class while you were at the other school, and NJ state law says you have to have gym class every day so they won't just let you miss it), so now you're YET AGAIN thrown into a group of kids you don't know being forced to participate in sports (which you probably suck at), so there's a high level of stress and embarrassment. And to top it off, because of how class scheduling works, you basically have to miss your weekly assigned Library period because the gym class they force you to take overlaps with when your class is going to the library (which was phenomenally stupid, because you'd think if there was one thing you'd want gifted kids to do, it's go to the library and read).

After the first few weeks I basically loathed it and wanted out. I told my teachers I wanted out and they said no. Then I pretty much begged my parents to let me quit and they had to go to the school to tell the teachers they didn't want me in the program (because my parents were awesome). The teachers tried to badger my parents into keeping me in the program but my father basically told them that if they didn't remove me there was going to be a serious fucking problem (because my parents were awesome).

So basically, their program for gifted kids essentially helped turn a kid who absolutely loved to learn into a little anti-authoritarian shit who had no respect for any of his teachers unless they "earned" it, because even at that age I realized just how much the people running the schools were complete fuck-ups (an opinion that has not changed over 40 years). It's a miracle the stress of it didn't give me PTSD, or absolutely kill any interest I had in ever learning on my own (fortunately, I still found self-motivated study to be fun and interesting, even if school almost never was).

On the plus side for them, all of their fuckery basically slowed me down so much, it let the other kids in my class catch up with me, so they basically succeeded in mainstreaming me backwards into normality. Whee!