Rambling about being "the smart kid."

[clockworktomato]

Another mailing list I'm on was having a discussion on how teachers often don't know how to handle kids who read, kids who are independent, etc.  I posted some anecdotal crap from my own childhood, and wondered if any of you experienced similar difficulties for being the smart kids

Comments

[clockworktomato]

Oh, you've reminded me that I have to take back what I said about never having a good teacher before high school. Librarians, all of them, loved me, and my favorite day of the week was the day we went to the library. I rode the bus to school so I often arrived early and made a beeline for the library, checking out all the books my constantly-strained backpack would hold. Checkout limits never applied to me, and I was even allowed to check out books restricted to older grades, etc. That was a real feeling of privilege, right there.

As for student-achievement, one thing that really stood out to me in my child psychology classes as well as my work with an elementary school student in a "magnet school" in Knoxville is that it's getting harder and harder to tell whether a child is a troublemaker or a genius. The instant a child gets the least bit distracted, he/she is thrown on ritalin and any other number of prescriptions, punished, talked down to, etc. And it strikes me very clearly that, if Ritalin had been all the rage in the 80s, I would have had a *very* different educational experience, and I might have ended up being considered "at-risk" or a "problem student." I worry, now, whether a lot of the children who are being treated as problems just need more challenge and/or a better fit of student to learning method. Now if Kid A (ha ha, Kid A) can't learn math as quickly as everyone else, there's no contemplation that perhaps he is a visual rather than auditory learner, or that perhaps he is actually *too* intelligent to learn via the method being used to teach math and, thus, is overthinking the problem (in much the way that we can mess up multiple choice questions by "overthinking" an answer and conjuring up possibilities that, to less creative test-takers, would not come to mind.)

It scares me, honestly, to think that the next generations of "little geniuses" may be having the very intellect poisoned out of them so they'll be robotic and, thus, easier to teach without additional effort on the part of the instructor.

*shudder*

The only "genius" that will be rewarded will be that talent shown in sports, music, or other more physically exhibited mediums. Everything else will be quashed away in some 1984-esque manner or exhibited as some sort of child prodigy circus sideshow.