Teacher's Journal - As Dumb As It Gets

[mankoeponymous]

A letter is about to go home to all the families explaining that, starting next year, the Level IV Gifted curriculum will be the default curriculum for all kids at our school. In short, we're going to teach ALL the kids as if they were not just Gifted but Top Level Gifted, including those kids who were already struggling and failing with the

Comments

[hitchcock73]

Um. Wow.

[mankoeponymous]

It's sorta the ultimate expression of the Lake Wobegone Syndrome: all of our children will be BY DEFINITION "above average."

[phenakistoscope]

That's idiotic.

Sorry you're having to put up with this crap.

[tanyateedubya]

Damn thats some crazy stuff. I remember being in the gifted program and hating it, mostly because there was extra homework and less 'cool' kids in the class room. But if they ever tried to teach the majority of my school mates the stuff I was learning there would be a lot of failure.

Also are they planning on segregating the gifted kids still or just returning them to the regular class rooms?

[mankoeponymous]

That's almost the sickest part...if they were to desegregate the kids who actually went through a process (often long and expensive) to get into the program, the parents would burn something/someone down overnight. Instead we're going to have segregated classes actually segregated by class, where the kids of rich families and the kids of less rich families study the exact same curriculum in different rooms.

Not that there aren't any middle-class or working-class kids in the Gifted program, but, um, very few.

[tanyateedubya]

Well that's insane. I guess then parents of the wealthy children will still be able to sleep well at night knowing that the cooties of the 'poors' haven't infected their precious little ones.

[mankoeponymous]

Ayup. The thing I've always loved about public schools in my hopeless romantic way is that they're the most integrated thing left in our society (plus the idea that a community would decide EVERY child deserves a free quality education is pretty rockin'). I know the standards in private schools around here are actually LOWER, and yet it's important for people to pay $30,000 a year to have their kids attend one...the only explanation I can see is that they're terrified of cross-caste relationships.