cimorene | epiphany: school is supposed to educate AND NOT BE COMPLETELY BORING! (no, really. epiphany.)

Last night's lecture (course for classroom assistants), the second from a Special Education teacher, was mostly about the national guidelines for building local and school-level curricula/course of study.

The teacher talked about leveling and how it was abolished entirely in Finland in the mid-1980s, all the way from elementary school up to high school (where the Finnish system splits into entirely voluntary technical schools and academic high schools). Even reading and maths are integrated for the whole class and Finland also has no what she called "elite" (or inherently leveled) schools. There isn't money to truly provide special needs children with THEIR education all the way throughout the country, which has many rural areas dotted with tiny rural schools with as few as 2-3 teachers and 15-50 students. Imagine, then, how little provision is possible for children of above-average intelligence. The lecturer admitted to me that these children are frequently not provided for; the ideal is that the teachers are meant to look at each individual pupil's level and provide them with more to do (or less to do, and more help), but the only REQUIREMENT is that the basic curriculum be taught in a certain way to everyone (except for special-needs students for whom a formal process provides exceptions).

God, I mean, just imagine how boring (I suspect, though, given that Finland has some of the best education in the world going by tests and so on, that it's actually still less boring than my childhood was). I was bored, and many many people are bored even in advanced classes (even primary school classmates who IQ-tested into the special weekly "Gifted and Talented" additions, as they were called in Alabama, but then didn't make the performance-based cuts to the top advanced levels of English, History, and math in middle school at grade 6).

There is no question that a child of above-average intelligence is in less need of help than a child with learning difficulty. Of course, the resources of society should be aimed at the latter, because the former is just bored, and the odds are, has the intellectual resources to find something else to do, and keep themselves occupied. But that's not to say that the deeply-ingrained habit of utter boredom and superiority imprinted on these children by inadequate primary school doesn't harm them! I actually didn't realize until the last several years how much it harmed me, but I am starting to think now that it was a lot worse for me than I suspected.

I am so accustomed to boredom, so used to it from the first day I transferred from a private Montessori school in New York to the Alabama public schools at age 6, that it didn't even occur to me until last night's lecture that the AIM of schooling is actually not only to "challenge" every pupil (a platitude I've often heard and which, let's face it, is problematic and in many cases not actually meant) - but to keep them occupied. The infinite variety of ways to occupy yourself "After you finish your work" was so familiar to me that I sat dazed and confused for several minutes while the lecturer talked about the ways classroom teachers can and do try to provide extra material and assignments for the above-average so they don't just sit twiddling their thumbs! "Isn't thumb-twiddling an essential, indeed, the MAIN point of school?", I thought at first.

I estimate that from age six when I started reading my own novels in class (first with Babysitter's Little Sister, quickly on to Babysitter's Club and Nancy Drew and thence to YA and adult fantasy from my parents' library), I was never without several personal books brought to read per day in my extra time, and I typically finished at least one per day all the way up through 7th grade, which was the first time I encountered classes I couldn't get through even if I kept reading the entire time the teacher was talking. I still remember the staggering force of my epiphany, in 7th grade "social studies" (really world history) that not only could I be engaged if I listened to the teacher only instead of reading while listening with one ear, what she was saying was actually complex enough to require more than one ear's attention to understand! Through high school, I was still able to finish a novel in a day to a week reading only in the time after I finished my work; but in primary school, I probably spent a good 50%-70% of my school hours reading.

And, hey, I have just fully realized the magnitude of that. Because... that is wrong. That is FUCKED-UP. And that should be obvious - should have been obvious to a long string of teachers who kind of weren't doing their jobs, not that it was really their fault with the utterly inadequate resources given to public education in Alabama.

Current Mood: thoughtful

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From:

laughingrat

I think the bad effects of letting down gifted children are really underestimated because, sure, we can generally perform on a level with the "normal" kids even if we're not being educated up to par. But what happens is we're let down very early, we're not engaged (I think this might be what you mean by "occupied," but that word made me shudder because it speaks to me of humiliating busywork), we're not taught how to study because, well, we don't *need* to study at first, and then when things get hard, a lot of us hit a wall and literally don't know how to work.

I've heard people talk about that with a little sneer--"Those 'gifted' snots ain't so smart now!"--but really, it's genuinely a problem. It's not that we're lazy or arrogant; studying is a skill that many of us never learned. And since performance is also integral to how so many gifted kids are taught to think of themselves, when they can't perform up to their usual standard, their world drops out from under them. They become not just poorer students, but unhappy, less developed individuals who have no idea of their real potential, who can't live up to that potential; when performance is the only thing anyone valued in you, not being able to perform is world-shattering.

If I'm passionate about this, it's because I've lived through it. Which sounds arrogant...heh. I'm sorry. I don't mean it that way. It's just...looking back, how much more would I have gotten out of college, for instance, if I'd known that it was normal and okay for college to be hard, and that it didn't mean that my brain had suddenly failed me? I'd've had more courage, taken more risks, worked harder. Maybe. :) Same with any creative endeavors where I've shone a little at first, then hit that skill plateau. Now I'm stuck trying to fix all this at 33!

From:

torachan

Yeah, same here. When it came to hard classes in college, I still coasted through them, even if it meant getting Bs, Cs, or even a D (only once, thankfully), because I just didn't know how else to do it. I relied on my good classes to keep my GPA up (IIRC I still had a B average GPA when I graduated).

When I was in high school, there was a girl in my class whom everyone said was soooooo smart, and I would look down on her because obviously she wasn't very smart. She spent all her time studying, both in school and at home. She had no hobbies, didn't read for fun or do anything but study! I thought, "That's not smart! If she were smart, she would be able to do the work in a few minutes like me and not study and have plenty of free time!" But last I heard she's something like a neurosurgeon now, so...

multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

epiphany: school is supposed to educate AND NOT BE COMPLETELY BORING! (no, really. epiphany.)

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