16 votes

Topic deleted by author

10 comments

  1. [8]
    kfwyre
    Link
    I'm so sorry. Depending on what state you're in, cutting a GT program could be illegal, as some states include it under the purview of special education which has some very strong laws supporting...
    • Exemplary

    I'm so sorry.

    Depending on what state you're in, cutting a GT program could be illegal, as some states include it under the purview of special education which has some very strong laws supporting students' right to education at pretty much all costs. On the other hand, given everything going on right now, most schools are having trouble simply meeting minimum staffing requirements, much less a diverse and robust set of instructors to handle different student needs. Even if what the school is doing is technically against the law, you're not likely to get much of anywhere pushing on it right now, and you'll likely make a good number of enemies in your local school's administration and staff in doing so given that they have significantly bigger fish to fry at the moment. It's not right, but it's the hand we're dealt right now, unfortunately, and I'll note that it probably didn't happen as a result of malice. Quite the opposite, really. If I had to wager, the school's cut of their GT program was as heartbreaking for them as it is for you.

    With regards to replacing gifted and talented education for your son specifically, it's honestly impossible to replace the personal component that a skilled teacher would be able to bring to the table in working with gifted kids. It's quite a skillset. I do think there are some things you can explore that might make the best of a bad situation though, without making you the child's de facto teacher for the year:

    Most online learning platforms aren't really designed for GT-type students, but I was impressed by a demo of ST Math, which teaches math concepts in a non-standard way, using no language and an emphasis on experimentation and observation. The app itself is clunky (and runs on Flash, which... yech), but it seems both instructionally novel and sound, and I could see a gifted student really take to it.

    I'm sure there are other platforms out there that I'm not aware of, and regardless of what they are or what they cost, I encourage you to reach out to their support and identify yourself as a parent interested in supporting your student and could you try out access? It is very likely they'll give you a free trial even if one isn't posted publicly. Some might even just give you the service outright, as right now literally every ed tech company is competing for mindshare. If they won't hook you up as an individual parent, reach out to your student's teacher and see if they can get a similar deal from the teacher's side. Ed tech companies have been throwing themselves at us for months, all trying to get their piece of the pie as demand for their products is booming. It's very much a buyer's market.

    I also recommend looking into TeachersPayTeachers which is essentially eBay for curricular materials. The quality of any given item varies wildly depending on who uploaded it, and even though the site sells itself as a sort of "little guy helping little guy" thing, it's pretty much overrun with professional publishers at this point, who can crank out prettier and more organized content than a teacher making a worksheet in 10 fraught minutes between a meeting and the sixth period bell. That's not to say that some of their stuff isn't great; just that overall the site isn't nearly as "indie" as it tries to be.

    For your son, looking up anything that uses inquiry-based or project-based learning would be beneficial. Those are sort of hallmarks of gifted and talented education, and even if you can't find specific pre-made stuff, it's decently easy to "roll your own" since they're pretty open-ended and flexible as concepts.

    It works like this: no matter the curricular topic, have your student identify what they know and generate some questions about the topic beforehand, then have him seek out information and knowledge about it, and then he can create some sort of final product representing what he's learned. This will likely be an incredibly valuable experience for him, especially if it happens along topics he's really interested in learning about. It's simple, but it's a very high-level thing to do, requiring research, synthesis, and creative expression.

    There are no hard and fast rules about how to do this, and I realize it's abstract, so let's look at a quick example. Let's say he's learning about different types of rock in science class. You could have him gather a bunch of different rocks from a backyard or park, examine them and identify and categorize them by key traits, and then come up with a presentation board or slideshow that demonstrates similarities, differences, categories, and why these are important.

    You can supplement this process for him by guiding it a bit (though part of the fun, if he's self-motivated, is seeing where he goes with it, and how he wants to tackle it), but one of the best things you can do is question him along the way. Invariably, there will be types of rocks that don't exist in your area, so ask him why he thinks that might be. Or, if he had to design an entirely new type of rock, what characteristics might he give it? Why is it important that rocks have those characteristics? Can you think of uses for rocks? If you had to use a rock to open a sealed can, how would you do it without making a mess?

    I realize that sounds like a lot of work for you, but to make it easy for yourself, it could be something you schedule out: Monday and Tuesday are research days; Wednesday and Thursday are project days; Friday is presentation day, where he sits you down and explains what he's learned and why he chose to make what he did to convey that. It doesn't have to be any more complex than that, and depending on his soft skills, attention levels, and trustworthiness, it could be something he could do somewhat independently. Even if at the beginning he needs a lot of help, if you keep the structure and expectations the same but change the content each time, after the first few he'll learn the ropes and gain independence over time.

    If you're finding that this sort of thing is unfeasible based on time constraints, particularly if most of his day is spent doing assignments for his classes, it could be worth reaching out to his teacher and asking if some of his projects could count for credit instead of some of his assigned work. You could align any given project to whatever is being taught that week, and then send his teacher a picture of the completed item at the end of the week. I will caution you that they won't necessarily agree to this, and their hands might be tied even if they wanted to, but I know that if I have a parent email me this year and ask if their student's self-created inquiry-based projects could count for credit in my class, I'd be ecstatic and more than happy to accommodate that.

    With regards to projects, they also don't have to be arts and crafts-type things. Depending on how comfortable he is with technology, he could use something like Prezi which is like a sleeker Powerpoint, or Powtoon to create his own animated movie. The format of the end project doesn't really matter so much as that he's using it to convey what he's learned and he's doing it in a way that's creatively fulfilling.

    I know I've said a lot, but a final note is that with this sort of thing, a swing and a miss is totally fine. There are a TON of soft skills that undergird processes like this, and part of developing those is by doing things wrong and learning what to do better next time. So, when his rock diorama is a total mess and there's glue dripping onto your dining room table and dirt smudges all over the construction paper, that's okay. It's actually a hugely valuable thing to ask not just about the content, but about his process. Why did you choose to display the rocks that way? If you had to do it again, what would you improve? That sort of thing. As a teacher I worry about how much of those soft skills students will lose this year given that they'll mostly be stuck behind screens which don't allow them the sort of rich experimentation they get from more hands-on and real-world tasks.

    I hope some of this helps, and if you have any questions, please let me know here or by PM. I hope the best for you and your son this academic year. It's unfortunately going to be a tough one for everybody.

    30 votes
    1. [2]
      blitz
      Link Parent
      kfwyre, the amount of effort and thought you put into every single post about education I've seen you contribute to is just amazing. Your passion for your profession is evident from this, and I...

      kfwyre, the amount of effort and thought you put into every single post about education I've seen you contribute to is just amazing. Your passion for your profession is evident from this, and I expect you put even more effort into your proper day job. You must be a fantastic teacher, and all your students are lucky to have you teaching them, even if they don't appreciate it at the time.

      I've been out of school for nine years now, but I still think about several teachers in grade school that were instrumental in forming me to be the person I am today, and I am incredibly grateful to them.

      You're awesome. Keep being awesome. <3

      15 votes
      1. kfwyre
        Link Parent
        Thank you very much, blitz. Your kind words are a nice balm for me amidst a very difficult time. I appreciate them greatly.

        Thank you very much, blitz. Your kind words are a nice balm for me amidst a very difficult time. I appreciate them greatly.

        5 votes
    2. [3]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. [2]
        kfwyre
        Link Parent
        Some quick additional thoughts: It's not really fair of me to dump "just do inquiry-based and project-based learning on your child!" as a solution, especially because I don't know your child and...

        Some quick additional thoughts:

        It's not really fair of me to dump "just do inquiry-based and project-based learning on your child!" as a solution, especially because I don't know your child and the other constraints you and your wife are working with. As such, I figured I'd give you a few more "traditional" resources that require less from you. I offer these not just because they're valuable but because they're also good to have in your back pocket for when you need them and as a change of pace for when things start to get samey. Again, if you can't get free trials/access to these as a parent, email your student's teacher and ask if they already have it/will sign up for it.

        Flocabulary has really great content -- it's basically Schoolhouse Rock for the modern generation. They cover a ton of topics really well and build strategic vocabulary, and their songs are legitimately good!

        Newsela is a differentiated newspaper for students. Each article is written at four different reading levels, and when a child reads and takes quizzes on the site, it identifies their reading level and serves them the one that best fits them. Their content creators do an incredible job at pulling interesting, up-to-date articles, and it allows students to access current events at their level, as opposed to trying to read a regular news feed that either might be way above their head or might be filled with junk information. It's also got a lot of high-interest reading, so students can read about, say, The Avengers movies and sports and Instagram. A lot of my students who don't regularly like reading nonetheless like reading on Newsela because they can find stuff for their specific interests.

        BrainPop is a good all-purpose support site. It doesn't go too in-depth with any one topic, but it has cute videos for different topics with some quizzes students can take to self-assess.

        Discovery Education is pretty expensive and hard-gated to the district level, so if your district doesn't have it you're probably out of luck, but if they do, it's got a ton of great content, especially regarding science.

        Math is a tricky subject because it is heavily skill-based and ability-gated, so inquiry and project-based learning, while valuable, will not get your son all of the skills he needs to have. He'll have to practice specific skills to acquire them in a "traditional" manner.

        Khan Academy is of course the most well-known and is good if your son takes to the instructional style of it.

        IXL is another good practice site -- it's not flashy at all, but it has lots of different skills broken out by topic so that your son can get good practice on individual ones.

        Sumdog is a game-based fluency system for math. I like it, with reservations. All of their games have time-pressure behind them, which works for some students to push them to faster fluency, but for others it simply pushes them to guess. Furthermore, the problems scale up to include non-fluency problems, like word problems, and I think the time pressure is hugely detrimental to these since the focus should be on allowing students time to think and process rather than rushing them to the quickest answer.

        Also, screens are screens and we all know their benefits and limitations. Sometimes working on paper is simply better for some students, and honestly, sometimes working on paper might just be a break from screens this year, which I think is valuable in and of itself. Some good paper resources:

        WorksheetWorks has beautiful, well-organized resources. It even has some more fun stuff that can be a good change of pace (e.g. math mazes).

        Math-Aids covers a huge spread of content.

        Math-Drills is currently down for me, which I am hoping is temporary, otherwise there are going to be a lot of teachers and parents out there left without a great resource. They have almost too much content, but the best part about them is that many of their skills are broken down in very iterative ways, so there's a nice progression for students to follow from one to the other. You could use the site to roll your own "workbooks" for certain skills, where each new page pushes your son a little further with his skills. Given that he's GT this might be infantilizing for him, especially if it's something he takes to quickly, or it could be a good way of a near-inquiry examination into new skills, where he's building them as he goes. It really depends on him and his needs.

        On a final note: skills-based teaching is sort of out of vogue in a lot of educational paradigms and in GT in particular, because GT students often intuitively pick up on skills so they don't need as much explicit instruction in them. However, every child is different, and if you find that your son needs more traditional skills-based stuff, that's not a problem either. There's really no way around it for some topics, math in particular.

        Even if he's doing skills-based stuff for things that would be better served by another method, it's important to remember that learning isn't just about the content but it's also about the self-awareness and soft-skills that make us functional human beings. Working through a difficult, boring, or repetitive task is not ideal from an instructional standpoint, but it does build resilience and stamina, for example. A lot of education has been focused at smoothing out all possible frictions for students, but this has come with a cost. Now, many of my students balk the moment they encounter any sort of friction and don't have the problem solving skills or fortitude to go over it or work around it.

        So, that is to say that this is going to be a very difficult year for your family and your children in particular. There are a lot of frictions we should be smoothing out for them given how many of them create huge unfairnesses that I don't think should fall on kids' shoulders, but that doesn't mean that some strategic and developmentally appropriate frictions won't benefit students, even if they dislike them initially. Don't be afraid to push your son instructionally in the presence of those frictions, and it's okay to identify them outright: "I'm going to ask you to do a lot of these problems, and they might feel kind of boring and repetitive, but I want you to try to get through them anyway." Similar to what I said earlier, questioning about process helps with this too. Afterwards, you can ask about how he felt, was it easy/hard for him to do the task, did he find he was able to focus the whole time, etc.

        Anyway, sorry to dump even more on you, but I had all of this floating around in my head and felt I should share it. You know your situation and son best, so take anything I say as suggestion, not mandate, and discard anything you don't feel is applicable or relevant.

        13 votes
        1. [2]
          Comment deleted by author
          Link Parent
          1. kfwyre
            Link Parent
            Wonderful to hear! Glad it ended up working out for you, and for your son especially!

            Wonderful to hear! Glad it ended up working out for you, and for your son especially!

            3 votes
    3. [2]
      The-Toon
      Link Parent
      This is off topic, but as a teacher do you know anything people not currently involved with US K-12 education could do to help the issues in it? I'm a high school student in California, and I...

      This is off topic, but as a teacher do you know anything people not currently involved with US K-12 education could do to help the issues in it? I'm a high school student in California, and I dislike my local school system and the state of US K-12 education in general. GT education is a particular issue for me, but given the other major issues in education I would be willing to help with anything.

      Disclaimer This is not for me as a student. My interests mainly lie in K-8 as they have less of a ability to change their situation, and I'm already in a reasonable situation personally.
      2 votes
      1. kfwyre
        Link Parent
        I wish I had an easier answer to give you, but educational policy and implementation in the US is byzantine and complicated. Big picture stuff is particularly hard to influence since we have very...

        I wish I had an easier answer to give you, but educational policy and implementation in the US is byzantine and complicated.

        Big picture stuff is particularly hard to influence since we have very little agency in that, but I will note that local school boards have a significant amount of influence over their area schools. For example, in the US, the decision as to how to reopen schools for particular communities fell mostly to local school boards, which is a hugely significant decision.

        Their meetings should be public and are often boring, but they might be worth looking into as a way of seeing how different processes work in your local area. Many of them are way easier to attend now that they are being held on Zoom, which I hope is a trend that continues. It's way harder to show up in person than it is online, and the accountability and involvement aspects of them being public only matters if people are present for them. I never used to attend the ones for my district but I do so regularly now, for example. Don't feel obligated to go to all of them, but watching a few of them might give you some insights.

        The other big thing I can encourage you to do is read. There are lots of books on education and educational policy out there. Diane Ravitch's works are a good place to start if you're looking for more insight into the system (recommended starting point: Reign of Error), while Jonathan Kozol has been telling the human stories of education in America for a long time now (recommended starting point: Savage Inequalities). I just finished Eric Blanc's Red State Revolt which was about the teacher strikes in 2018 in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, which I can recommend as well.

        You can find lots of other ones if you go looking around, as well as finding books that tackle different issues that aren't explicitly policy related but that are still deeply relevant to education in America (e.g. Dave Cullen's Columbine and Parkland tackle the topics of school shootings).

        1 vote
  2. Akir
    Link
    Are they forcing students to go through long lectures or are they going freeform? If you can take control of the schedule you can fill it with all kinds of extra things. I would recommend having...

    Are they forcing students to go through long lectures or are they going freeform? If you can take control of the schedule you can fill it with all kinds of extra things. I would recommend having them learn an instrument, as that is largely self guided.

    7 votes
  3. tomf
    Link
    If school is going virtual for the next bit, are kids still required to go to a local school or can they hit up an online school (if that's a thing... which it might be)?

    If school is going virtual for the next bit, are kids still required to go to a local school or can they hit up an online school (if that's a thing... which it might be)?

    2 votes