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Oh no, gifted programs are super-helpful because most teachers don't have the training or skill to deal with students who can work things out during the first explanation - when they're staffed by teachers who are trained for it. I know the one I was in wasn't, it was mostly just more assignments. It's hard for them to teach kids the value of hard work, because they've probably heard they're "smart" their entire life, even outside the gifted class, and so they're more likely to believe that if they have trouble with the class that it's the class's fault. It really needs to be something that the parents are told when they first find out they've got a gifted child.

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Yeah, as a gifted teacher, the first priority I had was to make shit actually hard to deal with. My first three science lessons were full of lies (and designed to include experiments that would directly contradict things that I said) until finally one of them called me on it and we started breaking down the importance of actually thinking critically about information you're given and being curious enough to find out for yourself. I was motivated in this due to going through a program myself and remembering how bullshit most of it was.

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Yeah, as a gifted teacher, the first priority I had was to make shit actually hard to deal with. My first three science lessons were full of lies (and designed to include experiments that would directly contradict things that I said) until finally one of them called me on it and we started breaking down the importance of actually thinking critically about information you're given and being curious enough to find out for yourself. I was motivated in this due to going through a program myself and remembering how bullshit most of it was.

 

That sounds awesome! I'm trying hard to remember what the curriculum for my gifted program was, but all I can remember are 1) a set of "math university" worksheets that were written expressly to trick you in every way possible, and 2) several different roleplaying scenarios, like representing the different international leaders of a putative Mars mission, that required cooperation as well as teamwork to be able to succeed. The second, at least, was enormously successful at getting me out from under my own sense of "success" and it's one of my clearest memories from elementary school because of it. It's really great to hear someone thinking critically about how to teach smart kids critical thinking.

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I wish I had had a teacher like you, Miffy. I didn't realise that smart people still needed to work occasionally until I was 19 or 20.

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I'm the same boat, I coasted through until second half of university. And here there was no such thing as a gifted program, so me and my friends would often solve the assignments in the class in half the time, then do whatever homework, then goof off for the rest of the class.

 

 

And yeah Miffy, that's a great move, I too wish someone had a teacher like that.  

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Yeah, as a gifted teacher, the first priority I had was to make shit actually hard to deal with. My first three science lessons were full of lies (and designed to include experiments that would directly contradict things that I said) until finally one of them called me on it and we started breaking down the importance of actually thinking critically about information you're given and being curious enough to find out for yourself. I was motivated in this due to going through a program myself and remembering how bullshit most of it was.

 

Man that sounds pretty awesome.  I suppose I was technically in my high school's gifted class.  For us it just meant talking a lot of AP courses.  I actually wish we had something more like what you describe because my classes were all about preparing us to take the AP exam at the end of the year, which is probably the worst way to actually teach anything.  Not that I didn't learn anything but I felt pretty unprepared when I entered college.  The way I described it was in high school I was a big fish in a little pond.  In college I was still a big fish, but in an ocean of sharks.

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In this thread, all the gifted children brag about how gifted they are while I sit over in the corner and beat rocks together.

O woe!

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In this thread, all the gifted children brag about how gifted they are while I sit over in the corner and beat rocks together.

O woe!

 

you might have noticed the conversation has a dark underbelly, that university is where the party stops

 

let's just say that it took a decade for me to be willing to try and get a graduate degree again and leave it at that

 

there are many things I brag about but brains are not one of them

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you might have noticed the conversation has a dark underbelly, that university is where the party stops

 

Yep, I'm in with all the other gifted kids who eventually hit a wall.  Coasted through high school, ended up dropping out of college in my sophomore year.  My self esteem took a crushing blow that took me years to get over.  Looking back, I can see how ignorantly confident I was before that, because I assumed I would always succeed at everything, because until that point I pretty much had.  Of course that was bullshit.  I had previously failed at lots of things, but they were all things that I quit on really fast rather than putting any work into them to improve (like multiple sports). 

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I am kidding Merus.

 

Also I'm pretty sure had I not been so incredibly, insanely lazy, I would've been in the "gifted" track, too. School was super easy, to the point where I didn't even want to bother. Until college!

 

^ reassuring oneself of one's superiority

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Yeah, I sometimes think about gifted programs and how they're often just a way to quarantine smug little twerps away from the rest of the student population. I was in REACH for DISD since the first grade and I remember enjoying it a lot but never really learning anything. If I weren't an avid reader, which grew into a passion for autodidacticism as I entered college, I could see myself being pretty lazy in terms of my own intellect. It would be nice if gifted programs actually tried to teach the value of hard work and of knowledge for knowledge's sake, but I'm sure there would be massive backlash among kids who just want to sit around and feel smart.

I always just felt gifted or higher level classes were just a the only way to not have the shittiest education ever in a Texas public school.

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Yep, I'm in with all the other gifted kids who eventually hit a wall.  Coasted through high school, ended up dropping out of college in my sophomore year.  My self esteem took a crushing blow that took me years to get over.  Looking back, I can see how ignorantly confident I was before that, because I assumed I would always succeed at everything, because until that point I pretty much had.  Of course that was bullshit.  I had previously failed at lots of things, but they were all things that I quit on really fast rather than putting any work into them to improve (like multiple sports).

From all the parenting material I've read this comes from the very common trap of parents with bright children who tend to praise how smart they are for picking something up quickly. This leads to believing that not picking up something quickly means you're failing (which sucks) and should go do something else. It also ties a lack of effort at learning into self-worth.

I'm trying very hard to praise effort and practice instead, because I'd like to see my kids have more perseverance than I do (essentially zero).

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I was also allegedly 'gifted' and I don't know whether to blame that or protagonist centric media for making me believe in myself as a special snowflake but college certainly deconstructs that idea, especially if you go to study a field you lack a lot of experience. I think it's a natural product of how schools are organised though, since they're based around a particular type of capability being the most important. If you happen to be good at that, school gives you the idea that you're just good at things (and the inverse too).

 

 

 

...also since this is the podcast thread, here's a couple recommendations!

 

Love and Radio by Nick van der Kolk is a really good series where each episode is basically an intimate interview/series of interviews with a person to give a portrait of their world. Usually they're people with a specific world or worldview that differs from the norm, the latest was for a set of phonecalls with a hasidic Jew about his insular community.

 

Also Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything is a podcast where each episode he takes a theme and will have a series of pieces, some fictional, some non-fictional, that explore different aspects to the chosen theme. He recently did a 3 part one called "Man Without a Country". I'm not sure how familiar the story is to others but I'd never heard of it, it's an oft retold tale about a man being sentenced to no longer live in his native land of America and instead forced to sea for the rest of his life. In Walker's version this entails having to fly around in a hot air balloon above the USA. I enjoyed the degree of farce he takes it too while still exploring the ideas in a real way.

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Rather than coming into this thread and complain about gaming podcasts I formerly liked, I thought I'd provide an actual recommendation. I've been listening to a lot of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour lately, and it's been great. It's hosted by Linda Holmes and other contributors to NRP's pop culture blog. They generally talk about two topics (for example "Books for the Fall and Our Favorite Detectives" or "Last Week Tonight and Batman") and then end the show by naming something in pop culture that's making them happy that week. It's funny, smart, and a good chance of pace if you tend to listen to too many gaming podcasts instead.

 

I've actually been making an effort to spend less time on gaming blogs and podcasts lately (mainly only listening to the thumbs and occasionally scanning Polygon headlines). It seemed like the amount of enjoyment I was getting from reading about games and hearing people talking about them was far outweighed by some of the things that were causing me a fair amount of frustration. So, I tried cutting out some of the other gaming podcasts I used to listen to and picking up a few new ones based on recommendations from this thread. So far I've really liked Slate's Political Gabfest, The Bugle, and The Dissolve Podcast, so thanks to whoever recommended them. I'm really enjoying my more balanced podcast diet.

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Unfortunately they stopped doing The Dissolve podcast. I like Filmspotting for movies still, but if anyone else has any recommendations I'd love for you to throw them out there!

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Not a podcast, but related: Pocket Casts has announced a web based version. You can sign up for the beta here. The UI is pretty sparse at the moment, but it syncs your progress with the mobile versions. I'm loving it so far because it lets me listen to my podcasts at work and pick up where I left off during my commute.

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Rather than coming into this thread and complain about gaming podcasts I formerly liked, I thought I'd provide an actual recommendation. I've been listening to a lot of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour lately, and it's been great. It's hosted by Linda Holmes and other contributors to NRP's pop culture blog. They generally talk about two topics (for example "Books for the Fall and Our Favorite Detectives" or "Last Week Tonight and Batman") and then end the show by naming something in pop culture that's making them happy that week. It's funny, smart, and a good chance of pace if you tend to listen to too many gaming podcasts instead.

I hope I am as cool as Glen at that age.

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I tried The Dollop.

 

I subscribed to The Dollop.

 

It is an hour-long or so story about a real historical event, interspersed with riffs on the story and on what people were thinking when they let this happen. Pretty great.

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I was both in the gifted program (I had a higher than average IQ) and LD (learning disabilities)...they eventually figured out that I had ADHD (and I really do...it took me a while to figure out how to fucking concentrate on things).  Grade school was basically hell for me, junior high started off worse and slowly got tolerable and then better...and then something clicked in high school and things started to fall into place as I finally figured out how to deal with my ADHD and I was lucky to have some really good teachers.  I did have to work my ass off at times, and I learned that I couldn't trust what I thought I heard or understood at all and that I had to always second guess myself because I would miss details if I didn't or I would just hear things "wrong."  I also sort of put my social life on hold because I didn't want to distract myself from studying since I had to do more of it (especially early on...later I got better at it, but I would obsessively over-study no matter how well I knew the material).  All that said it was more or less luck than anything else in my case...I happened to have parents who took the right approach in my case, I happened to have a lot of good teachers who helped me, and lots of other factors (including a lot I'm not even aware of I'm sure, along with socioeconomic stuff or whatever...I mean if my family was poorer it would have been harder for my parents to get me the right help just to give one of many examples).

 

Edit: I would add that they took me out of the LD program in 8th grade I think (and they were decreasing my involvement in that all along)...the gifted program wasn't so much a thing in high school either.  One of my best teachers who was my gifted teacher in middle school ended up teaching an AP Physics course an hour before school started for college credit when the high school dropped their physics course.  She was awesome...she and the chemistry teacher fought hard to get a local college to come in and offer the course (which she taught), because they believed that having a physics course was valuable for us.  I remember getting up early to get into school a little over an hour early to take an extra class every day that semester...and then every week we'd have a lab one night where we would come back in at 5:00pm and do a lab that would run until 7:00pm or 8:00pm (I can't remember for certain...that would have been in fall 1997...so its been a loooong time ago).

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Not a podcast, but related: Pocket Casts has announced a web based version. You can sign up for the beta here. The UI is pretty sparse at the moment, but it syncs your progress with the mobile versions. I'm loving it so far because it lets me listen to my podcasts at work and pick up where I left off during my commute.

 

Ooh sweet! I use Pocket Casts on my phone, I recommend it to anyone who wants an app that keeps good track of what episodes you've listened to, how far in you've listened (if you didn't finish the episode) and just generally has a lot of good options like letting you set the Thumbs episodes to auto download when they appear.

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I'm pretty excited about Serial, the new podcast from the creators of This American Life. They're taking one true story and telling it over the course of a season, which sounds like an interesting twist on their regular format. I just finished listening to the preview, and it sounds like it will be a long-form version of This American Life, but focusing solely on the possible wrongful conviction of a high school student for murdering his girlfriend. The first two episodes come out tomorrow.

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Speaking of TAL, Alex Blumberg of TAL and Planet Money recently broke off from the NPR pack to found his own podcasting company. Interestingly enough, he started off his new network with a show about the startup process of the network itself. He goes through the process of branding, securing funding, creating a business plan, etc. He also does a unique thing with his advertising where he actually interviews the advertisers as part of the ad, showing a little bit of the behind the scenes and providing some more context about each advertiser.

 

Anyways, you can listen to it here - 

 

http://hearstartup.com/

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Not a podcast, but related: Pocket Casts has announced a web based version. You can sign up for the beta here. The UI is pretty sparse at the moment, but it syncs your progress with the mobile versions. I'm loving it so far because it lets me listen to my podcasts at work and pick up where I left off during my commute.

This is really good! They offer you a week's trial for free, then a one-off cost of $9 to use it forever. I bought it straight away because the people who make Pocket Casts have always been great at responding to my issues and fixing them super quick.

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Also since I tweeted about it, I guess I'll re-recommend Song Exploder. Someone posted about it way back, and that's how I found it but I've been really enjoying it. It's a great podcast, it takes apart the elements of a song and examines how each piece of it is made in an interview with the composer.

I think most art is made from combining distinct parts, but in a song the pieces all mesh and blend together so well it's extra fascinating to examine them.

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