A new longitudinal study of 5,000 mathematically precocious children concludes — as I’ve long thought — that very smart students do not get enough attention in school.
This is one of the Great Connections’ purposes — to provide exceptional learning to exceptional young people, whomever they may be.
What happened to “equality” for them? The equality warriors’ bottom line is to bring everyone to the same level, and that’s not the highest!
Business Insider reports “the overwhelming majority of class time was spent helping low-achieving students get to the middle.
“SMPY (“Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth,”) suggests that teachers should avoid teaching a one-size-fits-all curriculum and instead focus on doing the best they can to create individualized lesson plans for students.”
Biographer Alan Hodges has written that as a child Alan Turing was “fostered in various English homes where nothing encouraged expression, originality, or discovery. Science for him was an extra-curricular passion, first shown in primitive chemistry experiments.”
Ah, when will they learn that the Montessori program does just that and the mathematically gifted can soar as high as they can go in a Montessori classroom?
This Business Insider article is, unfortunately, illustrative of poor thinking, also, since it claims “SMPY has repeatedly found, throughout multiple follow-up analyses, that some of the smartest kids possess a great capacity for spatial reasoning.” Of course it did: it was tracking the mathematically gifted! If they had done a study of the literarily gifted, I’d bet the conclusion would have been different.
The study does have great data to plumb because of its longitudinal perspective.
