posted
Feyd, thank you! I have historically constructed somewhat open-ended projects with a rubric for minimum requirements. As long as the parameters are met, the students may do as they will! I do always level with my students - I tell them why we are doing what we do. I express my frustrations and joys to them. I ask them for input. I tell them the goals of the project and grade accordingly.
A lot of you are bringing up something that is hammered on in my gifted ed. classes: Not all gifted students are gifted in all areas. This is crystal clear to me. I loved my G/T kiddos. They all had different areas to shine and different areas where they struggled. I see my role as that of a helper - I encourage and bolster the students' strengths and show them ways to work with their weaknesses. I confess my own weak areas and describe how I am working to improve myself. Basically, I treat my kids as I want to be treated....
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"To this day, I hate doing any kind of math becuase it has such bad associations for me."
I was also terrible in math, and very high in reading and writing skills. I went to a private school in Phoenix, with very small classes, so there was no program for gifted students. We were all just challenged like heck, by each other as much as by the teachers.
The worst for me was that they put me in the higher level math classes, and I should have stayed at grade level. I was always struggling and frustrated.
I learned math when I started teaching. I swear, I had to live more life before I could understand it. Now, I would love to take all those classes again. It is my favorite thing to teach, and English is my least favorite. Go figure.
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Jenny, a lot of people are telling you to leave your classes unstructured, and I know how for a lot of G&T students that works fine. My experience was different, though.
Through most of elementary school I was part of the very local SUMA program. We studied things like ecology and advanced math theories (well, advanced to us--the concept of different bases is one thing I remember as coming from there). It was loads of fun, but the thing is--I don't remember that I learned very much.
Y'see, the folks who ran SUMA were so hot on the idea that gifted students don't need schedules, they need unstructured time and will structure it themselves, that they didn't notice a lot of us weren't structuring it. We were goofing off, or sitting around bored, because there were so many possibilities and we had no idea how to narrow them down.
It wasn't always like that, but more often than not it was the case. I don't know how you teach kids to winnow things down, but handing the time to them sure isn't it.
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Maccabeus, I did try to make that point, but it may have been lost in my unusually long post (for me). Elementary school kids do need structure, no question about it. Highschool kids really need a very mininmal structure. Middleschool is a battleground, because some of the students will be dependent, and many others will still be dependent on the teacher.
What are kids are you dealing with Jenny? I think you mentioned it last time this topic came around, but I didn't notice in this one.
posted
I tested into the gifted program in fifth grade, but I remember one technique that can be used either very well or very poorly, and that is splitting the class into groups dependent on their skill. For me all three times I saw this it was for math. In third grade, my teacher broke up the kids in the class, then taught each group individually. This worked relatively well. She started out with only 3 divisions, the main class, the remedial group, and the gifted group. She later split the gifted group into two groups one more advanced than the other. Later still I was placed into my own group, where I would come in during afternoon recess to receive my weekly assignment, which I usually finished by the second day. Having personal attention from the teacher made up for the fact that I was losing time with my peers. The next year I had a different teacher.
For math she and another teacher each took a section of their combined classes and taught them in two seperate groups. I and about six others were given a table in the back of the room and told to work our way through the math book alone. We weren't allowed to talk to each other, but had to be quiet so as not to interrupt the class being taught. If we had questions for the teacher we had to go in front of the class she was teaching and interrupt her to ask it. Needless to say that was very embarrassing. The result was that I managed to excel at math but I hated it, and I was isolated from the other kids in my class. By the end of the year I'd stopped doing any of my work in that class, and the teacher had to have a conference with my mom. I was bored and frustrated, and had burned out on math and many other subjects.
The next year I was placed in a gifted program. The district bused me and a half dozen other students from our elementary school to another one half an hour away for class. Here the teacher also split the class up for math, but she allowed us to work in groups and floated around the room to help us with problems we had. She also had a planned curriculum for each math group, so we weren't left slogging through every problem on every page as I had been the previous year. Because we were the most gifted kids in the district (there were somewhere around 2000 kids in each grade level and 60 were in the gifted program) There were at least two or three kids in each level so no one was left to study alone. This also worked very well so well that the next year I was placed in an eight grade math course.
So in elementary school I'd suggest splitting kids up into groups to keep them from either getting lost or bored, but make sure to give personal attention to each group, while allowing the group to work together to solve problems. In high school and middle school, you'll usually find kids of various ages in each level of math so the splitting is already done.
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I'm an elementary teacher. I recognize the need of most elementary students to have structure. You have to have a workable infrastructure and a schedule that helps kids understand the pattern of their days. But also, as all elementary teachers know, you must be flexible. I try to teach my kids how to work within parameters and show them where they can find wiggle room. Also, I try to take them toward further independence and flexibility. But I have learned the hard way that an established structure is crucial in the beginning. But then (and this is the evil part, where I teach the kids to think for themselves and thereby give them Power) I explain how I came up with the structure and why things are structured that way. In so doing, I model taking charge of time and tasks. Eventually, perhaps, my students will do these things for themselves.
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and thereby give them Power) I explain how I came up with the structure and why things are structured that way. In so doing, I model taking charge of time and tasks. Eventually, perhaps, my students will do these things for themselves.
