'Problem' Students

[Bono]

www.theatlasphere.com/columns/050913-sowell-smart-problems.php

'Problem' Students
Opinion Editorial   by Thomas Sowell - Sep 13, 2005
During my first semester of teaching, many years ago, I was surprised to encounter the philosophy that the brightest students did not need much help from the teacher because "they can get it anyway" and that my efforts should be directed toward the slower or low-performing students.

This advice came from my department chairman, who said that if the brighter or more serious students "get restless" while I was directing my efforts toward the slower students, then I should "give them some extra work to do to keep them quiet."

I didn't believe that the real difference between the A students and the C students was in inborn intelligence, but thought it was usually due to differences in attitudes and priorities. In any event, my reply was that what the chairman proposed "would be treating those who came here for an education as a special problem!"

A few days later, I handed in my resignation. It turned out to be only the first in a series of my resignations from academic institutions over the years.

Unfortunately, the idea of treating the brighter or more serious students as a problem to be dealt with by keeping them busy is not uncommon, and is absolutely pervasive in the public schools. One fashionable solution for such "problem" students is to assign them to help the less able or less conscientious students who are having trouble keeping up.

In other words, make them unpaid teacher's aides!

High potential will remain only potential unless it is developed. But the very thought that high potential should be developed more fully never seems to occur to many of our educators — and some are absolutely hostile to the idea.

It violates their notions of equality or "social justice" and it threatens the "self-esteem" of other students. As a result, too often a student with the potential to become a future scientist, inventor, or a discoverer of a cure for cancer will instead have his time tied up doing busy work for the teacher.

Even so-called "gifted and talented" programs often turn out to be simply a bigger load of the same level of work that other students are doing — keeping the brighter students busy in a separate room.

My old department chairman's notion that the better students "can pretty much get it without our help" assumes that there is some "it" — some minimum competence — which is all that matters.

People like this would apparently be satisfied if Einstein had remained a competent clerk in the Swiss patent office and if Jonas Salk, instead of discovering a cure for polio, had spent his career puttering around in a laboratory and turning out an occasional research paper of moderate interest to his academic colleagues.

If developing the high potential of some students wounds the "self-esteem" of other students, one obvious answer is for them to go their separate ways in different classrooms or different schools.

There was a time when students of different ability levels or performance levels were routinely assigned to different classes in the same grade or to different schools — and no one else collapsed like a house of cards because of wounded self-esteem.

Let's face it: Most of the teachers in our public schools do not have what it takes to develop high intellectual potential in students. They cannot give students what they don't have themselves.

Test scores going back more than half a century have repeatedly shown people who are studying to be teachers to be at or near the bottom among college students studying in various fields. It is amazing how often this plain reality gets ignored in discussions of what to do about our public schools.

Lack of competence is only part of the problem. Too often there is not only a lack of appreciation of outstanding intellectual development but a hostility towards it by teachers who are preoccupied with the "self-esteem" of mediocre students, who may remind them of what they were once like as students.

Maybe the advancement of science, of the economy, and finding a cure for cancer can wait, while we take care of self-esteem.


Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is Black Rednecks and White Liberals, in which he argues that "internal" cultural habits of industriousness, thriftiness, family solidarity, and reverence for education often play a greater role in the success of ethnic minorities than do civil-rights laws or majority prejudices.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

The brightest students in the class don't need school - especially grade school.  They absorb all of the learning they need on their own, and grade school is only an annoying interlude: glorified daycare until they can actually start learning things that are not blindingly obvious.

From grades 1-7, I sat there going, "WTF am I jumping through hoops for?  I know this already.  I'm being forced to listen to tedious lessons on the planets of the solar system, when at home I'm reading Smithsonian magazine articles about competeing theories of the formation thereof."

In second grade I was calculating the areas of circles using pi*r^2.  I watched a PBS home-education program on trigonometry, and figured out on my own that the tangent of 45 degrees was 1.  Then I went to school where we learned the difference between acute and obtuse triangles.

So grade school teachers don't need to spend more time "developing the minds" of the bright kids.  The bright kids will get along just fine without their glorified babysitters helping them.  It's the dumb kids who need their attention.

[Blue Rectangle]

The Left has a near monopoly on education in this country.  The Left's education philosophy is analogous to their economic philosophy, which is that the economically successful are somehow guilty of various offenses (greed, luck, etc.) while the "disadvantaged", as the name implies, are poor only because of external factors beyond their control.  Thus the noble pursuit of equality demands that success is punished and failure rewarded.

The Left's education plan is the same.  Faster learning students are viewed as a problem.  Numerous roadblocks are used to keep these students in their place: early starting is strongly discouraged, as are grade skipping and early graduation.  As Sowell notes, "gifted and talented" are just extra busy work.  These programs are meant to keep the students busy and, more importantly, to keep them from advancing beyond their current grade.  (And notice the politically correct name "gifted" that the children receive--the implication is that the children learn well because of a gift from someone else, not because they are ambitious or simply enjoy learning.)

I think Sowell actually misses the mark somewhat in his conclusion.  The self-esteem drive is really just a means to an end: forced equality.  The reason schools stopped rewarding success and talent (an event that, not coincidentally, occurred about the same time that education in this country started to fail) had less to do with not offending average students and more to do with a desire to not provide motivation (and even to provide discouragement) to faster students.  The goal is for all students to move at an equally slow pace--and judging by countless studies of U.S. student performance versus the rest of the world, we have achieved that goal.

[John Dibble]

The brightest students in the class don't need school - especially grade school.  They absorb all of the learning they need on their own, and grade school is only an annoying interlude: glorified daycare until they can actually start learning things that are not blindingly obvious.

From grades 1-7, I sat there going, "WTF am I jumping through hoops for?  I know this already.  I'm being forced to listen to tedious lessons on the planets of the solar system, when at home I'm reading Smithsonian magazine articles about competeing theories of the formation thereof."

In second grade I was calculating the areas of circles using pi*r^2.  I watched a PBS home-education program on trigonometry, and figured out on my own that the tangent of 45 degrees was 1.  Then I went to school where we learned the difference between acute and obtuse triangles.

So grade school teachers don't need to spend more time "developing the minds" of the bright kids.  The bright kids will get along just fine without their glorified babysitters helping them.  It's the dumb kids who need their attention.

Keep this in mind - not every bright kid has access to the knowledge without being taught it in school. My Godfather is an extremely bright guy, but he's also a high school dropout with no college degree - reason is pretty much is that he was ahead of the rest of the class, bored with the knowledge, and the teachers would scold him if he tried to ask a question about uncovered material. If the teachers had recognized that he needed more(and more challenging) material to learn or would give it to him when they did then maybe he wouldn't have dropped out.

[Jake]

I hate school simply because it is geared towards bringing everyone up to the same mediocre level, rather than teaching every kid to reach their potential. I can relate to Beef's school experiences later 4-8 grade, but early on I had two great teachers deviated from the approved curriculum specifically to teach the kids who could handle more difficult material. Once I got to 4th grade, that went away. We were tested on Switzerland for some reason, and one question was how many nations border Switzerland. Knowing my geography, I said five, but the teacher marked it wrong because I wasn't supposed to know Liechtenstein was a country. (Geography was my life from 4th to 6th grade BTW) Now, in high school I'm sitting in Government class learning about the origins of the Constitution when I come home here and debate the merits of different parts of it. The teacher us currently formulating extra projects I can do instead of some of the more mundane worksheet crap we do, but even that isn't an option when the teacher doesn't care. People talk about education failing lew capable students. Wrong, education fails those who are highly capable, but never receive a challenge.

[opebo]

Whether children are 'bright' or stupid isn't really very important in determining their course in life - their economic class determines that.  For example a rich stupid will do very well, while a poor smart will usually go to jail.

That said, most of what we call 'intelligence' is actually just class-ques that tell us how much someone is worth in the social heirarchy.

[A18]

For example a rich stupid will do very well

I wouldn't say you're doing all that well.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

For example a rich stupid will do very well

I wouldn't say you're doing all that well.

hee-hee... Phillip made a funny.

[jokerman]

From grades 1-7, I sat there going, "WTF am I jumping through hoops for?  I know this already. 

Definitly something I can relate to.

[Alcon]

At the same time I was bored through (pretty much) eighth grade, it was a valuable experience for the social skills, which is one reason that homeschooling can put one at a disadvantage.

[ilikeverin]

Yes, I enjoyed grades 1-3 and 5-7 very much due to socializing

[Citizen James]

An intersting article.  One part rational observaton and critisism, two parts inane partisan ranting, and a dash or two of holier than thou.

I do agree that gifted students do need to be challenged, and in a way that expands their horizions rather than simply burdening them down with extra work.

However blaming it all on the bugaboo of 'self esteem' is a steaming load of horse trot.  Consider the principal's problem - limited (and these days frequently shrinking) funding, and future funding depends on all students meeting the minimal but constantly increasing standards of NCLB (all children are expected to become above average).  Knowing that their schools, and quite possibly their jobs, rests on the lowest scoring students; they not suprisingly slash everything that doesn't help bring the lowest scores up - band, art, and gifted education.   Further, with a lack of resources they do ask the smarter students to help the less knowledgable.   There are benefits to teaching as demonstrating concepts can help someone to better grasp them for themselves.

Ironically, his arguements dance around another important concept - the self esteem of hard working and gifted students.  Academic success is not a simple one variable equation - both inborn intelelgence (in different forms of intellegence), and effort, as well as enviormental factors (ever try to think hard when you haven't eaten all day) play a role in the ability for a student to understand material.   The student's self concept also plays a role in how well they learn, along with their emotional state. (When do you do your best thinking - when you're in a inquisitive mood and feeling safe, or when you're angry, frustrated, and feeling threatened?)

I am sorry that his old department chair was a jerk, but Einsien wouldn't have benefited from a gifted program of the time.  Most of his teachers, either due to the bigotry of the day or his learning disabilities, considered him a complete dunce.

Though he doesn't mention the term, he is advocating tracking.  My main concern with tracking is that it tends to be too rigid - students do not always have the same skills across the board, and their level of effort changes over time.  I would prefer a grouping by a skill level which is mobile given a student's most recent performance in recent classes, rather than branded for life or only evaluated every five years or so.

Now I'd like to see if anyone can back up his claims of teachers having 'low test scores', and if the ones with low test scores are the ones who stay in teaching or are part of the very sizable portion of teachers who drop out of teaching by their third year.  (teachers are paid more poorly than most other professionals with similar levels of education, and often require long hours, impatient administrators, and parents who refuse to take an active role in their children's lives).   Otherwise all his statement is is a rehashing of Sturgions law (90% of everything is crap).  I don't know if Sturgion is correct, but from what I've seen in the buisness world there are a lot of people out there who don't have the slightest clue what they're doing, and a lot more who know little beyond the scope of taking credit for other people's work and covering their @$$es.

Self esteem is important.  People without it tend to make a half-assed effort regardles of their skill, and in more severe cases tend to engage in self-destructive behavior.  People with good self esteem tend to have a can-do attitude and generally succeed and make the world a better place with the process.

I think part of the problem with the concept of self esteem is people not understanding self esteem.  It is not egotism, egotists talk tough but they shudder inside - boasting to compensate the inner fear that they are dumb, weak and useless.  It is not empty praise.  Even young children can see through such shallowness.  It is an honest assessment and apriciation of ones own skills in life, understanding one's strengths and weaknesses and having confidence in one's abilities.