That glass ceiling! Part 2

[var123]

Continuing the discussion about artificial limits placed on G&T children, and the resulting impact on their health and happiness (not to mention futures).

Do they really matter less because they have a perceived "advantage"?!

original thread here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/gifted_and_talented/2507232-The-glass-ceiling-for-very-able-children?

You see I don't think that maths is the only area where high ability children need to be guided (I think I prefer that term to 'taught').

If you take history for example, learning facts about a period is only the very bottom line. A bit like learning the addition and multiplication tables in maths. The next step is to learn to read a text and make a critical analysis of it, to be able to put it within the context of that period (that's where you need the knowledge of that period to be able to do it).
Now my question is: can we really expect even very able children to learn to critique a text all on their own ??

I'm not as good on the subject of litterature but again I'm pretty sure that litterature at a higher level isn't just about reading book or being able to write a story. Maturity was mentioned but there are also plenty of techniques that can be used etc etc.

So can we really expect children to deepen their undertanding on their own. Yes of course some (maybe the 1/1000??) will be able to do up to a point, maybe within the secondary curriculum. Others (the 1/100 or the 1/10) will need guidance much earlier on, even when the aim is 'just' to deepen knowledge. (But that guidance I imagine won't happen or will be sketchy at best, as there is no space for that within the limits of the classroom - time issue etc etc)

I do take noble point about the expectation of parents for the school to teach level 8 maths in a class where they are supposed to be at level6.
Now I suspect this is because that's what parents have been told:

• the teaching WILL be differenciated according to the level of your child.
• the teaching is 'linear' so if you have learn xx then you move onto yy.

At least, that's what I have been told when I enquired about dc1 being ahead. You cant possibly move him a year ahead. he will be taught at his level within the classroom.

The other thing is that teachers need to be careful as to what they say to the children. When children are told, you are a level 6, this is what we would expect someone who is in Y8 (Y9??? I actually don't know), then they assume they could walk into that class and follow the lesson wo a problem. Even though I suspect this is far from the truth.
This is the message that my own dc got from his teachers.... There has never been an expectation to go deeper, just move from one level to the next (as reported by school when they said xx is at a level and is expected to move by two sub level within the year)

cat if you don't think that chess or coding or Martin Gardner puzzles will help a mathematician with exactly the sort of skills you need to do proper maths (not grocery bill calculations like they learn at school) then you don't know much about maths!

lurked I actually have retained informatio from dc1 when he was in primary.
Because yes some stuff naturally came up but I knew that if I was giving the toolkit before the school, it woud cause too many probelm at school.

So I have never talked about square roots or fractions or whatever else. He would not have appeared as able as irvine dc. But he would have been even more bored that he was.

noble I don't think that was cat point.
What she is saying is that children, like herself, might just not enjoy playing chest even if they are keen mathematicians.
So you can't just fill the gap by saying 'Play chest instead'.
So being good at chest will help with maths.
But being good at maths doesn't mean you will enjoy chest.

lurked I wouldn't avoid talking about maths, it's actively teaching the curriculum systematically and thoroughly that causes the most problems. The parents who buy a workbook and teach little Johnny the column method etc, not the parent who talks about infinity and looks for symmetry and patterns in stuff.

A bit disappointingly, I've just found out what my two think about maths, and it turns out that neither like it. In both cases, its their best subject in terms of attainment and Ds2, at least, used to be really passionate about it.

There are school subjects that they positively do like, so its not a teenage attempt at being cool, but maths is not one of them. Worse, they both give the same reason "Its boring. We just do the same things over and over."

Two swallows do not make a summer, but I suspect that they aren't the only ones who lose their way thanks to how maths is taught and more specifically to always moving forward slowly before stopping again for extended periods.

I find this especially disappointing when you consider that I delivered two able, hardworking boys who were ready and eager to learn into the school system. I actually feel personally let down by the system and secondary school's maths dept.

It's not a case of demanding your child is taught l8 in a l6 class. Just expecting that if your child is l8, they aren't expected to sit and join in and listen to repititive explainations of l6 when they are already beyond it. Or more accurately in the case of our local comprehensive, 'consolidating' l4.

consolidating' l4! Is that the top set, or don't they set?

IME the potential for high ability in English can manifest itself quite early on (DC that are highly verbal/imaginative/expressive) but they need constant input and output over a number of years across a full spectrum of verbal and psychological activities in order to realise their talents. Some DC just don't get the exposure.

Wood but the child might like chess. What I'm saying is that a parent could think 'ooh my child is good at maths, let's teach him chess or buy her a raspberry pi or a book of logic puzzles'. But what we have is 'ooh my child is good at maths, let's buy a carol vorderman book and teach them long division'.

noble - I understand what you say about the best way for parents to nurture maths skills and I agree with you in theory. But DP did with the DSSs and does with DD precisely what you say parents shouldn't do, to great effect - he systematically checks what the DC have done at school in maths, checks understanding, plugs any gaps and stretches them 20% on topic.

He is, however, excellent at maths!

Checking what they have done at school and reinforcing is good. Teaching them stuff they haven't done in school but will be doing in school is not.

I bet English teachers don't get kids rolling their eyes when Of Mice and Men comes out saying 'my dad did that with me last year'.

var I wonder how much of that is down to teachers. My DD likes maths this year, and hates French, although in terms of giftedness, her ability in languages outstrips her talent for maths. This is purely down to the quality of the teaching.

I do think, though, that teaching in maths is far more important than in some other subjects. My DD has never had any formal teaching in English (at school, she she is "taught" English as a MFL), and apart from buying books I don't get involved either. Yet she can write better than most educated adults. It's much the same in her other language (french) - she could spell almost perfectly by the time she started formal education, and I think it's fair to say that she would be at the same point now with her writing if she'd never attended school at all (note: I'm talking about functional and creative writing here, and not about studying literature).

I think even the most self-motivated, gifted child would struggle to get to this point in maths without formal tuition of any kind.

I'm sure they wouldn't noble as a revisit of the text would no doubt throw up other lenses from which to view it.

As silly as it sounds, I can picture Ds2 age 6 doing maths. He was enthralled with it.

Then his Y2 teacher said he was too far ahead and he'd have to re-do everything (and then she got rid of all his hard work and made him spend the whole year doing it again, but slowly). Yet, although he was hurt and confused, it did not diminish his eager response when the Y3 teacher started to teach something new.

Year by year, I have watched him lose the excitement but there were always moments when you could still see it ready to come out again. There were times when he couldn't be bothered trying for the 100% in the tests, when he'd get 95% without trying. but he always found a 2nd wind and would start making an effort again.

Now he's in year 7, and he's been told that he's to re-do Y6 again (in the sense that he stuck re-doing L6), he just seems to have given up hoping and waiting for things to improve.

I am just really hacked off with everything that's been done to him, right now.

Going to start trying to think of ways to re-engage him again. (and if that means teaching ahead then its what i will do. Look where i've ended up doing things the school's way!)

I guess it depends.

My DC had read quite a few of the texts/seen the plays on the English Lit and drama curricula.

And DD, it being her nature, had discussed them quite fully with me (DS less so). But I don't think doing them again was a problem at GCSE, as she had a hell of a lot of other stuff going on.

At A level, it really doesn't matter as the class and teachers are just bringing so much extra to the party. It's just a joy for her to go to class.

"I bet English teachers don't get kids rolling their eyes..."

It turns out DD read a few GCSE texts in her upper-KS2 home-life. She just read and casually discussed them though. We didn't have her rote learning mark-scheme-compliant literary 'analysis'.

noble I see what you mean, but it's not that black and white. Or at least it wasn't for us. Eg I remember explaining both the concept of units/ tens/ hundreds and later decimal places in the supermarket. Not in a loud parenting way, just because she asked. And 'just got' it. We covered basic algebra cos she came home from a friends having seen an older sibling doing it and asked me about it. Same for other things, whether they were maths or any other subject.

When she was 10 and at that stage where she read kid books too quickly, but adult ones weren't always appropriate or of interest, it was easy to steer her away from possible nc literature, because there's loads of other choices. But answering 'Why do people inherit some stuff but not others?' is going to encroach on future nc however you answer it.

I'll also say my parents weren't exactly in the normal supportive category, let alone the type to push me through school curriculum for kudos. But natural ability and curiosity, combined with unnatural independence meant I was nearly always ahead of the curriculum.

Sorry var missed that. Yes, top set.

I'm wondering whether we should teach DS things like column addition or long division. The result of being interested, bright, and not taught seems to be he's coming up with muddled half-ways of doing things that he can't communicate on paper. Leaping ahead in some areas and leaving huge gaping gaps where he doesn't have the concepts or the formal ways of writing things down. It feels to me that he's getting shaky foundations by not learning things in some sort of logical order and being left to reinvent the wheel. I am trying to give him some puzzles, it's fun and good practice, but it doesn't mend the holes in the foundations. School is just too little too late. He got place value the first time they covered it, the next 3 times he learned nothing, and it looks like they're still doing it for the next two years at least.
Noble, chess and coding exercise some of the muscles needed to do maths. Puzzles more or less depending on their nature, but the more mathematical they get the more of the mathematical toolkit they need to tackle them. I feel that a child who loves actual maths probably shouldn't be sidelined away into related fields just for the convenience of the schooling system.
I don't know; but you can't have the argument that high level maths training like sports or music should be provided outside school and then basically ban it from actually teaching any maths.

cat I couldn't say. I taught dd column addition/ subtraction, but again because I was doing it (unrelated to her) and she asked how I did lots of numbers in my head. So I just showed her on paper. And she then wanted to do it.

By contrast, I missed long division and multiplication, and only years later realised I'd been doing my own round the houses long method. It did however slow down my working in anything requiring it, which was always a bonus as it reduced boredom time slightly for a while.

I totally agree with catkind. MY ds's school doesn't teach column method until KS2, and told parents not to teach children either. So, I told him not to used it, in Yr1. In yr2, he was suddenly given YR4 material and didn't know any formal written methods. He can calculate in his head, but didn't know how to show workings on the paper. And He was left to do workbooks on his own most of the time, without any assistance. That's when I started searching online tutorials and found Khan. I haven't stopped him to go further since. The school can change mind so suddenly depending on teacher. This year, he is doing YR3 stuff, but never know what happens next year. I certainly not going to stall him anymore.
But I am not sitting him down and made or make him do some work. He does it by his own will. And I don't even know what he is doing at the moment. Only rule I gave him was he have to follow NC on IXL, and don't move onto next year stuff until he has finished current level he is working on, so at least he doesn't get any gaps in his knowledge.

My DD has definitely read books at school that she has already "done" at home. For example: we read Matilda together when she was in the equivalent of Year 3. She saw the musical in London twice the same year. She bought the CD of the music and listened to it on a loop for a year. She watched the DVD of the film version at least 5 times. She read the book to herself. At the end of Y6 she did a week's residential devoted exclusively to putting on a show of the musical.

And then Matilda is on the Y7 syllabus.

Ho hum.

I actually agree with noble re trying NOT to teach the maths that will be done at school and have tried to avoid it, not always successfully. I did avoid teaching DC column method etc and instead challenged the DC to find their own mental methods for larger numbers. I knew school would do the formal stuff.

Strangely, DS's reception teacher seems to be expecting me to do teach ahead. This week the class home work involve recognising, writing and counting to 12. As she knows this is far too easy for DS, she sent home a workbook for us to do instead. It involved identifying from a group of numbers multiples of 5 and 10. I therefore needed to explain to him what a multiple was (took less than 5 minutes). He did the work with ease, then discussed multiples of 2 with me too. It's going to be somewhat boring for him when it eventually gets covered at school . . .

Noble, have ordered a Michael Gardner book after reading your earlier post. Which book would you recommend for able kids aged 10 to 12?