philobiblius

(Sorry about the long delay between these two entries!)

The following is from the Annual Report (#18) of the Board of Education, Saint Louis Missouri, in 1872 - including the Superintendent's discussion of their high school's system of promotion.

This is the second of two excerpts from the Annual Report. This is focused on how to avoid the evils of the standard promotion system! With no further delay, the words of Dr. W. T. Harris:

"In our St. Louis schools the classification is so arranged in the lower grades of the District Schools that classes follow each other at intervals of about six weeks. Should it be necessary to put back a pupil to a lower class, he finds it at just that stage of progress which will enable him to review and strengthen those portions of his course that need it. But this system allows of another advantage. As the highest class loses numbers by promotion, graduation or otherwise, its ranks are filled with the best pupils from the next lower class. The latter is again recruited by promotion of the best from the next one below it. This process is continued to the lowest class in school. After such a promotion bas been made the account stands thus: each class has sent forward perhaps one-third of its pupils (the best ones) to the next one above it, and has received the best third of the pupils from the class below. There has been no degradation of pupils.

What can be said is that two-thirds of each class (including all the fair and middling scholars) were left, and a few of the foremost in rank of those below them admitted with them. Within less than a half year's work the studious and brilliant pupils will work up to the top of the class. There will always be differences of native power as well as of previous acquirement. Before a half year has elapsed the two-thirds of a given class who pass for " fair and middling" scholars will be overtaken and, in some instances, surpassed by the brilliant pupils admitted from the lower class. A change of the kind I have mentioned, amounting to a readjustment of all the classes, is desirable as often as four times a year. If made, it will entirely prevent the collection, in any one class, of the dull and incapable scholars. These, for the most part, are pupils who have not become thoroughly aroused, or, more frequently, such as have become discouraged by degradation in rank. Their -defect is not primarily intellectual, but moral; they have feeble wills. It is very rare that a pupil has so dull an intellect that he cannot, if he possess a resolute will, accomplish any intellectual feat whatever by the aid of industry alone. Those who fail, do so through lack of courage or of perseverance. This furnishes the strongest ground of all against manipulating the system of classification in such a manner as to make those who are not promoted feel that they are degraded. By the method here described, I think the minimum of discouragement isreached. Two-thirds or more of the class—enough to preserve the identity of the class—remain after any re-classification, and, as this embraces many fair scholars, none feel that they have been slighted. The change made has elevated the fair in rank to the highest rank in class, and those who were poor to the rank of fair—at least for a time. Stimulated by this, they frequently increase in self-respect and develop powers that had hitherto lain dormant.

A number of years ago, I attended a lecture given by the late Dr. Ted Sizer. For those of you who don't recognize the name, he was the founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, one of the more established educational reform movements. At that point, he was Dean of Brown University's School of Education, but previously he'd held the same title at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and still earlier he'd been headmaster of Phillipss Academy Andover.

Sizer enjoyed startling his audiences and this speech was no exception.

"I believe in tracking," he declared. Then he paused to let his words sink in.

"...so long as there is one track for every student." The other shoe had dropped and the audience felt much better!

In a subsequent conversation, I hearkened back to that speech, which he recalled with a chuckle. "But Ted, doesn't that imply that fully individualized education is the way to go?"

While he did not initially get my point, after a bit he conceded that perhaps that was the logical extension of his comment, but he did not concede that it was necessarily what was actually best.

---

But what does that have to do with acceleration or physics? Bear with me briefly. We'll get there.

In educationese, for more than 100 years, acceleration has usually meant skipping a grade (1). Radical acceleration has been defined by Miraca Gross for at least a decade as resulting in high school graduation 3 or more years (2). More recently, acceleration has included a variety of techniques including subject-only acceleration - techniques that are almost as old as grade skipping.

Physics, on the other hand, says Acceleration is defined as the rate of change of velocity. Acceleration is inherently a vector quantity, and an object will have non-zero acceleration if its speed and/or direction is changing (3). (Velocity = speed and direction, both.)

To my mind, grade skipping barely deserves the label of acceleration at all. Imagine, if you will, a car going 60 miles per hour along a straight highway. No acceleration, right? Now, a beam of light appears around the car; the car disappears; then the beam places the car two miles ahead on the same highway going in the same direction.

The car has only been displaced - everything else remains the same: speed and direction.

This is almost a perfect metaphor for grade skipping. The student finishes a particular grade or even a particular day of a particular grade and then is a year removed forward from there without a change in the pace of the school or the direction of the student.

The thing that makes this not a perfect metaphor is that the first month or two in the accelerated school often involves some scrambling on the part of the student to acquire the full academic year of material that has been skipped past - it is often the most exciting time in the student's academic life! And it is sufficient for many if not most skippers. But for some of them (hg? pg? who knows!), the return to the regular pace after that burst of excitement is just as stultifying as the original grade was and all the student's reasons for being skipped return in spades, often to the thorough frustration of the school and/or parents, who thought they had dealt with the student's needs.

This is why we have radical acceleration.

From the physics perspective, though, there is more than a bit of irony in the resistance that so many teachers, principals, schools and districts give to acceleration.

It is not just that as educational interventions go that acceleration is among the most studied and best proven, though those are true and I am sure other bloggers have written about it and linked to A Nation Deceived among other documents that support this position.

It is that acceleration is an active standard tool actively used in almost every public school in America. I can imagine a few raised eyebrows, but remember that change in velocity is the definition of acceleration I am using, which means a change in speed and/or direction.

Our slower students and our SPED students get the benefit of acceleration regularly. (Or not the benefit in the case of grade retention!) Change in curriculum, extra time, adjusted curriculum or assignments or testing. Change in room for part of the time to get more support.

All of this is acceleration. And all of it would and does benefit the gifted student who gets it, too. Change the pace. Change the type of delivery. More or less time on a topic. adjusted curriculum or assignments or assessment.

I don't know that this is astonishing news. I don't claim that it is a new perspective. It's just the only thing I thought I had to say on the topic of acceleration. Hmmm... not quite.

In those times 100 years ago, they were conscious of having as much as 5 levels of knowledge (current year minus 2 through current year plus 2) in their cities' 4th grades, for example. They were conscious that as many as 25% of the students were one or more years accelerated in their knowledge, even when they were not accelerated by grade, let alone those who were accelerated by grade.

(1) For example, Annual report of the School Committee and of the superintendent of schools of the City of Chicopee for the year ending November 30th, 1914 (<http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?num=1&u=1&seq=16&view=plaintext&size=100&id=uiug.30112088234122&q1=accelerated>)
(2) http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10349.aspx
(3) http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/acca.html

"Vast sums are yearly squandered to no purpose. If the books selected consist of extracts and compilations, wholly unsuited to the capacity of children - if the house is cold or crowded, inconvenient and uncomfortable - and especially if given over to the management of an incompetent teacher, the school becomes a scene of anarchy and confusion, and all is waste-the young mind becomes disgusted with books and schools and teachers, and hates learning forever after.

...

"The entire premises... should be an enchanting spot, sheltered alike from the cold blasts of winder, and the summer's scorching sun; a place of love, of kindness and good will; and not a place of whips, consternation, despotism and terror."

J. D. Pierce, Sup't of Schools, Michigan, December, 1836 (Senate Document 7)
from
Journal of the Senate of the State of Michigan, January, 1837.

(also from System of Public Instruction and Primary School Law of Michigan (Document No. 6)
Prepared by Francis W. Sherman, Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1852)

"During the middle part of the last century individual teaching fell into disgrace and... the emphasis was placed on class teaching and class organization. Indeed, a careful perusal of [journals] would almost lead one to believe that individual children scarcely existed in the schools..., so little is said of their needs.

"Matters in America, however, began to change for the better in the seventies... The importance of the individual child has since then been brought to the front slowly but surely, until now the principle is rather firmly established that the school should be organized to meet the varying needs of the individuals who comprise it."

School organization and the individual child: a book for school executives and teachers, being an exposition of plans that have been evolved to adapt school organization to the needs of individual children, normal, supernormal and subnormal. By William H. Holmes (1912)

Optional Work. - A wide variation in the abilities and attainments of children makes optional work an essential factor of effective teaching. Since all pupils cannot go the same pace, it is important that some special provision be made which will insure a maximum accomplishment for each. In well-regulated schools this condition is provided for by adjusting the assignment to the average ability of the class and then providing special aid for the weakest of the group, and optional work of a supplemental character for the unusually gifted children.

With all of its defects the country school of a quarter century ago was strongest in caring for the unusually gifted children. These were given great freedom in thought, in rate of accomplishment, and in the materials assigned. The graded system with all of its improvement has decidedly narrowed the range of opportunity of the gifted child. Supplemental provisions, such as optional work, must be introduced to restore these opportunities for maximum development.

To be effective, optional work should not be merely incidental or 'busy work.' It must be an organic part of the school program. It should feature in both the assignment and the recitation with as much prominence as does the regular work of the class.

(Leaving the discussion of gifted)

Constant acceptance of the utterances of textbook writers and teachers, by pupils, slowly but surely develops a servile dependence which negatives the underlying factors in responsibility.


Unfortunately the school has fostered an enormous amount of docility.

The Essentials of Good Teaching By Edwin Arthur Turner, Lotus Delta Coffman
1920

(Originally posted Feb. 24th, 2007. Original title: 87 years later)

The literature on giftedness, what it is, how to raise and/or teach and/or counsel these children, is fairly extensive. It goes back more than 100 years ago, and about 90 years ago, they had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't.

Doesn't mean that they did it at any point in the intervening years or that there are many places doing it now. Merely that the failure to do it well is from a failure to do one of a few things: 1) Research; 2) Believe what you read; 3) Learn from your mistakes.

This is the generous view of it...

On the fictional side of things, there are only so many plots that are out there.

The first breakout is that you have one gifted kid or you have a bunch of them. The Odd Johns of the world - both IRL and fiction - are plentiful. The groups are less common, excepting only the super hero genre of comic books and novelizations.

Wilmar Shiras wrote about Children of the Atom years before the X-Men (or the Tomorrow People) came into being. A brilliant boy doesn't quite fit in without calling attention to himself and gets found out by a psychologist. Together, they seek out more like him, find them, and pull them together, only to discover that society is not ready for these kids to be working together. But, they are good kids, and want to make the world a better place.

Stephanie Tolan's Welcome to the Ark tells a similar tale, though there is more to these children than just intelligence.

The X-Men are mutants and, originally, gifted youngsters who need to learn to use their powers. The bigotry against them, as mutants, is usually blind and without regard to circumstance. It doesn't help that not all mutants are altruistic. Some are 'merely' self-serving and/or opportunists. Some have the urge to dominate and control others. Some just want to tear things down.

This, then is the crux of the issue: How do we know that if we have kids with these powers, that they will use them for the good of humanity, or at least our nation?

John Brunner's Children of the Thunder asks that question and suggests that not only do we not know it, but that if there are some of these kids with noble objectives and others with more self-centered goals, that all other things being equal, the negative approach will win out.

There is another wringer to be tossed in here - perhaps the most common type of tale that explores this stuff even slightly seriously. What if the institution that is training the children is corrupt, regardless of the original plan? John Brunner addressed this before he looked at the other - an individual gifted person, escaped from his school where he felt he was mistreated. Much of the novel is spend following our protagonist as he eludes capture in a world made up of plug in employees. (Shockwave Rider - Editor)

Jarod, in The Pretender, a TC series, has a remarkably similar path - escaping from The Center and adopting a variety of guises and careers to find out about his background while being a do-gooder everywhere he goes.

James Patterson's Maximum Ride series takes the perfidy of mad scientists and the evil institution and combines them with kids who are not merely gifted in their thinking. They have wings - and they have escaped from The School, whose owners and directors do NOT have the kids' best interests at heart.
*******

But in many ways, the questions asked, the puzzles shown, are consistent from book to book and show to show. How alone am I? How do I connect with others? If I run, where will I run too? What happens when my friends discover just how weird I really am?

Why am I so alone? And often, What is wrong with me?
******

(originally written Jan. 12th, 2008)

Postscript: This whole topic deserves a longer look. In addition to the titles/topics above, there is the counterpart to Xavier's School for Gifted Children, called Massachusetts Academy, where the Hellfire Club trained its future members (or cannon fodder). An interesting counter to the X-Men version of things is Aaron Williams' PS238, the School for Metaprodigy Children and its internal counter, Praetorian Academy. Also worth a look, at least briefly, is the movie Sky High.