On Dealing with Gifted Students

So, this morning, I made myself cereal like normal. Except it wasn't normal at all. I ran out of Cheerios yesterday and haven't gotten around to refilling my supply. This means I was eating an alternative cereal, stolen from my little brother, with about 2-3 times as much sugar as the Cheerios I know and love. Needless to say, I was doing my morning reading on a bit more of a sugar high than normal.

Speaking of brothers, I came down the stairs this morning and found a bum sleeping on our couch. I was a little confused by this, but then I realized that it was just my brother, who had apparently arrived at the house late last night and crashed there. Not that any of this is related to anything.

So, back to my normal morning (which apparently was not normal at all, but that's not the point). I was eating breakfast and reading Time magazine again. Apparently, I can't avoid it. So, yeah, the cover article is all about what America should be doing about the fact that we treat our smartest kids like crap. Or, at least that's what they claim the article is about. Really, it seems mainly focused on this school in Reno called the Davidson Academy. But, it's the first topic that I'm really interested in, so that's what the post is about.

Now, before I start bashing the article, the author, the politicians, the children, and whatever else comes to mind, I just wanted to say that the school sounds pretty cool. I can totally imagine wanting to go to a school like that when I was about that age (which I think is between 10 and 18, but they weren't too specific). I'm sure they're doing a really good job with the kids that go there (although the article makes it sound like there's only 45 kids or so), and that it's very impressive.

Also, I'm pretty sure that when I actually was that age, I did qualify as gifted by the standards they were using in the article (top .1% of the population on certain "gifted" tests, although I didn't take the same tests they call out, but we'll just assume that the gifted tests I took are equivalent, alright). So, when I relate my own experiences and opinions of the situation the gifted students face, just trust me that it's coming from a qualified background (whoo for asking for trust over the Internet!). Also, I make no claims whatsoever about my "gifted" status anymore (and I'm pretty sure this blog is evidence against said status).

For one, I more or less totally agree that the school system doesn't really have a response for the kids who learn quickly (and those top .1% kids are capable of learning really quickly). At the same time, I believe there are pockets of really interesting and intelligent strategies that already exist. To start, here's what I believe is the most important part of any strategy: that the system ensures that the gifted kids get to meet and interact with each other. I was disappointed that the article did not value this nearly as highly.

This is why I'm inherently suspicious of home schooling. This is also why I immediately know that the Davidson Academy is doing something right. Gifted kids really need to meet and interact with other gifted kids. Until they do, they will struggle to value their "giftedness" and consider themselves weird. The most important thing public schools (from here on, simply called: the system) can teach them is that their intelligence is something fun and exciting which they can use and enjoy.

The article, when it wasn't lavishing praise on the school, argued that advanced students should just be pushed forward through the system. The author seemed to think that if a kid is learning faster than those around him (or her, I swear I'm not sexist...), he should just be pushed on to the next grade, as if that will solve the problem. It doesn't, though. Admittedly, the author did provide a rather underwhelming study that followed about 40 different gifted students, some of whom skipped grades and others that didn't and many of the ones who skipped grades came out better. Personally, I didn't find it convincing.

The problem with skipping grades is that the gifted student is still interacting with non-gifted students (we're pretending, for the sake of argument, that the older students would interact with the younger, gifted student at all) and the classes are still moving way slower than he is capable of learning. In the short term, it seems effective, because the gifted student is challenged to catch up, but once he's caught up, then it'll be time to skip another grade, or leave him unchallenged again. It's not too hard to imagine an instance when a really smart 10 year old is finishing up high school (which is bad, not because he's finishing high school, but bad because he's become completely isolated from anything even remotely like his maturity level, assuming that boys mature at all, of course).

Basically skipping grades is not a way to solve the problem, but rather a way to avoid the problem. The kid shuts up about not being challenged for a little while and hopefully gets sent off to college quickly so the system doesn't have to deal with him anymore. The only thing the system did for him was help him to get out of the system, which shouldn't count as a positive (although, I suspect that's basically what the study got as positive).

No, the buzz word that needs to be applied to dealing with gifted kids is "self paced learning". From the description, I'm pretty sure the Davidson Academy does it, which is good. Interestingly, the advantages of this strategy can come out of a simple thought experiment.

Imagine this: You've got a group of motivated, intelligent (perhaps even gifted?) kids together, with a single intelligent, young teacher. What happens? Well, the teacher has to meet certain requirements so she (okay, I am sexist, I'm making the teacher female and student male, what can I say?) starts trying to teach the required subjects (math, English, history, science, whatever). English and history are easy for her; she just has to pick topics, promote discussions, grade papers, and maybe do simple tests to ensure that the students are keeping up and prepared for discussions.

Math and science are harder. At the beginning of the year, the kids all start out together, but quickly some students start getting stuck at points (we're assuming that whatever math they're learning is at least a bit beyond what any of them have done before... maybe an introduction to Algebra without wasting everyone's time with Pre-Algebra sort of thing). She has to slow down for some of the students, but the other students are still interested in moving forward.

So, she says, "Okay, you kids who think you're SO smart, can just read ahead in the book. I'll be looking extra close at your homework and if you're still doing everything right, I'll let you keep going forward. In the meantime, I'll be helping these ones try to catch up with you, and I promise to dedicate some time to answering any questions you have." And, boom, self paced learning just naturally arises out of the situation (I heart Steve Jobs, by the way).

Obviously, there's many places for the plan to fail, but the trade off is the opportunity to let the kids that want to advance actually advance. You'll need a good textbook, the teacher will need to be willing to grade a variety of homeworks, it will have to be made clear that going the pace of the class is not a bad thing, and the list goes on. But, and I swear this is true, it's actually really achievable. You know why? Because the kids will help you.

Let's say there's one kid that really just doesn't get it. He's struggling (because of course all the students are male, because I'm sexist) and everyone else is ready to move on. Now, the teacher could try to do something like set aside one-on-one time or just stop the class to help him out. But, there's another option. Find a volunteer from the group that's pulling ahead to sit down and work with him for awhile (ha, volunteer, I crack myself up sometimes...). This both reinforces the learning of the volunteer and frees the teacher to keep working with the rest of the class.

Obviously, there will need to be a significant number of groundrules set for the classroom. We don't really want instances of individual students pulling ahead of the class, but some other number, probably between two and five (if it's more than five, you're looking at a significant portion of the class looking to go faster, which means it might be time to examine the curriculum). This is because the goal is not only to allow individual students to excel, but to still encourage the group learning that helps to reinforce and support each student's learning.

It's worth pointing out that I was put in this type of environment on multiple occasions in my public schooling. As a sixth grader, I was in a 20 person class of gifted students. In that class, the teacher's goal was not so much self paced learning, as super accelerated learning. The result was the I initially found myself falling behind (in my defense, all the other students had been doing that curriculum for a couple years). The teacher would never have considered slowing down for me, but he did have a classmate sit down and help me. Pretty soon, I was caught up and going along with the rest of class, no problem. So, it's not outrageous to expect the kids to be able to help each other.

Also, my high school actually really valued the idea of self paced learning and tried to apply it to all the students. But, it totally failed. Not because it's a bad idea, mind you. It failed because they tried to use it for the entire population and not just the "gifted" population.

They thought that by making it possible for slow learning students to take their time, they could improve their learning experience as well. Of course, it is not very easy to tell the difference between lazy students and true slow learners, so the end result was that lots of students basically made no progress in subjects like math because they were going at "their own pace."

However, there was a segment of the school's population that really benefited from the self paced learning (I'll give you two guesses, and no, lazy students not having to do any work don't count as having benefited). That's right, the "gifted" students that were motivated and excited about learning. We got to fly through the math program, in little groups of two or three (helping each other along the way), as the teachers spent more time with the slower (read: lazier) students. The end result was that my little group completed 2 years of high school math our freshman year and then went on to take AP Calculus our sophomore year. In my personal group of two, both of us got fives, although we were sort of outliers on that one (I think most of the groups got threes, although my group had the advantage that we finished a couple weeks before most of the others and spent that extra time preparing).

You can compare this to my experience in seventh grade, where I was forced to retake Algebra because the eighth grade Geometry class was full (what was especially frustrating at the time was that there was a test to get in and I pretty much dominated it, while an eighth grader just barely passed, and he got priority over me when a space opened up...).

Anyways, that's my view on how public schools can help gifted students to rise to their potential. Implementing the ideas wouldn't be all that hard. There's already programs that help to recognize gifted students and create classes specifically for those students. This would just require changing the classes so that they're actually useful. And, yes, in the end it would probably be helping to move the gifted students out of school earlier (and, well, they probably should be getting out of school earlier), since we're expecting their pace to be above average. But then at least they're doing it with peers, instead of on their own.

That is all.

Francis

PS - In case you're curious, this post was just over 2100 words. Wow, the primary advantage of blogging: infinite page length. Whoo!

On Romantic Comedies as a Dying Genre

So, I was eating my Cheerios this morning and reading Time magazine (shit, I just admitted to reading Time magazine. Damn it.), when I happened upon an article about the lack of romantic movies being made anymore. The author, who was female, seemed bothered by the fact that major movies these days don't really focus on romance or relationships.

Even worse, I guess, it's been years since a romantic comedy managed to gross significant amounts of money (or something like that, I wasn't reading too closely since I was mainly concentrating on the Cheerios). Well, to make a long story short (more accurately, I'm about to make a really short story a whole heck of a lot longer), it got me to thinking about romantic comedies.

Obviously, there's other kinds of romantic movies (she brings up Titanic, which apparently isn't a comedy...who knew?). However, I'm only going to spend my time thinking about romantic comedies because I'm lazy (and I tend to avoid romantic dramas or whatever they're called because that's combining two genres I don't like, as opposed to romantic comedies, which are combining a genre I like with one I don't).

I would like to start by saying, "Yes." I'm not going to argue with the fact that this genre seems to be on the decline. I'm pretty sure I don't even mind. But, I sincerely doubt that it's truly disappearing.

Let me bring in a completely random example, to help make my point. Think of video games. One of the biggest selling games of all time was Myst (stupid Sims for taking the top stop away). It was in a genre called "point and click adventures". Nobody makes those anymore unless they like wasting time (and not making money). Does that means that the ideas and concepts of that genre are dead, just because no one makes games like it anymore? Of course not. Instead, the current crop of popular genres incorporates some of those same ideas and uses them to add to their experience. The Metroid Prime series from Nintendo feels remarkably like a point and click adventure (with the targeting system, information system, and focus on exploration), but it's a first person shooter.

How does this relate to romantic comedies? It doesn't, I'm just excited about the fact that Metroid Prime 3 comes out in less than 2 weeks. But it totally could.

Think about it. What really defines a romantic comedy? A movie that features a very cute couple that should be together (typically, it's pretty obvious they should be together as well) and the very cute and comedic struggles they have in actually getting together. In the end, they finally get together, overcoming whatever obstacle it was that required them to take 95 minutes of our time for them to overcome. Some examples include: not knowing each other (I think, Sleepless in Seattle), class differences (tons of examples), guy's immaturity or girl's neurosis (again, way too many examples), and the list goes on.

Well, the above paragraph pretty much summarized the romantic comedy genre in the space of two sentences. Admittedly, action movies could probably go faster (Pointless action! Boring exposition! Bigger pointless action! Credits, hopefully with funny outtakes!). But, that's not the point. The point is, the basic definition is really simple.

It's so simple that the last really popular romantic comedy (Love Actually) was literally a collection of cute examples of the application of those two sentences, all cut together into one giant movie (while skipping all the stuff that typically makes a romantic comedy original). It was a pretty huge success. And it did this by merely condensing the basic premise of a romantic comedy into small sections of a bigger movie (admittedly, the bigger movie was made up of similar sections, but that's not the point).

What does this show? It shows that the fans of the genre don't actually need a feature length romantic comedy to be spend on a single relationship. They seem to almost be happier when less time is spent on the couple trying to overcome the obstacle (Love Actually tends to just skip the obstacle all together using the Christmas season as an excuse, in order to expedite the arrival of the cute romantic ending). The key pieces of a romantic comedy can satisfy most fans of the genre simply genre simply by being present in a movie, potentially with other topics involved as well.

Amazingly, I can now go back to my initial video game example and apply it to romantic comedies. The romantic comedy genre can no longer support itself (because it's been done into the ground), but the desire for the content hasn't dried up. The result is an opportunity for other genres to borrow themes from romantic comedies to reach out to additional audiences (i.e. - the fans of romantic comedies).

And we can see this happening.

Stardust, a fantasy movie based on a graphic novel/book by Neil Gaiman features interactions (read as: bickering) between the main characters that would fit perfectly in just about any romantic comedy, and cute scenes of them overcoming the obstacles preventing them from getting together. Is it a romantic comedy? No. It's a fantasy movie with a decent amount of action, but it still found it worthwhile to build their budding relationship into the framework of the movie.

Family movies have been using those same genre themes for years. Recent examples include Ratatouille and Flushed Away (read as: the last two family movies I've seen), but pieces can be seen in Disney movies much farther back (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, et al).

The last example would, of course, be action adventure movies. They may be considered the realm of guys, but even as far back as Star Wars, can we see examples of the romantic comedy genre present. The dialogue (bickering) of the heroes with the women they are trying to impress is most certainly taking its cues from romantic comedies. In recent memory, the first thing I can come up with that follows this formula very closely would be the November blockbuster from a few years ago, National Treasure (not that I recommend you go see this movie, mind you).

So, yeah, you probably aren't going to see too many more true blue romantic comedies anymore, but that doesn't mean the genre and it's traditions have been abandoned. They are being incorporated into other genres. Hiding in plain sight if you will.

That is all.

Francis

Entry Level Anime: Slayers

So, I was reading Megatokyo earlier today (damn it, I just admitted that I read Megatokyo. Shit. Anyways, moving on...), and there was an ad on the top of the page (craziness, I know). This was a special ad, though. It was special because it wasn't for some stupid and most likely very bad anime series. It was for an anime called Slayers. This got me to reminiscing...

Slayers was the anime I saw that really, truly convinced me that I should continue watching anime (or rather, that there was anime worth watching and discovering out there). Prior to Slayers, I had seen two animes: Dragon Ball Z and Evangelion. Some day, I'll write a post about my opinions on Evangelion, but lets just say, neither of these shows had me desperately searching for more anime to watch.

I remember my friends telling me things like, "Well, you liked Dragon Ball Z, so you must like anime we just haven't found the right one yet". My response was something typically along the lines of: "I don't know much, but I'm pretty confident that Dragon Ball Z doesn't actually count as anime anymore." Not surprisingly, they had no response.

Then my dear, albeit semi-psychotic, friend offered to lend me his DVD box set of a old anime called Slayers. He promised I would like it, because it's ridiculous. This was a powerful argument. The fact that I was bored at the time probably also had something to do with it.

So, I watched it. And, obviously, I loved it.

Slayers is easily one of the best portals to watching anime that a random guy who doesn't particularly know or care about Japanese culture can ask for. It's primary advantage is that it doesn't really look like the Japanese animes of today. A lot of the trademark appearances and visual cues from more current animes are simply not present. Instead, the animation looks remarkably like the majority of the Saturday morning cartoon shows from the eighties and early nineties that I was exposed to (I think it's from around 95 or so). This is a huge help, because it really feels like a show I would have totally watched with a bowl of Cheerios in front of me (except that it's not in English, of course).

Another advantage was that it had a simple, well presented story with a relatively small cast. Even today, I'll admit to struggling to understand what's going on in many anime series, simply because I can't keep track of the characters. This series kindly takes its time with the characters, which I appreciated.

Of course, its real selling point was the hook: stupid, super violent, vaguely cute female mage that likes to kill things with fire travels with a far more stupid male swordmaster. Hilarity and violence ensues.

No question about it, that's a concept just about anyone can get behind. And, so yeah, I enjoyed it. It did a lot to convince me that anime is worth watching.

Also, in case you don't read Megatokyo (I wouldn't blame you, either, sometimes I wonder why I read it, but then I remember) and therefore didn't get to see the ad, I guess I should let it be known that they are re-releasing the Slayers season 1 box set with digitally remastered video. I'm not sure if it's really necessary, since the poor video quality in the originals helped give it an old school feel that I enjoyed, but... I also remember thinking the video looked pretty janky (and I was watching it off the original DVD box set, remember, not illegally downloaded files, I swear). So, yeah, you should check it out. I know I am...

That is all.

Francis

PS - Completely unrelated, but can you tell I've discovered how to make links. This could be dangerous.