Gifted Ed for School Newspaper, Again

Gretchen says the last one was whiny. It probably was, as I am frequently whiny.

Such is life.

Gifted Education

I submitted the first draft of my research paper with that as the title. It's probably the most boring title of all time, but it does get the subject across. Gifted education is, put in the simplest way possible, the teaching of gifted kids. However, any understanding of gifted education must rest on an understanding of what makes gifted kids gifted.

And no, "smart people" doesn't count.

Giftedness manifests itself in many ways. There are kids who learn to read before starting kindergarten. Some bury their noses in college math textbooks for fun. Some sneak literary classics under their third grade desks or devote their spare time to their own stories. Others become engaged in aspects of the sciences, finding a cool looking rock and spending the next three months wholly devoted to the study of rocks, and where they come from, and how, precisely, this particular rock came to be in their backyard.

The constant acquisition of knowledge leaves these students ahead of the school curriculum; studies have found that they typically know half of the information being taught- and that's before the course has even started. They frequently are also learning at a faster rate, finishing classwork with so much spare time that the day becomes a series of tedious waits rather than a continuum of work.

It is understandable, then, that some of these children become bored as the schooldays slog slowly on. I gleaned a list of time filling activities from interviews with gifted students. They fill notebooks with doodles, and stare at the clock in such as way that six hands appear, and play snake on calculators and perform Beethoven's 5th with their fingertips on their desks. One girl even went to far as to exercise discreetly, contracting various muscles or doing calf raises, to the point that she would experience muscle soreness. Even so, they cannot find enough useless entertainments to fill the long classroom hours.

The emptiness that is left is time used by other students to acquire new information, but also to learn how to think and work. Gifted children, however, are in want of a challenge. Leaders in the educational field focus on the importance of a perfect level of difficulty. A too challenging class yields frustrated kids who come to think that they can't learn. One that is too easy yields frustrated kids who come to think that they don't have to. Gifted kids can be spotted by their yearning for complexity, but when they don't find it early on, they don't know how to cope when it eventually shows up.

To give them this complexity, they need challenging classes at a young age. However, it's a lot harder to put gifted kids into their own classes than I've made it sound. For one thing, how does one decide if a child is gifted? The OLSATs, while great for finding precociousness, don't show much in the way of passion or complex thinking. On top of this, there is the force of the parental unit. No parent wants to be told that their child is not gifted; some even go so far as to hire tutors to get their preschoolers to pass the tests for gifted kindergartens. Teacher evaluations can get around the testing issue, but they're biased, with children misbehaving due to boredom frequently overlooked, and racial prejudices showing far more than they should.

These are a few of the problems associated with finding gifted kids to put into programs in the first place. This is completely disregarding finding teachers supportive of gifted kids, training teachers to teach them, finding funds for the classes themselves and this training, working any sort of acceleration into curriculum, making groupings fluid enough that borderline students are stuck between too hard and too easy, and doing all of that while keeping insatiable students satisfied and prickly parents pleased. I couldn't do it in ten pages, and I can't do it in five hundred words here. It's absolutely evident that gifted children need some form of added difficulty; it's just as evident that getting it to them may possibly be more complex than the complexity these children crave.

Slangy Research Paper Outline, formatted properly

as ordered by Cammie

-Gifted children

------IQ points

------quick learners

------need more than can be offered by the typical classroom

-The used to have programs

------but now they don't

-----------NCLB is a bitch. And it's not my bitch.

------It's helping slower learners

-----------and this means teachers and schools have less time/funds for the gifted

----------------they're not getting attention

-Everyone thinks they don't need it!

------They'll make it anyways! They have it made! Everything is sunny in smart kid land!!!!

-----------it's unpopular! Teachers hate them! OH NOES!!!

-But seriously, dude, they totally need it.

------school sucks for geeks

-----------remember those nerdy high school guys on TV, like Brian in the Breakfast Club, who never got a date?

------yeah, it's like that, very nightmarish, to quote a study

------Can't be too smart. And nerdy is evern worse. Pop culture says we can't have one without the other. It's a stigma!!!11! WOO!

-Consider also, the need for intellectual stimulation

------Kids learn best in a middlingly challenging environment

-----------Boredom, like too much challenge, is an issue

----------------Yeah, gifted kids- totes bored

---------------------They already know the material

---------------------This makes them suffer (McClure)

------They don't want to try

-----------Mario

-----------That mother with the kid who's acting out

-----------Prevents them from learning how to learn/work

----------------Big paragraph quote about stumbling

---------------------Nyxiepie!

-Chronic underachievement sucks balls

------Dropouts

-----------Conflicting numbers (all the hell over the place)

-----------------But, clearly, there are gifted children dropping out

----------------------And this is an issue

---------------------------Want to "attain extreme levels of capability"

-Why should you want this? They'll save the world!

------They're your doctors

------They help us compete with China

-----------Down with China

----------------Our principal's faculty meetings (no, I won't actually mention them)

-For the betterment of the nation, gifted children should not be made to languish

------Easier said than done.

-----------Fears of damaging other children

-----------Expenses

-----------Years of accepted educational dogma

----------------All at stake. A stake through the heart. Of a VAMPIRE!

---------------------Equity verses excellence

--------------------------Who wins

-------------------------------Can we have fairness while pursuing excellence?

------------------------------------Maybe if it's eggcellent?

-----------------------------------------Snack break!

-Equality debate --> leading view is that students stay in the classroom

------"integrated learning"

-----------language win

----------------but, yeah, doesn't really end up happening

---------------------?

Particle Physics is Basically Awesome (historical overview)

Yes, another Columbia SHP related post. I seem to have a lot of those.

I've got particle physics this semester, and it's going to be good. My teacher (I could call him a professor, but the teachers are grad students, so it seems a bit weird) is British and drawls his words just enough that's it's very easy to consign him to the background and zone out but, when I actually listen, he's really very interesting.

As proof of it's interestingness, I actually took notes. He started the class with three particle physics related websites we should check out, but they also have other physics related stuff, and I think Julie would find them interesting. The sites are Interactions.org, CERN Courier, and Symmetry. The second site is reportedly the most "substantive," whatever that is meant to mean.

During the class itself, we took a somewhat circuitous route through the development of particle physics. I always like learning science like that, because it makes you see the thought process of how and why the science works, rather than just what it is.

The lecture opened with the end of the 1800s, at which point atoms were considered as small as it got. These various atoms were categorized by the properties, and the periodic nature of these categorizations hinted at some form of internal structure.

During the 1890s, radioactivity was intensely studied by Curie, Becquerel, Rutherford, and others. Radioactivity is the emission of particles. The existence of radioactivity implies that atoms must have an internal structure, as they are able to be broken into bits. There are three particles associated with radiation: alpha, beta and gamma. Alpha particles are the equivalent of a helium nucleus and have a charge of +2 and a mass equal to that of four protons. Beta particles (electrons) have a charge of -1 and a mass of 1/1800 protons. Gamma particles (photons) are electrically neutral and don't have mass. These particles were identified using deflection in a magnetic field (electrons, protons) and film sheets (gamma).

At this point in the lecture, Allana and I took a break to pass notes:

Tea: the clock is 1 hr fast

Allana: shh don't tell him. his face is smug.

Then we returned to 1897, when electrons were discovered by analyzing cathode rays responses to magnetic fields. These responses found that the electrons responeded to Loretz's force law, indicating that they were particles. This law can also, by breaking force into mass*acceleration, be used to find the charge/mass ratio of various particles through the measurement of only acceleration. This ratio was obtained by establishing the energy equilibrium of charged droplets of oil when they were suspended over electric fields, a concept which, two days ago, I would not have understood. These charges are always integer multiples of a fundamental charge, the charge on an electron. The mass was then able to be calculated.

The mass of an electron is .511 MeV/c^2, or a really fucking tiny amount, or 500000 electron volts. This unit of measurement is derived from the famous E = mc^2, and, when written in literature, the c^2 is often implied, because typists are lazy.

Then we move onwards to the plum pudding model (!!!), which Julie and Gretchen will remember from chem. This was created by Thomson, and involves raisin studded pudding. The model was tested by Rutherford's graduate students, who spent long, painful hours in dark rooms waiting for their eyes to adjust to dark enough conditions for them to observe the changes in a sheet that fluoresced when hit by particles. When alpha particles were accelerated at a gold sheet, those that didn't hit the nuclei of the various atoms went through with only slight deflections, but those that collided were refracted at angles greater than 90%, demonstrating that the negative charges could not feasibly be scattered within a positive goo, as Thomson had predicted.

This motion is represented by the equation N(theta) is directly proportional to sin (theta/2) to the negative fourth power. How they derived this equation in a time before the TI-89 is entirely beyond my ability to comprehend.

In 1911 the nucleus was discovered, with hydrogen atoms standing as some elementary particle. The we went into photons, and I got a bit lost, since I only vaguely comprehend sinusoidal motion.

in 1914, Bohr did stuff about electrons moving in circular paths.

Centripetal Force= m v^2 / r, as we learned in physics, and it is directly proportional to e^2/r^2 (the coulombic attractive force between the protons in the nucleus and the electrons). What Bohr tried to examine was why the electrons didn't simply spiral in towards the nucleus. He also did some quantization, noting more things that come in discreet chunks/packets, indicating that a particle of a constant mass is involved.

Quantize is my new favorite word.

1927 was antimatter, by P. Dirac. He used to full form of E = mc^2 to show that equations have positive and negative energy solutions, but that, rather than negative energy existing, antimatter had positive energy. In 1932 C. Anderson observed the antimatter equivalent of an electron, the positron. This particle had the same mass as an electron, but opposite quantum numbers such as charge, lepton number, and spin. The positron is notated using an e with a bar over it.

1932 was the discovery of the neutron, as elements were heavier than their protons. Still- what holds them together? Some other force must be involved, and the particles that carry it buts be neutral but massive. This neutral charge made them difficult to detect experimentally, as one can't simply measure deflection in an electric field.

This force was the strong force, which is "strong" in the nucleus but decreases in strength very rapidly over distance. This was predicted to depend on an exchange of particles between the protons and neutrons, and these particles were called mesons, as the mass was between that of protons and electrons.

Then we went into Heisenburg's OTHER uncertainty principle, and light waves, and I got rather lost, and class ended.

It was all jolly good fun.

Science in the Air

Cyto was actually really fun today, despite the fact that Melissa wasn't there. I got to hear all about my teacher's drinking habits, which was fun. She could never teach at an actual high school, though. This is a woman, after all, who described purified microtubules by saying that they look like sperm, and then poetically going on about how they sparkle when you hold them up to the light (like Edward Cullen!)

At one point, there was a bit of a commotion on my side of the room. Guy-who-sleeps-with-his-head-out-the-window (GWSWHHOTW) had reached out and picked up a bunch of rocks, then passed them to boy-who-pays-attention (BWPA), who passed them to cute-Indian-boy-with-warm-smile-who-looks-far-too-young-for-this-week's-black-leather-jacket (CIBWWSWLFTYFTWBLJ), who turned around and gave them to me rather than continuing sideways and passing them to angry-tripping-note-taker (ATNT).

I looked at CIBWWSWLFTYFTWBLJ questioningly. "What?"

"I dunno. Pass it on?"

I turned to Bored-Asian-writing-English-paper-on-netbook (BAWEPON). "You want them?"

He ignored me, so I started passing them to girl-I've-never-seen-before-who-showed-up-midway-through-class (GINSBWSUMTC), but I couldn't fit them all in my hand at once, and her hands were even smaller, so she dropped one, and we were all laughing so hard that the teacher stopped class to figure out what was going on.

I was laughing the loudest, so I had to answer. "They gave me rocks!"

"Who?"

"They came from him," said CIBWWSWLFTYFTWBLJ.

"Are these a new courting ritual or something?" she asked. "Giving people rocks?"

"I like them better when they're shiny," I muttered.

ATNT took GINSBWSUMTC's rocks and passed them to the teacher. "These look more like bricks," she said. "You've got to get nicer ones."

"What should I do with these?" I asked, gesturing to the ones currently occupying my desk.

"Well, if you want to accept GWSWHHOTW's courting ritual, you can keep them."

I thought fast, trying to think of a way to get rid of the rocks without saying anything offensive. "You know, I would, but I really don't want to get my bag dirty."

"Bring them up here, then. My husband and I can use them as a conversation starter next time we have a dinner-drinking-dinner party."

The Victim

Every English class has one. He (and the victim is typically male) doesn't pay any less attention than anybody else, but, invariably, when there is silence, he is pegged as someone who isn't paying attention and gets called on, and which point he stumbles out a response and goes back to trying to hid from the teacher.

Last year, the victim was Richard. We had four demo teachers, but the problem didn't truly become evident until the third one, who singled him out, calling on him repeatedly, trying to get him to talk. When the fourth one came, he eventually asked a question that no one knew the answer to, and he looked out at the class for someone to answer it. "How about you?" he asked, looking at Richard. The entire class burst into laughter. The poor teacher was very confused.

This year, the victim is Lyle (I don't know if this helps, but he's friends with Jeff and isn't related to Lisa (Lisa is a famous person, not a nickname) and was in all of my core classes in eighth grade). I'm fairly certain that Ms. Seltzia has called on him while he wasn't raising his hand once per class this year. To contrast, I have yet to be called on while I'm not raising my hand. Usually, he says "can you repeat the question?" before managing a half-hearted response. Today, she had put our next essay assignment up on the projector.

"... polire- that's Latin. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right. Does anyone here take Latin?"

"Lyle does!" somebody said.

"Lyle?"

"Huh? Yes."

"How would you pronounce this?"

He squinted at the board. "What?"

"P-o-l-i-r-e."

He looked confused. "That's Latin?"

The class laughed.

"Yes. But how would you-"

Ariadne couldn't contain herself any longer. "It's Polire! You're right!"

Lyle nodded. "Yeah..."

Questions

written on spiral bound notecards from god-knows-when. (middle school, I think)

How do people get green eyes?

How do people get red hair?

Why are some people so good at puzzles?

Is there such a thing as a professional puzzler?

What is bigotism?

Who can I get to answer these questions?

Why do computers make so many mistakes?

Why are some teachers better than others?

Can good teaching be taught?

What do the 3 recycling answers symbolize?

What does Hallelujah mean? Why does it have so many different spellings?

Why are some lights brighter than others?

How do the genes work for different hair textures?

Why are grades so important?

How do electric keyboards make noise?

How are shoes made?

Why are some of the lights different colors?

Why is the earth round?

Should I override into Honors Biology?

How does a Punett square always work?

How is a punett square made for height?

Who is right, Discover or my science teacher?

How, exactly, are albino's genes different?

Why are some people more stubborn than others?

My Schedule

I got my first choice, after well over an hour of standing next to the English table. By the way, Margot (her twin sister's name is a flower) probably hates me at this point. Arena was about to close, and the department head was willing to give one of us period 8, but the other would have to take period 1, and I said I'd have to switch four or five classes, and Margot said she was just to confused, so the woman handing them out gave it to me. Avon later told me that Margot knew perfectly well that she'd only have to switch one class, she was faking it to get period 8. Ah well, I won in the end.

I hate how nasty everyone gets, though. For instance, Lily (and yes, that is a nickname) spent was continually saying nice things about the teachers she didn't want, trying to talk others into taking them. It just felt so underhanded.

Ah, well.

1 physics h

2 calculus b.c.

3 gym (with Nia and Kathrya and Ali!)

4 adv. drawing/anthropology

5 ASR

6 spanish h

7 gov (with the teacher whose name has two syllables)/oil painting

8 english