This is too funny to me. I absolutely, positively could NOT understand that period of music for the life of me. I HATED it. It made absolutely no sense to my pea brain growing up. My very distinguished teacher tried and tried, but I fumbled and fumbled.
But when I went back to study music as an adult, finally the lightbulb went off. I was mesmorized.
But to this day I do not *like* Beethoven. There are some of his songs that I enjoy listening to, but I absolutely am loathe to play him. I really had a tussle with my prof over learning several of his numbers. I learned them - barely.
So I definitely understand that there are things "inside" us that draw us to one period or another.
And I grew up, learning piano, with a mother who hated classical music and made me learn standard songs (aside from my regular studies) from the 1900's on up. I dearly love them and it certainly colored my view of the world.
They should be challenging children in at *all* levels, not just in GT. The problem is not someone not getting into a GT program. It's all the other programs not stepping up to the plate where they should. A separate, standalone GT program isn't even necessary when schools are truly designed to be more flexible, though few are and few teachers are trained to work that way. When regular programs aren't that way, separate GT programs are like programs for children with learning disabilities--they should exist only to handle those children whose needs cannot be met in the regular classroom (as it is set up in that area). There's no excuse for kids being bored at *any* level of instruction. And frankly, lots of GT programs suck anyway. Lots of them are just acceleration and lots of homework, rather than being geared towards the actual developmental needs of gifted kids. As far as the Odyssey of the Mind that Caryn mentioned, that's a worldwide competition with different areas and themes each year. Our elementary school were the world champions a couple years ago in the balsa wood structure event (they built a structure of a limited amount of balsa wood and glue that held well over a thousand pounds!). The team was comprised of both GT and non-GT kids, and it was *THIRD* graders who built the winning structure. There's no reason for such things to be limited to gifted kids. (Yeah, I know, most folks don't think they should be limited, but in practice, a lot of folks don't put in the energy to promote these opportunities to all kids as they should.)
*belly laugh* And then you have me. I loved to perform Beethoven pieces. When he wrote parts for the double bass, he treated them as if they were just big cellos. Beethoven is lovely to play for a bassist with a technical bent. And with my tiny hands, I really got a workout. Boy, I miss it.
This is consistent with my experience teaching at a public university in Ohio. The education majors at my current institution appear to be a bit more prepared, but they are still not the cream of the crop. I think that parents are more likely to encourage their children to go into business than into education.
Ericka Kammerer wrote: > They should be challenging children in at *all* levels,
Here, here! After all, we're *all* gifted in some way...the trick is to find that way and exploit it. And not to narrowly define one type of giftedness as though that's the only one that matters.
That was our experience. And the kids are smart...they say, "why am I being *punished* for being "gifted" when they see the workloads!
Yep. I'm a math whiz, but have almost no people sense. I always had a colleague read my "nastygrams" to make sure that they would not be unduly offensive to the recipient. She has excellent people sense, but anything beyond 4th grade math escaped her. And while she wasn't all that good at *writing* nastygrams, she was excellent at critiquing and editing them so the recipient got the message that you were putting your foot down, but didn't feel insulted.
The gym teachers had me labelled as completely useless, because we'd been playing basketball since elementary school, and I couldn't sink a basket in 1000 tries if my life depended on it. They were positively amazed when I wasn't nearly as bad at volleyball and softball, when we finally started playing those in high school. They were absolutely floored to find out that I was winning dance awards, since they'd had me written off as the ultimate uncoordinated nerd/couch potato. Nope -- I just don't see well enough to be able to sink a basketball, and all that running set off my asthma. Volleyball, I don't have to run more than a couple feet in any direction, and I only need to be able to see ten feet to the net, so that fit my physical limitations.
I think too often teachers extrapolate from one area to all areas in determining who's gifted and who isn't. I mean, who has the better gift for languages: my classmate who learned to write perfect Spanish (while butchering any attempt to speak it), or someone who writes imperfect grammar but sounds like a native?
They've lately (finally) been looking at, I believe it's seven, different areas of "intelligence", the standard IQ intelligence that's been tested for all along, plus others including emotional intelligence (people sense), art/music talent, etc. We had kids in our class who could barely read, but hand them a crayon and they made DaVinci look like an amateur. As someone whose drawing talent stopped at stick figure, *I* thought they were gifted, but some teachers were so hung up on IQ numbers that they saw an idiot and nothing more.
We are blessed with a GT program that is quite good overeall. Drives me nuts that so many parents campaign to get their kids in. The attitude seems to be that they think it's sort of like getting a private school education for free. Well, it's not. It's a program designed to meet a certain kind of need, and it is *not* fun for kids who don't have the particular need they're trying to address. Fortunately, our school also does a good job of challenging kids who are not in the GT program. Of course, that's not good enough for some parents .
exactly. I can understand some would not follow the threading for attribution, so point taken ;-) The origin is still coming.
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