he he ... you kids. When I graduated, I didn't have a chance at being valedictorian for two reasons. #1 it went to the BOY with the highest grade point average and #2 the HS averaged in gym grades.

Heh. My mother should have been dux of her school, but the nuns who ran it had a policy of only giving out one prize to any student, and of course she'd rather have the Religion prize, wouldn't she?

There's also a difference between gifted programs and tracking. Gifted programs are (or at least should be) for the kids who generally have trouble learning in the regular classroom setting. At the gifted program where I worked for a few summers, we had several sessions on the learning differences between gifted kids and average kids -- it's not just that they learn more quickly or know more, but there are very real differences in how they take in information, so that while some gifted kids do fine in a regular classroom, a lot really struggle.

This is (or at least should be) a totally different thing than just taking the kids within the more-or-less "average" spectrum and splitting them up by ability. I really haven't read enough to really have an opinion on that. But just like it wouldn't really be fair to, say, a kid with dyslexia to just put the kid in the lowest reading group without any special instruction to deal with the dyslexia, it also isn't fair to put a gifted kid in the highest reading group without special instruction to deal with the giftedness.

(One of the big characteristics of gifted kids is atypical learning progress. Most kids tend to learn at more or less a steady pace, and will be at reasonably the same level in all subjects at any given time -- gifted kids tend to learn huge amounts at once, then nothing for a while, and will also frequently have huge differences between scores in different subjects, once you give them a test that's at their level, but which score is the really high one and which is the really low one can change all the time.)

One of the odd things at my high school was that the kids in the G&T program and the kids in the Honors and AP classes didn't have a lot of overlap.

I remember senior year of high school, the yearbook picture for National Honor Society was during AP English. When all the National Honor Society kids went to the picture, the three kids left in the classroom where the three kids who had been in the gifted program in elementary school.

Yeah, I bet I would have been put in a G&T program, but I think it would have been stupid. I did really well in regular school -- both because I'm smart and because the format played to my strengths.

Oh! My mother called before I left work to tell me U2 is playing the Somerville Theater tonight! Bananas!

At that summer program, I worked with several kids who completed Algebra I (which used to be a ninth grade course, but is now frequently an eighth grade course) in three weeks during the summer between fifth and sixth grades, and their parents were worried about how they were doing in school, because they had trouble doing fifth grade math the way their teachers taught it.

One of the big things there is understanding how variables work in algebraic equations. Some kids just get it. Other kids need to be taught it. And a lot of the stuff used in elementary school and pre-algebra to lead up to the concept of variables just looks really confusing to kids who already understand it -- it's trying to explain things without explicitly using variables, but for the kids who understand variables, these methods seem totally counterintuitive, because their intuition is something that the book assumes they don't know.

We had 8th grade algebra in my adequate public school 20+ years ago -- it was how you got to calculus in high school.

they had trouble doing fifth grade math the way their teachers taught it.

In college one of the requirements was this layman's math class for dummies, and I Could. Not. Do. It.

All the steps, givens, proofs, gone. I could do the math, given a piece of paper and a pencil, but I immediately became the dumbest one in the group because I couldn't do it in my head. To assume that one hadn't screwed up a step in their head drove me bonkers. But, but, but, you could be *wrong*!

And of course it was only those of us in the "smart class" who took algebra in 8th grade, but how else do kids get to calculus?

I take crappy inside pictures: [link]

At my school, in the late eighties when my sister was in Jr. high, Algebra I was a ninth grade class for the "regular" kids and an eighth grade class for the "accelerated" kids -- to take algebra in eighth grade, you had to either have a recommendation from your seventh-grade math teacher or have your parent sign a special waiver. About 40 of the 100 kids in her grade took it in eighth grade. By the time I was there, four years later, eighth grade algebra was standard, with just the "slow" kids taking it in ninth grade, and I had to take a special test to get to take it in seventh grade. Five of the 150 kids in my grade took it in seventh grade, and about 130 of the rest took it in eighth grade.