[kstenerud]

The problem stems from trying to make a one-size-fits-all solution. You can never fit everyone into the same box, but people like simple solutions so we keep trying.

In the 2nd grade, I had a teacher who recognized potential in some of her students and separated them from the rest of the class to engage in self-directed learning. There were three of us chosen. I achieved grade 5 level proficiency in a number of subjects, while the smartest kid reached grade 7 in almost all of them. The following year, I changed schools, and spent the next 3 years re-doing the same boring shit over and over. My protestations were countered with "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!" I learned my lesson, and my grades from that point on slipped from straight As to the minimum required to pass. I'd only apply myself when doing my own projects (mostly programming).

Like in anything else, if you want to see success, you need to hire teachers who can recognize and focus potential, and then give them the leeway to do so based on their good judgment.

[netjiro]

I've seen test numbers where the top 5% group learn around 5-10x faster than the 50% group. The numbers hold for short term recall, long term recall, problem solving, critical and creative thinking, etc.

There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.

[danenania]

I believe that in Japan, they deal with this disparity by asking the top students to help teach others in the class. It seems like an interesting approach in that teaching something well requires a much higher bar of understanding than doing well on a test, and it’s an excellent way to reinforce knowledge for the one doing the teaching.

So the top students get a more difficult challenge than just coasting along, and the other students benefit as well. And, of course, it promotes teamwork and solidarity.

I’m sure there are downsides too. Perhaps it could create tension between the “teacher’s pets” and the others?

[vidarh]

My two best teachers (this was in Norway) took two very different approaches. One basically gave me a free reign to move ahead of the rest of the class and brought in more advanced text books for me, let me suggest my own homework etc. It took extra work for her, so I was lucky she put in the effort.

The other did what you suggest, and would have me go around and help others as soon as finished my own work. It was useful as a means to learn to understand what other people found difficult and why. It might not have helped that much with my understanding of the subject (maths) itself, but it helped with problem solving skills - having to come up with different ways of explaining things or approach a problem from different angles to whichever one I thought was most obvious when that "obvious" angle didn't work for someone else, and I think that was useful.

[kstenerud]

This is also how the school houses of old worked. You'd have all ages present since the population was so small, and the older kids would teach the younger kids while also doing their own studies.

This was a big help for socializing skills and empathy, since you were no longer segregated by age or sex and were exposed to many age groups with their own challenges throughout your early schooling.

[geomark]

That seems to be true, that teaching something solidifies one's understanding. Trouble is when top students are always teaching things that are well below their capability, rather than pushing onwards and upwards to more challenging levels. A balance between the two might be better, which is hard to do even in smaller classrooms.

[nkingsy]

IMO school is mostly about socialization.

Sticking the smart kids in one classroom or segregating their work means they don’t gain empathy for those who aren’t as gifted with academics. I’d argue the most important skill for a smart young person is empathy.

[david38]

Well, knowing how to “play with the other children”.

Social skills that work with a variety of people are something you can’t get by studying alone.

That said, it doesn’t take years and years to learn.

On the other hand, there have been numerous studies conducted by educators regarding what to do with the “best and the brightest”. Above all, we have learned what NOT to do. What you don’t do is make too big a deal out of it. The label rapidly becomes their identity and they hold onto it for dear life. This translates into becoming highly risk averse. In time this means they get passed by the average students who don’t have such fear of “no longer being considered a genius” and happily take more risks.

We know a few points * don’t talk about it much, it’s just “fun stuff” the kid is doing * let him do it. Kids learn to hate school that makes them feel bored * let them ease out or drop out if it without guilt or warnings about how their future will be average

Being “gifted” is one thing. Having the self drive to show something for it over a period of years is another.

[netjiro]

And it is also a waste of resources. The top slice of population can do amazing things if given resources and time. Why waste that? It's the most crucial resource we have!

[pengstrom]

It's only waste if you don't find helping others valuable.

[6DM]

I don't consider it a waste of resources. It will help them develop their leadership and communication skills. This will be essential if they want to motivate a team of people to achieve something later in life.

[netjiro]

Great, I agree in principal, but run the numbers.

Is it worth spending 1h of the day learning new things then 7h teaching others? I say that is wasteful.

[qqn]

"When one teaches, two learn."

[bonoboTP]

A curious kid can pace themselves along with a the rest just fine. Are the topics taught too long for your talent? Then dig deeper in each. Say, you're learning about magnetism in physics class but you learn the requirements in half the time allocated. Then textbooks usually contain small print optional advanced topics or references, you can read additional stuff online maybe ask the teacher for further direction. Any topic has almost vast depth with specialists spending their career studying just a tiny section of it. You can never exhaust a topic. Don't just skip ahead to the next lesson as that will make things boring but engage each more deeply.

The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization. A group of students subjected to shared experiences will develop community and solidarity easier than every individual student bouncing in their own special way in the system.

It has even been observed that people can bond over a shared meal better than if everyone eats their own different food.

Overall a huge huge part of school is about socializing, with fellow students or against fellow students, obeying and rebelling against teachers, being honest or cheating to copy your homework, the dynamics of bullying and protecting from bullies, snitching on others or lying to protect minor wrongdoers, feeling guilt when you made the wrong decision, feeling proud for the right decision, discovering the difference of rules and morals, of friendship and togetherness and betrayal and loyalty, of acting tough or showing compassion, of romance and heartbreak, etc. So many lessons that aren't taught by teachers explicitly or asked on a test. But these add up to a stable individual later on who can draw from a rich well of experiences for later reference, even in adulthood. You can do a lot of low risk experimentation at that age. If people become atomized, dropped into a class full of almost strangers in each subject, there is no way to develop group dynamics of the above sort. Maybe you can do some of it with your sports team but you spend much less time with them than with a shared class.

[whatshisface]

>A curious kid can pace themselves along with a the rest just fine. Are the topics taught too long for your talent? Then dig deeper in each.

This is not as practical as one would hope, because all of the assigned work and hours of lecturing would still be repetitive and boring. Can a smart kid stop doing times tables on problem 5 and do calculus for the rest of the worksheet? Can a smart kid decline to show up to class if they already know what will be covered? No, and that's why smart kids think school is too slow.

[bonoboTP]

Admitted that I wasn't an outlier-level smart kid (so often top of class but not top of school), when I was done understanding the requirements, I could always find a way to study things from different angles, think about the why's, how to derive the formula we had to memorize, why the on-paper division method works where we just had to memorize the steps, etc.

Now if someone is a real outlier in IQ, then maybe these things are still too easy, but you can't design the system for the 1% smartest. They have to go to special schools really.

But anyways, schools are already tiered somewhat at least in Hungary. You get admitted based on centralized test scores, so your peers are roughly similar.

[netjiro]

> The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization.

Also not going so well for the top 5%. They develop much better if they are not stuffed in the same prison every day as the rest of the population. I'd guess the same would be true for the the corresponding slower slice, but I have seen no studies to that effect.

I think there was a study on this highlighted here on hn recently, but my google-fu is too weak.

[bonoboTP]

Well I don't know how it is in the US but in Hungary, secondary schools (some of which start at age 10, some at 12, some at 14 - before that is primary school) use centralized admission exam scores and compete for smart kids or artsy ones, some are geared for trades or tourism and gastronomy etc.

You only have to endure 4, 6 or 8 years among the general population of your neighborhood, but at least that exposes people to some socialization with the different "classes". I'm doing a PhD now, but made good friends with people who now do blue collar jobs which makes the working class less of an "other" in my eye, compared if I had been to elite high brow schools the whole time.

[netjiro]

https://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10489

The first few paragraphs are fun / scary.

[candu]

There are also practical reasons to stuff everyone in one box.

With class sizes steadily growing, teachers are often stretched thin - from speaking with a few friends who happen to be teachers, they also often get lots of well-intentioned advice on pedagogy. Very little of it is actionable, especially when you're already overburdened and have little time to rigorously investigate further, some of it comes with thinly-veiled edtech pitches ("this shiny new tool will solve all your problems for every kid!"), and yet other parts are utter nonsense from helicopter parents who will insist that you're teaching their kid incorrectly no matter what you do.

As a result, it's a lot easier if you can simply teach everyone to the same template - if that works for 90% of kids, that's arguably better than catering to the other 10%, especially if half of that 10% is comfortable with self-directed learning. Plus you can point to standards to argue that you're just doing your job, which is much more straightforward than defending your profession / methods and their value to every last person who believes something random they found off the internet or a vague feeling about how best to educate over those with actual practical and theoretical expertise in the field.

[InfiniteRand]

I remember observing a 2nd grade classroom (when I was considering being a teacher) and seeing the teacher yell at a kid for going to fast in a practice test, same thing happened to me in 2nd grade. In middle school if I finished in-class work early, I would pull out a book or two, which might be tough to put down when the teacher moved to the next topic. So I think it's pretty common for students going too fast to butt heads with teachers (fortunately most of my teachers liked me for other reasons, which meant the butt-ing head moments did not build and tensions got dispersed)

That being said, the recommendation I heard when I was studying education was to offer enrichment activities. Which allows smart kids to do their own thing without going in front of the rest of the class in the normal material (so that you do not need full-on tracking and class separation). I generally like that recommendation, although it is not a cure-all. I may be biased since this fit my learning style well well since my academic behavior was chronically inconsistent at times (on-set of mental illness), and the enrichment activities often counted for extra credit which helped me make up for times when I was underperforming.

More generally I think letting smart kids build up a cushion of extra credit takes the edge off of the "always-need-to-be-perfect" pressure smart kids often feel.

[_630w]

> The reason to stuff everyone in one box is socialization. A group of students subjected to shared experiences will develop community and solidarity easier than every individual student bouncing in their own special way in the system.

Curious to see what the retention rate for school friends are.

[bonoboTP]

Not sure how that's relevant to my point. You still learned to act in a group and soaked up experiences of various emotions, dilemmas, love, hate, embarrassment, courage etc. Enduring the pointless, the mundane and boring stuff and complaining about it or occasionally rebelling against it is how you bond with others. At least that's how we do it in Eastern Europe.

[vmception]

My public US high school had 3 levels for this

Normal

Talented and Gifted

and Honors

TAG were people that planned on doing good in school, generally focused better. Significant overlap with Honors.

Honors seemed to sacrifice a life for prestige (tons of Advanced Placement classes) and it didn't seem to really make a practical difference, unless going to college at all is a practical difference to you, everyone went to state schools, maybe one went to Ivy League.

The main distinction was that it was a bad school district, non-designated students had almost no expectations, which is why there was a separation at all. The "good schools" in the bad district had Tag and Honors programs.

I think it created some solidarity, where philisters would have ostracized the people making an attempt at coursework.

The general concept can work in better school districts though.

[alistairSH]

There is no way "school" can equalise this.

There is, but it involves identifying the high achievers and putting them on a different track. Without too much thought, this sounds great. Except in real life, you end up with kids who are late-bloomers stuck in the "average" track. Or poor kids who didn't learn to read until kindergarten stuck in the "remedial" track for life.

As a society (in the US), we haven't been willing or able to solve those problems. The closest we've come is offering a few "gifted" courses to those high achievers (or forcing parents to pay for a private education). But, at the primary school level, that's generally a few hours/week of extra instruction. And at the secondary school level, it's AP/IB courses, but we've pushed the "college for all" narrative so hard that those are now watered-down crap at a lot of schools.

[mkl]

That sounds amazing. Do you have a link to the study?

[netjiro]

Sadly, these are aggregates of unpublished results, from multiple sources I've talked to over the years.

Last year of "gymnasium" (grade 12), right before I started my university masters program: I was travelling most of the year and only returned to school two months before graduation. I spent less than two months, on my own, reading up on a year's worth of what amounts to a specialised "science focused high school" program. Then testing through, taking all tests and assignments for a year, and got the top result from both schools in the city. 1000+ students graduating that year.

This was pretty insane, so I started digging. How was it possible to score so well after so little time, studying alone, when everyone else had 10 months of class. I'm not 200 IQ with eidetic memory.

So I started talking with teachers and professors I came in contact with. Very few actually had data available, but those who had... Wow!

Regardless of whether it's young children, high school, or university students the numbers were similar.

The top few are simply so much faster than the rest. I'm absolutely sure that good pedagogical methods have a huge effect on the students' learning. But even the best methods and tutors can't make up the difference.

The "5%", specifically, comes from two sources. A physics teacher and a math professor. They were both very interested in pedagogical methods and were experimenting and keeping detailed data on every student they had taught, over decades. Scoring them on a wide variety of tests and situations. Both had similar numbers, falling around 5-10x between the top 5% and the median.

My impression is that this is simply an issue that most societies don't want to know or deal with. It certainly is not hard to test for. Specifically, the physics teacher mentioned above told me that the municipal head of schools had threatened to fire him when he tried to discuss the data to improve the teaching for high capacity students.

[zo1]

I'd like the link as well. Good luck finding anything related to this on Google or Google Scholar. At this point, I'd have more luck starting from the IQ page on Wikipedia.

[koonsolo]

> "Well, if you've already done it, then it should be easy to do it again!"

The teachers in my son's school (6-12 year olds) solve this by either giving them more difficult exercises, or letting them help the kids that don't grasp it yet.

The latter is really interesting because helping others is a lesson on its own.

[amboo7]

People like _easy_ solutions, which they call simple.