|
It would be wonderful if normal schools would provide optional advanced lessons in many subjects! Among other reasons, it would be wonderful, because some kids are exceptionally talented in one area, but some of them are exceptionally talented in two or three different areas. Currently, if you are talented e.g. in art and math, you have to choose between a normal school, art school, or math school... but there is no option to get advanced art and math. (Advanced lessons are better than skipping grades, because skipping means "the same thing, only faster", while advanced lessons could also be "deeper". I don't have a good example for this, but imagine that normals kids spend e.g. one month learning about squares and one month learning about triangles... then the faster option would be only three or two weeks learning the same information about each... while the deeper option would be also learning one month about squares, but learning more facts about them, and then one month learning more facts about triangles. Except, it's not just more facts, but also more connections between the facts, etc.) Also, it is great if kids exceptional in one subject can interact with kids exceptional in other subjects. I have seen great school projects, for example a computer game where the code was written by a computer science talented kid, and the pictures and music were created by their artistically talented classmates. More impressive than a typical computer game generated by math school students, where the physics engine is awesome... but, no offense meant, the aesthetics is usually quite meh. Finnish schools seem to provide more flexibility to students; instead of everyone in the same grade following the same schedule, you have some freedom to choose classes. On the other hand, kids exceptional in one subject are typically encouraged by teachers to focus on the remaining subjects, rather than further improve the one they already excel in. The culture values balance, not extremes. (I was told so by a Finnish student.) And perhaps if we use more computer education in the future, it would be easier (and cheaper) to allow different students progress at their natural pace. Instead of normal and advanced classes, we could have literally each student proceed at a different speed... at a computer. And teachers could then provide consultations, individually or in small groups. Unfortunately, the same prejudices that people have against schools for gifted children, also apply to talented classes. If your dogma is that no one is really different from others, then no one is allowed to be different from others even for one lesson a week. There are also technical problems, like if you have 40 kids in a grade, then if their talents are on a bell curve, you get 1 kids exceptional in math, and maybe 2 more half-exceptional kids, and the rest is normal or bad at math. You cannot make a separate lesson for 1 kid or 3 kids; and splitting the class 20:20 will not provide that 1 kid what they need. |