Smart kids have always been a problem for some teachers. Most of mine seemed exceptional.
This is a good piece from The American Interest:
“The world is changing. It’s looking for people who are creative and entrepreneurial, and that’s not going to happen in a system that tells kids what to do all day,” Samantha [Cook, wife of “lead systems administrator at Pandora”] says. “So how do you do that? Well if the system won’t allow it, as the saying goes: If you want something done right, do it yourself.” […]
I couldn’t stand reading this, not because of the comments, but because of the revolting photographs used in the ads alongside the article. I don’t know who thinks this is a good advertising technique, but I never ever return to any website that allows it.
We pay exorbitant amounts of money to put our son through a private Catholic school and keep him out of the local public district. His current teacher just returned from giving birth to her 4th child, and you can tell she DOES NOT want to go back to work.
She called us in to discuss problems in class, and suggested ADHD/ADD, and the medication route. Meeting was over when I asked how many of her male students were currently medicated and if the medication route was her preferred solution for any child that didn’t meekly sit the entire day.
The author of this book fights this drugging of normal behavior lunacy.
My 8th grade geometry teacher didn’t know the basic geometry she was trying to teach us. Because she was only a lesson or two ahead of her class, she would punish us for asking her questions, or working ahead.
That semester, three friends of mine and I began a sort of contest to see which of us could prove or disprove the Four Color Theorem. (At the time, they either didn’t have a proof, or didn’t present one in a middle-school textbook.) We worked on this problem entirely on our own, and in spite of the teacher. (I think I had a pretty good proof sketched out, though probably not to the standards of a grad-school math major. After all, it seems you can cheat using fractals and other monster-curves.)
Anyway, I taught *myself* trigonometry during study hall, and worked out some methods to do rotations of figures. On the back of the yearly feedback report, I penciled in a ton of proofs that I had worked out on my own – the sort of thing I would be severely marked down for and given detention for using on any of her tests (I didn’t learn that from *her*, therefore I didn’t learn it!). >:-)
Smart kids have always been a problem for some teachers. Most of mine seemed exceptional.
This is a good piece from The American Interest:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/02/05/homeschooling-sweeps-silicon-valley/
I couldn’t stand reading this, not because of the comments, but because of the revolting photographs used in the ads alongside the article. I don’t know who thinks this is a good advertising technique, but I never ever return to any website that allows it.
We pay exorbitant amounts of money to put our son through a private Catholic school and keep him out of the local public district. His current teacher just returned from giving birth to her 4th child, and you can tell she DOES NOT want to go back to work.
She called us in to discuss problems in class, and suggested ADHD/ADD, and the medication route. Meeting was over when I asked how many of her male students were currently medicated and if the medication route was her preferred solution for any child that didn’t meekly sit the entire day.
The author of this book fights this drugging of normal behavior lunacy.
My 8th grade geometry teacher didn’t know the basic geometry she was trying to teach us. Because she was only a lesson or two ahead of her class, she would punish us for asking her questions, or working ahead.
That semester, three friends of mine and I began a sort of contest to see which of us could prove or disprove the Four Color Theorem. (At the time, they either didn’t have a proof, or didn’t present one in a middle-school textbook.) We worked on this problem entirely on our own, and in spite of the teacher. (I think I had a pretty good proof sketched out, though probably not to the standards of a grad-school math major. After all, it seems you can cheat using fractals and other monster-curves.)
Anyway, I taught *myself* trigonometry during study hall, and worked out some methods to do rotations of figures. On the back of the yearly feedback report, I penciled in a ton of proofs that I had worked out on my own – the sort of thing I would be severely marked down for and given detention for using on any of her tests (I didn’t learn that from *her*, therefore I didn’t learn it!). >:-)