a response to SmartyPants

Andrea's post on her experiences with gifted ed brought up way too many thoughts to overload her comments with, so I'm putting them here. Being good at school was never something I felt made me any better than anyone else (although, it did feel like the one thing that kept me from being completely and utterly worthless), but I knew never to talk about it, in case someone else felt belittled. That makes this hard to write without feeling like I'm being conceited, so I'm sorry if it comes across like that.

My first memory of school was taking the year 1 readiness test. My mum is a special ed teacher and it was actually her job to test the incoming kids, but she had to get a friend to administer the test for me. I don't know where my test anxiety came from at that age, but I remember being nervous about it. The test was pretty basic stuff like matching shapes and colours and recognising objects, but I was annoyed that I got a question wrong. I didn't recognise a picture of a pen knife and I thought it very unfair to count that against me since I'd never even seen one in real life.

The extent of the gifted program at my primary school was to let me write in crayon, rather than pencil, and borrow books from outside the picture book section of the library. I think there might have been some logic puzzles to do in grade 5 and in grade 7 we got to enter competitions in maths and english. The maths competition was pretty fun because it involved problem solving, but I still thought the practice we did was too easy and in order to include as many students as possible, we each only got to participate in half of the activities. The english competition was a basic multiple choice standardised test. A group of us got to leave class for practice once a week for a few weeks beforehand, but again, that was still easy enough to be boring. Most of the group wasn't in the "enhanced" range; only one other student scored in the top 1%. In high school, I got to go to the same maths competition every year, and do the standardised maths, english and science competitions, but there was never any practice or any extension the rest of the year.

I learned to entertain myself, though. I'd read or write stories until a new task was set and in grade 7, a friend and I would write notes constantly and fake newspaper articles about the rest of the class and the teachers. The rest of the time I was pretty much bored out of my mind. In one of my first high school classes I finished the activity long before anyone else and pulled out my book, but the teacher yelled at me for not asking for extra work instead. I don't remember getting the extra work, though, so I guess I just hid my book more carefully after that. I spent the whole of grade 9 with a book under the desk in every class and still was at or near the top of the class. In later years I alternated reading with decorating my diary and writing long letters to my penpals and the friend from primary school who I used to write notes with. I took a second maths subject in year 11 and 12, not only because I liked maths, but also because students who took it were eligible for an extension maths program at a university. I had the same maths teacher for both subjects, and in the easier class, when he got sick of nobody knowing what he was talking about, he would interrupt my letter-writing/reading so I could give the right answer (once he'd repeated the question, since I obviously never listened). I didn't even bother taking biology in high school because I could see it would be stultifyingly boring, and I could catch up once I got to uni.

When I got to uni, things didn't really change that much, though. I copied the notes down in lectures and did the weekly maths assignments, but nothing was really hard. All my science subjects relied on memorisation, rather than critical thinking or analysis. Sure, I'd panic at exam time, but that was because I did nothing outside of lectures during the semester. French was tougher than at school, but I could still get Distinctions, if not High Distinctions without working much.

While doing my mind-numbingly boring task today, I tried to think of times when I felt at all challenged. I came up with 13 instances, out of 20 years of schooling:

• In grade 1, when I was home sick one day, I made a poster about vikings. Vikings were so cool! They lived in houses with grass on the roof! And they let the animals live inside the house in winter to provide warmth! (that's all I remember of what I learned)
• In grade 7, we had to make something that involved a circuit. Most people stuck a light bulb on something. I made a moneybox in the shape of a cat's face, whose eyes lit up when you put a coin in. I spent ages trying to construct a lever that would close the circuit when a coin landed on one end. I think I'd assumed that the fact that coins don't stick to magnets meant they also couldn't conduct electricity, until my brother asked why I didn't just have the coin close the circuit itself and then I was annoyed with him for giving me the answer.
• In grade 9, for a maths assignment we had to make something out of cardboard and calculate its surface area, volume etc. It had to contain at least 2 shapes, I think (eg a treasure chest out of a rectangular prism and half a cylinder). I made a robot with the eyes, nose, arms, legs all being different shapes. I'm sure the teacher who had to mark the thing was cursing me.
• I quite liked researching history and geography assignments, if they were unrestrictive enough
• For the first half of grade 9 I did drama, but ended up hating it and switching to french. The teacher gave me the book etc so I could catch up over the holidays so in the last week, when I had to go to my mum's school with her, I taught myself a semester of french.
• In grade 11, we got to do one elective unit and they actually put the best students in one group. We were forced to read Wuthering Heights, which I didn't much like, but then we had free choice for the second assignment and I did mine on drug use and imagery in Coleridge's poetry. I used the uni library for the first time and loved it.
• In grade 12, there was one maths assignment that took a lot of research and thought, and when I got it, it actually felt liked I'd accomplished something.
• A grade 12 English presentation about media ownership that was fun to research.
• An essay for an intro philosophy class at uni, that I actually wrote a second draft of!
• My essay on randomness and human error for the coding and cryptography course that was my favourite class ever.
• The logic/maths class where we had to prove 1+1=2 was the only maths class I ever thought I mightn't get a High Distinction in (for reasons other than lack of studying, that is)
• coming up with a theory to explain my results when writing my honours thesis
• the class here where we discussed the entire body of literature relating to a different paper each week

The only things I remember someone teaching me, as opposed to figuring out for myself after getting too frustrated at the slow pace and reading ahead, were 2-digit multiplication and long division, both taught by my older brother as soon as he learnt them.

At home, it doesn't seem like skipping grades is something that ever happens. I used to read American books where it seemed to happen all the time and be insanely jealous. There was a kid in my class in grade 4 who got to do grade 6 maths occasionally and I was incredibly jealous of him, too. I used to wonder why my mum didn't campaign for me the way that kid's mother did, but having seen the way some teachers would take their insecurity out on the gifted kids, she didn't want to set the teachers against me. I was also a very shy kid, so she didn't want to risk me being ostracised by putting me in with older kids, either. I'm sure it didn't help that my older brother was in the grade above me, either. Mum did set up a whole afterschool activities program to help make up for the lack of in-class extension. I went to science club, photography club, irish dancing, drama, sewing, japanese etc, etc. I learnt piano and (briefly) flute and violin. These activities were great, but it didn't make the school day any less boring.

I was always jealous of people at other schools where classes were streamed by ability. One of the reasons I just tuned out in class was to avoid the frustration of listening to questions about basic multiplication, say, when we were meant to be learning physics, or a lecture on the difference between its and it's in English. Most of my class was in uproar after one science test that covered pressure because a question asked something about the pressure on a camel's foot and camels had never even been mentioned in class! Religion was the only class where we ever had any kind of discussion, so again, I was jealous of Andrea's description of "raging debate" in history classes, presumably involving actual facts and critical thinking. Unfortunately, my schools were big on inclusiveness and non-competition, which is all well and good, but it was incredibly frustrating. At least my primary school wasn't hypocritical about it and also didn't have competitive sports.

As Andrea's post showed, streaming certainly isn't a perfect solution. I don't think skipping grades is either, though, because it's the pace that's crippling, rather than the material. The montessori system has always sounded heavenly to me, but I can't see that becoming mainstream.