Why Gifted Students Still Hate School, Part II

I posted last time about my theory about why gifted students hate school (short answer: scary teachers) and added, somewhat mysteriously, that I would write more about the issue.

Here it is, in brief: Gifted students hate school because school is a sucking quagmire of mediocrity.

Okay, I know this hardly qualifies as an original thought, but perhaps my personal experiences can enlighten the issue a little bit: the mediocrity begins in society, but it seems to be concentrated, like B.O. in a cabbie’s upholstery, in schools of education.

In society, for which schools are a major tool of “socialization” (a word every homeschooling parent rightly fears, particularly since California judge H. Walter Croskey recently admitted that a central reason all students should be sent to public school is to enforce their “loyalty to the state“), mediocrity has been a rising fashion trend for some time now. Certainly television has elevated mediocrity to the status of a spectator sport: on reality TV, quite literally, anyone can be a star. Long gone are the days of celebrity when maybe you needed some kind of….oh, you know, talent to be a star: beauty, singing ability, a lovely figure, a handsome face, the ability to dance, act, or tell a joke. Now, you just put yourself on YouTube and you’re an instant classic: you become the Leave Britney Alone guy or the Temper Tantrum About the Car girl, or (unwittingly and unwillingly) the Star Wars kid. The line between talent and talentlessness has become so muddled and obscure that it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. Mediocrity rules.

The problem with gifted students is that basically by definition, they’re not mediocre.

The problem with schools is that basically by definition, they are.

Schools of education have taken the job of apotheosizing mediocrity – enshrining it, insisting on it, working dutifully to ensure that mediocrity defines the system from A to Z starting with the very people who populate those schools: ironically, the very worst students in the system. The influential 1983 report A Nation at Risk, whose findings have not substantially changed since its publication, found that too many teachers are “drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.” Those same students become teachers, so rather than your kids or my kids being taught by the best and brightest (or at least the solidly competent), they’re being taught in too many cases by people who essentially weren’t very good at school.

What’s worse, many of those students of education become professors of education: a case of the blind leading the blind. Acknowledging some of these problems, the University of Chicago, one of the most academically demanding universities in the country, utterly eliminated its own college of education some time ago, saying, “Our primary criterion in making this recommendation was academic excellence. If the department had been excellent, but costly, I certainly would not have recommended closing the department.” But it wasn’t. So they did.

Obviously – or maybe not so obviously – not every teacher is mediocre. Lest I be misunderstood here, I’ve been proud to know a great number of excellent, inspiring, and professional teachers whose energy and ability to turn on those mental lights made a profound difference for me.

However, let me hasten to say this: they were the exceptions to the rule.

When I was going to the College of Education at Unimpressive Local University, I was surrounded by students and professors who were a great deal like my observer Pat. These people weren’t evil, weren’t scheming, weren’t “bad” in any moral or ethical sense. Most of them were in education because they “loved kids,” which isn’t necessarily a good enough reason to think they could teach them, but on the whole, loving kids is a good quality for a teacher to possess. Many were in education because something else – their go-nowhere day job, their marriage, their ambitions to become a lawyer – hadn’t panned out. Quite a few were in education because they thought it would be easy: job security with summers off.

One thing you need to understand, though: Not knowing the Nation at Risk data at the time, I naturally thought that people who wanted to be teachers were probably people who had excelled in school.

At first, I couldn’t figure out why being at the College of Education felt so different from my experience earning my M.A. in Useful Content, but I kept flashing on a few key elements such as…

… the girl who pronounced the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida’s last name as if it were a snack chip. When she made fun of Derrida’s theories – or what she said were Derrida’s theories; they didn’t resemble my understanding of Derrida – no one corrected her.

… the teacher who looked and sounded like a clone of Tipper Gore who taught Methods of Teaching Literature (a multiply oxymoronic course title, as it turns out). Actually, Professor Tipper didn’t actually teach “methodS,” but more like “method,” period.

The method in question was reader-response, which consists of a student reading a text and saying what they found (in Professor Tipper’s words) to be “imPORdunt” about it and how it made them “FEEyul.” You weren’t supposed to mention what the author’s point was or how she used the tools of language or argumentation to communicate it, as I found out. The dance of the author’s language, the stretch and press of her attempt to put into words an elusive emotional state or vast, unspoken realization wasn’t important — sorry, imPORdunt — and what she was trying to reveal to the world about the world’s condition wasn’t of interest either; what mattered is how you felt about it.

The first time I tried to respond to what was impordunt, I mentioned the one element I had enjoyed in the poem she’d given us: that there was a (possible?) allusion to a line in the book of Genesis about “dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.” Yeah, I know it was a stretch: I based that idea on the fact that there was the word “dust” in the poem and someone died at the end. Eh. Oh, well.

“How did it mayke yew FEEyul?” Professor Tipper smiled. She was one of those people whose teeth are too white. “What you said is very innerestin, but the imPORdunt thing is how it made you FEEyul.”

How did it make me feeyul? A little bored. Somewhat nauseated.

This method of teaching, I thought, would basically turn the students into little one-celled paramecia: creatures not capable of any real insight into the author’s point they’d found there in the words and used their brains to bring forth, but creatures only capable of the bluntest responses to the bluntest of stimuli. Reader-response wouldn’t teach students about anyone else’s conceptions of the world, only about how others’ words existed to stimulate their own self-referential feelings – whatever those feelings were and whether or not they had anything to do with the author’s meaning or point. An endless reinforcement of a tautologically narcissistic worldview, this method would give those students nothing beyond themselves and hardly even that.

“It’s kind of hard to express,” I lied.

“Weyul, just tell us.”

“Really? You really want to know?” I asked somewhat skeptically.

Professor Tipper nodded brightly.

“Maybe you should call on someone else.”

She declined.

“Okay…I feel…that this is an emotionally exploitative work whose main purpose is to make the readers regret teen suicide, but, well…it’s about as honest and truthful as a Very Special Lifetime Channel program with lots of hugging and learning.”

Professor Tipper’s smile vanished. “Um,” she said, turning away from me. “Verry innerestin. Anyone else?”

I soon found out that very little was demanded of me academically in the College of Education. In place of the long analytical papers I’d written for my Useful Content degree — papers where I’d been required to micro-analyze data and lengthily explain in what way that data applied to my thesis (and find out again and again where I’d basically failed to do that and needed to work harder), I was essentially asked to do little more than make the occasional silly presentation or contribute to some nebulous “group project” in which any of the work or thought I’d done was subsumed in the mediocre whole.

Now, maybe the stuff I would’ve done otherwise would’ve been lousy on its own – but if this makes any sense, at least it would’ve been my lousy work. I might have learned from my lousiness that way. In the College of Education, even though I’d come there to learn, I learned very little, and what I did learn, I learned from competent experts – in short, people who were not professors of education, but who were actual classroom teachers like Barb.  If it hadn’t been for Barb, I would quite literally have had not the first clue what to do on the first day of school — or the other 179 that came after it.  I

When I went back for my endorsement in gifted education, I was less surprised but no less dismayed to find that education classes really hadn’t changed. I already knew a decent amount about giftedness from reading articles on Hoagies and Davidson Institute of Talent Development’s website, or reading books like Deborah Ruf’s Levels of Giftedness or certainly the Templeton Report. However, very little was taught to me in the gifted education classes – and I don’t mean, “I already knew a bunch of stuff that they were teaching” but more, “They didn’t teach very much content.” One class was entirely devoted to how to use PowerPoint. I don’t mean one class period; I mean an entire class. Hey, I admit I had no clue how to use PowerPoint and actually did learn, but I ended up devoting far more hours to my projects than they deserved – dedication that earned me the title of classroom PowerPoint God, an honor that was bestowed on me unfairly, mostly because PowerPoint acted on me as heroin does to an addict: with my sad, sick, and completely anal-retentive fixation on trivial details, I could not leave these stupid projects alone until they were absolutely perfect.

 

Irony time: to the best of my knowledge, I will never actually use this technology in the classroom.

The sad thing was that I really wanted to write a paper on profound giftedness and explore the topic as I had explored the texts I’d read as a graduate student in Useful Content: I wanted that sense of mental dig, of grappling with the logic of my argument and finding sources to support it, but I was told to do a PowerPoint, and that pretty much limits what you can say to a few words on a handful of slides.  I should add that even though I’ve now taken seven classes in gifted education, I really don’t know much more than I did after reading the Gifted 101 articles on Hoagies — and I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do in a gifted classroom.

In short, there is a relentless tide of mediocrity in schools of education, one that’s nearly impossible to swim through because only your personal ethic, your sense of wanting to do an outstanding job on whatever meaningless, useless, time-wasting group project you’ve been assigned stands between you and just doing whatEVurrr to get the meaningless grade you were going to get anyway. Going through education classes was like trying to sharpen a knife on a marshmallow – you meet with no substance, no real resistance. You learn to be mediocre. You learn that not to be mediocre — to strive for scholarship, to insist on a level of academic rigor — is either viewed as useless or pretentious, or it’s groupworked and PowerPointed out of existence. Mediocrity is the norm — and that creates an environment that is downright hostile to gifted students.

I’ll say this for the week and end here: Schools are not about achievement. I used to think that teachers would love gifted students, or at least tolerate them. Now I think that the system — and of course, some individual teachers themselves — actively hate them. But more later.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• VERY Bad Socialization
• Algebra and AP: No, Not For Everyone
• Why Gifted Students Hate School
• Web Sites That Help Students Cheat Are Flourishing

~ by adsoofmelk on April 5, 2008.