I’m a poser

I decided the best place to start writing my blogs this semester is to look back at my blogs from last semester.  Upon doing this I realized one thing:  I like to pose a lot of questions.  Rarely do I answer them, that’s for someone else to do.  But nonetheless a question mark gets used frequently. Why do I do this?

Well that’s one question, after some reflection, that I can answer.  I’d like to make the conjuncture that as young educators, our role is to pose the questions.  Questions that don’t necessarily need answers, but questions that need to be asked.

In the past week or so, it has been amazing the amount of discussion I have had on students identified with giftedness in our classroom.  The majority of them have been based around a comment made by a professor that (and I am paraphrasing) gifted students are the ones that will be future leaders and should be treated accordingly in the classroom.  What was great is most people questioned the validity and intention of this statement. 

As a former gifted student, the discussion touches a bit of nerves. I use the word former since my record states I was “demitted” from the program after middle school.   One reason I left the program was because I didn’t like the type of people it seemed to breed.  It might have been just my experience, but there was a sense of elitism that just rubbed me the wrong way.  As well, when everyone is put in the program based on math/science and only one in Language/Verbal, one has to question how we test these students.  Does Gifted just mean smarter?  Should students with tutors or who had Kumon as a kid have an IEP?  Because as of right now, at least for the kids who get in for their math capabilities, this seems to be a way to do it.

At the end of the day I’m all for the idea of Giftedness as a reason to have an IEP.  However in the way it is tested at the moment, we lose a lot of the aspects that I believe to be important for someone to deserve an IEP in a classroom in favour of how well they can perform on a standardized test.