Teachers who are not gifted can somewhat determine if a 2nd grader is gifted???
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Anonymous
Just stop with your private gifted diagnosis BS. The current method is holistic, and they can reject anyone for completely opaque reasons. They can and often do reject kids with gifted level WISC scores. The closest anyone can come to buying their way into AAP is volunteering in the classroom and brown nosing the teacher and aart. |
Anonymous
| I'm not a teacher at all, and I think I can tell which 2nd graders are gifted. Also which ones have parents who are pieces of work. |
Anonymous
I love teaching, are those with higher IQs prohibited from going into education? |
Anonymous
Another high IQ teacher here: I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in the 4th grade. I excelled academically and went to great colleges for undergrad and grad. My desire to teach never wavered, even though I had plenty of friends and advisors tell me I’m “too smart” to teach. I’ve been an educator for many years now and I’ve lost count of the people who are surprised I “just” teach. Some of us are driven by more than money and prestige. I’m driven by a desire to help students learn. I want students to find it as fun and rewarding as I do. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
| LOL wait until you find out that the AO reviewing your kids application barely graduated from a community college with only an associates degree or maybe a four degree from their local city college. |
Anonymous
Admission into AAP in Fairfax is primarily based on teacher opinion, not IQ score. This is the problem. |
Anonymous
And they just appeal with a private diagnosis and bingo get into AAP. |
Anonymous
Yes and no. Standardized testing is the best predictor we have of lifetime outcomes but it is not a perfect predictor. |
Anonymous
First, I absolutely believe teachers can, with experience and training, determine who is gifted, or more to the point, who will do well in AAP (which serves a broader group). I'm not sure if FCPS is aiming at those who will do best in AAP, but that's a different issue. Second, my first professional aspiration was teaching, but unlike the PP, I didn't pursue teaching because I was an outstanding student. I was told I could be a doctor, a lawyer, etc. Higher paid and more prestige. I ended up in law and did well enough, but it was not my passion and I never really enjoyed it. I left the workforce early and have taught as a volunteer and mentor, which I love and am really good at. Like Randy Pausch who wrote The Last Lecture, helping other people achieve their dreams is a very worthwhile endeavor. I grew up poor and never had any role models in the legal profession so I really didn't know what lawyers did. My close relatives were manual laborers. But I did have some excellent teachers with whom I had firsthand experience. I probably wouldn't have been able to retire early as a teacher, but I would have found it a more rewarding career. |
Anonymous
But it’s a subjective term, by gifted, they simply mean capable of accelerated academics and at a higher level. That can mean whatever the district wants it to mean. Maybe it’s teaching one year ahead. Maybe it’s teacher two-three yrs ahead at a double pace. The district sets that. |
Anonymous
NP. Have you read the law? The terms are defined at least somewhat. |
Anonymous
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The old-school gifted teachers, especially the ones who taught AAP when it was a much smaller program, often tend to be quirky former gifted kids themselves.
The current program is no longer a true gifted program, as is often pointed out. There are and always have been lots of definitions, IQ tests are problematic, etc., but the most commonly accepted standard for “moderately gifted” used to be an IQ score of 2 standard deviations about the mean, or 130, which applied to about 2.5% of the population. FCPS finds 8-10x that percentage eligible for AAP. Now many teachers with no real interest in gifted kids teach AAP now, and their training comes from FCPS and doesn’t focus on gifted kids. The state gifted endorsement still more more focused on giftedness, which is partly why the district AAP endorsement doesn’t certify you to teach in gifted programs outside Fairfax. So no, the teachers on the committees don’t need to be gifted or even care much about gifted kids. They just need to be able to apply the criteria given to them by the district. —One of those old-school gifted teachers who went into the profession because of how meaningful and important gifted services were for me as a child |
Anonymous
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Some teachers are going to be fabulous at identifying giftedness. Others might be:
-young and inexperienced (which is honestly about half of FCPS 2nd grade teachers) -biased toward high executive function rather than aptitude -racist/sexist -spending almost no time with your child. Ex. class is 25 kids. Highest reading group only sees the teacher once per week for 15 minutes during language arts block. Kid has a different teacher for math and has other pull outs with the reading specialist and AART. This is all assuming that the old GBRS and current HOPE forms are even asking for the teachers to "identify giftedness," rather than asking if the child is displaying specific traits. A teacher could 100% recognize that a child is highly gifted and then accurately fill out a HOPE form with a bunch of low ratings. The HOPE form isn't designed to "identify giftedness." It's supposed to be used to detect kids with potential who may not have earned high test scores for whatever reason. |
Anonymous
And then there is the whole "shows compassion for others" which may identify a kind-hearted kid (& mine did get ALWAYS on that one) but that's not an indicator of intellectual potential at all. |